"Is it true that there is no highest prime number? If so, Can you provide a physical explanation for that fact?"
sure i guess i could, but explaining that particular fact entirely and in detail would take a fair amount of time and effort.
can you narrow down your question to one of the following, or propose your own narrower question? i don't know which part of this you believe to be inexplicable on physicalism (perhaps you think every part of it is inexplicable?):
-how are numbers physical?
-how is the property of a number "being prime or not" physical?
-how are mathematical proofs physical?
-how are facts about non-existent/hypothetical sets physical?
"if physicalism says says: "material reality is the ground of being; numbers and moral values are both physical concepts", and Max Tegmark style Neoplatonism (is that what people are calling it?) says "Mathematical reality is the ground of being. The laws of physics are just one possible mathematical structure, which acts like our local address"?
How can we choose between these two, or a third alternative which says 'tegmark is right, but moral values also exist a priori' ?
How should we, without smuggling a value system into our beliefs and positing it as correct, say there is a 'better choice' between physicalism and alternative? Why is physicalism better than casting sheep entrails unless a true objective answer as to what is good, and what is not, exists?
At first this struck me as trivial: context requires lots of information, something without context less, so obviously "lots of information" is a more difficult ask than something requiring little of it.
We lack lots of knowledge is trivial.
I don't think his point is about how ignorant the population is. Rather, consider the ignorance of a population as a level, in the same sense that last year's GDP is a level.
Now let's divide the intellectual world into two kingdoms: knowledge and ideas. The Kingdom of Knowledge is that level: how much people know about stuff.
It would be hard to measure what our knowledge quotient is because there is so much stuff one could know, but the measurement of knowledge in a population *could be* objective regardless of how difficult it would be to do in practice.
Now consider the stream of information most people consume today. Most of it exists in the Kingdom of Ideas. What I mean by "ideas" are either theses or something with an implied thesis. For instance:
-"Raise the Minimum Wage"
-"There's a correlation between race and IQ"
-"Diversity in management improves results"
-"We have too many regulations"
-"Gender and biological sex are different"
-"Zoning is the problem"
-"We need election reform"
-"Russia will invade the Ukraine"
-"Prediction markets are important"
-"Context is that which is scarce"
All of the above reside in the Kingdom of Ideas not the Kingdom of Knowledge.
Of course, ideas aren't worth much without context, without knowledge. That goes without saying. We want ideas but the less knowledge we have to put those ideas into context the less valuable those ideas.
So what I think Tyler is saying by "Context is that which is scarce" has to do with the ratio of our intake of new information divided between knowledge and ideas. On Twitter, on Substack, we are inundated with more ideas. But most of these ideas, good or bad by their own merits, aren't helpful if we don't have the proper knowledge base in which to analyze them intelligently.
For every tweet we probably need an effort post to give us the background knowledge to, say, get the joke.
So I think Tyler is saying that reading theses is like consuming intellectual junk food at this point, whereas eating our vegetables would be, perhaps, reading more old books, taking more classes and travelling more to new locations.
Of course, it's easier to write an idea than an effort post. This post is an example. I haven't given you any knowledge.
I want to add that knowledge != truth in my above usage. Knowledge is simply lots of information, true or not. Does that mean my division of information into the kingdoms of ideas and knowledge isn't perfectly clear cut? Probably. Knowing lots of ideas is a form of knowledge.
For Effective Atruists: Is Combatting Ageism The Most Potentially Impactful Form of Social Activism?
I argue that 15-17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West. Not only is ageism everywhere, permeating every space, infesting every mind, even those of the oppressed — this oppression is still enforced by the State. Imagine if we still had forced racial segregation. What teens face from the State every day is similar. I know many might say it’s not as bad, but I have philosophical reason to disagree. More on that later.
You have to understand that laws are ultimately enforced with deadly force if the disobedient will not yield. The government will escalate force until you die if you are serious about disobeying a law. That is, if you refuse to obey, and you refuse to accept the invalid actions of the State in response, they will kill you. Let me provide a concrete example. You know that being forced to go to a facility against your will simply for being, say, 17 years old, for 40 hours a week is an extreme violation of your civil liberties. Therefore, you don’t go. The government sends people whose job is to commit violence on behalf of the State, to commit violence on you. At first they will try to restrain you. You’re probably not strong enough to resist, but say you can knock these people out. They’ll shoot you. Their protocol says to spray you with the whole magazine-worth of ammunition. That’s what they’ll do. Maybe if you’re lucky, you knock one out for laying hands on you for illegitimate reasons, the others (they always come in packs) will aim their guns at you because you’re dangerous to them with just your hands. Most will probably just kill you right then and there. They have “qualified immunity” and won’t face any repercussions, because you were “belligerent” and “dangerous.” Maybe they’ll yell at you to get down. They won’t go away though. They’ll probably surround you and if you try to leave they’ll get “scared” and boom you’re dead. The point is they will escalate violence until it’s life or death. They ultimately enforce the law with the threat of murder.
To my knowledge, this is the only way a State can have laws. Hell, advanced restraining sounds more nightmarish than this. The point is that State enforced oppression is a big deal. If you are a 16 year old who decides that it’s your moral right to be able to travel as you please, and you try to use this right, the state will ultimately escalate violence until you are dead. They will lynch you like for exercising your civil rights. In contrast, the most decentralized oppressors can do is refuse to associate with you under various conditions. Sometimes it’s unfair, but it’s a lot different than the State sending a death squad after you for minding your own business.
So. Are teens the most oppressed? Yes. Teens are virtually treated like criminals on account of their age, similar to black people before 1960. They are treated like children, similar to women before feminism. Yet unlike criminals and children, teens don’t deserve it. Oppression is unjust subordination.
If you think they do deserve it, you’ve fallen prey to harmful, pseudo-scientific narratives that should make old-fashioned racial phrenologists blush. I debunk these narratives in my book, An Empirical Introduction to Youth. The gist is that all of the data agrees that the brain is developed by the age of 15. Even 13 and 14 year olds have judgment capacities that rival certain adult demographics. This makes sense because it would be weird for evolution to make people idiots until the age of 25 with mature, dangerous bodies. The pseudo-scientists and the media who talk about these studies lie about their findings, similar to how Stephen Jay Gould claimed that Samuel Morton lied about his phrenology findings even though he didn’t. They do this because of who pays them: foundations like MacArthur and Johnson which are run by the owner class and their hired-brains, the PMC. The owner class set up the education system in order to offload corporate overhead, such as cost of training, onto tax-payers. The PMC were and are hired to improve this system using their brains, among other things. In the process of doing so, they inject their own desires and attempt to reduce teens and young adults to something like their slave-class, which exists to make them look important, to pay them tuition, low level work for them, and so on.
If this sounds extreme, just read Foucault! Power corrupts knowledge, and deceit is a fundamental tool of power. The point is to manage your opinions and to manufacture your consent. The :”default” view on this issue, like many issues in fact, is not to be trusted. Said view only benefits a small class of masters, and is extremely harmful to teens.
Anyway, to recap: yes, teens are the most oppressed identity group. What should we do about it? I leave that to a future writing.
> in the West (...) They’ll shoot you. (...) will aim their guns at you because you’re dangerous to them with just your hands. Most will probably just kill you right then and there
Can you provide examples of police or other law enforcement shooting teenagers for refusing to go to school?
Can you provide example of that happening in Europe?
> Even 13 and 14 year olds have judgment capacities that rival certain adult demographics.
So what? you need to be more specific here, "certain adult demographics" includes groups like "people with several mental disorder"
> I argue that 15-17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West.
No, they are not (you have not even attempted to compare with other groups).
PS Are you the same person as one banned from themotte for being an obnoxious single-issue poster refusing to discuss and posting the same screeds?
> qualified immunity
That i a big problem but enormous and absurd abuse of that seems to be an USA specialty, is not limited to teenager adjacent cases and is not general West problem.
You seem to be really USA specific, have you ever visited Europe or read about situation there?
I'm surprised that some people are struggling with thinking more than 1 layer deep. Yes, the penalty for breaking most laws isn't immediate death, but if you refuse to concede your rights the State will escalate violence infinitely.
Here are some examples in case you're still having trouble thinking a few layers deep about a scenario wherein the State is trying to enforce a law on someone who refuses to accept it:
As for Europe, I am unsure why you think they are pacifists, sounds like a great way to get invaded by China. AFAIK they are not pacifists and never have been,
>No, they are not (you have not even attempted to compare with other groups).
I don't think you read what I wrote, then. Youth oppression is enforced by the State, so it's the worst. You can't seriously argue that some group who has equal rights and who is constantly propped up by society as important and deserving of equality is more or as oppressed as a group that is effectively imprisoned for 40 hours a week for no reason, deprived of the fundamental rights to work, drive, vote, and self-determine, subject to all sorts of State-sanctioned humiliation, and then told they deserve it and that there is no problem.
>
PS Are you the same person as one banned from themotte for being an obnoxious single-issue poster refusing to discuss and posting the same screeds?
Yes I was banned for 90 days after a moderator censored me illogically, saying I wasn't allowed to make my weekly ageism post (always a new writing on my blog btw) anymore. I told them the fact that this topic is infinitely more important than COVID, and that they have like 5 COVID threads a day, so if anything I should be posting 10 ageism threads a day. Then the moderator insulted my intellectual value, so I pointed out that he never produces any scholarship on his account unlike me, then another mod said he had good noodle stickers from her "AAQCs" (which amount to 1 paragraph evidence free bloviations that confirm biases, literally, go on there and look at them) and she banned me for 90 days.
Surely you are bringing this up because you also understand just how irrational and ridiculous those people are, and you're totally not trying to irrationally poison the well!
> if you refuse to concede your rights the State will escalate violence infinitely
Not in all cases. You may be unaware of it but most of Europe has no death penalty at all and police killing/murdering people is extremely unusual.
Even escalation to fines or prison sentence is not in play for many minor cases.
In particular, refusing to go to school may cause problems for you (or parents) but noone is going to be murdered.
I suspect that while getting shot by police is easier in USA you are not going to get there for refusal to attend school.
> As for Europe, I am unsure why you think they are pacifists
None of your European examples involves teenagers being shot for refusing to go to school. World War II in fact involved cases of teenagers being murdered FOR attending school. Germans outlawed higher education for people considered by them as subhumans in at least some occupied territories and enforced it by death penalty.
The same goes for most of the examples, only Waco siege may sort of qualify (and as far as I know "teenagers refusing to go to school" was not part of it at all).
> sounds like a great way to get invaded by China. AFAIK they are not pacifists and never have been,
I am from Europe, and in fact I worry right now about getting invaded by Russia.
I'm surprised that some people are struggling with thinking more than 1 layer deep. Yes, the penalty for breaking most laws isn't immediate death, but if you refuse to concede your rights the State will escalate violence infinitely.
Here are some examples in case you're still having trouble thinking a few layers deep about a scenario wherein the State is trying to enforce a law on someone who refuses to accept it:
I think you're missing the main point that States ultimately enforce their laws with the threat of death. Whether or not a teenager has actually suicided by challenging these laws is irrelevant.
The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth
Author: Peter Rodes Robinson
[Photo of refugee boat]
Massimo Sestini—Polaris
How many humans are too many?
The concept of "carrying capacity" originated in the 1840s to specify the maximum weight that could be carried by a ship. Estimates of the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth vary widely though the number ten billion pops up frequently. For example sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson said "If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people." Of course this calculation means: forget about eating meat.
When it comes to cramming people on to the Earth, we are not talking about a cruise ship. More like steerage class on the Titanic or worse. Ecologist Paul Ehrlich has said that even a "battery chicken" world would not support more than 4-5 billion humans long term.
Until recently the rate of human population growth was increasing. In other words the doubling time was getting shorter and shorter, from approximately 2000 years to 700 years to 37 years! Fortunately the doubling time is now getting longer.
These are the first three paragraphs of my essay. Immodestly, I believe it is well written and presents a vital thesis. If you read it, you can tell me I'm wrong (about either or both contentions). You will also find many links
Or you might find something more interesting to comment on. I hope you will read it and comment. I adore feedback.
> We can probably agree that maximizing human population is not a future we yearn for. Ecologists Gretchen Daily and Paul and Anne Ehrlich have said the optimum population is no more than 1.5 to 2 billion people. David Pimentel and others think a population of 2 billion would be optimum. Theodore P. Lianos suggests that a world population of three billion is compatible with a steady state economy and ecological equilibrium.
I think if that were true, I would have heard a lot about that by now. Just Googling "estimates of earth's sustainable carrying capacity" shows that most scientists give much higher numbers. According to one survey[1], most studies estimate a carrying capacity above 4 billion and below 16 billion, with a long tail of more optimistic and more pessimistic studies.
And despite the EA community's intense interest in existential risks, they seem to give more credence to the more optimistic takes (over 8 billion). Actually it's weird how little this issue is discussed among EAs, but I assume that's because there are no obvious signs that we've already exceeded planetary carrying capacity (if reasonable steps toward sustainability are taken, as mentioned below).
I am a bit concerned about what would happen if someone invented life extension technology that could instantly double the lifespan of most people, but the current population trajectory, which is going to stop increasing at 10-11 billion, doesn't worry me very much.
> Too many humans causes air and water pollution which threatens human lives. Humans are steadily raising the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere which leads to global warming and rising sea levels. Large portions of Miami are at risk in this century and in the longer run coastal areas all over the world are threatened. Population pressures lead to deforestation which turns rainfall into devastating floods. Clear-cutting forests makes subsequent forest fires burn hotter and longer. Encroaching on natural areas encourages viruses to jump from animals to humans which can lead to pandemic diseases such as Covid-19. Too many mouths to feed encourages destructive factory farming and soil depletion.
This paragraph is a good reminder that carrying capacity is not fixed, but depends on what technologies we use and how well we use them.
I'm no expert, but can't synthetic fertilizers keep our soil in a usable state indefinitely? If in fact the carrying capacity were only 3 billion, we should be depleting the soil, pretty much everywhere in the world, very quickly. if that were happening, tons of experts would be raising alarms, but they aren't.
I'm sure that CO2 emissions / fossil-fuel air pollution and clear-cutting can all be stopped. It is practical to completely replace fossil fuel burning with renewables and nuclear power (I guess it'll be hard to go beyond 95% reduction or so due to our reliance on concrete and jet fuel, but net-zero is certainly possible). I am under the impression that Canada, for example, has a sustainable forestry industry. Brazil destroys the rainforest as a cheap and very dirty way to alleviate poverty IIUC, but there are other ways to alleviate poverty. I quite doubt that natural virus production will increase enough to worry about (the modern world's main problem is that it spreads viruses around the world so very efficiently). Sea level rise will eventually destroy a lot of valuable real estate, I expect, but I don't expect it to change the total amount of real estate by very much, and some locations such as New York are likely to put up a fierce enough battle against the sea to actually protect themselves.
I have reason to suspect that making people more prosperous might actually increase Earth's carrying capacity rather than decrease it, because more prosperous people will deploy more of the technologies that increase carrying capacity, e.g.
- More prosperous people can afford cleaner and more sustainable energy sources (nuclear, of course, being the least land-intensive, but also wind power can be used on farmland or at sea)
- More prosperous people can afford denser multi-storey housing and denser food production techniques => reduced land use (though this is offset by eating more food).
- Reduced wood-burning => reduced air pollution
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
That sentence sounds VERY familiar .... you must be the same guy I responded to before about this same topic, when I said: I don't see why this is reasonable. "Nature" is an abstract concept, like "life" or "evolution" or "welfare"; it doesn't exist as an entity in reality and so cannot have feelings. Perhaps you mean animals, like hens and foxes. Perhaps these have feelings, but in nature their existence is usually meagre, and one will eagerly kill the other without a second thought. Humans are animals too, and they sometimes kill each other as well, but at least they have the potential to make lasting truces. This is one reason to keep humans around. Another is our unusual ability to make discoveries, so that perhaps one day we will scientifically unravel the Hard Problem of Consciousness. A third reason is that if you decide not to keep humans around, they're not going to take kindly to your decision and the resulting animosity will be unproductive.
Which led me to point out that even if 2 billion is better than 7 or 10, it's going to be ridiculously hard to get everyone on board with a depopulation plan. And then I said many of the points I just made again.
I just asked a girl out, unambiguously, in-person, for the first time in a very long time. I was building it up in my head to be a bigger deal than it really was, like Harry Potter in 4th year. But it was no biggie. When I came into the gym all the treadmills were occupied so I was forced to take the treadmill next to her (otherwise I would feel weird about doing even that). Then there was 30 minutes of both of us silently doing cardio while I avoid looking at her or doing anything weird and I listen to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs at 2.5x speed. Then when she finished her exactly 50 minute cardio session and walked away she left her bottle behind and I said "hey you forgot your bottle" and she said she was just going to get a towel to clean the machine. (without a hook like that to give me license to initiate a conversation I would feel weird about it). Then as she's cleaning the machine I comment "so you did 50 minutes of cardio, that's a lot" and she laughed and smiled which I took as a green light, so then I just asked "do you wanna go out with me sometime" and she was like "no, that guy who was talking to me earlier was my boyfriend. Have a nice day." and I say "Have a nice day" and she walks out of the gym with her boyfriend.
What are some venues I can go to where I can feel maximally licensed to initiate conversations with strangers, but which aren't bars? I feel like cafeterias in school and university were great for this, but restaurants for adults are terrible for this. At school it was perfectly normal for strangers to sit together for a meal and talk to each other. There were countless times where random strangers put their tray the table where I was already sitting, and vice versa, and strike up a conversation. But in restaurants this is just not done -- I've eaten in restaurants approx 5000 times post-college and it has never happened once, p<0.000001. Why are restaurants so much more antisocial than school cafeterias? I'll take a stab at it. People who are going to the same school have a lot in common -- age, occupation, intelligence, etc. Whereas out in the adult world a random stranger has a vastly lower expectation of having anything in common with you. Without a high expectation of strangers having something in common it feels less worthwhile to try to talk to them. So the comparative antisocialness of restaurants compared to school cafeterias could be an example of what Robert Putnam calls "hunkering down" in response to diversity.
I am orders of magnitude more likely to initiate (and be initiated) in conversations with strangers at conferences and conventions, where we are all basically pre-screened to have something in common. But outside of some environment where people are pre-screened to have something in common, serendipitous conversations with strangers are exceedingly rare for me. No one initiates and I don't initiate either. I feel like "doing cardio next to each other for 30 minutes" is a sufficient threshold of having something in common though.
Congrats on taking the chance. It’s not easy if you are inclined to introversion. I came of age in another era - those licentious 70’s - when being healthy and not obviously dangerous was enough for a casual thing.
I met my wife at a mutual friends wedding. We really clicked so it was fate or good luck or whatever. We’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary later this year.
Keep trying. It’ll happen.
Edit
After you do get married it becomes much easier to strike up a conversation with women. The wedding band seems to signal that it’s just a chat. Not trying to get you to come home with me or anything. With that off the table it seems like everyone relaxes a bit.
I saw Richard Dreyfus use the trick in a movie once. He was hitting on Holly Hunter. When she noticed he said that was just to make women relax around him. He was a salesman. After he explained he tossed the ring into the ocean. Yes, he got the girl.
I found all of my girlfriends through mutual friends, online and offline, so I'd recommend having a social life. But mine is recently in short supply as well and I don't know how to fix it, so...
One opportunity for casual hookups (and maybe something more) are music festivals and similar places where people are less inhibited, more curious, and in general open to have a good time. Maybe bars, but bars aren't really a place I'd meet any girl I was ever into.
I'm only into orchestral music and your music festival recommendation probably doesn't apply to the symphony, right?
Another thing I miss about university is that everyone is prescreened by age and intelligence. So everyone I'm attracted to at university is almost guaranteed to be of legal age (and if not they're some genius who skipped multiple grades which would counter any claim they weren't able to consent, which ought to counter the social awkwardness if I mistakenly tried to ask them out). But elsewhere that's very iffy and hitting on a person of ambiguously-legal age could be a huge faux pas if I guess wrong. I tend to be strongly attracted to people of ambiguously-legal age and even younger. (I think Crown Princess Leonor of Spain at age 16.5 is the most beautiful person in the world, still, although she peaked when the pandemic started. This is one of her best photographs from her peak: https://people.com/royals/princess-leonor-of-spain-starting-school-in-800-year-old-welsh-castle/ I think my physical-attractiveness utility function peaks within a year after they begin to ovulate and then declines with a half-life of 5 years, which is plausibly rational in evolutionary terms of maximizing offspring over marriage-for-life with a short life expectancy, but unduly taboo). Meanwhile everyone at university is also screened by intelligence. I'm in the top 2% of intelligence and I want to find a woman who is as smart as me. That filters out 98% of my potential dating prospects. I once calculated that solely on the basis of not-very-ambitious filters for gender=F, age=18-28, and IQ>115, my alma mater (50k students) had the same number of suitable partners as the entire las Vegas metro area (2.3M randos) so that out here I'm trying to find needles in a haystack which is a much higher difficulty level than dating at university (which I did a good amount of in undergrad, including a year-long serious relationship with a valedictorian 19-year-old who looked younger and at one point was serious about wanting to marry me while I was less enthusiastic. Then her friend who disliked me took her to a 3-day music festival without me and we broke up within 3 weeks of her return. Then in grad school I was living 2 miles off campus by foot, and I was much less attracted to grad students than undergrads, and everyone was a lot dumber than me because I went to my safety school, so that made the difficulty level of finding suitable people much higher than in undergrad).
Undergrads are obviously more attractive at first glance than older women, but their advantage quickly disappears once you A) talk to them and notice they're annoying and you have nothing in common B) realize after a few years you'll be at square one, and if you're into long term relationships you'll have to deal with it. Find someone who is good company and ages gracefully, and you won't mind - speaking from experience.
I think you overestimate the importance of a woman being as smart as you - there's a lot of space between yourself and a normie, and it contains interesting people. Consider expanding from whatever STEM niche you live in - personally I enjoyed dating artists, it's a nice balance from the over-intellectualized environment of my professional circle, and they tend to be a lot wittier than you in conversation which is all that matters.
I agree it is really important to find someone who is good company, beyond the physical attraction. Also hopefully attraction is somewhat malleable and due to the constant reinforcement of having sex with a partner and the gradualness of their aging I'll stay attracted to them. I know married couples who are still attracted to each other somehow at ages when that should be impossible (perimenopause and up).
I thought about dropping acid and fapping to progressively older material as a means of adjusting my attractions, by analogy to methods that were used to cure phobias and trapped priors, but I'm not sure this would work and I don't want to risk messing myself up with acid, plus from an evolutionary point of view there's nothing wrong with me and it's society that needs to stop freaking out over post-pubescent age-gap relationships. I'm not going to do the equivalent of pray-the-gay-away.
I'm pretty sure everyone is like you, to some (big) extent, but it's polite to not talk about it.
Honestly a big part of what makes attraction malleable is that in a long term relationship, theoretically you could stray for that hot young piece of ass but it's not really worth it, when you think of all you've built together with your partner. Sex is just sex, and it's not like you're thirsty.
Also, I insist on the "ages gracefully" part, a large part of which is not getting overweight.
Thanks. BTW, If I want to be highly confident in having above-replacement fertility (3 kids), I can calculate the maximum age woman I should consider dating:
From meeting to starting to try to have first child: 2.75 years
From starting to try to first birth: 1.25 years
From first birth to second birth: 3 years (assuming a year and change of breastfeeding)
One might shave 5 years off that timeline by rushing the relationship, deliberately having twins via IVF, and not breastfeeding, but that doesn't appeal to me.
I think talking at concerts is a nonstarter. Either it's loud enough that they can't hear you, or quiet enough that third parties get annoyed at you for talking during the show. Plus I would feel extra bad about making anyone feel awkward if they were "stuck there" for the duration of the show. That's why I waited till end-of-workout to ask the girl at the gym.
P.S. My parents' marriage started unraveling when my father had an affair that started at a classical music festival. It is not as wild as pop music things, but you might be surprised.
Also: House parties used to be a big thing before the year 2020. You sound young, so maybe you don't know what the adult world was like in the Before-Times.
Dating is mostly about developing a social network (Not a fake fucking facebook one but a real one). A male friend can be as valuable as a female friend in terms of advancing your dating prospects if he is a real friend and has some charm.
I'd say work on developing a post-plague real-life friendship group. Because what you want to do is create romantic opportunities. That's much easier with friends at your back than going solo at a coffee shop.
From your description, you never got into much of a conversation in the first place. You need to talk to a girl for 20 minutes before asking her out. That's possible at bars or coffee shops but not at restaurants. Are you seeing girls eating alone at restaurants? Or do you mean a food hall?
At a coffee shop you need a ruse. Watch Impractical Jokers for some examples. Like write an interesting email, business or personal, and say "Excuse me. Is it possible I could get your opinion on this?"
You aren't going to get into a conversation with a girl without making a large effort to make it happen. Don't ever expect things to "just happen".
Edit:
>I feel like "doing cardio next to each other for 30 minutes" is a sufficient threshold of having something in common though.
No, no. That's the wrong idea. Only verbal communication counts.
Good job putting yourself out there. I know exactly how hard that can be.
The problem you mention, not having any place that feels like you're allowed to talk to strangers, is ridiculously hard to solve. But the advice I was given is to ignore that feeling and do it anyway. You gotta stop thinking of yourself as a potential harasser and start thinking of yourself as a potential date. People do apparently get dates by starting conversations in places that are considered unsuited for that, like when you're waiting for the metro or at the grocery store. It doesn't matter if you have anything in common, you can find out later.
Now, I don't know if this is good or useful advice and I have too many psychological blocks to put it into action consistently. Best I've been able to do is ask someone out at the blood bank - unsuccessfully, but without drama. It's worth trying anyway, since it's arguably easier than finding an adult social space like a high school cafeteria.
Law Enforcement recently seized ~$400 Billion in crypto stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack (link at end). From the DOJ Statement of Facts:
>"On January 31, 2022, law enforcement gained access to Wallet 1CGA4s by decrypting a file saved to LICHTENSTEIN’s cloud storage account, which had been obtained pursuant to a search warrant."
What is your interpretation of this with respect to law enforcement decrypting someone's file? Seems like the options are:
1. Perp used a deprecated encryption method that has now-known vulnerabilities or exploits
2. Perp used robust encryption but got lazy and left the decryption tools somewhere discoverable
3. Perp used "robust encryption" but it turns out the govt can bypass it anyway via secret means
4. The word "decrypt" was used incorrectly or imprecisely in the affidavit and what the authorities actually did was something more like unlocking a password-protected zip folder
Since substack reads these comments, I think the new layout is a bit annoying in so far as I have to scroll so long to get to the post I'm interested in. I'd suggest you reduce the amount of text to just a paragraph or two in the preview
On a computer it's not too bad. On a phone, scrolling past a bunch of posts to get to a particular one is a pain. You used to be able to click on the Codex icon and see heading links for all the posts. That was much better IMO.
The layout is bad and I assume it's a bug and will revert soon. There is no good reason to remove indexing/dashboards in terms of page navigation. Other substacks not affected.
It depends on what you like -- I'm partial to Flagstaff for personal nostalgia reasons (and there's more national forest up there), but maybe consider Sedona and/or Jerome, both attractive small towns? It also depends on the state of the weather. Flagstaff puts ground volcanic sand on their streets in winter, so it looks kind of ugly if there was snow a few days ago that's in the process of melting (I don't know if Prescott does the same).
I'd appreciate more meat on those bones - more statistical analysis, or hotter takes, or more actionable advice. I could get as much information skimming a discussion thread on Reddit.
In the UK there has been some controversy in Parliament and the news media. PM Boris Johnson suggested that the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, bore some responsibility for the decision not to charge a now-notorious (and dead) sexual abuser with any crimes. Starmer was the most senior prosecutor in England and Wales at the time. (Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate justice systems.) A lot of people have criticized Johnson for unfairly blaming Starmer over what was actually the decision of an unnamed junior prosecutor.
Which prosecutors tend to make which charging decisions, in which sorts of cases? If it's the lower-level prosecutors who typically make these decisions, how often are they overruled? Does it depend on the type of crime and/or the prominence of the accused?
I expect it will be hard to generalize about this.
England and Wales and the US (federal or state) interest me the most, but I'm happy to read about any country.
Below I asked about ways in which workplaces have grown woker than they were a few decades ago. The biggest surprise for me were claims that employees are now often strongly encouraged to talk about social issues at their workplaces--issues they may prefer to be silent about--with potential career-limiting punishments for remaining silent about them.
My question now is: why are so many corporations suddenly doing this? Is it:
1) They are covering their asses against potential discrimination lawsuits
2) They are focused on ESG compliance due to woke investors
3) The women in HR are True Believers in wokism and want to hear the rest of the workforce repeat the Party Line
4) Upper Management are True Believers and want to hear the workforce repeat the Party Line
5) Upper Management and HR believe that the majority of workers are now woke, and therefore it's good for morale for everyone to proclaim their solidarity in these beliefs
6) Something else?
I'm inclined to believe it is mostly about 1, somewhat about 2 and little about 3. Maybe at 70%/20%/10% ratios.
In the places I've seen it, I'm pretty sure it is a mix of 4 and 5, probably mostly 5. "Woke investors" is I think implausible in the general case, because most employers either don't have investors or have the bulk of their investments coming from mutual funds, pension funds, etc. And "HR Ladies" I think can't really get away with something this intrusive without buy-in from management, though they could be a contributing factor.
To me it seems like 1 and 3, in that order. Fortunately in my neck of the European woods mandating employees to "talk about social issues at the workplace" is a lawsuit waiting to happen, ironically on anti-discrimination grounds (and the employees tend to be smart enough to not fall for it, in case it comes from woke HQ).
Success of a corporation depends on good relationships with its employees, customers, investors, and regulators. So you'll see them mirror social trends in each of those populations, in proportion to how important each is to its business.
I think (3) & (4) are not causes--true believers wouldn't be put into high positions unless it was believed to benefit the company. (1) and (2) are definitely things any corporation will worry about, while (5) is something more important when there's a lot of competition for employees.
My memory is fuzzy, but I remember hearing regulators were collecting diversity stats. In industries with shortages of qualified diversity candidates, that makes the threat of lawsuits pretty scary, and so (1) would also be my guess as most important driver.
I agree with you and others here. I'll probably revisit this question in a couple weeks, hopefully with a more refined version of the question based upon the feedback here.
A political aspect of it I am interesting in exploring is: would Libertarianism help? It sounds like corporate wokism isn't driven by the government but by woke investors, woke employees, woke consultants, lawyers and fears of lawsuits. etc.
In other words, it doesn't sound like government is the problem here. It's culture.
Conservatives often say "politics is downstream from culture" but what I always assumed was meant by that is something like "todays culture is tomorrows public policy".
But in this case of corporate wokism, public policy has little to do with it. It's woke investors, woke employees, woke management making this stuff happen, short-circuiting any political considerations. In other words, this is the free market having its way. In that sense, it isn't progressive in any anti-free market sense but simply culturally progressive.
What if a Libertarian Paradise means we all spend an hour of our work day ceremoniously honoring the indigenous people who once sparsely occupied this land?
When I hear people complaining about this, the issue is often that a large fraction of the rank and file workers are True Believers (with a minority being loud and pushy but the vast majority agreeing).
It really depends if you're asking asking about mandatory seminars on X, which is all about ass-covering (points 1 and 2) or what conversation happens in the break room, which is to do with the beliefs of your actual co-workers (though an intolerant minority is capable of dictating topics)
None of this is new; the only thing that is "interesting" about corporate wokism is the ways it is superficially similar to a complex of beliefs that are somewhere between political and religious, and there are a lot more people who are offended by being made to pay lip service to "privilege" than are offended by being made to pay lip service to "quality".
Corporate wokism has about as much in common with woke politics as Corporate Memphis has in common with Memphis. Or, really, as much as Memphis has in common with Memphis; the art style had its corrupt corporate interpretation long before Corporate Memphis was a thing.
I agree with you (minus limiting 3 to the women in HR). The leading factor in a lot of businesses is lawsuit prevention, and *legitimate* issues are being raised more often (see Activision-Blizzard's recent lawsuits).
For the true believers who probably get these things started at companies, I don't doubt they mean for the best with it. The problem is that they are annoying at best and puritanical at worst.
EDIT, added the next morning: I would really like to be able to put this result up on a forum I’m on where there’s an ongoing discussion of the culpability of the unvaccinated, but I am not confident it’s a good enough analysis, even by back-of-an-envelope standards. Would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve done more of this sort of thing whether my analysis is merely rough and approximate (which is OK) or fatally flawed in some way that makes the result off by an order of magnitude. And if it’s fatally flawed, what do I need to take into account to fix it?
I am in the middle of a long argument on a huge state Reddit sub about how long and how much people get to hate on those who didn’t get vaccinated. There’s a “never forgive, never forget” mentality, and people writing purple prose containing phrases like “blood on their hands.” Honestly, people sound as though they think every person who refused vaccination caused quite substantial damage — like maybe on average each non-vaxed person killed one other person.
So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, trying to come up with a figure for how many US covid deaths it’s reasonable to blame on those who refused available vaccinations. So I compared our death rates and non-vaxed rates to Canada’s, from 1/1/20 to 10/3/21, and used these figures:
How many covid deaths did the US have above the number it would have if its vaccination rates were the same as Canada’s: 670,000 deaths
How many unvaxed were there in the US as of 10/3/21: 112,200,000.
So ratio of first number to second is 6:1000, or 1/167. So you can think of this as meaning it takes 167 unvaccinated people to produce a covid death that would not have happened if we’d all been as good about vaccination as Canadians. Or you could think of it in terms of “micromorts.” Every US citizen who did not get vaccinated killed 1/167 of a person — they accumulated 1/167th of a micromort.
I know calculating antivax micromorts could be called both Aspergerish and ghoulish, but I’ve gotten sort of preoccupied with trying to figure out how much societal damage a person caused who declined vaccination. And how does it compare to the damage caused by being a smoker? Or by being someone who frequently drives when impaired by alcohol, accumulating let’s say 1000 ETOH miles per year.
Is anyone else interested in playing around with these numbers?
And if you’re not: Where might I find data on “micromorts” for other activities that are dangerous to others? Also, is there a better country to compare the US to than Canada? I want to compare us to a country that gives a rough idea of what vaccination rates it might have been possible to achieve in the US, given our size, wealth, infrastructure etc.
Thank you for working on this. I've been dubious about the venom dumped on anti-vaxers and voluntarily unvaxed people, which is not the same thing as having a strong argument.
Just driving means taking a chance on killing someone.
I suspect the greatest risk is from new variants coming from people in low-vaccination countries. Computing the risk of new variants would be really hard.
Am I missing something, or are you attributing the difference in US/Canada death rates from 1/1/20 to 12/11/20 to differences in vaccination? Because nobody in either country, outside of the experimental study group, was vaccinated during that period, and that's when most of the deaths occurred.
Here’s what I did. It was a very crude method of approximating things, and skipped over all kinds of stuff including what you point about about virtually no vax in year 2020. Also, it only included data thru 10/3/21, because that’s the latest Canadian data on one of the graphs I used.
Calculated Canadian excess deaths as fraction of population:
17,000/ 38 million = .00045
Multiplied US population by fraction above. This gives how many excess deaths US would have had if we had managed the virus as well as Canada.
.00045 x 330,000,000 = 147,000
Subtracted US excess deaths if we’d managed virus like Canada from actual US deaths:
817,000 - 147,000 = 670,000. That’s how many lives would have been saved if US had managed virus as well as Canada. For purpose of this analysis, assumed that getting population vaxed is the only virus management strategy that matters.
So then I looked up vaccination rates for US and Canada as of 10/3/21 on this table:
Counted as unvaxed anyone who was neither fully nor partially vaxed. Fraction of US unvaxed on that date was 34%, number of unvaxed was 0.34 x 330,000,000
= 112,200,000.
Divided number of death attributable to US bad virus management (here considered to consist entirely of falling short of Canadian vaccination rates) by number of US citizens still entirely unvaxed at end of period examined:
[Edited] I think you did a similar mistake to the one John mentioned, though not the same one.
1. Excess deaths in Canada in January and February 2021 probably shouldn't be in your calculation because (i) Canada's vaccine supplies arrived later than the U.S.'s, (ii) it takes a week or two for vaccine-induced immunity to take effect, (iii) most deaths happen two or three weeks after infection - so I'm just guessing here, but even if all the elderly people in Canada got their shots around the beginning of February, it wouldn't prevent deaths until the end of February.
2. More importantly, the U.S. had 2.56x more deaths than Canada before Jan 31, 2021, so the obvious conclusion is that most of the difference between deaths in the U.S. and Canada is not caused by vaccines. After the end of February, the difference in the death rate between the two countries did increase to about 3.5x, though, which I would guess is related to vaccines in large part.
Let's try to get John's numbers. It's complicated, because there were points in time when some parts of the US has excess doses, even while other parts of the country had too few. Also, the same situation in Canada applies.
I -think- it is safe to say that, as of August of 2021, everybody who wanted to get vaccinated had the opportunity in both countries, however.
Using ourworldindata's Covid Death data (I'm not using excess mortality for a variety of reasons), ~292,000 people died in the US between August 1st and today. ~8,000 people died in Canada over the same timeframe.
That's ~2.1e-4 deaths per capita in Canada, and ~8.8e-4 deaths per capita in the US, for a difference of ~6.7e-4 deaths per capita, in the post-vaccine period. There's the start of John's figures, but as I got this data, I noticed that Canada had fewer deaths before vaccines began.
So what about the pre-vaccine period? Let's just consider the period of time from March 1, 2021, to December 1, 2021. (Technically vaccinations began on December 14th, and it would take time for those to take effect and start changing death rates, but even numbers.)
The US had ~783,700 deaths; Canada had ~29,700 deaths. That's ~7.84e-4 deaths per capita in Canada, and 2.4e-3 deaths per capita in the US, for a difference of 1.65e-3 deaths per capita.
Okay, so: Vaccines lowered the death rate of Canada from 7.84e-4 deaths to 2.1e-4 deaths per capita, a reduction of 73%. Vaccines lowered the death rate of the US from 2.4e-3 deaths to 6.7e4 deaths per capita, a reduction of 72%. So vaccines were about as effective in Canada as they were in the US, despite the different vaccination rates.
Without assuming that whatever factors caused a higher death rate in the US than Canada prior to vaccination stopped about the time we started vaccinating, those numbers are close enough for me to say that this calculation suggests that we cannot actually say that unvaccinated people caused any deaths at all. Including their own.
At this point I notice I'm confused. I could blame a correlation between the factors that caused a higher death rate in the US than Canada for erasing the signal, I guess; I can plausibly argue that the excess deaths in the US relative to Canada was because more people in the US were behaving irresponsibly, and these same people also refused to get vaccinated. If this is the case, I predict Canadian support for Covid restrictions will be higher than that in the US. However, when I look up polls in Canada, it looks like Canadians generally had slightly less popular support for, for example, stay at home orders, than in the US.
So I can't just say that the unvaccinated people were causing problems before vaccinations were available; that's just trying to salvage the hypothesis when the data conflicts with it.
Okay, suppose that the difference between 72% and 73% is, in fact, significant. That ends up being the difference between 6.7e-4 deaths, and 6.6e-4 deaths per capita in the US; so an additional 1e-5 deaths per capita from the difference in vaccination rates. I'm also going to use the "full vaccination" rates; 64% in the US, 80% in Canada, for a difference of 16%; this 16% "additional unvaccinated" caused 1e-5 deaths. Double this to account for the people who aren't vaccinated in either country, with some wiggle room for partially vaccinated people, and I get 2e-5 per capita deaths, caused by unvaccinated people. Multiply by the population, and unvaccinated people in the US added an additional ~6,680 deaths to the total.
And I'm back to being confused, because I'm pretty sure that figure is wrong, as it, with the other data, implies some kind of weird decision theory puzzle is true in the real world, and vaccines are only effective for people who would choose to get vaccines, and if you wouldn't choose to get a vaccine, the vaccine wouldn't help you anyways.
I'm going to conclude that either I've screwed up a step in the analysis, or the analysis fundamentally won't work for this.
First, a typographical issue, I stated the data started on March 1, 2021, but really it started on March 1, 2020. Second, I'm comparing a 21 month period of time pre-vaccines to a 6 month period of time post-vaccines. So actually this is overstating the overall effectiveness of vaccines by ... a lot. Like, basically, the entirety of the death reduction from vaccines disappears.
And for nearly three of those months, Omicron has been dominant.
This complicates the math a lot, but would it help your analysis to consider the most heavily vaxxed groups are the elderly and those most likely to have complications from COVID? And the least likely to get vaccinated are those who are young and healthy. That tracks the information I've seen, and also indicates rational thinking on everyone's part. Those least likely to die are most likely to avoid vaccination and because they were very unlikely to die, the overall death rates don't actually move much. If a large number of people with low risk profiles did get vaccinated, it would actually make the vaccine seem less effective, because they change the numerator (number of people vaccinated) without changing the denominator (number of people dying).
Roughly 1,000 children (18 and under) in the US have died of COVID. That's out of 73 million. If the vaccine were 100% effective against death and all children were vaccinated, that 1,000 lives saved would make almost no difference at all in your calculation. Adding 73 million more to the "vaccinated" list, there drastically changing the ratio of vaccines given verses deaths, would therefore make it seem like vaccines did nothing.
What I think happened instead is that the at risk populations of both Canada and the US took the vaccine early, and we got most of the benefit of vaccines by say, April 2021. After that most of our efforts getting people vaccinated was of less use.
Edit: And this actually overstates the effectiveness/need for vaccines in the under 19 group, because most of those 1,000 deaths happened before anyone under 18 was even eligible for the vaccine. Assuming only a few hundred potential lives saved and a less-than-100% effectiveness at preventing death (most of the children who died were immune-compromised or otherwise at greater risk), even complete vaccination of all children would have made virtually no difference whatsoever to the number of deaths from COVID.
Interesting results as I'm digging through the numbers of deaths more. Total US deaths from COVID of *all* people under the age of 50 was just under 62,000. Most of them died before vaccines were available, so maybe 30,000 total died after vaccines were even available. The amount of lives possible to be saved at that point, even with near perfect vaccine effectiveness and uptake, is not enough to move the needle very much on total deaths. Compare that with over 668,000 who died that were 65 or older.
We needed to vaccinate the older and the medically compromised, and the rest didn't much matter. I think we succeeded very well, and mandates were functionally worthless because we had already achieved almost all of the gains by the people who most needed them getting vaccinated without the mandates.
But yes, this. You can't just assume the difference in death rate in the US vs Canada is due to vaccination. There are other relevant differences in their COVID mitigation strategy, and there are relevant differences between US and Canada generally (e.g. population density). The fact that there was a substantial difference in per capita death rates before the vaccine was available, not only proves that but provides a decent quantitative estimate.
So, as Thengskald has done, you use *that* to estimate a baseline for the relative death rate and then use the *difference* between that baseline and the actual death rate during the vaccination period to try and get the death rate specifically due to vaccination differences.
Thank you Thegnskald for taking this on. I don't have time rn to take a careful look at your calculations and thoughts, but will later today. If you have any appetite for further wallowing in stats, here are a few other considerations:
-I'm pretty sure that most vaccinated people overestimate the amount of death and destruction caused by failure to get vaccinated. So in calculations like mine, I'm in favor of simplifications that are going to overestimate rather than underestimate the number of deaths that can be attributed to people's willful failure to get vaccinated. I'd like to present a figure and be able to say, "this is probably an *overestimate* of the number of deaths caused by individual's refusal to accept available vaccinations."
-Failure to get vaccinated leads to increased deaths in 2 ways: The unvaccinated person is likelier to die of covid, and is also likelier to kill someone else by infecting the other person with covid. But of course as soon as the original unvaxed person dies he stops being a vector. This creates a sort of mobius strip in the data, or maybe a coupla linked mobiuses, and how does one handle that? I didn't even try in my crude calculation.
-What got me started on this project was the scenario that seemed to underlie the most rageful purple prose on the Reddit covid sub I follow: *Here I am vaxed and boosted and my life is STILL terribly restricted because of all those non-vaxed mofos, who have killed lots of good folks like me and my kids and might very well kill me & my kids too if we resume living the way we used to.* One part of deconstructing this scenario would be to have an estimate of how many vaxed people have been killed by the non-vaxed. I'm guessing that number is *quite* low, for 2 reasons: First, the vaccinated are far less likely to die of covid than the unvaccinated. Second, vaxed people tend to moved in vaxed social circles and unvaxed to move in unvaxed ones. So a particularly useful pair of numbers to extract from the data would be "vaxedmorts" and "unvaxedmorts" -- i.e., if someone never got vaccinated, what fraction of an unvaxed person has he "killed," what fraction of a vaxed one?
The Germans had a fairly substantial stockpile of nerve gas bombs and shells by the end of the war, well in advance of anything the rest of the world could offer. But there are some things even Nazis won't do - either because the Head Nazi had had a very unpleasant experience with chemical weapons in the last war, or because as Bullseye notes pretty much everyone had figured out by then that chemical weapons aren't worth the bother against a serious army.
"According to Hermann Goering, the main reason was the Wehrmacht was dependent upon horse-drawn transport to move supplies to their combat units, and had never been able to devise a gas mask horses could tolerate"
That article was much more persuasive than I'd expected it to be. Thank you for linking to it.
I'd been expecting the argument to be based purely on the existence of countermeasures like gas masks, NBC suits, and atropine autoinjectors; and on the technical difficulties of using chemical weapons effectively on a large enough scale to matter. While there's a fair amount to these arguments, I think they're often overstated: they reduce chemical weapons use against a prepared enemy to a marginal advantage (forcing use of inconvenient countermeasures, use as a terror weapon against soft targets, and potentially doing a lot of damage against troops in the field when you manage to catch your target unprepared to use their countermeasures in time) rather than a proverbial silver bullet, but a marginal advantage is still an advantage.
Empirical examples I'd been prepared to cite in favor of chemical weapons still providing a marginal edge: continued use by both sides in the later years of WWI even after countermeasures were developed and deployed, the Iran-Iraq War, and the effort the US has put into deterring use of chemical weapons against us (first by building a VX gas arsenal, then by adopting our "WMDs is WMDs" policy and threatening to use nukes to retaliate against chemical weapons use).
The article did make argument similar to that, but the key piece for me was the additional argument about "Modern System" armies, specifically that chemical weapons are no better and are often worse than conventional weapons when used by or against a "Modern System" army, while acknowledging that chemical weapons do in fact have at least marginal utility in conflicts where two "Static System" armies are fighting one another, specifically discussing one of my intended counterexamples in the process.
That leaves that American "Gas us and we'll nuke you" policy unexplained though, although I don't think that's a fatal defect. For one thing, talk is cheap. Even modest-sized chemical weapons stockpiles are cheap on the scale of the American military budget. Combine that with military conservatism in the face of uncertainty over how things would play out on the battlefield (recall that there hasn't been a full-scale shooting war between Great Powers since 1945), and even if we're 95% certain using chemical weapons against the US Army would be useless, that last 5% is worth at least a bit of effort to deter. In addition, the policy also serves to deter use of chemical weapons as a terror weapon against civilian targets (we have the technical capability to distribute masks and suits to the whole civilian population, but civil defense is a bit of a taboo due to a combination of politics and successful Cold War era Soviet propaganda) and any of our allies that may still have Static System armies.
> we have the technical capability to distribute masks and suits to the whole civilian population
When Covid started we had trouble distributing surgical masks to the whole population. Why would gas masks be easier? Or do you mean “have the technical capability” in the sense that we can technically put people on the Moon?
(Re-reading what I wrote, it looks sarcastic. I’m genuinely asking, don’t know how to avoid making it look like that.)
For Covid, the problem was scrambling to do it immediately at the start of the pandemic. It takes time to ramp up manufacturing and arrange distribution of hundreds of millions of anything.
Making gas masks and glowbug suits for everyone on short order in an emergency would likely have been quite a bit harder than making surgical masks or N95 respirators for everyone, but that's not what I was thinking of. I was imagining a scenario where some major strategic rival decided to build a massive arsenal of nerve gas weapons as part of their strategic deterrent, and the US decided to counter this by ordering and distributing (or at least preparing to distribute) protective gear in parallel with the ramp-up and well in advance of any likely use of the weapons.
Israel has something like this as part of their civil defense program, stockpiling enough gas masks and protective suits for everyone and handing them out when there's a particular reason to fear chemical weapons attacks in the short to medium term. I attribute Israel doing this and the US not doing this to radically different threat environments and correspondingly different political attitudes towards civil defense, not to Israel having a particular technical capability here that the US lacks.
Long-time lurker here, commenting for the first time. I realize this is going to sound like a troll post, but I have a serious question I want to ask.
By now, it seems to be common knowledge in the rationalist community that the IQ gap between different races is partly due to genetics - Scott himself has acknowledged that the evidence seems solid to him. However, the scientific community at large continues to reject this view and bully dissenters such as James Watson, for what appear to be ideological reasons; the experts in the relevant fields appear to be complicit in this, which shows that even highly competent people are not immune to being misled. From this, I can conclude that the scientific community has failed at the task of upholding high epistemic standards in the face of ideological pressure, and every claim that it makes is now potentially suspect, especially if it is related to politicized subjects, including global warming, the safety of COVID vaccines, or the (lack of) efficacy of conversion therapy for transgender people.
Given the above, please tell me how a layman such as myself is supposed to trust any claim that is presented as the scientific consensus.
> it seems to be common knowledge in the rationalist community that the IQ gap between different races is partly due to genetics
I don't think that's true. I think what's common knowledge is that a child's intelligence depends somewhat on their genetic code, which is passed down from the child's parents. I've also often heard that black people have lower average scores on certain tests.
But it is not at all clear nor obvious that the *genetic component* of IQ is correlated with *skin color*, and I don't know of any rationalists who have studied the matter and presented a conclusion one way or the other.
But I did see Shaun rebut The Bell Curve pretty effectively on YouTube[1], and it seems clear that there is a segment of the population that VERY much wants to believe that black people have lower IQs because of their genetic code and *not* because of their environment (or English skills - often rural African students are not so good at tests written in English).
This indicates the issue is politicized, which raises the standard of evidence for me*; it means I need to know that the person claiming this relationship (from skin color to intelligence) is not a right-wing hack who wants very much to "discover" that relationship. Of course, there are also left-wing hacks spouting nonsense (like that nasty woke editorial in Scientific American[2]) but they are pretty easy to spot, since they typically imply that one's genetic code cannot affect intelligence at all.
[* Edit: mostly what I mean by this is that my standard of evidence is normally low: if something is not politicized and I hear a couple of scientists saying it's true, then I am strongly inclined to believe it. But once controversy becomes apparent, hearsay isn't enough and we have to go examine the evidence. The more controversial it is, the more carefully we should look. And this is extra tricky because even if you have a university degree, it's tough to evaluate papers by oneself, so there is a need to evaluate and listen to experts.]
If you tell kids they are no good at something, or if you tell kids they lack talent, that's likely to make them less willing to keep trying, and thus, less skilled. (I don't know if this is a rigorous result, but I saw a demo of this effect on adults in the pop-sci show "100 Humans"). With that in mind, I do think it would be unreasonable and unwise for a rationalist to claim without strong evidence that black people somehow have worse genetic codes that make them dumber on average. Even if we had solid evidence of this, it's not just a bad look politically, but also, contributing to a "black=dumb" meme could have a side effect of harming black kids' actual scholastic skill, and maybe even their intelligence. (also, of course, we should not be telling kids "your parents were dumb so you're statistically more likely to be dumb too". Though yeah, if we shy away from uncomfortable science too much or for too long, I guess that is a bad thing too.)
So if it were proven that that is true, but we only talk about it in hushed tones, that would be okay with me. Obviously - sigh - the woke people would be persecuting the scientists who discovered this, which I guess might be a good reason to speak up, but luckily I don't know of any scientist who actually believes this for strong evidence-backed reasons. You mentioned James Watson, and I notice that Wikipedia doesn't cite any studies Watson has done that support his view. Plus he talked about "Chinese being intelligent but not creative because of selection for conformity" - come on now, has Chinese culture selected against creativity for many thousands of years straight? This is prima facie implausible, and remember that evolution is a very, very slow process.
You are neglecting to recognize that erroneously attributing group differences to environmental causes, rather than genetic causes, may have undesirable consequences as well, in that measures will be introduced to compensate for "systemic discrimination", and those measures will become progressively more drastic as they fail to achieve the desired effect. Scott has talked extensively about this in his posts about women in STEM fields.
Assuming discrimination without clear evidence, or attributing group differences to environmental causes without clear evidence, or just generally being dogmatic, is also bad. But here are some obvious environmental differences that could be relevant:
- different wealth levels
- different nutrition levels
- different education quality
- people reading their native language vs a language they are unskilled in
I think there's probably lots of evidence that these factors affect how well people do on tests, but I'm not steeped in this enough to know where to get the evidence. (edit: and the Flynn Effect strongly implies that environment is important, without telling us which aspects of environment matter.) Luckily I'm not here to prove that all these environmental factors definitely affect IQ test results, I'm just here to say you can't reasonably reach a definitive conclusion while ignoring any of these factors (or any other potentially relevant factors).
I wish the entire discussion would shift from the poorly-defined abstraction "Intelligence" to "Problem-Solving in Any Given Environment". As humans adapt and evolve to different environments (with correspondingly different sets of problems) we would expect to see different specializations emerge. That would moot the entire issue of whether one group is 'smarter' than another. And instead of telling a population of kids 'you have a genetic disadvantage at X' we could instead say, "your ancestors are really good at X because they lived in an environment where Y was really challenging for humans". OK, maybe that's not super-inspiring, but it's better than what we have now, which as you note, is a group of people who seem REALLY motivated to find ways in which people whose skin color is different from their own have different scores on IQ tests.
Well, g factor[1] is a thing, and I haven't heard any good arguments that it's "meaningless" or should be ignored. Of course, g factor is not the only factor, so IQ (or similar) test results vary (would vary when taken by the same person) depending on what exactly they are measuring. But I think that, just as some right-wingers want to think "blacks are genetically dumber", some left-wingers want to think "really we're all equal, everybody just has different skills". And I haven't seen anyone do a good job defending either of these ideas... but even if I did, I would worry about whether the bottom line[2] was written first.
Most modern specializations didn't exist in the ancestral environment, e.g. I don't know how to complete a sentence like "Perhaps I am talented at computer programming because my ancestors lived in an environment where _________________." And again, evolution is very slow, so whatever the mysterious factor is, it would have to be in place for thousands of years. For that factor to affect one skin color but not another seems to require a lot of stability - consistent selective pressure in one broad racial group but not another (or opposite pressure in the other). Again I haven't seen that proposition seriously defended. (edit: though possibly genetic drift could do something here?)
On the other hand, the conclusion that "a child's intelligence is affected by their parents" is just something I would expect from basic evolutionary theory and agreed-upon facts. Although all complex adaptations are presumed universal[3], human intelligence and talents do in fact vary from person to person, including among people living in similar environments, and various respectable-sounding things I've heard lead me to think that there's a genetic component to the differences. But differences in intelligence/skills shouldn't be complex adaptations, so probably what we're seeing is akin to the alignment of engine parts: if all parts are aligned perfectly, the engine works very well, and every misalignment or small gap between parts reduces the engine's performance. A child will have a mix of "alignment settings" from zis parents, which usually produces an engine that performs similarly to the parents, but could also, by chance, produce much better or much worse overall alignment than either of the parents. Also, some parts of the brain are specialized for certain tasks, and I expect there will be "alignment settings" that only affect those parts, which could give people talents or shortcomings that are outside the g-factor.
I don't have an answer to "perhaps I am talented at comp programming because my ancestors ..." but I bet given time and effort we could come up with some pretty interesting speculations.
It's interesting also to think of culture as an evolved adaptation, which would itself drive further adaptation (as, over time, people evolved to better adapt to their cultural environment), which would itself drive further adaptation, and so on. And then of course humans alter their environment over time as well...
So a lot of potential entanglement!
I find it hard to take seriously the idea that we are all born genetically tabula rasa, but I recognize there are indeed people who argue exactly that. I tend to think in terms of populations (and individuals) having some degree of genetic specializations based on their unique evolved environments, rather than having a single trait (generalized intelligence) conferring advantages or disadvantages vs others.
G.I. is always going to be slippery because someone has to decide what it is and how to measure it--and that is invariably going to be political.
Well...as I tried to explain, complex adaptations should be expected to be universal ([3] above), and the g-factor is far from being a single trait (highly polygenic). I am not aware of evidence that defining it has ever been "political" and I certainly don't think it should be. If a partisan-affiliated or partisan-sounding scientist tries to define it, that will be a good reason to be more skeptical of the definition. Usually in science there are multiple definitions proposed by different scientists, and the most reasonable definitions produce highly correlated measurements (e.g. there are many ways to estimate global warming, and the half-dozen groups estimating average surface temperature change all get similar results. I believe the same is true of intelligence tests. I don't think anybody reasonable wants politicians or partisans involved in decisions about how to do these measurements!)
Steve Sailer is fond of noting that the position of NFL Corner is invariably occupied by people of a certain skin color. Does "ability to play NFL Corner" fit into your definition of g-factor? Does my ability to deduce what g-factor means without looking it up on Wikipedia? Why or why not?
I suspect we both believe average global temperature is well-defined. We might disagree as to how best to measure it, but there would likely be no disagreement between us as to what, exactly, we were trying to measure.
In contrast we have no such definitive agreement as to what "intelligence" is. We might agree to define intelligence as "the score a person gets on an IQ test," but that's hardly satisfying, because it implies intelligence depends wholly on the test's construction--or more accurately, on the test's creators.
And thus it becomes political. That does not imply that intelligence is not real (nor consequential!) -- it just means we have no objective definition of it, nor even an agreed-upon definition of it, and therefore (obviously) we have no good way to measure it.
I think an extremely important job these days is "person who helps other people find people they can trust." Not sure if there is a catchy job title for this (there ought to be!), but I think Scott is an excellent example of such a person. Given the state of the media these days I don't see any way around cynicism regarding "scientific" consensus. But there are people who are trying hard to come up with a best approximation, given the best available evidence, as to what is true in any given moment. They are worth finding. So to answer your question, find good Trust Arbiters, and let them do most of the work.
Don't trust consensus, trust results. Disparities haven't gone away despite massive efforts; there are your results. The experts can't get any results, and until they do you can disregard them. They don't know anything if they can't get results. Moldbug is useful here despite all his shortcomings; see his "Clearpill pt 2" essay for what he says about power disrupting truth. It does disrupt truth greatly; if you can get canceled for saying something, you're not dealing with science and there is a high risk that the consensus is distorted by power away from truth. Results don't need to cancel; I can preach the flat Earth and keep my job, but if I give my judgment on genetic difference between racial groups (which comes down to me predicting new study results accurately + predicting that genetic modification will get rid of disparities) based on the massive amount of evidence I have sifting through, it's over for my career. That's not a sign of trustworthiness.
> the theory of relativity, *which is still wrong*
I would refrain from calling a description of reality that is indistinguishable from perfect "wrong" - it takes a lot of meaning out of the word "wrong", even if the theory is superceded later.
>If it's "common knowledge in the rationalist community", then the rationalist community is wrong. There are still plenty of holes in that hypothesis that do not square with real world data (eg: there is no observed IQ gap between the white and black children of US military personal raised on oversea US bases).
What study is this? I think I know the one but I want to make sure. If it's a different one I somehow haven't heard of, I'd love to see it, although at this point there is so much evidence contrary to what you're saying that what you speak of can simply be said to have not replicated. Given our political climate it's easy to imagine why that may be.
May I ask your qualifications on this topic? Me, I've written multiple essays on it, I've read dozens of studies, hundreds of block posts, and 10 or so books on the topic. I consider myself to probably be in the 98th percentile of expertise on this subject. It's always good to know where others are when it comes to this because it's somewhat complicated and it's probably not worth debating, eg flat earth, with someone doesn't know any physics or geology if you're an expert physicist or something.
You ignored my question on your background in this topic, which is a bad faith tactic. Readers should therefore assume you're not very well read in this topic, and indeed, I can say as a relative expert that your objections here are more revealing of a low level of contact with the field than with anything having to do with the field itself. One thing I like to make clear on this topic is that it's a serious, complex area of scholarship, and before you can make judgments on it you have to read a lot of stuff. It very much seems like you're pretty low-info on this topic, so I find your judgments inappropriate. If you know you are not very well-read here, especially compared to me, I think it's most appropriate to show a little epistemic humility.
That said, let's see why I think this, other than your bad-faith ignoring of a main part of my post.
>I can't find that particular study, but it's not like it's the only piece of evidence against that theory.
You make this vague statement against "that theory." From my very well read POV, this sounds like a flat earther making a vague claim against "that theory" that the Earth is round. What do you have to back this statement up?
>It largely fails to explain, for instance, why economic outcomes are so uniform over sub-saharan africa, denoting homogenous IQ rates, which makes 0 sense if IQ is strongly linked to "race", since there's more genetic diversity in sub-saharan Africa than in all the rest of the world combined. There should be more IQ variations between different groups of black Africans than between Europeans and Asians.
This is all you have to back that statement up. You can't find the other study you referred to, and now you have these statements. The problem here is that you're assuming IQ and economic status of a country are 1:1 and nothing else factors in here. The correlation between IQ and SES is about .5 and it's the best known single predictor of SES (Strenze 2007). So the idea that IQ variance has to produce a lot of economic variance is a Stubborn Assumption. In 1st world conditions having a gene pool that produces a lower IQ does largely cause black economic underperformance because the US is largely a meritocracy, especially at incomes under $200,000 a year or so, and especially for intelligence. In Africa it's more than plausible that, for instance, there is a threshold effect where having an average IQ under 80 and not having access to welfare from Europeans leads to bottom-barrel economic conditions. Such a threshold could cause very little economic variance compared to genetic intelligence variance. Furthermore, you've also failed to consider that we are only concerned with genetic variance that impacts intelligence. How much variance do sub-Saharan Africans have in skin color compared to Europeans? The idea that the "lots of African genetic diversity" meme that is very common in race denialist literature implies "lots of genetic variance in IQ among Africans" is a low-information Stubborn Assumption.
You have not recognized your Stubborn Assumptions as such because the reality is that they're hard to notice unless you're familiar with the broader body of evidence. You're evidently not very familiar with the broader body of evidence, so these assumptions seem fine, maybe you're not even consciously aware of them.
I know, however, that the broader body of evidence essentially proves, as much as science can ever prove anything, that like everything else evolution happens above the neck, and the US-black US-white IQ gap is highly, highly genetic. Yet it very often happens in this sphere that people who are not very familiar with the evidence come up with some reason Igbo Scrabble scores imply that the US black-white IQ gap is highly environmental. So far all of these are based not on evidence, but on Stubborn Assumptions that link these two disparate topics together uncritically. Therefore, I coined the term Stubborn Assumption Cherrypicking, or SACing, to refer to the phenomenon when someone who is very low information thinks they can debunk a whole field of study from their arm chair with one or two idle observations plus one or two Stubborn Assumptions. "If the Earth is round why can I see the Twin Cities from here? They're supposed to be under the horizon." (I have seen this with flat earths for real actually, besides assuming a wrong horizon/observation distance, the answer is that light refraction can cause things which are under the horizon to appear as if they are not, especially near water. This is complicated and it's a hardly noticeable Stubborn Assumption to ignore this).
I'm saying this because I don't want to be your personal SACing debunker, so if you SAC again I'll have to ignore it or go over it much more briefly. I hope this commentary has given you the tools to recognize when you or others might be SACing; it's a common fallacy that I see in this sphere that the Overcoming Bias types must have missed.
At least you're acknowledging that you just ignored my whole post. What is it with you and ignoring things that make points you dislike? I will give you credit for half acknowledging that this is what you're doing at that you have no expertise here.
What you need to do though is get less haughty with me. You need to have some epistemic humility; if you know you don't know much compared to another guy, you probably shouldn't try to tell the other guy what the reality is as if you're on high. That's what I do. When someone knows more than me, I just ask questions. I have epistemic humility.
So you are dictating to me, quite arrogantly,
>The vast majority of experts reject the idea of a strong link between race and IQ, which you and OP are certain exist based on your own research.
The reason for the wrong ones are incentives and low information, as always. You seem to be lacking in familiarity with how the Cathedral operates but suffice it to say that most "expertise" is see-through. This is because cranking out a paper and advancing your career is not the same thing as actually knowing your stuff. I've been on the inside of this process numerous times in STEM and I know it for a fact. See the 1st three chapters here: http://thealternativehypothesis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AltHypeReader.pdf
>There are only possible two explanations for why this is happening:
So as we've seen, I really don't think you're in an epistemic position to dictate to me what the two possible explanations are. You display 0 humility in this statement, like your others, and still like your others you are wrong. You are absolutely certain, like the other things, based on little to no actual information, that there are only these two explanations and no others, and yet once again you are wrong.
The third explanation is that the portion of "experts" that are wrong on polls (no where near all in this case, probably because the evidence is so overwhelming) are victims of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. There is no conspiracy of professors. One man in particular has gone over this at length specifically for people of your persuasion, here you go: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-2-of-5-a-theory-of-pervasive-error/
Now please, instead of ignoring this whole comment and responding with some other arrogant gish gallop, that will in all probability, based on my last 3 replies to you, just get eviscerated like your other random classifiers, read my links and learn something, challenge yourself, gain expertise. Grow!
Just to clarify, I am not saying that the scientific method is invalid - just that the scientific institutions in the West might be corrupt, similarly to what happened with Lysenkoism and Japhetic linguistics in the Soviet Union.
Scientific institutions are many and varied. They are hardly homogeneous. It should take more than a handful of examples before you decide to throw out all expert knowledge.
WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, pushed back hard on Tuesday on the Republican Party’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and its characterization of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse,” saying the riot was a “violent insurrection.”
Yeah, that was the first time I was impressed by McConnell. Even I was skeptical of the term "insurrection", but I guess the incident really did rattle him.
The risk-taking part isn't meaningless but it's also not the whole story - there are other issues, like being physically large enough to see over the wheel and reach the pedals, and sufficiently-trained hazard detection.
Are these things highly variable in people of all ages? Yes. Could a battery of tests discriminate on these measures more accurately than an age cutoff? Yes. Does age *correlate* fairly well with these things? Yes. Would the increase in complexity of law have a social cost? Yes.
In the particular case of driving there is also the issue of wanting people to have full criminal responsibility for manslaughter before handing them the most common tool of manslaughter yet devised (this is similar to the attribution problem with killer robots - it fundamentally breaks the laws of war if it's possible for war crimes to happen without a war criminal who cares about the punishments). The previous four rhetorical questions apply to that field as well, but the social cost of complexity in that case is far greater.
Then this kind of ageism is correct. I do not care about quality of specific study, it is self evident to me that 13 year old should not be allowed to operate deadly pile of metal on a public road without proper supervision. And that is without going into even more obvious cases (sex, drugs, contracts).
I think that pretty much everyone that 8 year old should not be able to drive car, enter in serious contract, take loans, have parental rights, be able to buy drugs or be claimed to be able to consent to sex?
And at most you can ague which age should be applied to that - 18? 16? 21? Something else?
Does anyone else think Glenn Greenwald's latest (about the Joe Rogan/Spotify censorship campaign) is a little over the top? I agree with him in spirit, but the rhetorical heat level makes me uncomfortable. So does the word choice "liberals" to refer to an essentially authoritarian faction within the democratic party that wants literally the opposite of the root of the word.
"I agree with him in spirit, but the rhetorical heat level makes me uncomfortable"
This has always been my experience with Glenn for the 10+ years I've been following him. The rhetoric is sometimes entertaining but not helpful, sometimes utterly destructive and pointless, but he's usually 'correct' in a sense I care about so I still follow his work. I do wish he would tone it down a bit at times, but as Mr Doolittle points out he's also copped at least as bad as he gives so his reaction is mostly understandable.
Glenn has a personal history of getting censored and attacked for unpopular reporting. First when he helped Edward Snowden, and then more recently when he tried to write about Hunter Biden. Both times it was by people calling themselves "liberals." He uses the word on purpose because his targets self-identify with that term, and he sneers it because of the fact that it means the opposite of what many "liberals" actually do.
Was he actually censored (as in a government institution used legal means to prevent his views from being published) or did people just vehemently disagree with him and refuse to engage with him (by choosing not to publish his writing or choosing to no longer do business with him)?
I guess that depends on some information that the public doesn't have. Regarding the Hunter Biden report, he claims that the company that he worked for broke their contract with him and forbid him to write the story (at least the way he wanted to, which he says was in his contract to do). Breaking a contract to prohibit him from publishing does seem to go beyond "no longer choos[ing] to do business with him." You can read his take on it here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept
For clarity, I do consider "censored" to go beyond official government action, and to include private actors censoring for political reasons as problematic.
In regards to Edward Snowden, the government clearly went after Snowden for blowing the whistle on illegal activity. How much Glenn was affected or targeted by *official* legal action is up for debate and depends on information we probably can't ever see. He was threatened with arrest by people in Congress, though it's hard for us to determine if they were at all genuine instead of grandstanding. That they "attacked" him for his actions is without doubt. Here's his Wikipedia page if you want to read more on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#:~:text=Greenwald%2C%20who%20was%20not%20detained,a%20ruling%20from%20Supreme%20Court
What is up with the options for responding that appear below each post? As of this thread we now have the option to report comments. As of last night, evening of 2/7, there was a Report button, and also a Give Gift button. The latter allowed the reader to donate money to pay for a month's or a full year's subscription to ACX for the writer. This morning, the Give Gift button is gone, but meanwhile somebody sent me a heart in the night, liking a comment I'd made. How did they even do that? There was no 'Like' option when I was on yesterday evening.
So wutz up? And while I'm talking about options, would like to express my preferences:
-I'm delighted to have a Report button
-I want the option to send someone a "like." It makes posting here feel more real and satisifying -- it least it does that for me. It adds an element that's there in spoken conversation, where people's facial expressions let the speaker know when they are moved or amused or othrwise taken with his ideas. (On the other hand, I wouldn't want accumulated like votes to appear alongside posts -- that feels like high school.)
-I didn't like that give gift thing as a way of expressing approval. Seems unreasonable to have to pay $10 to tell someone you liked their post. And it seems like many recipients would find the gift useless, because they already are subscribed for the year, do not want to subscribe at all, or have no need of a little ACX scholarship. And it seems like the money basically is a donation to Substack.
I think there is a browser extension that allows likes. You can 'like' someone's comment if it shows up in an email. At least that option is there for me.
Incivility is *way* down. I put up a post on Open thread 206 complaining about the degree of incivility, especially instances of flat-out PVA, Primitive Verbal Abuse. That was a month ago, and I can't remember seeing a single instance of it since. Worse thing I've seen since is occasional sniffiness and irritability - "you're continuing to argue back despite my clarifications, seems like willful refusal to consider my point" kind of thing. And that stuff is just par for the course.
So no PVA is great. I'm delighted by the absence of turd-dropping harpies zooming over the conversations here, but am not sure why they're gone. Doubt that my posts convinced any harpies to change their ways.
Scott, did you ban a bunch of people?
Everybody else: Do you agree that civility level is much improved?
Personally, I think it's improved, but I think part of it is because "I hate you, you are (enemy tribe) and you deserve evil to happen to you" has been mostly replaced with highly weird and esoteric ways of saying the same thing. Over the past week, I've been repeatedly accused of engaging in "frame manipulation", which as far as I can tell just means "you think that things I find good are bad or vice-versa and refuse to use my nomenclature, and this is a personal attack on me and morally evil instead of a strong disagreement."
I still prefer this over "I hate you, go die" because it at least is trying to have some kind of elevated discourse, but I suspect part of it is more "adaptive camouflage" instead of a genuine attempt at civility. But maybe I'm just being uncharitable.
Yeah, I was vaguely aware of an exchange with you and someone else that had that tone, but it was about some topic about which I had neither thoughts not feelings so I just skimmed over that part of the thread. I have a vaguely worked-out idea about debates -- how the people involved are of course feeling angry and eager to win, but that the best debates are the ones where the emotions are just fuel for the process of articulating and angling acute points. The emotions are burned up in the process. Sounds like what you're describing is like an engine with poor combustion.
Having read Scott's blog for a while, I find that there are two main factors that vary from time to time. One is individual actors who bring heat to discussions. They can easily respond to a dozen different people and add nothing of value to the conversation, which can make it seem like a lot of incivility (especially when people respond to them angrily in return). A few well placed bans can often fix that (marxbro comes to mind as a recent ban that probably made an actual difference - more from people no longer responding to his sealioning). The other factor is in individual discussions. One or two heated topics or threads can feel like a lot of incivility, compared to the low baseline.
That said, yes, I have noticed less incivility as well.
Please consider subscribing to my Substack if you are interested in Progress Studies, metascience, or AI. I feel optimistic I will have a couple posts on those subjects published in the next few months.
Hey, have you guys heard of ZDoggMD? I just discovered this guy and loving it. He's a sort of rationalist / scout mindset type of guy, but with a different branding. As a doctor, he's doing a lot of videos on vaccine misinformation lately, and I think he's doing a fantastic job.
Another example: here he's arguing against hydroxycloroquine king Peter McCullough using the FLICC analysis framework without explicitly naming it (Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking and Conspiracy theories): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pcIbVvHI2c
And like myself, he's promoting a political middle: "If you like the way we talk about these things, join our tribe of alt middle people. We're trying to change discourse. We're trying to fight social media and big tech's dominance on weaponizing our hatred of each other. We're trying to think clearly. We have a good time." But unlike myself, he does a good job :)
> Yeah a lot of the people who used to love me hate me, and you know, and people who used to hate me love me. [...]
> Honestly that's why I like to do a show with you, because I know this about you, you've been consistent. In fact, I reached out to you years ago, prior to Covid, because I saw your work. And I said, this guy is as skeptical of how medicine does its business as I am. A that was a kinship right because we both share that particular compass. And what's interesting is what i've had to learn, what I've had to grow into myself, is understanding how how to to look at another side compassionately and be able to speak to them in a way that is accepting of who they are without giving up the fact that I actually think what I'm saying is right and I need to persuade you. So that's been a change for me that Covid helped to accelerate. And the truth is, if you're not allowed to change, grow, or have strong opinions, because you're afraid the audience is going to abandon you, then that's a bad [business] model, right, it means you're dependent on clicks. [...]
> So your survival mechanism is that you, probably to a large degree, you're willing to tolerate massive losses in your audience?
> Yeah I am, in fact I'm willing to tolerate it going to zero, i just don't care, but it took me a long time to get to that point. [...]
Like Thegnskald I much prefer reading to taking somebody in via videos. But I will check him out, and hope to be pleasantly surprised. I looked him up and he is on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram but does not seem to have a blog. Here's an article about the guy: https://www.chcf.org/blog/the-curious-case-of-zdoggmd/out.
Wow, it's as if I'm the only one here that enjoys videos. 2x speed anyone? But I think it's important to have more rat-adj or "alt-middle" thinkers on video... because lots of people don't like reading so much. I don't know if he does any text work.
I am trying to find a book review scott published on SSC possibly 2019ish. Subject was on the Holocaust, and I think the gist of the analysis was that Jewish populations did worse (by far) in areas that were effectively stateless when the Nazis invaded, and were (much?) better protected in areas with strong functioning governments. Assuming I am not hallucinating this, If anyone could give me the book title and even better a link to the review I would be most grateful. Thanks!
Section IV discusses which countries did more or less to protect the Jewish populations. It doesn't look like Scott himself comes to that conclusion about the correlation with having a stronger government, but maybe people in the comments talked about that.
Are you sure? He (or H. Arendt) discusses the treatment of Jews under different governments as well as their own leadership in the second half of the article.
I have a distinct memory of Scott having a strong emotional reaction and calling it (paraphrasing) one of the most depressing books he'd read. But I've searched through SSC's archives and I can't find anything that fits. Sometimes I think I have memories of other universes. :)
I actually searched through a bunch of SSC articles with references to Jews and Nazis (it was a slow night) and couldn't find anything that seemed to fit better (to what I understood from your description). For example, this is one paragraph from the Eichman article:
Other interesting profiles include Greece (hopelessly depressing), Slovakia (very Catholic, in favor of killing Jews but got in a bunch of fights with the Nazis about ethnic Jews who had been baptized into Catholicism), Hungary (ruled by an admiral despite being landlocked; otherwise hopelessly depressing), Belgium (deliberately left the trains unlocked so the Jews could escape!), Holland (kind of like France; the local Gentiles tried to help, but the assimilated Jews sold out the refugee Jews in the hope of placating the Nazis; the Nazis were not placated; three-quarters of Jews died), and Poland (I don’t even want to talk about how hopelessly depressing this one is).
One obvious explanation is that if the government is strong and is hostile to Jews, the Jews would have already been killed or driven out. So this would not prove that stronger governments protect Jews on the average--you're literally seeing survivorship bias.
In this case "strong governments" = governments that protected the rights and safety of their citizens, Jewish people included -- even after they were invaded
Was going to try and submit this via the AC grants, might still, but going to post here-
I have a proposal that doesn’t require any funding. I am hoping you might write a post on David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative.
It is essentially a trans-humanistic argument that humanity is ethically obligated to use technology to guide its own evolution to reduce suffering asnd maximize eudaimonic and “hedonistic” states. By “hedonistic” we do not mean “wire head hedonism.” We mean raising the baseline of mental health in a similar way in which Bayesian rationalism aims to raise the “sanity” wireline.
We know that much of a person’s baseline happiness is determined by genetics. In the short term, we can use technology to improve this basis for everyone. But long term, towards a post-human future where mood states and spiritual states might be comparable to the MDMA experience. There is already top down stimulation technology developed by IARPA’s brain project for PTSD that works “too well” in terms of curing depression and creating euphoric states. But this is just a narrow framework of what could be possible. There are experiments involving electromagnetic fields that induce a temporary form of ablation of turning off neural circuits temporarily to determine their function. There was a story (and I would have to dig to find the link because it was years ago) where someone who had previously only been able to draw stick figures was able to see the world as an artist and while this EM field was in place, draw realistically detailed art.
There is the possibility, not that far in the future, that people can not only improve their states of well being, but not be limited by their genes and experiences to access different modes of consciousness and being.
Pearce’s view is ambitious and comes from a negative uiltitarian standpoint where he emphasizes the abolition of suffering. I sympathize with this, but I don’t see that the basic idea necessarily has to be conditional on accepting negative utilitarianism or any specific ethical system as a prerequisite with whatever philosophical baggage that entails. Pearce and many who support the HI advocate for the abolition of suffering in all sentient creatures. In the extreme long term, this means a re-engineering of the biosphere.
However, I along with Pearce and others have started something called the biohappiness initiative. The aim is not adoption of the HI as a specific dogma, but opening the Overton Window to discussion of these considerations. This is ethically urgent as humanity is already in the time where the decision we make now will influence the future in incredibly dramatic ways. I see this as as intersecting with existential risk.
For sure, many will be wary of such a utopian ideal. And wary for good reason. But the important thing to understand is the beginning of these changes is already happening, and if we collectively stick our heads in the sand and adopt a “wait and see” approach, the evolution of this will be an extension of the current condition in which these dynamic forces began to shape.
Governments, corporations, and specific visionaries will push these things along a Fabian gradient. Much like the early days of the internet, when engineers understood that the principles they established then would have dramatic consequences in the future, we can’t afford to wait, as in the case of the internet, till these things have become such a part of the fabric of our society they can’t be reversed and re-engineereed in hingsight. If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.
We already see talk of how Elon Musk’s neuralink hips could cause orgasm. Imagine a metaverse that directly connected to the brain where instead of the “soft” dopamenergic push of Facebook’s tricks, one had induced orgasms to reinforce behavior.
Or the experiments where people’s sense of ethical judgements can be altered. Or the technology that can read images from peoples mind and even insert them (if you’re skeptical of any of this I can provide links but I think you are better informed then the average person on these matters.)
Or Xi Jingping’s combination of big data and mood monitoring helmets. It is not hard to see how any number of nightmarish dystopian possibilities could evolve.
Or, to put things in terms of conventional existential risk, how when people integrated more and more with technology, the “runaway ai” scenario could look more like the Borg then Skynet.
Musk already has stated his goal is to combine machine and human intelligence and understands the risks, but feels it is the only way to stop the purely AI singularity.
We are summoning a kind of techno Moloch that can runaway with nature of humanity in a way where this really will be “the dreamtime”, and no push to say “no we shouldn’t” will stop whats already growing and evolving. For the same reasons we can’t just play civ and design the perfect society, we cant stop this change. Even if such things we’re banned in the US, we can’t stop Jingping or Putin- but as you understand its deeper then that.
But we can imagine an actual dreamtime. We can open up and accept the inevitable, and realize we can’t go the luddite route. The only way out is forward. Towards a difference between literal heaven and hell.
My aim in asking you to cover this is to get our ideas into the Overton Window of discussion. I do not expect you to agree with everything Pearce says. I don’t myself. But the ideas as a counterpoint to the “digital copy upload” version of transhumanism which is more popular at least is worthy of discussion. If nothing else then as a counterpoint to the current trend of discussion which strikes me as not unlike Huxley’s Brave New World, where he later admitted he presented two insane option and only later wish he had included a saner option.
There needs to be a discourse, at least amongst the tech minded crowd, where there is something more then just “we need to summon a lesser a Molloch to fight the bigger Molloch.” It seems to me that for all of Less Wrong’s success at raising the profile of existential risk, no one has any solutions that don’t involve creating the very thing they are afraid of (like proposals to create a global AI to find and shut down existential risk). I believe the HI, or at lest the general thrust of it, is a sort of “third” or “fourth” way, and really the only chance we have of avoiding disaster.
"There is already top down stimulation technology developed by IARPA’s brain project for PTSD that works “too well” in terms of curing depression and creating euphoric states."
Got a link for that? I just googled IARPA + PTSD and found absolutely nothing except a single study comparing 2 common PTSD treatments, EMDR and Truama-Focused CBT. Both treaments were found to produce moderately decent results, and to work about equally well.
I agree with you 100%, a future without superhappiness is wasted potential. I'm interested in learning about IARPA’s brain project for PTSD. Is there a paper or website that you could share? I've read a lot about brain stimulation and it would be good to know if this is something novel.
You claim that Pearce is opposed to wireheading, but from the way you're describing his goal, it sounds bad for similar reasons. It might not be wireheading in the strict sense of "sit in a chair pressing the 'pleasure' button all day and doing literally nothing else," but being able to control your own emotions to the extent of making yourself happy whenever you want sounds like a softer version of the same thing. There are good evolutionary reasons we didn't develop to control our own emotions, and being able to do so would argue destroy the impetus for much of what makes us human. "My entire family just died horribly, but I still feel happy because I can just make myself feel happy whenever!" isn't any kind of enlightenment or paradise, it's something that most people would rightly consider a mental disorder. (In fact, "being happy all the time regardless of circumstance" is an existing mental disorder. Pearce's proposal is different in that people would theoretically be free to choose other emotional states, but given the opportunity to simply choose happiness, it's hard to imagine they would choose anything else.)
Suffering because your family is dead is the normal reaction, expected by society, but that doesn't make it good. Because, in addition to your family suffering, you are now also suffering. A negative emotional reaction to a negative thing doesn't make that thing any better.
Unless your response to death is to declare death your enemy and do what you can to prevent it.
How do you get that from "raising the baseline of mental health" and "abolishing suffering"? There are already people out there who naturally seem to be positive and happy all the time, without any "wireheading" drawbacks.
I mean one could take it too far and I guess that would be a disorder, but I think most people are on the other side of the line of optimality, more on the side of melancholy than necessary. And if, hypothetically, people were "flipped" about the optimality axis - biased to much toward happiness rather than biased too much toward experiencing suffering - that sounds like it might be a better tradeoff than the one we have.
Are you sure you'd be able, at your lowest, to resist modifying yourself into something less than human just to stop suffering?
Given how we already have huge problems with very blunt wireheading instruments (opiates, cocaine) I think there will be a literal lost generation with, hopefully partial, societal collapse. Whatever society emerges on the other side will have a sane approach to wireheading figured out (which may be just tabooing the whole process).
I don't think the problems associated with extreme highs (opiates) necessarily translate into problems with targeted techniques to prevent suffering that do not create highs.
Interesting essay on public intellectuals! Interesting example (Thomas Friedman. I agree!).
The ones that deserve to fade, I think, have strong opinions on hard questions in areas they know nothing about.
But they stay around if they market themselves well.
Lots of average thinkers say outrageous things for attention, to stick around.
Which leads us to...who is the audience for these public intellectuals? What is that audience looking for from public intellectuals?
If you want to impress seriously smart people with your ideas, you're only going to have a small, niche audience. I'd be satisfied with that if I were a public intellectual.
That was interesting! I'm not sure if anyone saw that, but the comment said "asfasadfasd" for a few seconds and then changed to the spam one. I guess the substack spam filter doesn't work on edited comments.
So Julia, I'll give you credit for figuring your way around the spam filter, but... is this a manual process? Is this forum really the right target for this kind of spam?
It’s still there after 15 hours. Apparently an effective weird trick. Much better than the one weird trick to remove belly fat. Is it possible that no one has reported it?
[Edit] I reported it and it was deleted. I guess everyone thought it had already been reported.
It’s hidden from me in Safari on my phone but visible in Windows with Chrome. [Edit - It's hidden on my iOS Mac with Safari too. Looks like a browser dependent issue.
Looking for opinions / experiences with a similar situation (I amconsidering a job offer)...Thanks!
Synopsis:
I am currently working for a more or less consultation company, doing data science and machine learning. The company has grown considerably over the past 2 years, from a startup of a few dozen people to a mid sized company of almost 200 (and growing). The work is shotgun-like, we do all kinds of data science and ML but this also means it is not too focused (although not everybody does everything) and projects usually last a few months to a year. I can learn quite a bit of this and that but it is not that focused. I learned A LOT about business and thinking about it when doing data science though, I doubt I could learn it as much elsewhere. There are also a lot of people who know a lot about specific ML-related things I don't know yet and want to know. The pay is average to perhaps somewhat below average in the field (it is supposed to increase company wide this year though and I would likely get a bit of a promotion on top of that which would probably translate to a 10-15 percent increase or so in pay)
We have a client/partner company where I've been leading a data science project (for the past year or so). The company is a startup which recently got funding from their main investor and are looking for others. It is run by two business guy and all data-related stuff has been done by us. They want to boost their development and are looking for an internal data science team (they will need data engineers as well) and they offered me a position leading that team. The pay offered is extremely good compared to my current pay (twice as much, in fact). However, being a startup (and there is competition in their field which might be a bit head of them), they may easily crash and burn. I also have an option with my current company payable in about 2 years which I would lose and which is good enough to cover quite a bit of the difference (though not all).
I am quite confident in my data science and business skills, somewhat less so in my data/platform engineering and DevOps abilities (or MLOPs, though I feel nobody has really figured out proper MLOPs yet) but I suppose I understand these well enough to recognize people who actually understand it very well and who would therefore be good additions to the team. The founders are entirely business people and the "tech" part of the job would be up to me entirely because of that. I think it might be interesting to build something almost from scratch like that but at the same time it is a bit risky. I am in my early 30s so I guess I can afford a bit of risk though :)
To summarize, I guess the main motivations to stay where I am are familiarity, more security and a lot of ML-oriented people I think I can still learn a lot from (probably the last thing is the main motivation for me). The main motivation to take the offer is the pay, focus on one clear thing (instead of working on 2-3 disparate projects at any given moment and having fairly limited time to code) and simply the fact that it is something new that I have not tried before (setting up and running a focused team like that).
Take the offer. It pays more, and doesn't seem to be obviously worse.
Current job might give you more depth (specific ML knowledge) but the new job will give you more breadth (engineering side plus management side). Breadth will be more important for your future career.
Even if the startup crashes and burns in eighteen months, once you can say you've led a team your career prospects drastically improve.
I think I would learn a bit about engineering even in my current job. Management in terms of leading projects with teams of 3-4 people and project ownership in general is what I've already been doing in my current job, though this would definitely be a lot more "holistic".
I am not completely convinced about the founders though in terms of their business skills (they're quite alright personally), so perhaps this is the one thing in which it is clearly worse (our CEO is definitely someone who has proven to have skills to turn a small group of 10 or so people into 150+ sized company within 5 years and with no external funding (the no external funding bit is of course easier for a consultation company which. at the end of the day, mostly sells labour).
But you are right that having such an important role in a starting product-oriented company is something I don't have experience with yet.
If the start-up isn't offering substantial equity, I would punt. The way you get rich is ownership of something that works out well. That's what compensates for the fact that almost all start-ups are short-lived.
They offer 2 percent in ESOP. I discount the value a lot though, in fact I am not really considering it much in my decisionmaking since as you say, start-ups tend to be short-lived. My reasoning is that the pay should be good enough to compensate for that and if it actually is successful, the ESOP is a nice bonus (though 2 percent aren't a lot unless they become really wildly sucessful which I doubt) They also offer a further increase in pay after another successful funding round.
Well my impression is kinda meh. 2% is pretty cheap, if you're one of a handful of near founders. If they're offering a way above market salary instead, that seems like a danger signal to me, like maybe they think either the company will fold or they won't need you around for all that long -- anybody can pay a very handsome salary for a short time. To my mind your current set-up bespeaks a little better biz judgment, paying people in a new company market to a little under with the promise of a stake a little later. That's financially sound, plus you prioritize those in it for a longer term. (I'm assuming here you're not drastically underpaid, because if you *are* then you should 100% jump ship, you don't want to work for people who don't recognize your value.) You've got to weigh $$ against working conditions for yourself, but I personally put a premium on really superior top management, as that is both hard to come by and a daily burden when it doesn't exist.
Any chance you could discuss this frankly with your own top management? I mean, if they offer you a bigger equity stake in the current venture that might make the decision easy. If it were my company, and I had someone I valued very highly, I'd want them to let me know the situation, so I could make them happy if it was worth it to me. But YMMV of course.
I think i could discuss this, in fact my current company has minority share in that startup and I was already discussing this with my boss, basically saying that if they offered something extraordinary, I would consider it but I'd rather stay if their offer was not that special (I did not know the exact offer yet at the time but my boss wanted to discuss it, he knew about the offer since the founders discussed it with him as well).
In my current company I don't have an equity though, only an option whose value is based on company business performance (but with a fixed range based on specific business goals being met) and which is payable in about 2 years from now (provided that I keep working there full time or close to full time throughout the 2 years). But you're right that if this were increased a bit, that might make it easier as you say.
I read John Gray's "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" and I found it to be a very good description of the differences in how my wife and I behave/communicate and how that leads to conflict.
Now, I've read a few popular psychology/self-help books before, so I wouldn't have been surprised to see a few vaguely plausible but quite general claims that kind of make sense, so that you could fit them to your reality like a horoscope. But this was more than that. I read many of the accounts of arguments couples had had and thought, "Wow, that's just the kind and sequence of things we said when arguing about X the other month, with the male/female roles matching."
To what degree are the claims the book makes about typical differences in male/female behaviour/preferences true? There's a summary of some of the key claims here:
I haven't been able to find a good discussion of this online. There are plenty of people who say, "This book is amazing and saved my marriage." as well as those who say, "This is a terrible book because it perpetuates sexist stereotypes," but not much else. I found one paper where someone did a survey of "romantic gestures" in the book suggested for men/women and didn't find men/women preferred them as the book might suggest, but that's about it.
John Gray makes a number of dubious-sounding claims about hormones and nutrition elsewhere, but he's not an expert on biology or medicine, so I don't have much faith in those. On the other hand, he has claimed that before writing his book, he was a celibate "monk" for nine years, then had sex with hundreds of women over a couple of years and asked them to "tell him their stories". If true, I suppose that may be a bigger data source than most social science studies.
Men are from a fixer-upper planet that's going to take a whole lot of work to be really nice, women are from a pure unredeemable hellscape? That can't be right, can it?
Ha ha. I suppose that's the astronomical interpretation.
The surface of Mars is Frozen, so you can fix this fixer upper with a little bit of love.
I recall from a BSD fortune that Biblical hell has lakes of molten sulphur, so must have a temperature between 115 and 445 degrees C. But the mean surface temperature of Venus is 464 degrees C. So it can't be a literal hellscape!
Venus has very high air pressure, which changes the melting and boiling points. I looked at some phase diagrams, and I'm not totally sure, but I think sulfur would indeed be liquid on the surface of Venus.
The big thing Venus has going for it in terms of interplanetary colonization is that Earth-normal air is a fairly powerful lifting gas in Venus's atmosphere, and the upper bands of Venus's atmosphere where the pressure is about the same as Earth's at sea level also has a fairly reasonable temperature range of ~30-120ºF, so floating cities are theoretically possible.
There are a few downsides, though: the colony/airships would need to be either constructed in place (out of what materials?) or transported interplanetary distances fully-assembled, either of which involves extreme engineering and logistical challenges. The colonies would also need to be build to withstand Venus's atmosphere, which is still highly corrosive at that altitude even if the temperature and pressure are reasonable. And then there's the question of what you're going to do on a floating Venusian city that's going to be worth all that effort and risk.
I read the paper. The introduction is snarky and presents a straw man. The second half is a critical (read: social justice) analysis in which the author asserts a "blank slate" position on male/female personality differences. This doesn't invalidate the remainder, but doesn't fill me with confidence.
The first half cites results from a number of studies, mainly on when and to what degree men/women feel cherished/needed and how they respond when stressed. (I haven't looked up the individual studies.) My reading of the analysis is that there are small differences, which mostly agree with the directions of Gray's claims. However, because the differences are not large, the idea that men and women behave as if from different planets is hyperbolic (but then you knew that already).
I have not read the paper, and believe your critique of it. I def have a bad attitude about the book, some of it justified by title's absurd implication that male-female communication differences are enormous, some by my life experience and reading of social science research, both of which tell me that it's a virtual certainty that there will be considerable overlap of male and female bell curves on almost any variable.
Additionally, I was irritated by what I experienced as a sort of subtext about the author's personal skills with women, in the account of how he researched the book: After 9 years as a monk, he went into penis turbocharge mode and bedded *hundreds* of women, who found him to be such a perceptive listener that they happily confided in him about their communication experiences with menb while basking in a post-coital glow. Seems like the book's subtext is: "Had a 9 year dry spell? Read me and you too can go turbopenis and fuck hundreds of babes who will like you and confide in you."
I haven't read the book but from the summary, it seems like it teaches valuable communication skills. The contentious bit would be whether the different personalities it tries to bridge are as rigidly gender-correlated as the title implies.
Suppose I'm upset for some reason. There is definitely a problem-solving mood and a need-a-listener mood, and I seem to get more of the former while my girlfriend gets more of the latter. However, there are definitely moments when treating me like I'm "from Mars" will just make me more annoyed.
So... "the good parts aren't original, and the original parts aren't good" seems to sum it up.
I have no idea whether Gray's claims about men and women are true at a statistically significant level, let alone whether they are true at a noticeable-without-regression-analysis level.
But an existence proof for them being incorrect as stated is trivial - just find one woman who argues like Gray claims men do, or one man who argues like Gray claims women do; I don't even have to go outside my household to do that.
My guess is that if you believe what he says, rather than translating it into what he might in fact mean, you'll make an ass of yourself.
OTOH, those cross-purposes arguments are really really common. People with "good soft skills" can fairly reliably figure out how some other person works, and adapt their communication.
Maybe some people with meh soft skills can improve their poor track record with heuristics like this.
Thought experiment: imagine that many people really do tend to match one or other of Gray's communication patterns. Imagine farther that the pattern match is somewhat gendered. Let's say 60% of men are "male" patten, and 40% of women, and vice versa.
Now let's take Joe Clueless. He personally follows the male pattern, and currently treats everyone he encounters as the same as him. He's wrong 50% of the time overall, but 60% of the time when dealing with women, and only 40% when dealing with men. If he adopts Gray's theory, and assumes all women follow Gray's female pattern, he'll now be right 60% of the time, with all the improvements involving his dealing with women.
If men with Gray's female pattern and women with Gray's male pattern are less common, he improves even more.
He's still made of fail compared to someone with decent interpersonal skills.
But if his wife or girlfriend happens to follow Gray's female pattern, it might just save the relationship.
OTOH, if he starts treating male-pattern women as female-pattern, those relationships will somewhat predictably go straight to Hades.
And ditto for Jane Clueless, a female-pattern women with similar social aptitudes.
For what it's worth, John Gray acknowledges that a lot of what he says are generalizations that may be untrue for some people. In the introduction (of the edition I read), he writes:
"I make many generalizations about men and women in this book. Probably you will find some comments truer than others... after all, we are unique individuals with unique experiences. Sometimes in my seminar couples and individuals will share that they relate to the examples of men and women but in an opposite way. The man relates to my descriptions of women and the woman relates to my descriptions of men. I call this role reversal. If you discover you are experiencing role reversal, I want to assure you that everything is all right..."
The summary I linked doesn't mention that, and I can see how claiming generalizations were universally applicable would offend people, and applying them universally would make many inter-personal relationships worse (not just romantic ones). In any case, taken literally, the title is provocative, as "a real dog" points out.
There's something in your model that I think needs refining. The way the book is written sounds like it's mainly targeting people in long-term (heterosexual, monogamous, etc) relationships. (OK, Gray seems to have rewritten basically the same book several times, and one edition is about workplace relationships.) In this case, the outcome will be more binary, as Joe Clueless only applies Gray's ideas to one relationship (with his wife Jane). Then it's potentially either a big success or a terrible failure.
Also, what happens if Joe Clueless is married to Jane Clueful? Presumably she can at least communicate with Joe as he wants, which will diffuse a lot of arguments. Do they both have to be initially clueless to get a significant benefit?
Regarding sexist stereotypes, this is what Eugenia Cheng says about it in her book x+y:
"Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray is a famous and divisive example, but I actually found it rather useful. I didn’t take it to mean that all men behave in the “Mars”-type ways, but it helped me to recognize when someone (of any gender) was behaving in one way while I was behaving in the other, and thus helped me to communicate better and resolve situations that might otherwise have become ever more antagonistic. It helped me understand things like why I am resistant to advice when I tell someone about a problem in my life (because I am seeking validation, not a solution—in a Venus-like manner). I take the book to be really saying, “Some people, in some situations, are from Mars, and others, in other situations, are from Venus, and it’s often men who are one and women who are the other but not necessarily, and you might be both at different times in different situations.” That is a somewhat less catchy title.
Somehow the imagery is much more vivid and arresting when it involves a very distinct dichotomy between two completely different things, but our need for something vivid and arresting can get in the way of a nuanced understanding."
I agree with that interpretation...the goal is to figure out how to relate to individual people, even if there are "typical differences in male/female behaviour", you're still just talking to the one person. In my mind it's a book about making a serious effort at understanding the person in front of you, and how hard that can be sometimes, and just how different people can be from each other; it's not a book about how men and women are different.
Have a Martial (?) take. If you're upset, try to remember to say whether you want listening or advice. It's possible that which you want will change in the course of a conversation.
If you talking with someone who's upset, ask them whether they'd rather have listening or advice.
I'm inclined to think that people who don't like the idea of saying which they want are worth avoiding, but I lack experience, so this is a guess. This rule doesn't apply to small children.
I found the same thing. I found it very difficult to work out why my good lady was arguing in such an unproductive fashion before I read that book and discovered that we were both aiming for different goals in the conversation.
I was using speech to try to solve the problem while she was using speech to help her consider the different aspects of the problem.
Once I recognised that behaviour, and stopped trying to solve the problem, everything made sense.
I’m skeptical. I see a lot of variability between individual men and individual women but don’t see a great different between one group and the other. Maybe it should be something like men are from Iowa and women are from Illinois.
This is the issue I was actually hoping for some insight/commentary on.
I'm aware of some differences in the "Big Five" personality traits, and of the people/things difference, all of which have been discussed on this blog and its predecessor. But these traits seem quite low-level compared with claims like "women want men to listen to them while men desire solutions to problems". That sounds like a stereotype.
Research on stereotypes (for example, Jussim/Crawford/Rubinstein) shows they are often true qualitatively. But has anyone looked at these stereotypes specifically? Obviously something like that is going to be quite hard to measure empirically, but I imagine you could devise an experiment involving recording arguments and coding what each person talked about.
There are tests that try to determine gender. I took one once and they weren’t sure if I was a guy in spite of my years of eating rusty spikes for breakfast. [I wish didn’t have to do this but: Joke]
Maybe I should have used a magnifying glass to fry ants instead of taking the thing away from my brother. I dunno.
What is a very fascinating aspect of your favorite historical group that has never been implemented in a video game in a representative way? Consider the Socii system of the Romans as a potential example. Examples can be political, religious, administrative, etc. Don't limit yourself to war games mechanics.
After reading Bret Devereaux's article on the logistics of the Mongol hordes (a slow-moving base camp with the sheep moving between grazing lands, supported by hunters traveling much longer distances on horseback) I really want to see it implemented in a game. It almost reminds me of XCOM 2's mechanics with the Avenger.
Nomadic groups in general are hard to represent in a traditional cities-and-borders sort of wargame. Have any games done a good job with that?
They aren't a real people, but I like how the Beastmen factions (imagine if the Greco-Roman nature monsters were demonic, hated humans, and lived in the HRE) work in Total Warhammer II. Your army's units don't have upkeep- instead you have a pretty strict cap on how many of the non-fodder units you can recruit, which you raise by building a reputation through military aggression (this attracts more monsters to your banner). This reputation determines a bunch of other things (want your hordes to start stronger? Spend reputation points. Want the unique commanders with special mechanics for their horde? Spend reputation points. Want an extra horde? Reputation points.) The income you get through burning cities to the ground is spent on upgrading your hordes' camps, which lets them field-recruit replacement units and adds passive bonuses to them in battle. The only permanent settlements you build are giant monoliths to your evil gods, which then mark all the surrounding territory for aggressive raiding and razing and (once you're done with the raid-and-raze phase) poison the land so that the other factions have to smash the monolith (and the army guarding it) to reclaim their lands. Burn enough valuable settlements and dedicate the land to the elder gods, and you win. Your army itself also vanishes when encamped (Beastmen lurk in the forests and mountains away from the trade roads) and can take shortcuts through impassible forests, swamps, and mountains (because they can take paths "civilized" armies baggage trains can't), although they can't just pop up out of nowhere and attack over the Alps.
It encourages a very unpredictable, aggressive playstyle while also avoiding one of the biggest problems horde factions run into in cities-and-borders games (Other factions immediately reclaiming the territory you torched).
The Dharma Kings of Tibet. Tibetans get stereotyped as a bunch of humble saffron-robed pacifist farmers so heavily that the fact they had three kings who were simultaneously VERY Buddhist and VERY warlike is completely glossed over.
I'd love to see a video game that covered either side of the wars between the Tibetans and the Qiang and Xia peoples.
This is a really weird question. What do you mean implemented in a video game?
My favorite historical group are the early Royal Society scientists, Hooke and Wilkins and Christopher Wren and all them. The inventors of the experimental method, and specifically biology, computer science, and... architecture where your buildings don't fall down, respectively
Nothing remotely related to any of these people or their philosophies or their lives has anything to do with video games, so I don't really know what to comment on. Is this the kind of example you were looking for?
The current climate change orthodoxy states that coal is very badwrong (or badong) and makes Jesus cry . This has resulted in coal fired power plants in places like the UK being demolished and replaced with renewables like wind, which has weakened the resiliency of their power grid and resulted in a few blackouts. How about instead of outright demolishing these plants they're mothballed or kept in service at significantly reduced capacity so that they can be reactivated if it turns out the threat of climate change is overstated and non-nuclear green energy can't power an advanced industrialized nation.
Sorry my dude, but climate science is settled, which is why we need all these research grants for climate science. If you don't believe me just look at this graph I found on reddit of global temperature increase that conveniently begins at the end of the little ice age.
And then I point out that none of the past temperature reconstructions, not even that magenta one on the bottom, show a 1°C global temperature increase in a 50 year period. Do you (A) move the goalpost, (B) argue all global reconstructions of the past are wrong but YOU know The Truth, (C) argue current global temperature records are a hoax, (D) change your tune or (E) stay silent?
Wrong about what? Wrong that the climate is changing? That's very unlikely. Wrong that disaster is looming? That's very likely. However, there really isn't a plausible short position in the former, and there doesn't seem to much action on the long side of the latter. I can't think of any asset class that's being severely underpriced by a market that thinks it will become worthless due to climate disaster, or conversely that's being severely overpriced by a market that thinks it will become fabulously valuable due to climate disaster. So far as revealed-preference goes not many people seem to be acting on a belief in climate disaster in the short-term, whatever they might say.
This tracks a lot of my thoughts. Theoretically you could buy a lot of oceanfront property in areas that are supposed to go underwater in <10 years for practically nothing, but in practice those properties appear to still be priced as if they wont go underwater at all.
Renewable power technology seems like an area that could be overpriced, but it's either pretty close to expected price or, if it's actually too high now, likely to remain too high for the foreseeable future.
That's not hedging, that's actively sabotaging yourself. It's the equivalent of taking a short position against the same equity you have a long position on.
I don't know exactly what an equivalent hedge would be in this situation. Maybe investing in something that doesn't actively contribute to climate change, but would benefit greatly if climate change turned out to be incorrect. Like maybe investing in agriculture in regions that are projected to become less fertile due to climate change.
For the political and moral philosophers on here: Do you consider Marxism as an ideology (as originally intended by Marx) to be fundamentally deontological or consequentialist in nature, a mix of both, or something else altogether?
I've always considered Marxism to be a hard consequentialist ideology, since it seems largely centered around a sort of "the ends justify the means" logic (though I suppose that could be said about most ideologies). But recently I heard someone arguing that Marxism actually exemplifies the flaws of *deontological* thinking, since the Marxist worldview - despite its claim of scientific objectivity and "historical materialism" - is heavily rooted in moral axioms and value judgments which are simply taken for granted. And I think he had a point there, though I always considered the axioms of the Marxist worldview to be epistemological rather than moral, but maybe they're both. Another person in the discussion claimed that Marxism combined both deontological and consequentialist thinking (and in his very critical view, it combined the worst elements of both, though some may find that overly harsh).
I suppose an argument could also be made that Marxism was rooted in virtue ethics (see: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/v/i.htm#virtue), though that seems like a bit more of a stretch to me. And I've occasionally heard people say that Marxism was an egoist or nihilist ideology, but that usually comes from either 1. anti-Marxist conservatives who don't really know what Marxism is and just think of it as generically evil, and also think of egoism/nihilism as generically evil, or 2. leftists who are egoists or nihilists themselves and also nominally Marxist, but only adhere to Marxism for tribal signaling reasons and/or because they think it would personally benefit them. In both cases, I think it's safe to say that those people don't have a great understanding of what Marxism is, and the idea that Marxism is either egoist or nihilist in nature seems rather obviously wrong to anyone who's actually familiar with it.
In common usage, "the ends justify the means" excludes "the means" from "the ends" so that we don't worry about the eggs we broke to make the omelet. A true consequentialist includes "the means" in "the ends", so those broken eggshells - and the ripple effects produced in society by those who care about those eggshells - as part of "the ends". Thus "the ends justify the means" is a different (and less respectable) idea than consequentialism.
Now, a utilitarian consequentialist is looking for a very good and very likely outcome (as good as ze can get), not merely an outcome that one finds plausible and appealing in some idealistic way. (Marx always sounded to me like an idealist.) Maybe he was not utilitarian but rather egoist, which I think is a form of consequentialism, but not the usual kind. Regardless, I strongly doubt he behaved as a serious modern consequentialist would, specifically: thinking through consequences carefully; taking risks (and consequences) of failure seriously; considering many possible courses of action and public policies in an effort to discover the best available distribution of consequences.
How can I strongly doubt this without actually reading Marx? Aside from the fact that almost no one employs consequentialism well, and Scott's characterization of Marx as expecting his desired outcome would happen magically, there's the material fact of how communist regimes turned out in reality, and the lack of interest in Marx from consequentialists I respect.
Edit: perhaps I'm being unfair by implying that badly-done consequentialism isn't "real consequentialism". I guess I have a tendency to avoid lumping the bad in with the good, lest good consequentialism look bad by association. Edit 2: note that I'm not a philosopher as you requested, maybe that was obvious since I didn't read Marx.
You will probably be interested in Bernard Yack's perspective in *The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche*. I have only read the reviews. Quotes from reviews:
"Freedom for Kant was defined as autonomy, as freedom from externally conditioned objects of desire. He recognised, however, that autonomy was to be employed as a measure of human behaviour; it was not a goal one could expect to fully realise. It was Kant's successors in the 1790s who demanded that Kantian autonomy become the goal of political association and social interaction. The French Revolution was an important catalyst, raising hopes for integral social regeneration and moral renewal. And classical models of harmony seemed to demonstrate that the dehumanising spirit of modern society was historically contingent, simply the most intractible modern obstacle to the 'realisation' of a human autonomy in harmony with nature." (Vincent, Stephen, 1988. History of European Ideas 9(3))
Yack classes Marx as a Left Kantian. The Left Kantians' “criterion for the evaluation of principles of political association is a kind of extension into the public realm of the categorical imperative employed to evaluate the goodness of the will in the precincts of personal morality. According to Yack, the Kantian left is characterized by 'the conviction that man is justified in rejecting all political institutions that do not embody the capacity for autonomy,' and this conviction necessarily yields 'dissatisfaction with, and determination to replace, any social condition that does not fully reflect and embody man's humanity.'” (Reynolds, Charles, 1987. Soundings 70 (3/4))
I lack the background to analyze this, especially the objections in the critical and lukewarm reviews. But there's a reason I was motivated to read every review I could find. Yack's idea seems something like a missing puzzle piece for what I hadn't been able to grasp about the background of Marxism. And not only Marxism.
Perhaps I can suggest a merging of ideas. At the time that Marx wrote, he was leaning very heavily on empirical observations. In the 150 years since that time, much has changed about the world and about how capitalism is practiced. Approaching the world of 1890 through the eyes of Marx is consequentialist, while approaching the world of 2020 through the eyes of Marx has taken on a morality that bridges the differences between what Marx could have known about society (i.e. prior to welfare, Medicare, Social Security, and Democratic Socialists Scandinavian countries) and what is different now. To take 150-year-old writings as perfectly coherent given advances in society requires an almost religious devotion to the underlying ethos. That is, a nearly religious sense of morality imputed to the underlying goals, reinterpreted into modern day Marxism.
I think it's safe to say that anyone who reads Marx and doesn't see egoism plainly written in his work has a particular reading in mind when they start, just as somebody who reads Atlas Shrugged and doesn't notice that the central complaint of the book is how rich and powerful people appropriate other people's work and use it to bribe the lower classes to maintain their own control over society probably has a particular reading in mind when they start.
Alternatively they have a conception of egoism which excludes most egoistic philosophers, in which they conceptualize man as something other than a social animal. Stirner is a decent start at an understanding of egoism in these terms, and echoes of the egoistic union appear, not coincidentally, in Atlas Shrugged. Egoistic philosophy tends to focus on the negative, however; on the ways in which existing society does badly, not in the ways in which it could do better.
Essentially, in a social animal such as man, egoism leads naturally to mutualism, and even, in a very narrow and technical sense, altruism (explicitly not Comtean altruism, but rather biological altruism), in the same way evolution, which is similarly self-interested, leads to these same elements.
I have a hard time reading Marx because of that egoism. You might be using the term in a different way though. I’m thinking of all the asides sniping at rival thinkers.
Edit:
Yeah pretty sure you meant it in another sense. Just did a search on egoism + philosophy. Ethical egoism huh, imagine that.
Marxism as written by Marx or as practiced by Marxists? Because Marxism as written by Marx has little ethical content. Marx is largely uninterested in morality because he considers it a superstructure determined by underlying material conditions. Morals are just a result of the world-historical materialist moment you find yourself in. It's dependent on your mode of production. If you are born in feudalism you will have feudal morals. If you are born in capitalism you will have capitalist morals. If you are born in socialism you will have socialist morals.
Marx actually attacks the idea of morality per se. The idea of making a more just world is an incoherent concept to Marx and he attacks it as such. Marx is actually surprisingly hostile to modern left, even the modern far left. Marx has an entire rant about how things like minimum wages or equal pay or whatever are nonsense. He also wasn't a big fan of the welfare state or income redistribution. And not just for accelerationist reasons. The modern American far left has much more in common with left anarchism like Kropotkin than Marx. Something which the actual remaining Communists like the Chinese have noticed and criticized.
But Marxism as practiced has always been a melange of far left beliefs. To use the terms of this blog, the ideology was not the movement and the movement marinated in a more generic form of far left politics. A lot of utopians call themselves Marxists while ignoring that Marx spilled a lot of ink talking about how pursuing justice or vague utopian ideas was a terrible waste of time.
As practiced? Yeah, Marxism is often practiced as a deontological morality. Though again, this is more from other far leftists than Marx strictly speaking.
This is an overly casual statement and one I think needs some unpacking, because if it's accurate, surely you don't expect it to be self-evident to everyone?
If China's leadership is made up of actual remaining Communists, then was Deng Xiaoping likewise? If he was, was Mao?
Yes, I expect it to be self-evident to everyone. Nothing about China's commitment to Communism is subtle. The majority of the world's self-proclaimed Communists party members (nearly a hundred million of them) are CCP members. It's highly inconvenient for certain western socialists to admit the majority of their movement is made up of loyalists to totalitarian one party states. But it is nevertheless true.
Of course, not all Communists support the Chinese interpretation of Communism. But the straight up denial that they are Communists is delusional. It's like the type of extremist Protestant who is highly invested in demanding that Catholics aren't really Christians.
Yes, China's leadership is made up of Communists. Deng Xiaoping was a Communist. So was Mao. And Hua Guofeng, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. Chinese Communist Party members are Communists. The Pope is also Catholic. And Biden, I have been reliably informed, is a Democrat.
"But the straight up denial that they are Communists is delusional"
A definition (such as "actual Communist") cannot be delusional. That's a category error.
Furthermore, I have no opinion on what an actual Communist is and who qualifies.
All I was doing in my previous comment was drawing attention to the fact that millions of people think there were some important changes after the Cultural Revolution.
The group of people who took power and shaped China over the next few decades represent a historical course that we can imagine going the other way.
Millions of people think it was a Big Deal, regardless of whether they were for it or opposed, whether they're Chinese or not, whether they think it was an improvement or not.
The only type of person I would expect to say "China is run by actual Communists and it is self-evident to everyone" is someone actually running China now. I would not count on Mao, if he was resurrected, agreeing.
> The only type of person I would expect to say "China is run by actual Communists and it is self-evident to everyone" is someone actually running China now.
Or somebody who thinks that the definition of a word includes the way the word is used by most people. And most people would say China is Communist, and most people who identify as Communist are Chinese. So, the CCP is communist under conventional ways of using human language.
"Actual" qualifies "Communist" in what I wrote. You're addressing me as though that word was not there. Conventional ways of using language include adjectives.
Suppose I said that it's not clear the US is run by regular (non-Blue Dog) Democrats.
And in response, someone said that the US is run by Democrats under conventional ways of using human language, because Democrats have the House, Senate, and Presidency right now. That's not a rebuttal.
The modifier matters; it is distinguishing people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema from Democrats in general.
You are equivocating. If you want to argue China is no longer Communist then come out and say it. Make your case. Don't pretend you have no opinion and then hint and gesture.
> The only type of person I would expect to say "China is run by actual Communists and it is self-evident to everyone" is someone actually running China now. I would not count on Mao, if he was resurrected, agreeing.
I'd expect it to be said by the vast majority of Communists and the international Communist movement. Did you know the CCP and the CPUSA both attend an international conference of Communist Parties together? Along with about fifty other countries' Communist parties. There is a narrow view, popular among certain western leftists, that that is not "real" Communism. But the vast majority of self-proclaimed Communists both by total population, world influence, and number of Marxist theoreticians disagree.
Now that doesn't mean they're wrong any more than the greater number of Catholics disproves Protestantism. But it's a parochial view that says the opinion of Communism from a dorm at Berkeley is more correct and important than the view of the CCP. Likewise, the people who think the constant furious study of Communist doctrine and Xi's constant references to historical materialism are all just a lying grift are... well, to say I find their theory badly supported is an understatement.
>But it's a parochial view that says the opinion of Communism from a dorm at Berkeley is more correct and important than the view of the CCP.
This is a made up argument between imaginary people, and I wish you'd stop trying to rope me into such.
But it raises the question for me - the CCP is something like 6% of the population, no? So why *would* their opinion be privileged?
I don't know how it works in countries where there is one party and a relatively small percentage of the population belongs, but it is *clearly* not a "party" as in Western democracies.
The way I figure it, on one side of the debate you've got 95 million Chinese Communist Party members, who will tell you that Communism is whatever the CCP says it is.
And on the other side of the debate you've got Marx and Mao, and they're both dead.
I was gonna write something to the effect of "And by that logic, the earth was at the center of the universe until around the 1800's, when suddenly the sun was at the center instead!", but I think I like this formulation better.
I've always thought Marxism was plainly consequentialist. He considered himself a scientist in developing a theory of how things *must* turn out due to the real world laws of History, which is governed by dialectical materialism. He's commonly (and fairly) lumped in with the Classical Economists (Smith, Ricardo, Mill the elder).
Whatever normative stuff exists in Marx coexists peacefully with all the reams of data he gathered in the British Library, ploughing away at his (since disproven) ideas of "Scientific Socialism."
Over on reddit I heard the new term "sanewashing" to refer to a situation where
* A radical fringe produces a new term like "defund the police" and mean it in a literal sense.
* Due to luck or some other reason the term becomes widespread and associated with the tribe.
* More moderate and influential members of the tribe try to redefine the term to something within the overton window "we mean more money for social care".
Sort of like a bailey organically forming around a motte. But without the people in the bailey ever agreeing with the motte. I don't have any deep thoughts but I thought it was an interesting word and wanted to share.
I think you're describing a thing that happens, but I don't think it happens often enough or successfully enough that we really need a word for it.
In particular, no amount of "sanewashing" is going to make the people who mean it literally and seriously, go away. They've got no place to go, you're(*) literally claiming their ideological territory and redefining it as your own. But on top of the "radical fringe", you've got a lot more people who don't have a particularly strong concept of what policy changes they want but very much do want drastic results which the proposed "moderate"" proposals will never deliver.
And the opposition, will never believe you don't mean the literal version. Or if the smarter among them do, they'll mostly be smart enough to know that painting you as an advocate of the literal
So, the most likely outcome of "sanewashing" is failure and defeat. Weakened by tribal infighting with the radicals who won't give up, and handing the enemy the near-superweapon of a literally extreme position to argue against and incite fear of, is not a winning combination.
The second most likely outcome is I think that you get mos of the radical version anyway. The radicals always wanted that, and you probably had to compromise with them (but not them with you) to avoid the destructive infighting. The policy-ambivalent will want that as soon as they realize the moderate compromise isn't a really big win. Your coalition had the strength to win in spite of the enemy casting you all as radicals, and momentum is a thing, so you overshoot.
Actually getting the moderate policy proposal implemented in any significant way seems like the least likely outcome.
But there should be examples of it working at least occasionally. Does anyone here have any off the top of their head?
* Casting "you" in this discussion in the role of the sanewasher for simplicity.
You describe the problem well. The fringe is extreme not just in it's policy ideas , they are also entirely unwilling to make a sensible compromise.
It seems this happens a lot in politics. I'm reading Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook". The British CP is described as entirely extreme. Old friends joke darkly that if they were in the Soviet Union one of them would have shot the other as a traitor.
The only solution that comes to mind is when something idiotic is put forward by the fringe the more moderate part of the coalition bluntly calls it stupid.
I saw a gentler approach in the Twin Cities. To their credit, the local media interviewed several Black families in predominately Black North Minneapolis. These were ordinary citizens not the folks at the barricades. To a person they said defunding the police was not a good idea.
This gives some balance to people paying attention but it won't prevent the issue being used as a cudgel against the Left.
That slogan was so obviously damaging the sane portion of the left should have disowned it immediately or maybe said it came from The Proud Boys disguised as BLM activists.
On the other hand, think about what "sanewashing" looks like from the point of view of one of the sane people.
You're out there protesting sensibly in favour of something sane. Now some less sane people show up at your protest (an experience very common on both sides) and start protesting in favour of something less sane.
Do you:
a) Turn around and immediately start fighting (whether physically or metaphorically) the less sane people to ensure that the purity of your sane protest is not tainted by less sane versions of itself?
b) Fully embrace the messaging of the less sane people? Or...
c) Argue that "Well actually I guess that the slogans of the less sane people could be interpreted as actually calling for this sane thing".
You could argue that (a) is the most intellectually honest thing to do, but nobody wants to spend all their time trying to purge crazies from their own side; if you do this then every protest movement immediately degenerates into an internal shitfight. It's easy to see how (c) is pretty tempting. And I've probably done it myself without realising.
> You're out there protesting sensibly in favour of something sane. Now some less sane people show up at your protest (an experience very common on both sides) and start protesting in favour of something less sane.
True. If you get on a bus to DC to protest the premature demise of the human race or another pointless war you will get there and run into a hard headed individual who demands to know, “Do you support the oppressed xyz minority’s insurgency in country ABC? Do you? Yes or no?”
You aren’t going to reason your way out of that confrontation.
Sanewashing is about a movement that *at its core* is made up of crazies, not just about a movement that has crazies show up. If crazies start showing up, you need to figure out what the core of the movement is in order to know whether it's you or them who are misled.
Warning signs include "the crazies are historically connected to the movement" and "the slogans of the movement don't take a lot of interpretation to support the crazies".
Bailey -> hard to defend, valuable/lucrative/powerful position
Normal motte & bailey -> the same group of people by default advocating for the bailey, but retreating to the motte when pressed
Sanewashing would be a motte arising in the midst of an extremely indefensible bailey, except that that motte insists that in all circumstances the motte is real and the bailey doesn't exist.
So, sanewashing doesn't really fit the motte & bailey model.
Finding a catchy and comprehensible term to describe the strategy of the Motte and Bailey (which literally no one who isn't a geek understands) is desperately needed. While strategic equivocation is certainly better than medieval fortifications trivia, it may not be *that* much better. But "sanewashing" may be just the pithy and sticky term we need to really capture the issue. Thanks for sharing!
Sanewashing isn't exactly the same thing as motte and bailey though. Motte and bailey is basically a combination of the equivocation and bait-and-switch fallacies, it's a tactic where someone tries to smuggle in extreme views by equivocating them with more acceptable ones. Sanewashing is different because it occurs on a group level rather than an individual level, and it's not really an intentional attempt to deceive; there's one set of people in the "motte" and another set of people in the "bailey," and they don't really cross into each other's territory or even seem to recognize that the other group exists; they both use the same slogans, but have different (yet earnest!) beliefs about what that slogan means.
Both terms refer to the same situation, where you have a bunch of basically-sane ideas and a bunch of crazy ideas coming from the same mob. This is one of those situations that looks very different when you're in the mob versus when you're outside the mob.
If the mob are your enemies then you can see that _clearly_ the mob is actually in favour of the crazy ideas, and are just using the sane ideas as some kind of cover.
When you're actually inside the mob, though, it feels different. It feels like you're trying to make a sensible point, and it's not fair that your opponents keep focusing on that tiny lunatic fringe with the crazy ideas.
BLM is an example on the left, that Canadian trucker convoy is an example on the right. Supposedly some idiot showed up at the rally in Ottawa with a swastika flag, and now all of a sudden "truckers shouldn't have to get vaccinated if they don't want to" has been declared the motte of the bailey "Nazism forever lol".
"The difference is that Scott seems to think that the government, media and other authority figures continue mostly to play by a version of these rules that I believe they mostly used to follow. He doesn’t draw any parallels to the past, but his version of bounded distrust reads like something one might plausibly believe in 2015, and which I believe was largely the case in 1995. I am confused about how old the old rules are, and which ones would still have held mostly true in (for example) 1895 or in Ancient Rome.
Whereas in 2022, after everything that has happened with the pandemic and also otherwise, I strongly believe that the trust and epistemic commons that existed previously have been burned down. The price of breaking the old rules is lower, but it is more than that. The price of being viewed as actually following the old rules is higher than the cost of not following them, in addition to the local benefits of breaking the old rules. Thus the old rules mostly are not followed."
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ACOUP, a professional Roman historian, responds to Were There Dark Ages? (an old SSC post, which he's probably not aware of).
"In this sense there really is a very strong argument to be made that the ‘Romans’ and indeed Roman culture never left Rome’s lost western provinces – the collapse of the political order did not bring with it the collapse of the Roman linguistic or cultural sphere, even if it did fragment it."
"And so when it comes to culture and literature, it seems that the change-and-continuity knight holds the field – there is quite a lot of evidence for the survival of elements of Roman culture in post-Roman western Europe, from language, to religion, to artwork and literature."
"If on politics we have a bit of a mix between decline and continuity, when it comes to the cities that made up the old political system, the ‘decline and fall’ knight strikes a clear blow: the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later. The institutions that had maintained it (like the curiales) largely vanished, replaced in some cases by local ‘notables’ and in other cases by ruralization."
"Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages."
Part III: Things, coming on Friday. ACOUP has promised a discussion of how life changed for the typical person in this part.
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My own blog has been laying out a simple model for what it would take to transition electricity production from mostly fossil fuels either to solar & wind or to nuclear.
Currently, the majority of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, especially coal and natural gas. Burning fossil fuels has given us access to tremendous amounts of energy and has made modern civilization possible. Without them, we would have had trouble feeding ourselves, let alone obtaining our current standard of living.
Unfortunately, burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that warm the global climate. And they will run out eventually. What other sources are available?
This post will put together the results of Parts I & II in a simple model to test different strategies for moving away from using fossil fuels to generate our electricity.
The simplifications in the model will make the transition away from fossil fuels look easier than it is. But they should be a fair comparison between the different strategies we might use.
In Part 4, coming on Thursday, I will compare these strategies and describe what I think the best policies are.
Does anyone know of grants that a non-profit can apply for in the Seattle are to acquire computers for daily use?
A local non-profit is looking for somewhere between 8-12 laptops - in some cases they can make do with Chromebooks, but in other instances they'd need Macbooks (because of software dependencies). Factoring in support contracts, I'm thinking roughly USD 10k.
You know how children are easily entertained? They play the same games for hours, they watch their favorite movies over and over and so on. Some of them would even eat the same food every single meal if they could.
I wonder if that has something to do with the way they learn. Supposedly there are some topics like language, music and multiplication tables that are said to be easier to learn while you are a child. Learning those topics involve lots of repetition, and children are apparently more tolerant of repetition. Is that really true or just folk pedagogy?
If true, is there a way to induce this state of mind? If there is, what would be the drawbacks?
I don't know about children having more tolerance for repetition when it comes to actually learning useful things. I think adult me would be able to learn to play a musical instrument much faster than child me could, because adult me has more discipline. Adult me is capable of spending hours doing a fairly boring task if there's going to be a payoff, whereas child me would get distracted and go goof off doing something more fun.
I've heard a theory that they only absorb something in pieces, and so they replay something or re-do it until they've fully assimilated it, and move on to the next thing. Could this be? Not sure how valid it is
That's neat, I was going to respond with the same thing. It seems they miss a ton of details on viewing a movie or something, and then each additional viewing actually adds instead of repeats.
I'm sure that there's more to why they want to keep re-watching than that, but that's been my guess about how they can tolerate the repetition.
Well my toddler will ask for the same bedtime story every night for 1-2 weeks, and then move on to a new one. And I recall when Blues Clues first came out they would air the exact same episode very day for a week. They said that the research showed it was the best way to engage with toddler, who will watch silently on the first day and by day seven would point out all the clues and answer the hosts when they asked questions.
It seems weird to me to say that children learn language quickly because they are "tolerant of repetition". My model is that children learn language quickly because it's the ultimate "immersion" experience -- they're practicing all day every day. It seems to me that what you're calling being "tolerant of repetition" is just enjoying watching TV, talking to people, and engaging with the world.
I've never heard anyone say it's easier to learn multiplication tables as a child.
I'd thought of mentioning that, too. Not sure if/how it ties in to the original poster's assertion (that I agree with) that children can be obsessed with watching the same movie over and over again. Maybe just two unrelated phenomena.
Also there's a ton of data coming out of the altered transcriptome of first pregnancies (nulliparous mothers) vs subsequent pregnancies from scRNAseq of various model organisms
Nulligravida or nulliparous? The distinction seems crucial here, if one is wondering about the complex microscopic interaction between mother and fetus, which would be lots more interesting than mere intracorporeal effects, I think.
Nulligravida!!! Thx for the correction - mainly uterine lining and blastocyst transcriptomics are a bit different during the first implantation- but not in any gene sets that are obviously interesting/impactful
So, I've been tapped to review a battery science-related paper by a journal editor who is a friend of mine. I've done peer review before, but those were on shorter papers with a focus on specific technological advances; this is closer to a review paper. Does anyone have any tips on how to do it well? I'd like to do a good job on this.
The greatest success in peer reviewing is not rejecting a bad paper, but helping make a mediocre paper better. And maybe you've got one of the bad ones that has to be rejected, but for your first pass at least assume that the paper is worth publishing and try to offer advice on how to improve it.
If it's a review paper, then you need to look at it from the point of view of a relative newbie to the field. Review papers aren't *only* for newcomers, but that is an important part of the target audience. Look for the things that were left out because "everybody knows", but really only veterans know. Make sure that the depth of coverage is reasonably uniform across all areas of the field, not diving too deeply into the things the author knows best and ignoring the rest. Make extra sure that all the terms and jargon are defined.
Unless you are a super duper master of the field, your primary job should be to ensure that the article is crystal clear and comprehensive, and that's about it. Make sure all the important statements are clearly stated, reservations and hedges clearly laid out, important assertions backed up by math, figures, or at least references which directly address the point. Imagine you're a new graduate student trying to get a one-stop review of whatever issues are covered here -- make sure that hypothetical reader can either find thoroughly documented info here, well organized, or at least can start his literature search with a good grasp of the search terms needed, the authors' names to be looked up, maybe even other and previous review articles. It goes without saying to make sure symbols are well-defined, equations are completely explained, no mystery jumps in logic or math occur, graphs and diagrams unmistakable and unambiguous. This is kind of drudgy work, but future readers will thank you for it.
If you want to go beyond that to make sure they cover all the areas of the subfield that are relevant, you can do that, too, but that would require a formidable mastery of the field.
Also pragmatically make it great/be harsh because my go to suggestion to friends who don't know what to do with their life is to go into Chem E to work on battery chemistry to make batteries capable of making renewables actually convenient/not absurd. And it would be great to have a review that amalgamates all the technical challenges.
Sorry, I'm a former ecoterrorist raised by people in geology/hydrology/energy-sector adjacent work.
Be honest, be nice, but be constructively critical on what needs to be added or subtracted or reconfigured to create an actually useful comprehensive up-to-date review so that lazy PhD students will make it a go to citation and it functions as a sort of historical snapshot of understanding right now with an eye on how future developments could unfold
Is there any data repository on families around the world and their offspring # and gender ratio?
Whenever I meet another family with seven daughters like my mothers I definitely think there's gotta be some weird LINE1 biology/methylation/TET dysregulation requiring rhox or something going on in the Dad's spermatogenesis but then I remember I should look at actual empirical data
You are sent back in time to 1939 take over the Emperor of Japan's body and mind. Your task is to direct Japanese government and military policy so as to ensure the long-term survival of the Japanese Empire. What do you do?
The obvious answer (ignoring the issues about how I as Emperor can actually control Japan) seems to be to join the winning side. Declare that Japan is a British ally, sink a few German ships in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and forego any future territorial expansion, concentrating on consolidating what I've already got.
Meanwhile, Japan very quietly starts acquiring and enriching uranium...
Right after the Battle of France when the UK is at its most desperate (July 1940) I offer to send planes, ships, and weapons to help defend the UK in return for the UK recognizing Japanese guardianship of Asian colonies of countries that have been conquered by the Nazis. If the UK doesn't go along I tell them that the Nazis have developed nerve gas that they will use in an invasion of the UK and suggest that UK intelligence use their sources to confirm that the Nazis indeed have such gas. I tell the Japanese army that the US will soon have atomic weapons and so we really, really shouldn't anger America by taking more and more of China. I tell John von Neumann that if he moves to Japan I will let in 10,000 Jewish refugees and then set him to work developing computers.
> I offer to send planes, ships, and weapons to help defend the UK in return for the UK recognizing Japanese guardianship of Asian colonies of countries that have been conquered by the Nazis
This may well work. It would be tempting for the British to give the Dutch East Indies to Japan in return for help.
> If the UK doesn't go along
The implied threat of Japan siding with Germany and Italy may well be persuasive, as those three together have a larger navy than Britain.
Japan's main economic weakness was lack of oil, so a crash program to ramp up shale oil, coal and iron ore production especially in Manchuria.
Diplomatically: make peace with China. Japan can't afford a long war, and it wasn't possible to win it quickly.
Japan really needed raw materials, which could be got from either Siberia or the Dutch East Indies. To this end, encourage Indonesia nationalists to rise up against the Dutch (when the time is right). Train and arm them.
Regarding foreign policy, Japan needs to make sure never to fight a war against USA as it will lose. A war against one of UK or Russia, provided Japan is allied with Germany (and Italy in the case of war v. UK), is winnable.
It would make sense for Hirohito to go on a foreign policy tour of Europe. Impress on Germany and Italy that they need to fight one enemy at a time (no invading Russia while still at war with Britain!), and that Japan would be happy to join in a war against either Britain or Russia but not both at the same time. Suggest to France and Britain that the join with Germany and Japan in dismembering Russia. Suggest to Poland that it forms an alliance with Germany and Japan against Russia, and point out to them that Japan has intelligence that if they don't Germany might invade Poland, and conquer it quickly, so that Poland is better off allying with Germany and Japan.
As part of the peace deal with China, suggest that China joins the anti-Comintern Pact. The USSR didn't have any friends, and if a powerful group of countries attacked it they would win.
If WW2 in Europe progresses as it did historically, help Indonesians rise up against the Dutch and give military assistance to the new Indonesian state in return for raw materials and trade. Ditto for the Vietnamese against France.
Comment on this specifically: This is not a helpful suggestion. Japanese afvs were pretty much optimal for their intended use, and 1939 is WAY to late to try anything like a US style crash program if you want to design a whole new tank branch.
Their big tanks were, of course, fucking stupid. They also never really existed in the wild. The tanks they actually deployed worked well at supporting infantry and cruising though jungles and broken terrain, which is what they needed.
The Germans didn't really attack their own allies in WW2, except for when they arranged a coup in Hungary towards the end of the war, when Hungary was about to defect.
The issue is, it was not a coincidence who their allies were and who were not. Hitler's strategic objectives always included annexing Danzig and the corridor, and re-establishing Poland and other pre-WW1 empires' subjects as non-independent client states to Germany. That is why their attempts at bringing Poland into Anti-Comintern Pact in the early 30s never worked out.
I'm not familiar with Polish political history, but I have heard the analysis that antisemitism was just as widespread in Poland as it was in Germany, and Hitler had the option of allying instead of invading if he wanted to. Given that he was ruthless, deceptive, and generally evil, I am skeptical that a positive statement from Japan would have changed his mind.
Negotiate with America to keep gas imports, commit fewer atrocities for moral reasons and to prevent people from disliking Japan if they see pictures of atrocities, only engage in conflict for the explicit reason of gaining more resources. It's a huge mistake to attack America because the Pacific Ocean has fewer resources than any other direction. Reducing internal strife also seems important. Saving face was too important relative to learning new things in the military, but that level of cultural shift seems really hard.
I think if Japan had found alternate fuel sources and had just disengaged entirely from America, that would have kept Japan from being destroyed. They might have been invaded anyway once Germany collapsed, and I don't think they had enough strength to stop 1940's American military unless they somehow developed an atomic bomb themselves.
You are missing the fact that none of those choices were done by the Emperor. The hallmark of Japanese government in the 30's (and 40's) is that mid-level officials and military officers all did whatever struck their fancy, and the central government was basically impotent to influence them in any way. As a transplanted emperor, there's no plausible way you can rein in the Kwantung Army that doesn't involve a very bloody civil war, and I wouldn't bet on you winning it.
Plus 1. If this was going to be done, you'd need to start in the Taishō era and try to hold on to actual political power while spending the next decade stamping out alternate power centers. 1939 is waaaaay to late to steer Japan in any direction.
There's two ways to take it, though. One is that the OP just means you're put in charge of Japan, civ style, in 1939. What's your best play? The second is that you replace the emperor, and have to work within those constraints.
Is there anything the emperor could have done, given his role, if granted foreknowledge of how the next few years would go?
As far as I understand it...well, I'm sure he could do something but he didn't have many good options. At that point the Army and Navy were in control, fighting with each other for dominance and doing whatever they wanted while still coordinating against their enemies. Hirohito was the Emperor but, like....it wasn't that many years before this that a faction of the Army tried to take over the government and claimed they were doing it for the Emperor, and they kept up the fight for a good while after the Emperor came out and said "Stop doing that." Everybody said that whatever they were doing was for the Emperor, and nobody could control the Army or Navy, but if you tried to stop the Army and Navy then that would reveal that you don't actually have control over them, so mostly people in the government tried not to do that.
On the other hand, Hirohito did approve the Pearl Harbor attack plans shortly before they were carried out. If he refused to approve it, would it have still happened? Maybe. Maybe not. It definitely would have been a gamble: if he refused to authorize the attack and then the Navy backed down and followed his order, then he would have a much larger opening to direct policy and to make his wishes manifest. But if he refused to approve it and the Navy went ahead and did it anyway (which they very well might have, the Army started the war with China without any authorization and everyone just went along with it) then he would be in a bind. If he insists at that point that he did not approve the attack...well you can't pull a Pearl Harbor and then say "Whoops! That wasn't what I told them to do! Can we go back to being at peace and pretend this didn't happen?" If he vocally opposed the war at that point he'd be threatening to tear the country apart, right when it needs to be unified to survive the multi-front war they're in.
Still, in this hypothetical you have two years of runway before Pear Harbor becomes relevant. If you started throwing your weight around right away...well, it could work. But generally Japanese Emperors are not the type to throw their weight around. Meiji was the exception, but when he took the reins of power back in hand there wasn't really any functional government there to effectively stop him. Hirohito would be facing a lot of entrenched power centers. I mean I can't imagine he'd get assassinated but...well, people only have the power you give them. If the Emperor won't play ball, maybe everyone will just pretend he is just to save face.
I'll admit I'm too lazy to pursue the primary sources used by The Scholars Stage blog author, but one of their statements seems false on the face of it.
"By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking."
What the what?! I can't think of any painter in the last two centuries who peaked in their 30s or 40s. The visual arts is something that seems to benefit from continued to practice and innovation into old age. Many novelists continued to producing good work well into old age. Music is not my forte, but many of the great classical composers continued producing until they died. Popular music may be a different story, but I'm not convinced.
And all baseball player's most expensive baseball card is from when they are 20 years old (aka their rookie card).
Most expensive doesn't necessarily mean best, when the novelty of "Van Gogh's first painting" carries a premium even if it's not nearly as good as their later works.
Could be the good ideas problem, where you approach the limit of technical skill and use your best idea; and if you can't come up with new shit/don't have a goya style breakdown you just keep making less inspired versions of your best idea.
BTW your comments on psychedelics last thread were pretty helpful. There is a Minnesota Psychedelic Society near me but they get tied in knots trying to stay on the right side of the law.
I had met a couple guys that both had 12 year old sons that were talking about learning to lead with love during their experiences. I wanted to learn more about what they were thinking when Covid came along. I haven't been able to talk to them in a couple years. One of these days things will approach normal and we can see each other's face in real life. I hope.
I have a theory that bands age less well than solo artists because a band is more about a particular moment (these four people find unexpected depths of creativity by bouncing their ideas off each other) and trying to keep the same dynamic 20 or 30 years later just doesn't work. While solo artists can keep applying their own particular talents to new situations (i.e. new collaborators or styles of making music).
As to classical music, there's been a lot of ink spilled about "Late Style". I was talking to someone the other day who said, roughly, that it wasn't surprising that I found mid-period Stravinsky boring but late Stravinsky interesting. Because Stravinsky settled into a respectable rut in the middle of his life, but near the end he was trying new things again.
I would agree with you about bands. Also, there's pressure on bands to revisit their past hits in their concerts, and certainly there used to be pressure from labels (not sure if there is anymore) not to change a successful formula.
The movie Soylent Green was set in 2022. This review fact-checks every aspect of it (cannibalism wasn't the only thing it predicted), and concludes it was comically wrong.
"The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously."
I think it was a trope in a lot of old science fiction stories that meat would become unobtainable for most people because of overpopulation, and I think of it every time I go to the grocery store and see "Beyond Meat" or whatever.
I am hoping for cruelty-free artificially grown real meat soon. That too was predicted, The Space Merchants comes to mind.
But people used to say a lot, that science fiction isn't about predicting the future. The only reason, in my opinion, that people judge some stories harshly, is because certain *other* stories sparked the imagination of the people who *created* the future (present), and so *they* look prophetic.
There are some fundamental, unaddressed challenges to scaling the technique to the point of being economically competitive with animal meat. Essentially, the capital costs are enormous due to the requirement of high grade clean rooms, massive stainless steel vats, cost of amino acid feedstock, etc etc. None of the startups in the space have shown a good answer for these challenges, and the CEO of one of the companies interviewed was shockingly frank about their likelihood of failure, basically saying, "Well, we'll make the stainless steel vats REALLY big, and uh, hope for the best?"
I agree with what I think the goal of the article is, to prevent the industry from getting government subsidies based on speculation. And to the extent they are attacking a *particular* company and plan, I'd trust that they have a point.
But as far as the general concept of lab-grown meat being impossible, well, if practical fusion power is still respectable to believe in...
Is there a decent graph/table on what ages people have their first kids at? It is really easy to find an average, but hard to find a listing of what percent of of first kids where born by women age 20 vs 21 vs 22...
I would predict the data would show two peaks around 18-22 and another in the 30s. I think the increase in the average age that we see is due to the 18-22 peak shrinking and with smaller growth in the peak that occurs in the 30s.
The public intellectuals article was recently featured on Thinking About Things (http://thinking-about-things.com) which is why it was probably in someone's mental cache. Highly recommend the newsletter, it often features blogs I've never heard about.
Since the last politics-allowed thread, I read the latest Human Freedom report by the Fraser Institute. Given their political leanings, this is basically a report on how libertarian each nation is.
I want to bring up Hungary, which got a special call-out in the section which discusses the countries with the biggest changes in score from 2008 to 2019:
> Hungary's rating decreased from 8.41 to 7.73
If Hungary had maintained its score of 8.41, it would be the 30th most libertarian country. With it's score of 7.73, it ranks 59th. Looking at the historical data for Hungary (page 187), which only goes to 2008, its score does seem to start decreasing once Orbán came to power in 2010. This is driven by a reduction in personal freedom. Econ freedom stayed around 7.5 +/- 0.10, but personal freedom fell from 9.11 to 7.88.
I remember when Scott reviewed Orbán in the dictator book club, many people countered that he wasn't a dictator. Seeing the above motivated me to lookup Hungary in The Economist's Democracy Index. Again we see Hungary's score decline year over year when Orbán is in power: 7.21 down to 6.56. This still places them in the Flawed Democracy category.
So it may have been premature to call Orbán a dictator, he is definitely pushing the country hard in that direction. I think he fits being in the Dictator's Book Club regardless.
"Libertarian" is not the opposite of "dictatorship". It's entirely possible to have a libertarian dictatorship, if that's what the dictator wants. It's even more possible to have a near-libertarian dictatorship if the dictator has only limited state capacity which he focuses on maintaining his regime's security with a side order of luxurious living for a small ruling class. Everyone else can have fun, get rich, do whatever makes them happy so long as it isn't anti-dictator political activism, maybe having to bribe the occasional cop or bureaucrat but with all of them combined taking a smaller bite than e.g. the IRS.
In practice, liberty is anticorrelated with dictatorship, and I'm not saying that Orbán's Hungary is in any way a "libertarian dictatorship". But the anticorrelation is far from perfect, and I wouldn't use a "human freedom" index as a direct indicator of whether a country is or is not a dictatorship.
I'm a resident of one of your high-need signature counties for the Clean the Darn Air ballot initiative. I read the 2020 initiative and I vaguely remember not supporting it last time around. Then I read through the proposal and I still don't support it. I'll provide my objections and give you a chance to respond.
1. I support getting rid of the regressive grocery tax, but why are you proposing to replace it with another regressive tax? I own two electric cars and no gas cars. I have an electric lawn mower and snow blower, and I have solar panels on my roof. If anything, this legislation would be financially beneficial to me, since I buy groceries. The only reason I'm able to avoid the additional carbon tax is because I'm well off. Many of my neighbors are also well off and are similarly able to avoid much of the financial burden from the proposed carbon tax. Those heaviest hit would be my friends and family who are less well off, with no solar, electric vehicles, etc. Thus, this is a heavily regressive tax - probably more so than the grocery tax it proposes to replace.
2. I understand the need to get rural support as a practical matter in getting this bill passed. I don't support the proposition to gain that support through a direct wealth transfer from cities to rural communities. Much of the natural beauty of Utah would be better served if fewer people were incentivized to settle on every square inch of it. If people in rural communities are having a hard time making ends meet unless they move to the city, why encourage them to stay?
I do support what you're trying to do. Of the many different cities/states I've lived, the Salt Lake Valley sometimes has the worst air quality I've seen. This is a problem of geography (there's a weather phenomenon caused by the mountains and the nearby lake that traps the air - and all local emissions - in a 'bubble' across the whole valley). It can't be solved by moving the mountains, so the only viable solution to the air quality problems is to reduce local emissions. The power plants have all been moved outside the valley, so the main source of emissions comes from vehicles. Trucks are especially bad culprits, since lots of people use them as daily drivers, and they're particularly popular around here.
I'm on the side of cleaning up the darn air. But I don't see the sense in trading one regressive tax for another in order to make that happen. The burden should not be primarily borne by the poor, to the benefit of the rich, in order to make the air quality better. If you come up with a different approach, I'm open to supporting future initiatives.
Brown energy is cheaper than green energy. Ergo, any efforts to switch to green energy is going to be regressive. The solution is to offset the regression with some sort of citizen dividend. Either that, or replace one regressive tax with another.
On the other hand, billionaires with yachts and private jets burn a lot of brown energy. A carbon tax would hit said billionaires pretty hard.
I think there's a strong version of this claim and a weak version of this claim.
Strong version: Switching to green energy cannot be done without some burden on the poor.
Weak version: Switching to green energy cannot be done without disproportionately burdening the poor.
The strong version is something I can accept and work within. I'm not asking to put all the burden on the rich and middle class. The weak version violates a lot of my moral intuitions.
Depending on how strongly you want to define it, I think it's fair to say there has been some social unrest in the last 5 years related to perceptions of unjust inequality. Would it be wise to implement policies that are fundamentally designed to increase that inequality?
It's one thing to tolerate inequality as an unavoidable part of how our economic system functions. It's another to intentionally design an economic development strategy with increasing inequality as a key part of the policy mechanism.
The Utah bill tries to balance the regressive nature of the tax with a match of the EITC, which is a step in the right direction. The problem is that gas and electricity bills are paid throughout the year, while the EITC is a one-time lump sum.
Despite the specifics, this mirrors the general problem: Proposals to institute a carbon tax are most strongly supported by the financially well-off for ethical reasons related to stewardship of the environment. Meanwhile, opposition to the proposed tax is most strongly voiced by those who oppose it for ethical reasons of their own, in not instituting regressive tax policies.
I know a lot of economists prefer the idea of a carbon tax because it uses the price mechanism to internalize externalities. And that's great in theory, but in practice it's a tax on the poor as the rich can afford to transition away from widespread use of dirty power. If the tax were already progressive (e.g. a road usage charge or a $/kWh charge indexed to income) the incentive would be more closely aligned with those most able to respond to it.
Why isn't solving the regressive effect as simply as crediting each taxpayer an equal portion of the revenue collected? That would turn the "stick" into a "carrot". If you drive an average amount, then the tax doesn't cost you anything, but you can *save* more by driving *less* than if there was no carbon tax.
Ensuring the money isn't used for general purposes, and selling it politically is an exercise for the alert reader.
It’s rightly perceived as a class war. Greens are generally voted for by the top end of society. I wonder, by the way, why we haven’t banned private jets yet.
A little googling suggests private jets emit about 33 Mt of CO2 per year, within a global CO2 emissions budget of 43 Gt, so about 0.077%. Aviation as a whole appears to account for about 2% of global CO2 emissions.
That article was recently featured on Thinking About Things (http://thinking-about-things.com) which is why it was probably in someone's mental cache. Highly recommend the newsletter, it often features blogs I've never heard about.
Somebody I know came up with a term for something we're both aware of: "Other People's Shit."
The thing being pointed at is this amorphous blob. It's fashion, but it isn't fashion. It's politics, but it isn't politics. It's nostalgia, but it isn't nostalgia. It's having shelves full of stupid plastic figurines that represent the media you consume, but it's that, for everything; you have your shelf full of mass-produced political views, media consumption, musical preferences; all in place of being a person; it's reference comedy, but instead of comedy, it's reference culture.
I know too many people, at this point, whose political opinions are whatever political opinions they think they're supposed to hold, whose media consumption is whatever media consumption they're supposed to engage in, who are nostalgic for whatever it is currently fashionable to be nostalgic about. It's the most boring zeitgeist in history: Have you seen the new Marvel TV show? Isn't John Carpenter's synthwave the best? September 6th was a coup! Look at my new Funkopop, isn't it so me? Isn't rickrolling the best?
I'm not talking about fashion trends themselves, or the fact that people share common cultural influences and so tend to have lots of things in common; it's something else, almost a state of fear of not being part of the thing, of not having the shelf full of the right things. It's Family Guy as a lifestyle.
And I'd love to be complaining about the next generation, so I could be shaking my fist at them, but honestly, they seem way better about this specific thing than my own. And it isn't like other generations don't have fashion that everybody buys into, but it's not that; I struggle to name exactly what it is, but I find it incredibly cringeworthy. It's a little bit corporation-as-identity, but the corporate part isn't even necessary.
And as I look at fashion, and generations, this reference culture thing is something the baby boomers and millenials share in common. You could say it originated with generation x, and observational humor a la Seinfeld, except it's even more evident in what Christmas songs we hear every year, and what music keeps getting trotted back out. And it may look like baby boomers are the opposite in some respects, but it's an opposite which is also the same thing - I Can't Drive 55 is almost the theme song of their generation, a compulsive refusal to buy in, which becomes its own kind of buy in.
The silent generation, generation x, and generation z, have almost an oppositional attitude, culminating in generation z finding it gauche to reference memes. Not that generation Z doesn't have its own fashion, with its own legacy; the heritage of ratfink is evident in their memes, inherited from their parents, inherited from their parents in turn - but their fashion looks, at least from the outside, more one-and-done; their nostalgia more specific and less shared. "Other People's Shit", or reference culture, could also, from the perspective of the other generations, be called something like poser culture, if that helps illustrate the difference.
And also maybe at least one of the positive aspects of the culture, because it is not inherently exclusive.
It seems that the peak of this would be the mid 1960s, when literally 1/3 of all music sales globally were albums by the Beatles. Over the decades since then, mass media has gradually been diversifying again to give us something as diverse as what we had in the decades before broadcast, but stratified in a different way than geographic, as it used to be.
Re: Q4 2021, that's not an issue, because people presumably answered based on what was actually written in the question. I can see tossing it based on the "Scott recommendation" part, though.
The Bored Apes one is more of a problem. Please don't change the target there, because then either everyone who has already entered needs to notice and go back and change their prediction (not going to happen), or else you'll end up with a mix of what people were predicting. So either leave the contest judged as the original stated, or else decide to throw the question out completely.
I've been thinking a lot lately about being "ahead of the curve" and the benefits it can incur to your life. Namely, a good heuristic for achieving wealth, fame, status, etc. is being one of the early-adopters of something small before it achieves immense growth. We see this as basically the lingua franca of startups, where everyone wants to hop on the next Google or Uber rocketship. Most cryptocurrency projects - especially the scammy ones - use "getting in early" as their prime marketing funnel. If you bought Bitcoin in 2011, you're very wealthy now.
Was curious if any SSC/ACX readers have strategies they use to hone this type of behavior. Are there communities or blogs or forums you read and spend a lot of time on? Areas you live? The type of work you do or the people you work with?
My strategy is to assume that in everything I don't know about, the efficient market model is right. There is no point to studying public information that other people can process as well as I can in deciding how much a company's stock should be worth because the market is already doing that. Buy stock in a company if you know something the market doesn't, not in the sense of insider information but of understanding, that is important enough to substantially increase the expected value of the stock. When the Mac came out I had been using my own computer for years and already knew about the Xerox Parc work with graphic interfaces so could see, as my colleagues at Tulane Business School couldn't, why the Mac was something different and better, hence a reason to buy Apple stock.
That approach has worked for investing. On the other hand, my attempts at inventing computer test taking software c. 1985 and computer programs to supplement econ textbooks a little later went nowhere beyond the programs I wrote for my own textbook — because I don't have the abilities or interests needed to convert a clever idea to a successful product. So one question to ask yourself is what sort of ahead of the curve insights you are actually competent to make use of.
I was in early on bitcoin, as well as an early employeee at both Uber and Twilio (ie worked for both in 2011), years before IPO’s for either. So I think I’m qualified here.
My answer here would be: try to think a bunch about the future, spend time around people doing the same, and MAKE BETS to calibrate your intuition. Most of these will bets fail, many, spectacularly so. Then, learn from those failures and try again.
In 2012 one of the best investments I made was bitcoin. The best was convincing the woman who is now my wife to move in with me as a roommate. The worst investment was buying $100 worth of hostess mini donuts when hostess was bankrupt. I figured I could freeze them and resell them on eBay later, for a huge profit. And this is an example of a cheap failure.
Lest you think I’m a bajillionaire, I was indeed early at Uber, twilio, and bitcoin. But the bitcoin investment was tiny- I saw it as an asymmetric bet and didn’t really “get it” until 2016 or so, when costs were much much higher. And I left both Uber and twilio before any shares vested, to join a gaming company that raised a million dollars from a Saudi prince before it crashed and burned and we sold it to a cryptocurrency Scam artist turned politician. The net result there was that I walked away from options at Uber which are now with maybe $100 million, in exchange for some neat stories i can tell. Finally, years later, I can say that yes it was worth it. But regret of that size takes some time to work through.
I was hospitalized for mental health issues 5 times in 2012-2013, and spent a few years rebuilding myself before finally getting to a point where I’m now doing well.
My point in all this is that I think I was ahead of the curve on many things because I lived an ~extremely~ volatile life for a few years (2010-2013). This volatility let me learn a ton about how things work, but there was definitely a cost.
Thanks for sharing your story. Makes me think how important it is to move on mentally from the opportunity / sunk costs of walking away from options (of which I've walked away from my fair share of them, however none of them resulted in anything unlike your story).
Wow. That was a ride of a story. Sounds like you've had quite the crazy life so far. I appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with me.
It definitely seems like a function of your appetite for risk, where by far the riskiest (perhaps to the point of foolishness) are people that put a lot of money in Bitcoin or current Big Ns. A little bit to the left of that you have startup founders, and then all the way to the right side of the spectrum are people that major in something like tech or medicine, invest in the S&P 500, live in LCOL areas, and do what makes them happy with a comfortable life. Neither decision is really "wrong" or "right" - just a tradeoff of what you value.
Does anyone have data on health and safety of babies sleeping on their stomachs vs backs? I know the “official recommendation” is that back sleeping is best, and the understanding I have is that this recommendation comes from a correlation in studies on SIDS, which is still poorly understood.
I’d like to see analysis of multiple factors and the tradeoffs involved, if any such analysis exists.
I remember digging into this, and this is entirely from memory. My sense of what I found was: the seminal studies on SIDS do show a convincing difference (convincing to me, at least, and I was going at it with skepticism) in SIDS relative to back-sleeping vs. not - and I remember feeling convinced by how they accounted for other variables. (I.e. the N didn't seem too small, they didn't seem to be doing shady things...) HOWEVER I found, for example, that a child who was sleeping on his stomach to start with has less SIDS chance (though more than a back-sleeping one) than one who ended up on his side/back after never sleeping that way.
I had a baby who REFUSED to sleep on its back and I spent many anxious nights with it on my shoulder, in my lap, anything, sort of on her tummy, etc.... And also I don't know if many moms would admit to putting their child on their stomachs - it feels so taboo to admit. (Also this becomes moot once they are able to flip themselves over anyway.)
I don't have the time now to recreate all that research. But this is more or less what I did - I searched until I found a page with actual references to actual studies, and then followed their footnotes and read abstracts/papers where I could access them. So to get the ball rolling:
Next, CDC's "Resource Links" includes a document with "Evidence Base for 2016 Updated Recommendations for a Safe Infant Sleeping Environment". That is very thoroughly referenced and you can go down the list of references.
I'm sure there's more but digging through the footnotes in all of these should bring you to the original abstracts where they get their percentages and conclusions from.
Emily Oster almost always has a blog post or book chapter for any, "But what does the actual data really say about kids and X, and what are the limitations of that data and our understanding?" question.
If the US had a much smaller population, would it still be anywhere near as wealthy per capita? America famously has quite a bit higher income per capita than most other developed countries- $63k annually per the UN & World Bank, versus $45k for Germany, $40k for Britain, $39k for France & Japan, etc. Let's write an alternate history where North America is just physically a much smaller place, so despite becoming an independent country only so many Europeans could settle here. (Or, more interestingly, the North American continent became a bunch of different smaller countries, as South America did).
That higher income- is it just a return to scale for America? Like, if Germany had a population over 300 million, would it also have a much higher average income? This would be my intuitive guess- there's some network effects to being huge, so more & more businesses are founded and productivity gets improved when you already have a huge population & economy. I am a bit skeptical of the jingoistic, America's success is due to its unique culture argument. To argue against this point though, the few developed countries that have higher incomes are very small- Norway and Switzerland, with Iceland and Denmark coming pretty close to the US.
So- would the US be poorer per capita if it had Germany's population? Would Germany be as wealthy or wealthier than the US per capita, if it had America's population? Bit of a common sense note, of course there are minimum cultural prerequisites needed to become wealthy (Nigeria, Pakistan and Mexico are obviously not, despite being near or above Japan's population). My question takes for granted that developed countries have a baseline level of cultural competence/stability, then you add the larger population into the mix
I have seen several discussion of the large wealth gap between the US and other industrialized countries (like Germany, France, UK) recently. Mind that the size of the gap, in the unadjusted values given in this post, is a historical exception.
The US have always been in the higher part of industrialized countries in the last 30 years. But the ranking and the gap to other countries fluctuates a lot.
In 1995, the US were behind Germany and Austria, and en par with the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
In 2000, the US were far ahead of all these countries, more than 50% ahead of Germany, France, and Belgium, and about 40% ahead of the Netherlands.
In 2005, the US were again pretty high on top, but the gap to the Netherlands had basically vanished.
In 2010, the US were a bit lower in the ranking, similar to the Netherlands and Austria, but still ahead of Germany, France, and the UK.
In 2015, the US were again higher, and ~20% ahead of the Netherlands, Austria, and UK.
In 2019, the distance to NL and AU is again 20%, but the US are more than 50% ahead of the UK.
I think the gap *is* real and consistent if you control for things like exchange rates, but it is smaller than the 63k vs 39k-45k comparison suggests. Be careful when you try to build theories on numbers from a single year. This plot from ourworldindata is adjusted for a few things:
Luckily someone has already done a "smaller US" experiment for you, and it's called Canada. (It's not physically smaller than the US, of course, but in practice you can just ignore the top two thirds).
What's Canada like? It's rich, but not quite as rich as the US. I think that Canada is what you get if you combine all the US's cultural, institutional etc advantages without the sheer size needed to dominate the global economy.
Then we did the same experiment twice more in the Southern Hemisphere, and we got Australia and New Zealand, which economically look a lot like Canada.
An advantage all of these former colonies have over the Old World is that even the big ones like the USA are much more sparsely populated, so there's more natural resources per capita.
I do think the USA has some cultural differences beyond sheer size, mind you - almost certainly related to the fact that it's the only one in your reference set that won independence via rebellion. I note that while the USA is richer in the sense of GDP per capita, I'd rather live in Australia, Canada or NZ (I'm Australian, and love it here, and have previously remarked that of all the many countries I've visited Canada is the only one that seemed as good, though Scandinavia was close)
An Inconvenient Truth about the American Way: part of our wealth is our elbow room. The United States has a low population compared to its carrying capacity. We still have enough surplus nature that sub median class people can engage in the gentleman's sport of hunting. We have bigger homes and bigger cars than Western Europeans because we have more space per capita.
Soon after we opened the immigration floodgates in the mid 60s, working class wages stagnated for decades, and the national debt has ballooned into the unsustainable range.
We only closed the immigration floodgates in the 1920's. In the years before and after WWI annual immigration was about one percent of population, I think a higher ratio than we have ever had since then.
True, but the 19th century was also a time of expanding borders for America - I could see immigration pressure have different results when all land is owned compared to the historical results in times when there was empty frontier in need of people. (Not actually commenting on optimal immigration levels today, just on the merits of comparing to 19th Century American immigration)
Immigration was not particularly relevant to the wage-productivity divergence. Outsourcing, sure, somewhat. Labor market concentration, sure. Adoption of anti-inflationary policy, sure. Decrease in union power, definitely. But the effect of immigration was negligible.
The bigger homes and bigger cars has nothing to do with the national population divided by the national acreage. If that was the explanation, then Canada and Australia would have larger homes and cars than the United States, and Sweden and Finland would be closer to the US and the Netherlands would be farther from the US than other European countries.
These are about a set of policy choices in the mid 20th century that prioritized expanding urban areas to make more room for cars and houses rather than prioritizing other economic ideas. Even the Netherlands has had plenty of space to expand for dwellings and automobiles, despite their high nation-level population density.
Key phrase: "carrying capacity." Australia is mostly desert. Canada is mostly frigid. The eastern half of this country get a lot of rainfall. The climate is a bit more continental than Western Europe but it is considerably less brutal than Russia or the Stan Lands south of Russia.
Southeast Asia, including parts of China, gets a similar moisture from the south weather pattern. Note the enormous population density. The US is pretty empty by comparison.
One important thing is that the infrastructure investments of the 19th century (canals and railroads) and of the 20th century (interstates) did a lot to damage local economies, but helped big businesses get big nationwide. Because of that, American big businesses were big enough to be the big ones at the era of globalization.
If the United States had been smaller, then it wouldn't have so much been the American businesses that had that advantage.
I think you’re on to something here, but you have to ask, return to Scale of what?
India and China are much much larger than America. But they are also much much poorer. So if there are wealth returns to scale, they can’t be due to population alone.
I have an answer that i think makes sense, which I can share if you’d like.
It's not just a return to population scale. It's primarily a return to greater economic freedom during the past (when the population was much smaller), which is also when most of the growth difference occurred. The U.S. still grows faster then Europe, due to it's still slightly free-er economy, especially in the labor markets, compared to most, but not by as much.
Relatively recently, some of the Nordic countries have figured out enough economic freedom (combined with a welfare state, but losing much of the governmental interference) to compete.
You say that as if it contradicts my comment, so I'll restate the premise and give a couple more examples.
All else equal, more economic freedom in a country equals more economic growth.
Examples abound, everywhere from China (which began it's much more rapid catch-up growth only after the CCP loosened up economically and re-introduced more market-based reforms) to Venezuela (which rapidly destroyed it's economy by nationalizing most industries and introducing ever more severe price and regulatory controls).
Do you have contrary examples where a country become more economically free, and the economic growth rate slowed way down, or became much less economically free, and the economic growth rate accelerated as a result?
This isn't a controversial premise amongst economists, not even left-leaning ones, who tend to content themselves with arguing that economic growth isn't as important a result as whatever X policy/effect they prefer to it.
I mean I said “plenty of countries have become rich by not following the US route”. That’s still true of China, not being fully communist doesn’t make it fully capitalist. No Asian country has followed the US route either.
As to your question - yes I do. The USSR collapsed after it became more economically free.
It’s very close to being a higher income country. And at present rates of growth will be as rich as the west per capita in about two decades. Which will, in total GDP, make it the worlds biggest economy by far. Mexico isn’t a poor country either. China has a GDP per capita that’s 6 times India for instance.
I think you're switching the order there, the USSR collapsed, _and then later as a result_ it became more economically free, averaging, for example, a 7% annual GDP growth rate the decade after the deregulation and tax reforms of 2000 and 2002.
In contrast, there's good reasons the Russians call the 70s and 80s the "Era of Stagnation".
Edited to add: China isn't fully capitalist, but it's still an example of more economic freedom = higher economic growth, as are the other Asian countries. Compare South Korea/Japan to their neighbors.
I have no particular opinion on the distinction, but I think there is a widespread narrative, that glasnost/perestroika was started as a way to save the existing order of things, and led to the dissolution of the USSR against the will of the people who started the ball rolling.
Is the cliched view driven by Russians or non-Russians and is there controversy around it? I don't know.
But I would guess there's some truth if you were to claim the USSR collapsed in the middle of economic liberalization, so not strictly before or after.
I discovered this blog in the middle of last year, and since then I've also read hundreds of archived posts on slatestarcodex. After all that, I have two questions/confusions:
1. What is Scott's political position? I know it seems like a simplistic question and an attempt to force a large set of nuanced beliefs into a meaningless label, but is there some rough description (like "left-leaning centrist" or "evidence-based conservative" or "anti-government utilitarian")? I'm trying to make sense of him focusing most of his criticism on the left while voting for Elizabeth Warren, for example, and other things like that. Every time I think I've grasped his general stance I read something else from him that doesn't fit.
2. The "rationalist" label. It was my understanding that rationalism is an approach to knowledge that takes logical argument as its fundamental basis, while empiricism takes experience or evidence as fundamental. Kant and Descartes vs Hume and Heidegger. But the "rationalist community" seems to be built on evidence and experiment and suspicious of pure reason. Is the word being used to mean empiricism or am I misunderstanding the community? I've never seen this addressed.
The thing called "rationalism" has little to do with rationalism as the term misunderstood in mainstream philosophy. It s better understood as part of a pattern where a succession of small, insular groups engage in a very self confident style of amateur philosophy. Unlike other cult-like groups, they claim to have a strong orientation to science, logic and reason, and to be able to implement them much better everyone else.
Examples include Yudkowsky's "rationalism", Critical Rationalism (particularly David Deutsch's version), Ayn Rand's Objectivism and Korzybski's General Semantics.
In more detail, This kind of Thing is characterised by:-
• Being science-orientated , but having much more specific claims than "science good"
• Being largely outside of mainstream academia etc
• Being an insular group that mostly talk to each other
• Having difficulty in communicating with outsiders , in any case, because their own theories are expressed in a novel jargon.
• Centering on a charismatic leader, with a set of mandatory writings
• Having an immodest epistemology..which claims to be able to solve just about any problem..
• ..which is based on a small number of Weird Tricks
Yudkowsky's rationalism places a premium on the ability to change one's mind in the face of evidence, but also to gather evidence that could potentially change one's mind, and Scott is in that sphere.
When I read Atlas Shrugged, I noted not only how darned certain Rand was about everything (well, Yudkowsky isn't far off in this regard) but also how the story was structured to insulate her heroes from criticism; attacks on her philosophy came only from the weakest of strawmen. See Yudkowsky criticizing Objectivism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
I'm also a little confused as to why Scott supported Warren in the primary.
Just by my own casual judgement, she seemed like the "wokest" of the top 4 candidates. I understand Scott wanting someone smart, but I would also have pegged him as disagreeing with Warren more than with, say, Bloomberg. Also, my own judgement and the judgement of some smart people who I trusted who looked at lots of graphs was that Warren was more likely to lose to Trump than Biden was. And as it played out, that very well could have happened.
And also: "41: (12/6/21) In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error."
Did something big happen in December that I missed?
I recommend reading Wikipedia's article about Warren. Whatever she is, believes, or does, she's a heavyweight. Just because she's attacked like AOC is doesn't mean she's equivalent, she's spent 40 more years doing stuff. She's 73 and what she's done in her life should speak for itself, but she's treated as a generic Democratic woman politician by the right and when progressives defend her, they don't always realize she's not. I can't think of an instance where I read something about her that was as respectful as one would be of a 73 year old male politician.
Every damn piece of propaganda these days is made of claims that are supposed to be rejected, that are supposed to be outrageous, but that smuggle a false premise in that takes root without examination.
Didn't Scott write "I think I voted for Warren", as if he couldn't remember for sure for whom he voted? Since I have trouble believing Scott couldn't remember exactly how he voted, I took his statement to mean "Just so you know, I'm left-leaning" with the name "Warren" as a stand in for someone obviously on the left, while not wanting to explain or necessarily reveal for whom he really voted because that wasn't the point of his statement.
I was more than a little confused. She seemed to me like precisely the candidate who would annoy Scott the most, and he'd also talked about how her brand of obsessive social justice was electorally poisonous. I thought he'd have voted for Yang, or maybe even Bloomberg. Honestly even Biden seemed more likely than Warren.
I didn't expect him to vote for Bernie, but I really don't understand how Scott has such a bad perception of him. Policy-wise, he's very clearly a run-of-the-mill social democrat of the Northern European variety (not a socialist or communist), and he manages to avoid the woke crap more than almost any Democratic politician. His chances in a general election are definitely subject to debate, but I don't think that explains Scott's dismissive attitude towards him.
By the time the primary circus got to California, the only remaining candidates were Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Warren. Without wanting to start a whole thread on which of these candidates is the least bad, it's not completely unimaginable that a reasonably sensible person (who for some reason votes in Democratic primaries) might think it's Warren.
Not saying it's completely unreasonable, just rather surprising given his own past writing and the other candidate options you listed. I think a reasonably sensible person would recognize that voting in primaries is important, and the Democratic one seems like a fine one to vote in.
In my opinion (most) voters weigh cultural signals far too much. You’re likely right that Scott and Warren are far apart culturally. But she had, relative to president candidates, solid rationalist bona fides. Culture is a distraction and an emotional cudgel in politics, and if you find yourself focusing on it, you’re likely losing the thread.
I agree that focusing too much on culture issues themselves is unwise, but acknowledging their impact on a candidate's electability is perfectly prudent.
I'd say a reasonable exception can be made if the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party have effectively no chance of being able to actually achieve their goal of eating people's faces, but a decent chance of being able to pass their great tax plan. Changing tax policy is fairly easy in a modern liberal democracy, putting people in concentration camps is extremely hard and arguably all-but-impossible.
The nefarious Leopard Party might not be able to get their Face Eating bill passed, but they can slip some face nibbling language into a 1,000 page Keep the Government From Collapsing bill no one has the time to read.
For example the anti gun left in this country has virtually zero chance of outright banning guns in one sweeping action, but they're still able to make small consistent gains to make gun ownership a pain in the ass in an effort to slowly snuff out the "gun community". The current establishment prefers persistent smothering repression rather than sudden jack booted violence.
As a working class guy with a working class tax return (ie I don't itemize) there are some culture war issues that affect me way more than tax policy. Red Flag laws for instance skirt all of our normal constitutional safeguards and will definitely result in unnecessary deaths.
Re. rationalism: I hadn't seen that post. I'm still a bit confused about the name though. Does Yudkowsky/Scott "rationalism" have ANY connection to rationalism in epistemology? That they "share a name, nothing more" can mean they're entirely independent or they're similar/related but not the same.
Re. politics, let me be more specific. My confusion is not "he criticises the left, but he's on the left? That's impossible!" It's more like "he suggests extreme thinking and identity politics on the left are very harmful, yet he voted for someone who seems (from my non-American perspective at least) to embody both of them".
And I'm confused as to how anti-tribalism explains this. Is the "woke left" not a tribe itself? My impression of Scott is: he is not part of the woke movement, he criticises them more than any other faction (left or right), and he is left-leaning more generally. And I'm wondering what ideological or philosophical characterisation best explains this.
None of this, by the way, is intended as any kind of criticism. Only curiosity.
Warren built her career on being a smart technocrat. She wrote a book, and her campaign was long on policy specifics. Her political base was the college educated middle class. The college educated middle class was (and is) on board with woke stuff, so she said woke stuff. But my impression is that it was a bolt on - something she said because the voters she was chasing wanted her to say it.
Assuming Scott had the same take, she makes sense.
"Rationalism" around here does not mean the traditional sense of "continental rationalism, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." It would be more helpful for you to think of it as analytic philosophy, with particular interests in decision theory, Bayesian epistemology, AI risk, experimental psychology, and behavioral economics.
I think one factor is that you're overestimating how extreme-left and identity-politics-focused Warren looks from inside Blue America. Especially in 2019/early 2020- I think she's moved a bit more in that direction since then in ways I find disappointing (and I infer Scott feels similarly).
"he suggests extreme thinking and identity politics on the left are very harmful, yet he voted for someone who seems (from my non-American perspective at least) to embody both of them"."
Consider the alternatives. You don't avoid extremism, identity politics(or science denial) by voting R.
The "woke left" is not, in fact, a tribe itself; things aren't that well sorted. Also, Scott is generally opposed to strategies, rather than ideas.
Consider two concepts which may be more familiar to you, depending on your own experiences: A Christian who does their best to live by the Bible. And a Christian who tries to make everybody else live by the Bible. The difference there is important.
Scott, and most of us here, oppose, categorically, the people who want to make everyone else live by their own Bible-equivalent; it doesn't matter if their Bible equivalent is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Wokeness.
And most of us are basically fine with people who simply do their best trying to personally live up to their own idea of what being a good person means.
As a philosophy professor, my take on the "rationalism" name is that it has very little to do with the classical philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism. They're interested in rationality, which means reasoning well with whatever tools you have. As opposed to the 18th century debate, which is about whether reason is somehow a better tool than the senses. Some contemporary philosophers are still interested in this foundational question about where knowledge ultimately comes from, but I think this movement grew up somewhat outside academic philosophy, and therefore didn't choose the same terminology.
(If anything, I think it's more connected to the "skeptics" movement of the 1970s-90s, that eventually gave rise to New Atheism. These "skeptics" are of course not skeptics in the philosophical sense of thinking we can't know anything, but just in the weaker sense of doubting particular outrageous claims.)
1. When you've rejected christianity, nationalism, and anti-lgbt sentiment, all of which are commonplace if not venerated by the Republican party, you end up voting for Democrats in most if not all national elections. Additionally, Elizabeth Warren, while being on the far left by national politician standards, is by no means an extremist when it comes to internet leftism. If you're a 6 on the "right to left" scale, you can still vote for an 8, and be critical of the 9s and 10s.
2. The "rationalist" label, as used by myself, Scott, and other members of this blog, is a philosophy outlined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and is completely distinct from the philosophy Descartes and Kant advocated. Here is quick summary of the virtues of the philosophy: https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues, and here is the founding text of the philosophy, known as "The Sequences": https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality. Some of it's out of date—some of the text quotes psychology experiments we now know fail to replicate, and it engages in late-oughts political discourse at times which now seems a little silly, but I think it stands up if you read it in that lens. (Also, if you enjoy fanfiction, you can read the Harry Potter fanfiction about rationality here: https://www.lesswrong.com/hpmor. We try not to take ourselves too seriously)
That all makes sense. But regarding Warren, it just seems to me that electing her would have pushed everything even further left. Surely these internet trends in some sense follow the political situation; they don't come out of nowhere (sjw/woke followed Obama, the evangelical online movement followed Bush, and so on).
And I'll add that although I follow some aspects of American politics very closely, not living there means I probably don't have a real sense of the level of tribalism. Is there really virtually no such thing as varying your voting habits now and then? Everyone always votes for the same party no matter what? It sounds more like almost-war than democracy..
"But regarding Warren, it just seems to me that electing her would have pushed everything even further left."
I don't think Scott is part of the political right, or even the anti-left. If he's anti-woke, he's anti-woke from a principled-liberal position. If he's in any sense libertarian, it's in the sense were the libertarians are well off the normal political axis and not just a special flavor of the right wing.
Scott is pretty clearly in favor of smart/rational rather than dumb/ignorant, and I think at least somewhat in favor of technocratic rule over populist rule. Warren is on the political left, which isn't going to be a problem, and she's woke, which maybe is, but the Elizabeth Warren who e.g. wrote "The Two-Income Trap" is presenting herself as a smart thoughtful technocrat, and that's going to appeal to a lot of rationalist (Bay Area, not Cartesian)
I think the perception of internet trends following political situations is going to vary a lot based on your own personal experience from these times. In my case, it seemed like the SJW/woke stuff peaked in the 2016 election and began declining once Obama was gone and Trump was in office, and also that the end of the Bush era coincides pretty well with the rise of New Atheism. So rather than being a furtherance of the previous political situation, internet trends seem to represent more of a backlash.
Yes, that's what I was getting at: wokeness developed and peaked under Obama; the president is a powerful cultural figure and his rhetoric has great influence on society.
Although it's my impression (and I think the impression of many commenters here) that wokeness is more institutionally entrenched than ever, even if there are fewer militant advocates of it. Similar to how gay marriage and obamacare remained in place after Obama left office, and the war on terror and occupations of various countries continued when Bush was gone. Once you elect someone, many of the agendas they implement (both policy and cultural) are irreversible.
What are the best examples of wokeness being institutionally entrenched? I don't dispute that it is, I'm just wondering.
I don't think the woke stuff is irreversible in the same way as gay marriage or Obamacare. It still feels like a phase to me. I think there are some good elements of recent social justice advocacy, even if they're often overshadowed by the absurdity of the rest, and I think those gains will remain due to their actual merit. But some of the more plainly illogical stuff is so plainly illogical that it just can't hold itself up for long. The emperor won't get away with wearing no clothes forever.
I think it's stuff like Diversity Officers and trainings. My job is having us do a couple of hours about this every month or so for six months.* The trainings are prepped by an office of three or four professional HR people. It's their job to do this kind of thing, so I assume something or other in this vein will be ongoing. I would call the creation of jobs specifically intended to inculcate the ideology to be its institutionalization, as those jobs, and by extension that ideology, now has an independent office and staff.
*I don't myself mind this much, as I agree with a lot of it and can tune it out and cruise the internet if I'm bored or frustrated. But for the dedicated anti-woke it's probably pretty unpleasant.
But I think he'd say, as to why he criticises Internet leftism a lot despite being broadly left-wing, that this is because he rejects tribalism, and indeed, finds it more important to give "constructive criticism" to his own side, the side which he *wants* to see be right and efficient, than to keep piling on the opposite side which he already disagrees with.
I've been experiencing a lot of problems posting comments recently. The Chrome tab for ACX randomly hangs when trying to post a comment. Sometimes the comment gets posted during such a hang, sometimes not. Anyone else notice this recently? Just happened to me now. This started happening maybe a couple of weeks ago.
I’m experiencing similar problems on my iPad, with Safari. I’d seen things hang when posting a comment before, but today even scrolling is barely working.
Yes, I and others have had similar problems. I suspect the JavaScript for comment threads wasn't written or tested for the volume that posts on this blog achieve.
So I had a printshop do some nice quality prints of these, and... the printed versions aren't moving when I look at them!
My best guess is that some Bayesian subconscious part of my brain knows that printed images never move, while on screen images often do, and interprets them accordingly.
This is interesting! Not sure if I've seen any printed optical illusions recently, but when I was a kid, I had lots of optical illusion books, and illusory-movement ones like these worked just fine in print. I have no idea why printed and digital ones would be different for you.
Maybe you need worse prints? Print is usually 600dpi and up, while the screen is typically 90dpi . Maybe there is something about the higher quality combined with the original source that provides the visual cortex with enough clues that it can tell it's not moving. Or maybe there are surface highlights or something in looking at them by reflected light, instead of by direct light (as you would be on the screen), which give additional hints to the cortex. You could try looking at them through a pane of glass maybe.
Interestingly, I find they only move if I look directly at them. If I look sufficiently to the side they stop moving. I vaguely recall that the fovea is very good at color discrimination, but areas further out are better at detecting movement.
These images only move when I move my eyes - if I stare steadily at one point on them they stay still. Possibly you're looking at prints differently - maybe try running your gaze around the edge in circles?
I don't think I've ever looked at printed images of these sorts of illusions - I would have assumed they would move just as much!
Some hypotheses I have if they don't:
Perhaps the colors aren't quite as bright or vibrant - instead of pixels shining light, they're just reflecting ambient light.
Perhaps the presence of shadows or other ambient light effects eliminate the effect that is creating the movement.
Both of these seem like things that could be fixed by getting a fairly bright diffuse light source.
Another test - can someone hold the print up in front of a camera while you look at it through Zoom? Could transferring it back to a screen make it work, or does getting it on paper once ruin the effect even after putting it back on screen?
It would also be interesting to see just how sensitive the effect is to the precise colors used. I imagine that CMYK printing gives slightly different results from RGB pixels, and I wouldn't be totally shocked to discover that there's some subtlety in the color contrast that makes these work.
If I try hard, I can get maybe 5% of the effect from the screen. On screen I don't to try at all.
Google says that "magic eye illusions" are those hidden 3D images in what looks like noise that came out in the 90s. After some practice, I learned how to unfocus just enough to see them.
I haven't commented on why you suck before, but I have spent quite some time thinking on it, because I, too, enjoy reading you less, and recommend you less, than I used to.
One reason is that since you moved to substack, I read every one of your posts, regularly, instead of once in a while a bunch of those that look most interesting to me. Of course the average quality/relevance to me goes down that way.
Another thing is that (I think) more of your posts are presupposing agreement on some basic ideas you wrote about before. From your end, no reason to stick to the broad, general question when you can use your answer as a step-stone to reach higher. From the reader's end, you become a lot less interesting or relevant to those that disagree with you on the first step.
A third is that the more I read from you, the more I learn about you, and the better I identify areas of disagreement. The first contact with a new idea is strange, foreign, fascinating, but over time you figure our whether and how to integrate it into your own worldview, and at that point you're over it and don't need or want exposition to the raw, unintegrated form of the idea anymore.
And lastly I'm just personally very disinterested in prediction markets and special economic zones, think AI risk is ridiculous, and want more neuroscience, rumination on cognition, and tidbits from science and history that I wouldn't encounter on my own. I am not sure if the ratio has changed or just seems like it to me.
Imagine the perfect storm, a long 6-part disquisition on an evil superintelligent AI that arises as a result of entrepreneurs in a special economic zone attempting to game prediction markets, in particular predictions of AI risk.
Double ditto on prediction markets etc. But worst for me was Georgism. I was wondering if there was a way to set up an 'anti alert', some way of notifying me when the word 'Georgism' hadn't been mentioned in a while.
Re: suckage in general though, I think a lot of it is frustration about something that's (probably) not Scott's fault - it's the low yield of usable output. The whole point of having insight is to operationalize it. The reason I look to Scott (and others) for insightful critique on culture war issues is that I'm looking for a way to win! The things that struck me about the 'Why Do I Suck" article was all of the culture war subjects Scott was bored of and has moved on from. At first my reaction was anger - these are live issues! These are fights that need to be won! You don't just get bored and wander off the battlefield! You suck! But on further reflection it's obvious that I'm just displacing my anger. My real frustration is with how intractable culture war issues are, not with Scott. Nonetheless, Scott moving away from important culture war topics due to ennui /does/ seem like a bit of an indictment of the rationalist project. If we cant use reason to solve problems...
Which brings me to /anosognosia/. Is Scott /really/ bored of the topics he claims to be bored of, or is this a coping strategy? If I spent untold hours thinking and writing about an important problem and failed to turn all that work into a usable stratagem to solve the problem I'd count myself disappointed, not bored. And I guess this is the crux of the matter - if I did cope by claiming to my readers to be bored of the problem instead of owning up to my disappointment, then my readers are just gong to be disappointed on my behalf. I'm hereby dubbing this 'Anosognosic Displacement'. /Someone/ has to be frustrated by a paralyzed limb. If the owner of the paralyzed limb isn't frustrated, then the people around them get to be frustrated instead.
This is also my trifecta of reasons for "why Scott sucks" lately. (To be clear, I don't actually think you suck, Scott, at all).
I think prediction markets are an interesting concept, I just don't share Scott's apparent degree of confidence that they work well or will work well.
Regarding AI risk - and I've said this before - the discussion doesn't seem to have changed in years. Which is frustrating I guess, but it just doesn't make for interesting (or productive, apparently) reading.
And the special economic zones seem like a fantasy that only fringe libertarians could imagine working out well. So I wonder if Scott has some stuck priors on the merits of economic libertarianism.
I turned Scott's short allegory from his Ivermectin article (about aliens, space plague, and brain implants) into an audio drama. I reached out to Scott and received his blessing, so I'm glad to now share it with you.
Much more than you wanted to know request: Uyghur situation in China. I still feel unsure about the facts on the ground, it seems like there is something bad going on there but also like it's not a genocide in the WW2 sense. Is it "cultural genocide" in the sense that Westerners use the term? Are there large-scale forcible detainments happening? Is it uniform, is it based on political dissidence, is it well-understood by the Chinese citizenry? I would like to know more. Also, if somebody has a good overview of this situation I would love to be directed that way.
I met a Chinese citizen in grad school who was very opinionated about it. The conversation wasn't very long (most of it was taken up by a Vietnamese student unsuccessfully trying to talk him down) but he was very supportive of anything being done to the Uyghurs- he kept calling them terrorists. I didn't know beforehand, but apparently there is an extremist movement for Uighur independence (under the name East Turkestan) and they are responsible for a few small-scale terrorist attacks. Nothing 9/11- level, but it's my impression that the Chinese government is trying to make sure everyone in China knows about it.
It doesn't help that the *US* designated at least one independence group as a terrorist organization while trying to get Chinese buy-in in the fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party says they recently got taken off that list.
The rumors I've seen is that for both Uyghurs and Tibetans, most children are now taken from their families and raised as Chinese. I think that counts as cultural genocide..
Maybe there is more solid confirmation that "rumors", but I haven't seen it.
Based off of one of Amy Chua's books, this seems to be a more violent and forceful version of China's standard policy for minorities- they're treated poorly, but allowed full rights if they take on Chinese names, customs, marry a Chinese person, etc.
Westerners don't use the term "cultural genocide" in anything like a uniform way. Our paradigmatic understanding of genocide is that you take all the people who belong to a particular culture and kill them. But we also have a concept of genocide where you do it by raising the next generation in a way that they are unaware of the cultural signifiers of their parents and just grow up with the culture of the surrounding community.
Both of these things were done by governments in the Americas to the indigenous communities. France very famously did the second to its minority communities in the 19th century. Hitler's Germany famously tried to do the first.
"Genocide" is one of those dumb terms that should be abolished. It variously means "a really really terrible thing involving mass murder" and "a usually bad but sometimes defensible thing not involving any murders".
I assume you are aware of the extensive reporting from western media. If you want primary sources a good place to start is Xinjiang Documentation project https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca
MODERATOR RULING: I received a report using the "report comments" function, saying that this was a terrible comment. I cannot deny this is true, but under the circumstances I am not going to take any action.
Is there a good example of a situation in US history where a government entity was created to solve a problem, and it was later determined that this government entity wasn’t able to solve the problem, so the governmental entity was disbanded?
The only relevant situation I can think of that fits the general shape is prohibition. Are there other such examples?
FDR's WPA was disbanded in 1942, because it was clear the program was no longer needed as US transitioned to the full employment of a war economy. The CCC was also disbanded at some point. And the National Recovery Administration was also terminated at the end of the Great Depression.
The Department of War and the OSS were disbanded and replaced by the Department of Defense and the CIA. Immigration and Naturalization Services was replaced by various sub-departments of Homeland Security.
I don't know of many cases where an entity was created to address a problem, and then people just gave up on the problem, rather than creating a new entity to try to address a related problem in a different way.
Thanks; these are good areas to look further. But did these stop because they were seen as ineffective at “solving the problems,” or because they were wrong?
Tentative: Root-Bernstein said that scientists could make discoveries when they addressed practical problems outside their specialties.
Hypothetically, taking a year or two sabbatical to take a crack at something new and/or getting more experience might help.
My first thought was that public intellectuals become too busy to learn new things. Aging might also be an explanation. I also consider it possible that people only have so many insights, and when they're used up, they're used up.
There's a real problem here, that may be insoluble for an individual. An analogy...
Consider vacuum tubes. They were advancing rapidly in design, reliability, and efficiency. A bit before 1960 they looked unchallengeable. Transistors couldn't handle enough power and were too unreliable. But transistors had an "easy" path to improvement, and vacuum tubes didn't. Incremental gains were still happening, but nothing major. The expertise used to build vacuum tubes didn't easily transfer to building transistors. So about the time of the IBM 7094 there was a switchover.
A name that could be applied to the process is "sunk cost". When one spends a lot of time and effort developing expertise in an area, one become unwilling to switch. Even in retirement I'm a computer programmer, though now it's a cost sink rather than a source of funds. But my way of thinking has been channeled through years of successful results. If I could switch to being an entertainer, it would now be much more rewarding, but I don't think that way and haven't developed those skills.
A major culprit named in the article is, basically, success; journalists no longer travel between war-torn streets, and instead travel between boardrooms. Like comedians, success dries up their well of insight, until all they have to talk about are airplanes, hotels, shopping experiences, and corporations.
What does this kind of success look like for Scott Alexander? Would he no longer have the experience of being just another voice with no real home, trying to speak out against a world which is fundamentally hostile to his ideas? Does he now have the internet equivalent of traveling from boardroom to boardroom? (Would an anonymous identity count, or is that experience fundamentally different because he has somewhere to return to?)
Which, if we look - yeah, his commentary has changed from being, in an abstract sense, about what it's like to be another anonymous voice, to what it's like to be a public voice. But also he tried very hard not to be a public voice, and, like, this new blog exists for a reason, and it wasn't his choice.
I think that shameless self promotion outside of classified threads (ie. spam), should be considered reportable. And yes there a particular annoying commenter I have in mind. Any other thoughts on this?
Scott has previously mentioned that people shouldn't spam the open thread with self-promotion, with the boundary for 'spam' intentionally undefined so people don't rules-lawyer it. I agree that excessive self-promotion should indeed be reportable, but I wouldn't go around reporting every self-promoting post of a particular user, just one representative post.
Re: Public Intellectual Shelf Life: what of C S Lewis?
Reading his collected correspondence there's this moment toward his late 40's when he worries to a friend that he's made his mark and is more or less done publicly, and it takes you a moment to realize that he hasn't written Narnia yet. And then he hands the world _Till We Have Faces_, which is a book I'm now going to stop thinking about so I don't start to cry again. Meanwhile _Letters to Malcolm_ is as good as anything he wrote earlier in life. Maybe he died just as the well ran dry but I wouldn't bet on it, and he probably qualified as a public intellectual by the time he gave the first _Mere Christianity_ address, so that's conservatively a 20 year high.
The Christian part of me would like to chalk it up to God growing larger the older you get, but that feels a little like special pleading. Are theologians outliers in general? Or is he just personally an outlier? Or am I missing something in the chronology?
Turns out there's not much of a peak - for every Hume or Marx whose most influential work is written in their mid-20s, there's a Kant or a Mill whose most influential work is written in their mid-50s.
Could interpret that as a transition from coming up with ideas to finding ways to spread them. Eg he wetits novel theology early them finds ways to package it in kids books, which are successful but don't contain anything new
It hadn't occurred to me that theology was a humanity, but of course it is, so this is a good point. Now I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly the boundaries of a public intellectual are...
I think that blogger's comments on the creatives is just plain wrong. Most painters are developing their craft and their art continuously into old age. Many classical composers continued to develop their art into old age. Musicians frequently get better until their physical health prevents them from playing anymore. As for poets, most contemporary poetry is so ephemeral, it would be hard to say — but of the poets of the established 19th and 20th canon, they seemed to have been producing innovative work well into old age.
I would guess a novelist is not the same kind of "public intellectual" that Greer writes about. It's easy to think of many great authors who kept publishing good works throughout their career. Similarly, scientists are also a kind of intellectuals, and they often keep doing good science.
Novelists need wisdom, which requires life experience. They need to have a deep understanding of what makes people tick and institutions tock. Note that there are prodigy poets but no prodigy novelists. Tolstoy published Anna Karenina at age 50. Philip Roth published American Pastoral at age 64. I'd guess healthy novelists peak between the ages of 30-60.
That may be a clue. Novellists tend to write at a high level of abstraction presented as a low level. If there are many possible ways to translating the high level into the lower level, then the expression may be more durable. I feel lots of uncertainty about this, but it seems plausible.
FWIW, I found C.S.Lewis quite unconvincing as a religious presentator. And he often presented views that I found boring, unconvincing, or stupid. "The Great Divorce" was adequate, but "The Screwtape Letters" was much better. "Out of the Silent Planet" was interesting, but "Perelandra" was not, and "That Hideous Strength" was a waste of paper. I got the impression that they were primarily liked by those who agreed with him before the opened the book.
OTOH, novellists are basically entertainers. If the "sell the birthright for a pot of message" they quickly decline in quality...but this doesn't mean they stop being entertaining. I really like Xanth despite the strong moralistic message, because it's entertaining...though it's also because "Gee, I wish things were like that" in a lot of places.
But what *is* a "public intellectual"? Do you limit it to folks like Dawkins and Dennett? Do you include Andy Warhol? If you mean "A speaker to the zeitgeist", then there's a clear reason why their time is limited implicit in the meaning of zeitgeist. One doesn't ask why most athletes have a short time at the top, but for one who plays with ideas things are harder to see. However is may be the same thing. If a "public intellectual" is one who presents interesting new ideas that are worthy of consideration, then a clear limit is the number of interesting new ideas that are worthy of consideration that they can develop. And "interesting to who?" is an important question here. Music styles change, and there appears to be no particular logic as to how they change, except that the music one likes as a teen won't be the same as what one likes 10 years earlier. Perhaps the same is true of "intellectual styles".
While you're grading his novels, what did you think of _Till We Have Faces_? I found _Perelandra_ decent and OotSP dull. _That Hideous Strength_ is, as you say, a waste of paper. And I loved Divorce and Screwtape, though they're barely fiction. I would tend to agree that Lewis is fantastic if you already agree with him, and probably quite mediocre otherwise.
Your point about zeitgeist is interesting and suggests that theological public intellectuals may be more or less susceptible to falling off based on how much they center eternal theological truths vs getting caught up in the Zeitgeist. So N T Wright or Ravi Zacharius can go on forever (well, until certain things come to light) while Rachel Held Evans or The Liturgists are likely to fade.
Perhaps our definitions of fiction differ, but I find it hard to figure out why you would say "Divorce and Screwtape, though they're barely fiction". I consider fantasy a subcategory within fiction. (I gave up on him after the books I mentioned, so I have no idea about "_Till We Have Faces_". Despite occasional moments, calling his general level mediocre is quite generous.)
The fiction in those two books is a thin veneer designed to let him philosophize, rather than a story with strong themes. Or, put another way, the story is there to serve the philosophy, rather than a philosophy informing the story. If that's still fiction, then fair enough.
I promise basically everything else he wrote is better than the space trilogy, with the possible exception of _The Pilgrim's Regress_.
Six users reported this comment and asked me to ban you for it.
Technically I've stated people are allowed to post links to their own stuff in Open Threads about twice per year. You haven't posted more than that, so you're within the letter of the law. But users were still upset about the blatantness of the links, the culture-war-ness, the fact that lots of people thought they were pretty wrong, and the fact that some of them are to subscriber-only posts they can't read without paying you.
I don't think you did anything officially wrong, but I agree with them that this is slightly obnoxious, so I'm giving you a minor warning, where four minor warnings = one ban.
As to the last link, the ONS data would take a lot of effort to make any sense of.
Their article contains some important disclaimers, such as:
"The age-adjusted rates are not equivalent to measures of vaccine effectiveness; they account for differences in age structure and population size but there may be other differences between the groups, particularly underlying health, which affect the mortality rates." (No kidding, the people who got vaccinated are probably quite a bit different from the ones who did not. E.g., I would assume just about all the population of nursing homes got vaccinated, whereas some healthy old people who lived alone did not.)
"Changes in non-COVID-19 mortality by vaccination status are largely driven by the changing composition of the vaccination status groups because of the prioritisation of clinically extremely vulnerable and people with underlying health conditions, and differences in timing of vaccination among people who were eligible." (I.e. the drop in the deaths among unvaccinated people is partially because the sicker people got vaccinated and are now on the other curve.)
That said, there was a lot of bad stuff going on besides coronavirus and vaccines, such as people suffering from lockdowns, hospitals being overwhelmed, people not being able to get medical care for conditions they had, people not getting their usual checkups, nursing homes not allowing relatives to come in and help, etc. (This is not UK, but it's a rather striking example of how bad things were: https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/06/06/dartmouth-college-student-suicides/ )
Someone needs to crunch the ONS data so it stops being confusing and actually becomes useful.
I don't deserve credit; I mostly just reposted some of the disclaimers from the article.
They do attempt to un-confuse their data down in the paper. They post separate graphs for people who were healthy, and for those who were more sick or less sick. I'm not sure if this is enough, but it's a lot more helpful than the combined graphs.
I'll have to read it very carefully to see what they covered, what can't be covered, and what can be improved on.
Suppose you are present at the US constitutional convention, and you’ve somehow managed to convince everyone that factions are going to be a thing. What would you change, aside from using approval voting? Anything? Would you make the factions official government entities with specific rules?
Madison argued that factions were the saving grace of a large republic, because with a sufficient number of them, and a sufficiently divided populace, it would be impossible for any one faction to gain lasting dominance --- so they would, in the interests of their own survival when out of power, agree to limit the central power of government, and become (reluctant) champions of individual liberty.
I think he was on to something. I tend to credit the fractiousness we see to today to the ability of the Internet to strengthen factional ties considerably -- they need not degrade by separation in time or physical distance, the way they always have before. Communication that reinforces shibboleths and checks ideological purity is far less costly. As a consequence, we form fewer but much stronger and more durable factions, which each have a greater hope of acquiring and retaining power. So we are no longer as (grudgingly and self-defensively) supportive of liberty and individual variation.
I don't think there's anything you could fold into the Constitution that would help. It was written with great intelligence and awareness of the usual things that kill republics. The changes that in retrospect seem unfortunate and pointed in the direction of the imperium in which most republics seem to die (the Federal income tax, the direct election of Senators, the metasis of the Commerce Clause, the Federal Reserve system) were all very popular at the time, and had some substantial positive effects that hid their inherent centralizing tendencies a long time.
There's no way in hell that the representatives at the constitutional convention will go for this, but here's what I would want them to do:
Voting stuff:
1) Approval voting for senators, with equal-population districts drawn in a way to maximize locality. (Purposefully vague—the legislature can pass laws that change how "maximizing locality" works as technology advances)
2) Use a national party-list proportional representation system for the house.
3) Use approval, something ranked and condorcet, or maybe STAR to do a national popular vote for the president.
Non-voting changes:
1) The house, senate, and president all have 80 days (~approximately the lame duck term) to respond to actions of the other. If the house passes a bill, the senate must vote on it, or it gets passed by default. If the house and senate pass a bill, the president must sign it, or it becomes law by default. No more pocket vetoing. The same goes for presidential appointments; they must come to a vote or they get approved by default.
2) Each president appoints one supreme court justice per term. Supreme court justices serve 9 * 4 = 36 years; so the last 9 presidential terms each get one justice. Right now, that would mean we'd have 1 trump, 2 obama, 2 bush jr, 2 clinton, 1 bush sr, and 1 reagan justice. What about retirement and death before 36 years? I'd allow justices to appoint their own replacements, or vice-justices, and have those senate-confirmed. That would mean we'd have.
While I would advocate approval voting, it's not due to political factions existing. Still a good policy.
I think I would bring up for debate the idea of having the constitution recognize them and specify some hard rule for which parties gets to appear on the ballot. As a not American, I find it really strange that individual states can decide what parties are options on your ballot.
I might entrench the filibuster in the constitution (or something like it), and advocate for a clear term cycle on supreme court justices. Maybe a couple other similar things to make a 50% majority less effective
I would do the opposite on the filibuster. Codify a talking filibuster at most (which was the original filibuster format, to be clear), ideally none. The current US Senate filibuster is absurd and no other legislature has anything like it, they generally have talking filibusters, usually with limits. Requiring a supermajority to pass legislation was a feature of the government laid out in the Articles of Confederation, and the complete dysfunction of that legislature was the very reason for the Constitutional Convention.
Fundamentally, if your faction (or coalition) commands a majority of seats, your faction should get to implement its agenda to the extent that its members will support it. That is how Canada works, it's how the UK works, it's how Germany works, how France works, along with virtually every other representative democracy on the planet. And while all of those countries have their own dysfunctions, their legislatures can pass significant legislation and the US Senate apparently cannot outside of the limited framework of budget reconciliation bills, and that has been the case for over a decade at this point.
A majority should be a mandate. Treating it like it isn't means the legislature cannot do anything unless the population is very strongly unified behind a specific faction. When the legislature cannot accomplish much sans incredible national unity, power concentrates in the executive branch, as we see in the United States, because decisions still have to be made and policies implemented. In the US, aside from the President, that branch is completely opaque and does not answer to the public in any sort of direct way beyond confirmation sessions that are almost entirely a formality if the President's party holds the Congress. It also forces many issues to be litigated via the judicial branch, increasing the politicization of your judicial system in a way that seems clearly harmful. Bostock (discrimination protections for gay and trans people) and Obergefell (legalizing gay marriage) were judicial decisions when they should have been legislative ones specifically because with the current filibuster your Senate cannot pass anything meaningful on any issues that don't directly impact finances or are judicial appointments without a supermajority. And yes, changing that might theoretically mean things see-sawing back and forth as two polarized parties exchange power, but in practice that is not what was see in other countries (the major parties generally converge a fair bit on both policy and rhetoric, since they can't talk a big game for their base/more extreme members and then use the convenient excuse of the other party obstructing them to explain why they didn't follow through on their ambitious plans despite having a majority, so they end up losing seats in a subsequent election) and the US already does a great deal of that see-sawing via executive orders.
Who says decisions have to be made? The US survived very well for 3/4 of its lifetime without the Imperial Presidency making sweeping decisions that reached into every corner of average life, and there is no obvious reason why that could not have continued indefinitely. I think you take as an obvious axiom an assumption -- that there *must* exist a big central government, because problems cannot be solved any other way -- which is not only unexamined but deeply suspect. There are not many cases where problems are better solved by a central authority dictating one solution to 300 million people than by the spontaneous organizations of those people.
Leaving aside the question of whether the federal gov't is the best place to solve problems - the US was also missing the 60 vote threshold for most of its lifetime. Until 1970, filibusters were rare, and 51 votes was enough for most things. I think Nancy is arguing that the Imperial Presidency is partly the result of the crippling of the Senate via the modern filibuster.
First, from everything I have read, the supermajority rules in the articles of confederation was the least of their problems.
That aside, I think that the core of our disagreement probably is around whether we agree that a majority should get a mandate. I personally don't think so in general, but I also think that such a setup leads to a two-party system like we have now (i.e. each party is just fighting for the bare majority). I think it would be much harder for two parties to compete for 60% of the vote, and it might help to break the party system.
Also, almost every severe change that's proposed in congress, I oppose. I tend to be in favor of pretty slow incremental changes, so that's why I like the filibuster (it slows down majorities).
Have Senators appointed by their Governor with the advice & consent of the State legislature rather than selected directly by the latter. Better chance the 17th is never enacted, keeping the Senate more orthogonal in incentives & behavior to the House.
Yes. As long as you've got a collection of representatives that are trying to get bills passed, there's going to be a need to trade favors - I'll vote for your bill if you vote for mine. Once you establish some relationships about who you trade favors with, you'll set up a faction. It might not be an ideological faction - for most of American history, the parties were pretty orthogonal to the ideological divides. (The big difference between the Whigs and the Democrats was about tariffs and construction projects, and they specifically avoided the cultural issues of the time including slavery; the big difference between 20th century Republicans and Democrats was more about big vs small business rather than cultural issues include Civil Rights.)
I'm actually mainly focused on using "ideology" in the sense of "liberal"/"conservative", in any of the ways those terms have been used. Other than the Republicans of the 1850s-1870s, I think every major party in the US before the 1990s included prominent liberal and conservative wings within its ranks, however the words "liberal" and "conservative" were used at the time. Name a decade, name a party that was prominent in that decade, I'll name a liberal and a conservative, both prominent, in that party in that decade.
Probably. Approval voting in theory incentivizes candidates to move towards the center, but you still need to make decisions for and against things. If some of the electorate wants peace and some of it wants war, it's doubtful that you could get a compromise candidate going on "war, but only a little bit."
I was trying to come up with a binary issue, rather than something like taxes where "taxes at 10%" and "taxes at 20%" could easily meet in the middle at 15%, but in hindsight that's a bad choice of example.
Slavery, maybe? I don't think approval voting would lead to a middle-of-the-road candidate calling to abolish slavery and replace it with Jim Crow laws.
How about legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level?
The difference between legalizing and decriminalizing is that legalizing means putting something under the full panoply of licensing and regulation, while decriminalizing means pretty much letting people do it, maybe with some limits.
The middle position on slavery would be something like "abolish slavery over a period of decades while compensating slaveholders". This is closer to what happened in the rest of the Americas, and the rest of the Americas managed to avoid having civil wars about it.
> Slavery, maybe? I don't think approval voting would lead to a middle-of-the-road candidate calling to abolish slavery and replace it with Jim Crow laws.
Hold the vote in the right decade, and it probably would. "Black people are inferior, but that doesn't justify slavery" was a common opinion for a while.
I think the common opinion was "black people are inferior in such a way that slavery was a necessary part of the path to uplift them from savagery, probably for another generation or two, but if the last generation was enough then it's still less important to cut off slavery in exactly the right generation than it is to avoid massive social upheaval, so let's talk about a long-term master plan to phase out slavery".
And political master plans that last more than two election cycles, have a poor track record of actually coming to pass. "Slavery is an intolerable evil that must be abolished right now!", I don't think was ever a middle-of-the-road position.
What if anything could be done (by governments or with business arrangements) to make it more likely for people to live in extended families? Might remote work do a lot in that direction for some families?
Maybe remote work could be the big deal enabling extended families.
I don't mean that extended families would necessarily live in the same house, but let's say that everyone is within fifteen minutes of each other. Social contact and help are *convenient*.
I don't know that it would be a better world that way. I think the present world is commercially convenient and makes it relatively easy (not actually easy) for people to get away from abusive relatives. Unfortunately, it also breaks up families where people are good for each other and might have something to do with demographic collapse.
One social factor currently inclining against extended families living in close proximity is the pattern of people selling their houses upon retirement and moving to "sun belt" states, particularly Florida or the desert Southwest. Motivations are warmer climate (cold winters being particularly inhospitable to the elderly) and cashing out home equity once living near work is no longer a factor.
There are various options to discourage this. One is simply to wait for organic factors to stabilize population distribution so more people live in sun belt states to begin with and property values equalize between states. Remote work will help with this, by allowing still-working families to relocate to the sun belt for similar motivations.
Another would be to push YIMBY reforms in non-sun-belt states, to lower the cost of living there, while simultaneously dropping policies that subsidize home ownership over renting (mortgage interest deduction, FHA loans, mortgage securitization, etc) so fewer people will have home equity to cash out.
The nuclear option would be to ban residential air conditioning. Sun belt migration is largely a phenomenon of widespread residential air conditioning changing the balance of utility between hot summers in the south and cold winters in the north, with retirees taking the forefront of the migration because they aren't tied to their current location by their employment situation the way working-age adults are.
The nuclear option might avoid moving wholesale to the Sun Belt, but it wouldn't prevent the (upper) middle class scenario where two properties are owned, one in the Sun Belt, one in Canada / the Northern states. My parents own a property in Arizona; I don't think they've turned the air conditioning on for more than a week every year; by the time the air conditioning is required, it's time to come back to Canada for the summer.
And it is my understanding that the gated community in Arizona where they live during the winter has its population drop by more than 80% during that part of the year when air conditioning becomes a necessity.
Another social factor against extended families living in close proximity is the 'go away to college at end of high school' effect, which often leads to grown children finding a home/career/future-plan combination which leads to them living some distance away from their parents house.
As a recently retired person with no intention of moving to Florida - I want neither a hot climate nor an old folks ghetto - I wonder how common such a move actually is.
I’m in the same part of life and am happy to remain in Minnesota. BTW How about that being able to do what you want thing? Every day!
I do have older sibs and cousins in Florida and New Mexico though. It depends on what you enjoy I guess. I like the big small town feel of Saint Paul and actually enjoy shoveling snow. Other folks want a beach or have aches and pains that are worse during cold weather.
Possibly - but what they enable is much much larger working radius. Think of it like remote work for everyone, even people who need to be present. This would enable families to all relocate to a single location without their members changing jobs or possibly even schools.
I want to leave the below here, to see if anyone has any reactions to it. I don't think I agree with it, but it's a perspective you don't often hear. The person answering the questions is late author Toni Morrison.
I think there's maybe something to the idea that people have a hard time raising a family because we have norms for when you're supposed to develop a career and all, that were based around the model of men working and women at home; and now women are in the workforce but the norms are unchanged, and aren't designed for people to take substantial time off for childrearing.
Q. This leads to the problem of the depressingly large number of single-parent households and the crisis in unwed teenage pregnancies. Do you see a way out of that set of worsening circumstances and statistics?
A. Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility. I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community — everybody — to raise a child. The notion that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a patriarchal notion, that a woman — and I have raised two children, alone — is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don’t know. It isolates people into little units — people need a larger unit.
Q. And teenage pregnancies?
A. Everybody’s grandmother was a teenager when they got pregnant. Whether they were 15 or 16, they ran a house, a farm, they went to work, they raised their children.
Q. But everybody’s grandmother didn’t have the potential for living a different kind of life. These teenagers — 16, 15 — haven’t had time to find out if they have special abilities, talents. They’re babies having babies.
A. The child’s not going to hurt them. Of course, it is absolutely time consuming. But who cares about the schedule? What is this business that you have to finish school at 18? They’re not babies. We have decided that puberty extends to what — 30? When do people stop being kids? The body is ready to have babies, that’s why they are in a passion to do it. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it .
Q. You don’t feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?
A. They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, ”Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me — I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don’t want to pay for it.
I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black — or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about. We don’t care whether they have babies or not.
Q. How do you break the cycle of poverty? You can’t just hand out money.
A. Why not? Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich get it handed — they inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s shared bounty of class.
I don't have anything to add, but since you're asking for reactions, mine is "Hell yeah. Preach." I've never seen this put this well and I absolutely agree with it.
This all sounds amazingly right, and prescient to me. And it seems to line up with a lot of the ideas of the rationalist community too. We need extended households of one sort or another to provide meaningful families, and focusing on preserving the man-work-woman-raise-kids-no-one-else-around model is just struggling with something that only barely worked for a decade.
Did Morrison know that, back when the Patriarchy was running things, divorce courts facing the decision between placing the children with the broken family headed by a man and the broken family headed by a woman would almost invariably choose the latter?
Some of Morrison's takes are better than others. A woman can be the "head" of a family without family being broken, whether "head" means "primary income earner" or "the adult who has final call on decisions", which are roles that don't necessarily have to fall on the same person. (The person who earns more has some latent leverage if there ever is a dispute, but it can be offset by charisma / assertiveness of personality.) And of course, many aim at collaborative responsibility and decision-making.
However, no matter who is/are "primary decision-maker", a family where the father of the kids (or at least some of the kids) is present is quite different from a family where there is no father contributing anything at all. Two parents who are present can provide more resources (that is, people who can do adult things) than one parent. If you count that each parent brings their the grandparents and make an assumption that parental grandparents are more keen to participate if the father is present, after the two generations of single parenthood the family loses 2-to-6 in "responsible adulting resources available" compared to two generations of nuclear families.
It is quite curious sleight of hand that Morrison conflates "single parent household" with case "woman is running a family". Sounds like it is Morrison advancing the patriarchal notions here. It shouldn't be impossible for a woman to be the head of a family if the father sticks around?
I can't think of a family in which one parent (in a two-parent household) has the final call on all decisions. Among other things, whether one parent has a dominant influence varies with the nature and circumstances of the decision, and with the age and sex of the children (assuming we're talking about decisions about children), and to the extent you can identify parent with decision area it usually ends up some complex pattern the couple work out over time, in which sometime's it's mom and sometime's it's dad. Which is why "go ask your mother/father" is something kids hear all the time, when the pattern is ambiguous.
My immediate reaction to your *phrasing* is to query whether you consider two (or three, or four) males raising children together to be better for the children than two (or three, or four) women raising children together. Or for that matter, whether you consider the children of a single father better off than the children of a single mother.
Probably, you didn't quite mean what you appear to have said, and are implicitly comparing single female parent only with heterosexual couple. Thereby missing the point Morrison makes about even a couple not being enough.
Saying that "even a couple isn't enough" is moving the goalposts - sure, a wide community might be better than a isolated 2 parent household, but an isolated 1 parent household is even worse (and it has nothing to do with gender, gender didn't even feature in the question, only in her answer)
As to whether men or women are better at raising kids, I expect a homosexual couple (either kind) to be approximately equal to a heterosexual couple - the main benefit comes from raw numbers.
Can't disagree with some generalities here, there always will be exceptions to everything, there are people flying to the moon and lottery winners all the time but most people are those people. I do wish everyone well but selling the idea to teenagers that single parenting is simply an alternative lifestyle without the highly likelyhood of a lifetime of financial, emotional, logistical personal burdens along with the likely associated child development challenges is mostly wishful thinking.
Don't believe me? Single mothers are much more likely to be poor than married couples. The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2018 was 34 percent, nearly five times more than the rate of 6 percent for married couple families. Essentially the same for whites and blacks married and unmarried.
Elementary school children from intact biological families earn higher reading and math test scores than children in cohabiting, divorced-single, and always-single parent families. Adolescents from non-intact families have lower scores than their counterparts in intact married families on math, science, history, and reading tests.
Adolescents living in intact married families or married stepfamilies (with stepfathers) performed similarly on the Peabody Vocabulary Test, but adolescents living in single-mother families or in cohabiting stepfamilies (with their biological mother) did worse than those in intact families.
Over 75 percent of low-income children entering adolescence are living in single-parent households - data from the U. S. Department of Labor’s Panel Study. There are 100's if not 1,000's of these studies out there.
None of that is in dispute. She's simply saying that that isn't fated to be always the case in all societies, it's simply the way ours evolved.
To draw an example from my own life. My grandmother grew up (poor) in a small town in the bootheel of Missouri. When she got married and moved out of her parents' home, she moved to a little house in the same neighborhood. Her mom was right there. An aunt was close by. One of her adult sisters was there. My grandfather's parents and brother were close. And my mom remembers these people, and being raised around and by them. My grandmother and grandfather weren't alone, there was family all around them. (Friends too I think, but I'm vague on that.) That's what Morrison is talking about when she says that two parents were never enough, that this was always easier, and usually done, in the context of close-knit communities.
And in *that* context, according to the argument, single parenthood wouldn't have been that bad. If my grandfather had been a cad, my grandmother would still have had her mother, sister and aunt, at the least. Probably more, in terms of cousins that I've met once or twice or friends I've heard mentioned here or there.
How we do single parenthood right now makes it shitty. But it's not the only way, it's just our way.
"Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility."? First tye question was about teen parents. Second, Ask any single parent and they will tell you that raising a child while single is a hellish way into poverty. The statistics are undeniable
Third, if you want a "community" to inculcate your child with their values and morals you're losing the greatest parental opportunity of your life to pass them on to future generations. Today's public schools teach children to obey because someone in charge told them to not because it's morally correct.
Therefore so many other problems with these answers my fingers don't have the time here.
Raising a parent with no support is a hellish way into poverty. The problem is that we've conflated being unmarried with having no support. Her point is that being married helps a bit, but it's still not enough support. What you really want is a whole household that raises a family, not just one two adults on their own.
The "community" doesn't have to be a government-run public school. It could be your friends from church, or from the bowling league, or from your rationalist book club.
Fascinating. I've reared 5 children, the oldest a touch over 30 now, and I can't say the parenting value contributed by school, friends from church, the bowling league, book clubs, neighbors, daycare staff, traveling salesmen, US representatives, the entire General Assembly of the UN, or strangers in the street approaches a millionth of a percent of the value contributed by their mother on alternate Sundays.
I'm curious what kind of weird American family could even say something different -- as in, Mrs. Schmo down at the bowling alley with whom we sat every Tuesday from 5 to 7pm like clockwork, why, she had just as much influence on me as my own mother! Who says things like that? I mean, unless your mother was rather a waste of space in the first place and you were effectively reared by wolves, or one is talking about some extremely restricted area, like who taught a person to cuss or change the oil in the car.
Exactly the problem. In any century before the 20th, the average person would have grown up in a household with many adults, and in the 20th century this has become literally unthinkable.
In 1890, the median US household size was four people, down from five in 1790. I can't readily find a breakdown by age, but that's hard to square with "growing up in a household with many adults". I mean, four people *could* be one child, two parents, and one aunt/uncle/grandparent, but that's not the way to bet.
Thank you John, very value add comment that dispelled me of the clearly mistaken notion I also had that pre 20th century, familial household units were much larger. Out of curiosity, where did you find this data ? Was there any distribution across income groups included? The question of resource availability in this context as an argument for communal child-rearing has me wondering what different household sizes across income groups were like in previous centuries as well.
There’s some truth here, but also a bunch of confidence around areas I don’t think the author really understands.
I do think it might make more sense to develop cultures around the idea of extended clans living together and people having children at 16, but you’d need them to still be focused on their education since their younger brains are better suited for learning. I think there are huge issues with our educational systems being wasteful, for example. When the author says “rich people are just given things”, she’s right to some degree, but wrong about how well the inheritance of class could be replaced by the state. Parents who teach you about investment because they are skilled at it themselves will be infinitely superior to a bundle of cash from the state, and bad habits taught by state employees who, almost by definition, are not skilled at allocating capital.
Is this a puzzle where you combine the first letters of all fallacies to form the secret phrase?
I do think it is true (or at least plausible enough to warrant serious discussion) that the difficulty of raising children in the 21st century is a social rather than individual problem. In particular, when I look at the "daily time parents spend with children" curves ( https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids ), comparing them both with 50 years ago and with Eastern countries, I'm getting the impression that we somehow managed to push both sexes back into the kitchen, at least for those who have kids... that, or 1965 was an outlier that should have produced wolfchildren everywhere. Part of this is probably parental priorities, but I'm definite that child neglect laws form a significant incentive and need to be dialed down quite a few notches. Not seeing the political will for it so far, though...
Communal co-parenting a la pods will probably be a great help, but I'm not seeing the amount of grassroots organization so far that it would take to set it up. All over the world, educated people have somehow lost the skill to form friendships and informal organizations without mediation by institutions or apps. Solve *this* and parenting will fall out as a bonus.
On what basis are you making the claim that loss of skill enabling friendship forming without mediation is exclusive to educated individuals? Or is even occurring ? Curious to see your source.
If one was to claim that this supposed skill loss is illustrated by educated parents spending more time with children than their uneducated counterparts, then how do we address Denmark seeing such a dramatic and matched increase in mothers' time spent with children regardless of education level - with the gap widening substantially between non-educated mothers and educated fathers ? Or France for that matter, per the data provided above, seeing a decline in educated mothers' time spent with children while educated fathers time is increasing ?
It seems unlikely that this systemic social issue can be reduced to an issue of child neglect laws placing onerous demands on parents and friendship skill loss since 1965, but I'm genuinely curious to see the pieces of the puzzle that sparked your comment.
My claim about loss of social skills among the most educated is unrelated to my claim about time spent with children (which holds across educational cohorts). The latter is based on data, the former on my anecdotal observations. It's just that both are contributing to the mess we are in.
When the covid lockdowns began, I expected essentially every high-earning educated community to get some private teachers to organize learning pods for their kids. But months passed and I haven't seen any hints of this happening on a large scale. The sort of self-organization that our grandparents seemingly did without thinking appears to have gotten much harder for my generation.
Idea to increase birth rates: Similar to women's quotas have parents quotas for professorships, boards of directors, government positions, etc., conditioned on taking 6 months parent time.
I fell like people compete for status much more than for money, so one-time cash handouts for babies seem not as attractive. It would reframe getting children from a career hindrance that has to be compensated to an advantage in your career. Also it costs almost nothing, much of the bureaucracy of managing quotas exists anyways. It increases parents in visible high-status positions and pushes institutions and companies to accommodate them. Since it's required by law, employees who get pregnant are appreciated by the company (as the quota has to be filled anyway) instead of met with "why now?".
Why aren't at least states like Hungary, Russia etc who really seem bound on improving their birth rates in any way possible doing this?
I would say one of the biggest reasons we have lower birth rates is that in many cases a family needs two incomes to get by. I think there's a cycle where governments get more taxable income and corporations get more workers at a lower pay rate, but over time, the population declines.
That's not the whole story, but I think it's a big part. One trend I've seen as well as I've gotten older is that people like me (mid-40s, kids are mostly teenagers) really like the 9-5/40 hours thing, and the younger go-getters who can burn through 55-60 hour weeks are often preferred. Now, I depend more on the income: I've got a family that needs to be fed. But I've got the band concerts and games and church stuff that comes with having kids, and I'm defensive of my time. It's probably better for a company to have a bunch of younger people who can work nutty hours who don't have distractions of ye olde family life. In the short term, anyway.
See _Sex and Destiny_ by Germaine Greer. It's about the idea that the best society is Family-centered, high birth rate, most people die before they're old. Greer spent some time (in her twenties?) among Greek peasants, and was favorably impressed.
One of her points is that business sucks labor out of families. See _The Railway Children_ by Nesbit. A mother tells her children wonderful stories. When things chance and she needs money, she writes children's books for pay and has less time for telling stories to her children.
Back to Greer. If you pay attention, you'll see some bad aspects. Barren women are low status. If you aren't in a good family, you have nowhere else to go.
Still, if you were doing a utilitarian calculus and started with basically affectionate, competent people, that sort of peasant society might not be a bad deal.
I don't think fatherhood is a career stopper (at least for the upperish positions where you are likely to have affirmative action). The last US presidents all had kids, as far as I can remember (?). For mothers, things might be different.
Also, this may add a facet of age-discrimination: if you are selecting for parents, you are (mostly) selecting against 18 year olds.
I think affirmative action is very different depending on the field. AA on board membership feels basically meaningless to me --elite female board members might just as likely vote against the interests of (female) workers as their male colleagues. AA on things like college admission is a double edged sword. It can probably help minorities in certain professions, but might also attach the stigma of succeeding because of quota, not merit on the minority. I think standardized admission processes (e.g. on test scores) are probably better in the long run.
Financially speaking, raising a kid is a daunting prospect. Moving up one step on the pay-grade ladder will probably not matter up. And having kids so one can go to law school will likely result in people going even deeper into debt.
The other question is if you want to raise the overall birth rate or the birth rate of a particular sector of the population. AA-like measures are likely to affect the birth rates among college-educated professionals more than for factory workers, for example.
Re Age based discrimination: Well it's only a quota, it's not 100%. I would say the current system discriminates (indirectly) against parents and thus indirectly for 18 yo (adjusted for skill level I think most would prefer 18yo for 30 yo), and thus the AA would counteract that.
I think college educated have the lowest birthrates anyway so that would only counterbalance.
I think the highest factor is societal opportunity cost. You don't wanna have a completely different livestyle than your firend circle.
In some countries (e.g. Israel for a Western example) children get you in new more social circles than they get you out of. So there is a social incentive for children, even if it is a financial burden. Also, most financial burden is really social. Westerners have much more resources at hand than poorer countries but have less children, even factoring in living costs ---> the real cost is social.
So I think linking children to higher status + plus lots of people in your social bubble (your job) having children is a good incentive.
The same would hold for cash incentives. But I actually think that people who are qualified for good jobs are above average parents, not because they have necessarily better character, but they probably aren't meth addicts or in prison.
Does anyone alse find default substack font for articles awful? Default font used for comments is much better, imho. But perhaps I just have idiosyncratic preferences...
I think people might complain that it clogs the ACX frontpage by adding yet another type of non-longform post to the blog. I don't know if I personally care so much about that problem though, and I do enjoy reading the opinions of all the fun folks here. I think I would like to see something like this once in a while. Otherwise I will just start asking for recommendations in the OTs!
What do folks think the 1/6 event at the Capitol means? I tend towards that it was bad because of threats, deaths, and vandalism while not feeling very sure that it means high risk of ending democracy in the US.
Technically a coup attempt, but the most pathetic coup attempt I am aware of. I'm certain there are others, but a coup attempt that pathetic anywhere other than the recent history of my own country is probably not even going to reach my attention. As such, not a serious threat to democracy, and coupled with Trump's various other attempts to overturn the 2020 election, proof that our democratic safeguards are in at least marginally good working order.
But, claiming that there's nothing wrong with a pathetic coup attempt because it was pathetic, that this was "legitimate political discourse" (yes I know about the retcon), sets the floor higher for the next attempt and that is dangerous. And on the other side, treating a pathetically ineffectual coup attempt as if it were a clear and present danger that very nearly ended democracy in America, risks overreaction in the other direction.
People on both sides are making way too big a deal out of it.
1) A sufficiently large part of the country finding itself unable to trust election results for whatever reason, resulting in something like January 6, is very bad. When elections become completely untrustworthy, that tends to be the end of democracy.
2) A lot of people were charged with nothing more than coming into the building, hanging out there while wearing pro-Trump gear, and posting something the judge didn't like on Facebook. A number of these people are going to jail. (See, e.g.
When a large part of the country is no longer able to trust elections, and when people can go to jail for something people with other politics don't go to jail for and for expressing unapproved political views, are you quite sure we even have a democracy still?
I tried to make two points, both of which I thought were common-sense. Either they did not come across right, or they were scissor statements.
1) One of the signs of a country that is not democratic is that, if there are elections, the results aren't meaningful in any way and not taken by anyone to represent the will of the people. Think Soviet Union.
We've gone from "ballots cast today are in those 3 boxes over there, absentee ballots are in that box, all postmarked, everyone who requested an absentee ballot is on record, some military ballots are delayed, but other than that we should be done counting by midnight" to, in many places, "ballots are in an unknown number of containers all over the building, some of these containers aren't sealed, some don't have any custody chain info, ballots were sent to everyone who's ever lived in our county, we have no idea how they were returned since we have a lot of drop boxes, we have no idea how many of them are still supposed to come in, we also have a pile of ballots submitted in some new way that we need to check for what in it is or is not legit, and there's two more weeks for ballots to come in." The predictable result is an all over erosion of integrity and trust, where nobody really knows if elections matter anymore.
We are not quite at the Soviet Union situation yet, because so far it's only some parts of the country that went down that rabbit hole. Nobody implies that elections are untrustworthy in, say, New Hampshire. But if the government manages to pass a law mandating that kind of chaos all around the country, we will be getting a lot closer.
Here's what's possibly the worst of 2020, and it's not even a Trump race. This ended up lasting into February:
I'm pretty sure that having elections that are so chaotic that the results can no longer be understood or trusted is overall detrimental. I can't see why this is a controversial point of view, so I guess we're in scissor land.
2) You have two sets of people committing the same infraction, hanging out in the Capitol while trying to make a political point. (To be clear, I'm not talking about people who actually assaulted someone or damaged property - of course, they should absolutely be in jail. I am talking about the ones who waltzed into the open doors to take selfies.) One set of people gets a free pass, the other set of people gets arrested and jailed, and the judges decide what kind of sentence the individual perpetrators get based on whether they wrote "lol" on Facebook (real example from the link I posted).
So people's political views and political speech ("I had fun lol") land them in jail, even though the infraction was the same that people with other political views didn't even get arrested for.
This looks like political persecution to me, and I think this is really bad. Again, I can't see why this is at all controversial, so I guess we are in scissor land again.
About the same number of people died from 1/6 as died from the Boston Massacre. I viewed it as a clear example of Republicans showing their true colors.
According to Wikipedia: “Five people died either shortly before, during, or following the event: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes. Many people were injured, including 138 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.”
I remain deeply confused about why three people just happened to die of "natural causes", in a relatively small crowd, in the space of a couple of hours.
I believe there were a couple of fatal heart attacks among the protesters. Older people, too much physical exertion, too much extreme emotion I would guess. Not sure about the third.
Your position is confusing. The common theme between the Boston Massacre and 1/6 is that agent(s) of the sate opened fire on a riot in progress, but you're conflating the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre with the rioters of 1/6, who didn't kill anyone. The 1/6 rioters are much more similar to the Bostonians who were throwing clam shells and clubs at the Brits.
Oh, I see why the analogy isn’t clear : I was thinking of both events as “public acts of political violence which have an outsized impact due to their symbolic effects, despite the relatively small number of casualties.”
It was a just about perfect demonstration of Trumpism in action - a clueless lashing out against the powers that be, at their symbolic seat of power. It's no threat to American "democracy", because it continues to serve the interests of both business and political elites well enough, and in practice it's them who decide the form of government.
The event on its own had a low risk of ending democracy, I think. There are various plausible means by which it could have escalated into broader unrest or delayed the process for longer or maybe even killed some legislators, but a coup takes a certain amount of groundwork so that when you say "Hey, ignore what the law says, I'm president now" people actually obey instead of looking at you like you've lost your mind. I don't think that groundwork was present.
The argument that it was bad (I mean, worse than it looked) is "a coup that isn't punished is a dress rehearsal." Trump (or whatever Trump-like figure follows in his wake) now has some useful information on how many people support overturning an election and what actions could improve the odds of success next time - maybe getting state legislatures on board, maybe coming up with better legal justifications and spreading the Big Lie more in advance, maybe finding a more spineless VP, maybe coordinating with groups like the Oath Keepers that apparently had an actual plan for assaulting the Capitol instead of just smashing the windows and milling around aimlessly. It wasn't a victory, but you can see the shape a successful coup might have had.
+1. The scenario that concerned me the most was the possibility of Democrats being captured or killed and Republicans using some legal tactic or other to block their replacements, creating an all-Republican government. It seemed to me that Trump did *attempt* the outreach needed, to governors and to corporations, and other powerful figures, but only after it was clear he'd lost. He got too arrogant and complacent and got caught by surprise. If he'd started preparing before the election I'd have been much more worried about his chances.
I think it was bad and an eroding of our democratic values. I think the Democrats spent four years doing the same thing, and I worry that the Democrats are still doing it. Biden recently said that if we don't nationalize our elections (aka pass his voting bill that would, among other things, override state election laws in favor of national laws) then they are potentially illegitimate. That's dangerous, in the same vein as Trump's comments (though Trump is an idiot and doesn't allow his team to do damage control like Biden's team does).
I am worried about the future of democracy in the US, but not necessarily from a Jan 6 type event. I think Jan 6 itself could have been much worse, and future events could make a repeat more likely, but the bigger issue comes from attempts to overturn the election results through ostensibly legal means.
The vote being tallied and certified depended on the acts of a bunch of state and local officials, and the rulings of various courts. They mostly did the right thing. But the people who did so, generally took office at a time when their actions in this sort of situation were not a partisan issue. The question is whether they now have become one, so that people who want to win local and state races will have to take positions in favor of overturning elections if they want to win. Especially if people involved in the attempts in 2020 go unpunished (including if trump wins and pardons them).
As an example, trump seems to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. Whoever his running mate is would immediately be asked if Pence should have tried to overturn the election. Trump knows this and would only pick someone who would say that Pence was wrong.
As for Jan 6 itself, I think the main danger would have been from a combination of (i) Pence “declaring” trump to be the winner, (ii) the rioting disrupting the proceedings and preventing Congress from saying anything otherwise, so that the last "official" thing that anyone has said is "trump wins!" and (iii) the military moving in to “secure” the area, acting as a show of force and presenting this all as fait accompli. I don't know if that was the plan, or how coherent a plan there was; it seems like trump's actions are a combination of never wanting to back down, and thinking that chaos is good for him. There also seem to be some loose ends, like Pence reportedly not wanting to be driven away because he didn't trust where the driver was going to take him.
I agree with you it--it was a lot of violence and property damage that accomplished nothing. It seemed like most of the protestors had no concrete plan for how to turn physical presence in the Capitol into a coup--the sentiment was that it would just happen. Maybe it's part of a trend toward politics becoming more symbolic or even mystical/ritualistic.
Was there even any meaningful property damage? Some guy wandered off with a lectern, I'm not sure if it was returned later (it's kinda hard to carry home).
Protestors don't necessarily have to see a straight line between "protest about thing" and "thing gets changed", they just want to protest. It's a shame that legitimate concerns about election fraud got lost in the media freakout about some guy with a silly hat.
One common thread between QAnon and the 2020 election overturning stuff/Jan 6 is a (professed at least) absolute certainty that trump will somehow prevail against his enemies. For QAnon, whatever the details, the theory always ended with a grand reckoning and final victory, with the Democrats all going to GITMO or being abducted by aliens or whatever.
My memory of Jan 6 is also that many Republicans (including some influential, normally levelheaded people) were expressing insane levels of confidence that trump would somehow manage to win, and on Jan 6, they were not only shocked at what happened at the Capitol, but shocked when it finally hit them that yes, Biden was going to be President.
I wish I could find it now, but the head of some local county Republican party sent a letter around, AFTER Jan 6, saying that he had 100% certainty that trump would be sworn in on Jan 20. Supposedly at 11:59 am on Inaguration day some people were still expecting some last second deus ex machina.
What you said about republicans could be applied to democrats in 2016, that took a long time to even realize that Trump had a chance, and were in strong denial for a long while. They even talked about impeachment for a long time.
I’m with Nancy Leibovitz here. The New York Times was certainly not trying to claim Trump’s election was illegitimate or stolen, and I don’t recall any other liberal-tilting MSM outlets doing that either.
But I keep hearing people making this claim - always without evidence. I’d love to see actual examples of this.
Republicans love to make this comparison but it strikes me as an odd one. Democrats certainly hoped that scandal would drive trump from office, but that's not the same as trying to overturn the election itself (in part because impeachment comes after the guy is already President, and results in Pence becoming President). This sort of thing always happens to some degree. Before 2016, people were saying Obama wasn't born in the US, with the idea presumably to get him out of office, a cause most prominently supported by....
For the election itself, Hillary conceded the next day, and Obama brought trump to the White House the day after that, called trump the President-Elect and said he'd do everything to support the transition etc. Other than some scattered individual efforts, Democrats were not really hoping, much less expecting, much less believing with certainty, that trump would somehow not take office.
I don't think it's that odd considering all the talk around impeachment during 2016-2020. My point is a relatively vague "people seem worse than before at accepting the reality that there is a president from the opposite side", and that seems to lead to bigger and bigger consequences.
Do you really think "the President, who was already elected and inaugurated, committed impeachable conduct" is the same as "the President-elect didn't actually win"?
Merits of the arguments for each one aside - ask any Democrat what was the chance that trump would actually be impeached, convicted and removed from office, and they'd have probably said "absent some compelling new information, probably not, and even if he was Pence would be President". For all the impeachment talk, Democrats didn't impeach until the Ukraine thing happened, and even then understood it would likely fail. Like, to give you an idea here is an SNL skit from early 2018:
Becca: "So I have to wait two more years for him to be out of office."
Mueller: "Honestly, probably six"
And SNL is super anti trump.
Meanwhile, in mid-December 2020 - after the electoral college had already met and voted - the Washington Post called every Republican member of Congress and found that the vast majority did not acknowledge that Biden had won, and a majority answered "yes" to "Do you support or oppose Donald Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory?"
Being thrown off balance by Trump's rather surprising victory isn't the same as denying that he won. I don't think I've seen anyone denying that Trump won, there were just efforts to figure out how the Trump victory snuck past them.
There were a lot of people claiming that Trump only won because he was basically a Russian spy and Russia's other spies basically rigged the election for him. And, yes, per "bounded distrust", at the highest levels that narrative was pushed by people who very carefully and artfully worded their statements to be not-technically-lies, I don't care. Someone "winning" the presidency because a bunch of nogoodniks rigged the election on their behalf is a bad thing whether they are foreign or domestic nogoodniks, and so is falsely accusing someone of that.
The relevant difference is that Trump's opponents decided that the correct remedy was to impeach Trump (and probably Pence right after so that Nancy Pelosi would be President), whereas Trump and his supporters favored the "have someone, anyone, declare that the officially certified electoral results don't count". Since we have a well-established legal and Constitutional process for impeaching Presidents, with reasonable safeguards, whereas nullifying elections is an unprecedented ad-hoc thing, that's a significant difference.
It's also an interesting problem if hostile outsiders "cheat" by dumping damaging information just before the election, so they affect the actual vote.
Also, what Lucas said about four years of making up a story about Trump to try to get him impeached, using very high level officials throughout the intelligence community in the US. Some of these officials knew prior to any investigation that the Steele Dossier was made up and also funded as opposition by the Clinton campaign, and they did it anyway.
Are you visiting from an alternate universe? In this reality we didn’t have any statues of Founding Fathers torn down, no neighborhoods were burned, and there was no “storming of the White House.” Just out of curiosity, what does “BLM” stand for in the world you came from?
Anyone identified doing damage in Minneapolis or Saint Paul during the riots has been or will be prosecuted.
If the president wants you to convince his VP to throw out certified election results and you attack the US capitol building live on television you should and will be prosecuted.
If the people who stormed the Capitol on 1/6 had been met with the same level of force that the BLM protestors were met with, the steps of the Capitol would have looked like this:
So yes, I do want BLM protestors treated the same way the 1/6 protestors were - that would be considerably better treatment than what they actually got.
(Or we can flip it around and say that the 1/6 protestors should have been crushed before they made it to the door of the Capitol, that would also be equitable, but I have a policy about not wishing harm on strangers on the internet.)
You really think that every single person in that entire crowd is facing the full force of the federal government right now? And that they'll face the maximum possible sentence for everything they're charged with? Guaranteed, 100%, a clean sweep of every last revolutionary? What an optimistic view you have of the FBI's reach and will to pursue justice.
To me it looks like they're getting the low-hanging fruit - the people stupid enough to post videos of themselves breaking and entering on Facebook. Plus the more organized groups like the Oath Keepers which were seriously planning their attack and sending text messages full of evidence to each other.
But even if I accepted your incredibly slanted description of what's happening as the truth, I would still say that it's better than what happened to the BLM protests. Why? Because the police in the BLM protests attacked a lot of people who didn't commit a crime at all. There's videos of police committing drive-by shootings with pepperballs and baton rounds. Shooting at journalists who aren't doing anything to threaten them. Shooting at people just standing on their front porch.
If the police could *only* target the people who broke windows, trespassed on government property, or threw something at a cop, that would once again be a massive improvement over what they actually did to the BLM protestors.
Recently, I came across the work of Robert Kegan and Ken Wilber on "Development". I would define development as a life-long series of processes of personal improvement inclusive of education, learning, parenting, self-improvement, etc.
Whereas, the "science" of development has mostly focused on children, Kegan and Wilber take a more life-long view. I have found some of their conclusions very helpful. I'd like to know if there are other advanced thinkers on this topic that I'm missing. Does the ACX community have any recommendations to further my research?
Note: Wilber focuses a lot on spiritual development, which is a bit of a foreign territory for me. He also tends to be defined by that part of his work. At this point, spiritual development is not the avenue of research that I'm looking for.
Thanks. I have come across David Chapman and his Meaningness.com.
To be more specific: Wilber's AQAL framework (the way I understood it), introduces a matrix of sorts: with stages of development on one axis, and facets of humanity/intelligence on the other. I am interested in the hierarchy based on experience and competence... but also on the splitting of human facets/intelligences (cognitive, creative, athletic, aesthetic, musical, emotional, interpersonal, spiritual, humor, etc.) along a number of independent and semi-independent trajectories.
I am attracted to the idea of a stage-based multi-disciplinary development matrix, kind of like a Whole Earth Catalog, but more of a Whole Life Curriculum.
So there are the "multiple types of intelligence" researchers out there which may be relevant. And also, perhaps more practical applications of development across said multiple intelligences. That said, I have seen more written on using different intelligences to approach a core curriculum. I'm more interested in reversing that and developing divergent curricula to develop divergent-ish intelligences.
(I was the man on mobile) While there is some truth to multiple intelligences, I don't think they are as independent or divergent as you think. For example, insights from seemingly distant subfields of mathematics regularly get combined to advance understanding. Of course, while fields of mathematics differ, they share a common framework that allows them to be mixed. So, we'll need a method of combining the systems, which is a meta-rational task. My model of the "varieties in intelligence" is perhaps closer to some sort of multi-dimensional Pareto frontier. While it may be interesting (and useful, if you need more of a certain type of intelligence) to model movement along the frontier, I'm more interested in advancing the frontier, myself. We could try to do some dimensional decomposition, but I think the vector space model of intelligence is a bit limited. In particular, I don't think it would be surprising that intelligence has non-linear behaviour. (in fact, it frequently has discontinuous behaviour).
I’m also interested in “multiple intelligence”, since I’ve always had a gut level suspicion of “IQ is everything” arguments. This is largely because I’ve known many people who have high “intellectual” intelligence, but low “interpersonal” and/or “physical” intelligence, for example
I’m sort of inventing my own category names here - hence the scare quotes. But I suspect the first is much easier to measure with a pen and paper multiple choice IQ test than the other two I mentioned.
Other commenters, who - unlike me, have actually read whole books on intelligence - pushed back when I brought up this idea in an Open Thread a few weeks ago. They seem to prefer G - generalized intelligence, which was a new concept to me. I wasn’t convinced but didn’t do much follow up research, TBH.
(If I can link to that conversation here, I’ll edit it in, before Substack eats my comment)
Perhaps we can avoid the "IQ" trap, and the "genetic" trap, where a lot of these conversations often end up by avoiding the word "intelligence" and focusing on development.
What would it look like if development beyond some point in late adolescence was branded as “spiritual development”, that it was difficult to do, and religions were mostly bags of heuristics that for the right prescriptions (be loving, patient, kind, other-focused, humble) and couldn’t find a way to tie the prescriptions together into a theory without invoking supernatural claims?
Well, this is quite common. But we're slowly secularizing useful yet mysterious traditions such as meditation into mindfulness. This is also part of what I'm trying to do: demystifying alchemy, secularizing a form of magic. Of course, making scientific frameworks for these poorly understood techniques requires quite the cultural and intellectual basis, but I think that especially the roleplaying and gaming communities have made enough progress to help here.
The way I understood your comment is that religions may have an underlying mission of human development that can be corrupted by a supernatural dogma. ex. Start with the golden rule, end with indulgences. Maybe I projected the corruption onto your comment.
My suggestion for the ACX grants: next time, give them a classier name.
It sounded like several of the grants you were awarding were for people to further their careers in fields you want to encourage, including in academia. For an academic, the line on the CV saying e.g. "Rhodes scholar" can be more important than the actual money. By contrast, "Astral Codex Ten grant recipient" sounds like a weird internet thing.
Okay, it *is* actually a weird internet thing, but you can probably increase the impact with no extra cost by dressing it up a bit. Call them "Foresight grants", or something.
I'm not sure how you make something *sound* classy unless you use a name that already exists. "ACX Grant" sounds totally like a plausible small thing I haven't heard of, and if you add "competitive grant funded by a touchstone of the rationalist community", then it sounds fine. People who know of it will respect it, and for people who don't, it's going to be hard to do much more (though it's probably helpful to not have the word "Astral" in there I suppose).
You can make things sound somewhat classy by constructing it from elements with classy connotations and which overall triggers readers' heuristics for "this is the sort of name that classy things have". Once a name becomes tied to a reputation, that reputation will dominate how the name sounds, but to someone who's never heard of it before, connotations and heuristics will shape the first impression because there's nothing else on which to have an opinion of it beyond your prior for "thing I've never heard of before".
A useful illustration here is an anecdote that P.J. O'Rourke has recounted about his early career writing for "underground" hippie newspapers. He was on the staff of a paper called "Harry", named thus because the editor had asked a young relative what they should name it. A friend of his had also founded another underground paper, called "The Chesapeake Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts". O'Rourke teased his friend for having a paper with a boring name, and the friend replied:
"Twenty-five years from now, your curriculum vitae will say 'Writer for Harry', and mine will say 'Editor of The Chesapeake Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts'."
Agree, although classier isn't quite what I would ask for. Something more Scott-esque.
If you look at the titles of a lot of Scott's posts they are, if anything, more distinct than the articles themselves. They're creative, funny, clever and very memorable.
Maybe it has proved impossible for Scott to come up with something in place of 'ACX grants', that has the four characteristics I mentioned above. I think that is just about forgivable.......
"Rhodes scholar" sounds impressive more because the name has been around for a while and acquired a reputation. "Rhodes" is just the surname of the guy who bequeathed the initial endowment of the scholarship fund.
Renaming ACX grants might improve how it looks on a CV in the short term, but keeping the name consistent would speed the process of accumulating a positive reputation.
I agree that "Rhodes scholar" sounds impressive mostly because of its reputation - but I think that part of its impressiveness is that it isn't a nonsense acronym with an "X" in it. Scott can't copy the first part (yet), but he can at least copy the second part. (Sorry: I wasn't clear enough about this in my original comment.)
I also agree about the benefit of keeping the name consistent - which is why I advocate changing the name *now*, when there's only a single round's worth of consistency to be lost.
Seconding this: I received a scholarship to fund my PhD research, and 'impressive sounding scholarship on my CV' was probably at least as valuable as the actual money.
I wouldn't expect much. His dictator book reviews seem to be among his weakest content, because good sources on such topics are extremely hard to find (non-existent?). So he ends up with something like the default Western mainstream position, because nuanced contrarianism is both hard to discern and tends to get drowned in the opposite side's propaganda of even worse quality.
I don't think there are any scientific publications to base "Ukraine/Russia situation: much more than you wanted to know" on.
While Scott also does less rigorous political-ish pieces (e.g. dictator book club), he wisely picks out topics where most of his readership is not entrenched in one side (e.g. Modi, not Trump or Biden).
After reading "Why Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives" (linked above), I would consider it a warning sign if Scott found it necessary to have a public opinion on Ukraine. (Unsurprisingly, the exemplary Mr. Thomas Friedman does in fact have a published opinion on three randomly picked hot button topics, namely "Ukraine", "abortion", "sixth January".)
If Scott has a special insight into the Ukraine situation, by all means let him comment on that. If not, I would much rather read about his take on Arabian Nights, FDA/fluvoxamine, cactus persons or whatever else weird niche topic he digs up.
(Also, it seems that substack does not keep a copy of drafted comments around if a tab crashes/is closed. Probably a ploy to get people to rewrite their comments more compact.)
I wouldn't see it as a red flag if Scott talked about anything. I think OP-Ed are incentivise to claim to have insight into a topic, so if they stray from their area of expertise in order to deal with the issue of the day they might be faking.
Scott (IMO) does a much better job than average op-Ed writer at being transparent about his uncertainty and his approach.
Even if he starts with no special knowledge of a topic I'd expect him to investigate what is out there deligently and dispassionately and let us know what details he found mattered and what context the popular narratives are missing
If you want to have a better-informed-than-almost-everybody opinion on Ivermectin and Covid, it's not _that_ hard, especially if you start with the major advantage of understanding medicine as well as a typical doctor. All you need to do is to read every single paper that has been published on the subject, which is a thick but manageable pile of reading.
Having a better-informed-than-almost-everybody opinion on Ukraine sounds much, much harder. You can't possibly read everything that has been written on the subject. Worse, most of what has been written on the subject is in Russian or Ukrainian, and if you're reliant on English translations you're looking at a tiny and probably biased tip of the iceberg. Worse, while scientific papers are usually written in good faith, political writings are usually full of outright lies, which will take forever to disentangle.
I keep reading on the internet about how much woker US Corporations are now and that everyone has to bite their tongues or be sent to the gulag. Perhaps I am merely fortunate to have not experienced this yet.
But I'm curious what specific things one can't say now in a professional work environment that one could say with impunity 30 years ago. You could certainly get fired 30 years ago for saying something that might be interpreted as racist or sexist. Generally, smart people figure out quickly to avoid talking about politics and religion at work.
What's a concrete example of something one can't say now in a "woke workplace" that they could say 30 years ago?
For me it's not about what I _can't_ say, because I've got no desire to chat about controversial or potentially offensive subjects at work anyway.
The problem is the sorts of things that I am obliged to hold my tongue and listen to, which offend _me_, but which I know I can't express objection to without damaging my career.
Example: here in Australia there's a sudden (last couple of years) trend towards opening meetings with something called an Acknowledgement of Country, with the words "'I begin today by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we <gather/meet> today, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present". This is a bizarre shibbolethic ritual, especially in a country which has generally prided itself on informality, but I know that if I object to it then it's the beginning of the end for my career.
That does sound insane. Sounds like a good situation to go 50 Stalins on. Instead of objecting, go all-in. Make your acknowledgments longer and longer. Go into gruesome detail about historic events. Make everyone else uncomfortable. If someone taps you on the shoulder and suggests you are going long, shed a tear. Suggest a minute of silence. Stretch the minute into 5. Go full Good Soldier Svejk.
Public schools in the US, start many gatherings with the Pledge of Allegiance. (I find it a little creepy/weird.) On the other hand I like singing 'the star spangled banner' before sporting events.
My job is the development and design of widgets - nominally. Now it also invovles (being seen to be) taking active and proactive measures to address structural inqualities in the widget-development-and-design space.
I have been repeatedly asked to talk about certain social issues at work, with the implication that it will affect my pay and promotion prospects in the future. Not sure if that counts as "forced" in your book.
Maybe not to talk about it, but being neutral is considered a kind of betrayal. A lot of these policies run more on anger and impulse than thought-out strategies.
Being neutral equals supporting status quo, which is now considered to be a political stance. For what it's worth, I agree, everything is political, but the fact that the status quo politics are seen as broadly unacceptable seems to be an unusual situation.
There's a space between "don't actually care about the number" and "aiming at an arbitrary ratio". You can think that ratios closer to 50% might be, other things being equal, better, and thus care about the number, without thinking that every ratio other than 50% is bad and wrong.
That final claim is the one that keeps getting made. But I haven't heard anyone point to anything other than James Damore as evidence of this. And Damore didn't just say one sentence. Did anyone in the 1980's do what he did and not face consequences? That's the claim that needs to be justified here - that there was a change.
This is kinda the opposite of something you can't say, but: pronouns in screen names/email footers. At my university, it was required for professors to have their pronouns listed in their Zoom name and in email footers, as well as announce them on the first day of class (though the latter may have just been the one college on campus). At my current job, we are heavily encouraged but not required to do the same.
> Absolutely nothing has changed since 1992 in terms of what’s socially allowed speech wise.
Depends on the industry. In software development, it's not that uncommon for HR to send out policy statements to the effect of, "we're hiring but we're ignoring all applicants from white males".
Granted that there’s memo’s on pronouns or some such that wouldn’t have been around in 1992 but at the shop floor level folks talk in almost exactly the same way on exactly the same stuff as then, maybe slightly cruder - I blame retirements and young men growing up watching “South Park” and listening to Howard Stern, but the difference isn’t much.
An obvious example is anything anti-gay. 30 years ago you could loudly proclaim that you don't like gay people, or could refuse to hire them as official written company policy. That's probably not what you're looking for in terms of "woke" but it does help illustrate how far some things have moved.
Not all organizations are like this, but in many you could get in trouble/fired for "deadnaming" a trans person, misgendering, using the wrong pronouns, etc. 30 years ago no one would have known what any of those terms meant. Racial slurs used to be fairly common (I've heard several bosses drop the n-word specifically as racial slurs). Some of that still goes on, but way way less common or accepted than it used to be.
No offense intended, but I take it that you are too young to remember that time clearly then. Even in the 2000s it was common for people to be outwardly anti-gay. Proposition 8 in California (banning gay marriage) passed in 2008. Obama and Hillary both officially denounced gay marriage options into Obama's first presidency.
The 90s was when people could get beat up on the street for looking or acting gay.
Being anti-gay-marriage and being anti-gay are not the same thing; one doesn't have to be pro-everything-gay-people-want to be not-anti-gay. There were, and I expect quietly still are, a fair number of people who were sincerely both pro-gay and anti-gay-marriage.
But on the general point, even explicitly anti-gay was still on the edge of the Overton window in most of the United States in 1992. You'd have to have worked at it to get fired for that outside of e.g. San Francisco, and if you pulled it off it would be for grossly violating the norm against being loudly political in the workplace more than for the specific political position.
The Damore memo always reminded me of the 1996 Tom Cruise movie, "Jerry McGuire", in which Cruise's character sends out a memo to the whole company at his sports management agency:
"After criticism from an injured player's son triggers a life-altering epiphany, he writes a mission statement about perceived dishonesty in the sports management business and his desire to work with fewer clients to produce a better, more caring personal relationship with them. In turn, SMI management sends Bob Sugar, Jerry's protégé, to fire him."
Why is Cruise's character fired? For rocking the boat. You don't circulate a memo around your company that is going to piss off management without expecting to get fired. Although the content of Damore's and Maguire's memos may have varied drastically, they more or less got fired for doing the same thing.
I wonder how much sense young people today could make of the Jerry Maguire storyline. Although it was a huge hit at the time, it doesn't seem to be a popular movie now.
My understanding of the situation, though It's been a while, is that Damore's memo was posted on a small internal sub-forum and almost all the circulating was done by people who were opposed to him
Why not? Feminism was about a century old by then, so it's not like nobody thought to consider the reasons for gender imbalances and whatnot before the last decade.
You could probably find a company somewhere that would have had an issue with it, but that would certainly have been the exception - especially on a forum meant to be open to discussion as with the Damore example.
I haven't been working long enough to know what you could _say_ 30 years ago, but I'd guess that workplace dress has changed. I've seen cultural appropriation accusations for Hawaiian shirts and African and Asian printed fabrics, and those definitely weren't considered out of bounds for white people in old tv shows or fashion books/magazines.
I don't think you would have been allowed to wear them on Friday. A lot of Casual Fridays in the '90s meant "you don't have to wear a tie, but please don't wear denim".
I had heard about "Aloha Shirt Fridays" from my parents in Canada in the 1980s, and checking Wikipedia, it looks like "Casal Fridays" actually grew out of an "Aloha Shirt Fridays" movement that originally started in Hawaii but spread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_shirt#Aloha_Friday):
In 1965, Bill Foster Sr., president of the Hawaii Fashion Guild, led the organization in a campaign lobbying for "Aloha Friday", a day employers would allow men to wear aloha shirts on the last business day of the week a few months out of the year.[34] Aloha Friday officially began in 1966,[35] and young adults of the 1960s embraced the style, replacing the formal business wear favored by previous generations. By 1970, aloha wear had gained acceptance in Hawaii as business attire for any day of the week.[33] Unlike the court dress required in most jurisdictions, attorneys in Hawaii may be allowed to wear aloha shirts in court, though this varies among individual courts.[36]
Hawaii's custom of Aloha Friday slowly spread east to California, continuing around the globe until the 1990s, when it became known as Casual Friday.[33][34] Today in Hawaii, alohawear is worn as business attire for any day of the week,[20] and "Aloha Friday" is generally used to refer to the last day of the work week.[33] Now considered Hawaii's term for "Thank God It's Friday" (TGIF),[37] the phrase was used by Kimo Kahoano and Paul Natto in their 1982 song, "It's Aloha Friday, No Work 'til Monday",[38] heard every Friday on Hawaii radio stations across the state.
Interesting. I had never heard of Aloha Friday. My memory of Casual Fridays is of men wearing polo shirts and kakis instead of a button-down shirt with a tie.
I was under the impression that the problem is not about what you shouldn't say but what about you should say, and that lots of people complaining about "wokism" are complaining of having to say/do things they don't believe in. For example, discrimination during recruitement to favor minorities, participating in inclusion workshops, stuff like that.
These certainly aren't fireable offenses but a few examples of phrases that are discouraged in my workplace are "guys", "whitelists" and "blacklists" and "master-slave" in the context of database replication. So much so that significant engineering hours are spent expunging these words from the codebase and documentation.
If you are or aren’t seeing these stories, it says more about your online activities than anything else. There are plenty of first hand accounts out there, if you go and look for them.
Can somebody help me find a less charged word to use in an argument about Wordle? I was trying to explain to somebody that I don't like the fact that Wordle's "Share this neat pattern with your friends! Compare your results!" billing encourages people to spam my social media feeds with daily reminders that the game exists. It reminds me of the Dark Age of Farmville and other cheap MMOs that only survived by incentivizing their players to give the game free advertisement on social media. I described its psychology as "exploitative", and when someone else said that it also reminds them of cheap Facebook MMOs, I agreed with them, but after that the conversation quickly got bogged down in discussion of how most MMOs try to get players to spend as much money and time as possible on them, and since Wordle is "free and doesn't take long", people said that I wasn't right to say it was "exploitative like an MMO".
I think "exploitative" is a perfectly fair word for something that tricks people into telling everyone they know about it on a daily basis, but I realized that if other people reserve that word for games that specifically try to make the player spend money, I might be Worst Argument In The World-ing. I tried to think of an alternate word, but all I could come up with was "manipulative" which has the same problem. Is there another word that better sums up my gripe?
You can't win this with a rational argument. There are tons of people who just want to be involved in what the masses are doing. You don't want that. It is an unresolvable conflict. The answer is to use filters, especially on Twitter, to simply block Wordle.
I think there's a really important distinction between two things, that Wordle separated but nearly everything else doesn't. One is spamming others for virality purposes. The other is being addictive and asking more time from everyone who uses it once.
DrawSomething was particularly bad in doing both of these things together. Civilization is particularly bad on the second, but not on the first. Wordle is unusual in being bad at the first but good on the second.
If you don't like seeing stuff that interests your friends but not you, your only worthwhile options are (a) get off Facebook, or (b) suck it up, like I do with all the cat photos.
Wordle doesn't give any incentive to share your result. People do it because they want to. Presumably because they had a particularly interesting pattern or they like seeing others' results.
I don't think you'll win a strong front on arguing about the psychology, because it's really hard for you to do that without people interpreting that as you saying (in so many words) "You are morally-wrong to enjoy Wordle" or "You are a victim of Wordle" (I assume your complaints don't actually rise to this level). I think it's pretty fine to just say "It's annoying, I don't want my feed clogged up by people's Wordle Cubes" unless you want to try to browbeat others into not playing Wordle.
Why didn’t the US succeed in banning TikTok? Maybe someone with a legal background could help me understand why the executive order failed. I can see reasons why we wouldn't want almost 100 million Americans using a highly addictive, effectively Chinese government-owned tech app. The downsides of banning of course would include the loss of some people’s incomes and maybe a dangerous precedent for government control of online platforms?
Not just that the courts would prevent the ban, but that even Trump couldn't figure out a way to even begin to phrase the ban that wouldn't be just laughed at by the targets. Would Apple or Google have removed the app from the store just because the President said it was unAmerican? They would just laugh and promote the app with that endorsement!
The US government needs authority to do something. If they don't have the authority then they can't do it. This has been solved by very, very generously interpreting various enabling acts. For example, basically all regulatory authority like OSHA comes the Federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce. The... generous argument being that all economic activity affects interstate commerce.
Trump tried to ban TikTok by using the IEEPA which deals with international commerce and national security in states of emergency. Trump basically declared TikTok a national emergency. TikTok sued and won on the grounds that the existence of TikTok was not a national emergency.
Biden removed those orders and has made comments about new standards but hasn't actually done anything other than order new reports and intelligence investigations.
The US could ban TikTok either through a direct ban or (more common these days) a new regulatory agency. But either thing is bound up in wider politics about regulating the internet. In particular, the Democrats really want to domestically and the Republicans are reflexively suspicious of regulatory agencies right now.
Most importantly, the fact that Trump wanted to ban it means that it needs to be even more awful than him for the Democrats to agree, a condition which TikTok seems to fail (barely?)
Essentially the ability to influence the US population. Or in the words of this inconclusive paper: manipulation, censorship, propaganda, control, and influence.
What other internet properties have been banned? The courts will sometimes order a domain name seized/disabled, but a) this is usually only a temporary setback and b) the site in question has broken a specific law. There is not some kind of general “ban stuff from the internet because it’s socially pernicious” power hanging around, for the President or anyone else. Is there?
Not a ban as in a national firewall, but there are tons of websites where I can’t make an account and am not allowed to use (sports betting comes to mind).
I think I am basically suffering from pathological under-stimulation of my frontal cortex. Every day I struggle against debilitating brain fog paired with raging impulsivity, desperate to have the presence of mind that makes me feel competent, functional, and alive. I have tried Vyvanse, Adderall, Welbutrin, Cymbalta, etc., with mixed results: the stimulants often helped enormously for a short while (usually a matter of two or three days or so), but as I took them I developed a tolerance which completely undermines their effects. Wellbutrin unfortunately didn't pair well with my anxiety, and Cymbalta has taken the hysterical edge off of the neuroticism while turning my impulsivity into pathological listlessness and avolition, where I just wallow in my bedsheets all day. It beasts panicking, I suppose; but my grades are going to suffer if something doesn't change soon.
What is so strange is that there are other days (or, more often, stretches of a few hours here and there) in which the fog lifts somewhat or entirely and I feel remarkably better. I can think, write, speak, etc. without any feeling of impairment whatsoever. Better, even: people tell me that I can be strikingly articulate and knowledgeable, but this is only said of me when I experience a parting of the fog.
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and am currently treating it with CPAP, and it does make me feel more refreshed by my sleep. I notice that on the days without CPAP, I feel much worse. Sadly, none of the cognitive symptoms have subsided despite about two months of treatment, causing me to fear that I have suffered from permanent brain damage.
I wake up in the mornings gasping for air intellectually. My mind is a disorganized, haphazard array of random, incomplete sentences. Or else it is just blank and vacant, with thoughts only occurring to me with great difficulty. *"Chair... Shoes... eh, eh.... walk! Yes,* I wanna walk. Sh-sh, sh....*Shower!* Need, Ne...Ne... I... I... Need, I need, I need, need, a sh-*shower!*" is essentially my internal monologue in the mornings. I will talk to myself with the hope of jump starting my brain, but the effort is usually hopeless and my thoughts come out in hideous, elliptical, self-interrupting and inarticulate sentences.
I have learned not to meet people for coffee in the mornings or allow any extended social interactions, because when I do I alarm people by my shocking lack of basic self-awareness (like walking away after paying for my food/coffee and leaving my credit card or forgetting to pick up what I just paid for; forgetting people’s names who I interact with on almost a daily basis) and confused/jumbled speech.
I experience the brain fog in involuntary physiological cycles; my mind is obliterated in the mornings and slowly becomes tractable in the afternoons and extremely vivid and clear in the late evenings. Conversation helps. Sugary foods and soda helps. Intense exercise can wipe me out, but a walk or something more relaxed can help. Feeling appreciated/impressive/socially desired and enjoying an adrenalizing experience helps (clubbing, drinking with friends, etc.). The fog usually happens with a lot of neurotic and unhealthy/self-critical thoughts and, weirdly, rampant impulsiveness that pervades my body, driving me to while my life away in a hedonistic blur.
My life is vibrant and thrilling when the fog is gone and my cerebral function is restored; I feel focused, accomplished, and extremely capable. Otherwise, I am a shell of my true self and burn with a feeling of waste and loss. Please share your thoughts and offer any ideas you may have about improving cognition, awareness, intellectual engagement, etc.
I wish so badly that I had endless reserves of energy to draw from in order to accomplish my goals. A latent part of me is tempted to begin pursuing options around electroconvulsive therapy, just so that I can resolve my mood problem without the need for antidepressants. I’ve had enough of having my brain on factory settings, and feel strangely unperturbed by the idea of permanently changing it for the better.
I am in desperate need of effective treatment for my lack of motivation, and become a vastly more functional human being on extended release Vyvanse (30mg). If not for the tolerance problem, I would literally be among the happiest and most fulfilled humans to ever live.
What can I do to overcome this? Some solutions I have been thinking about so far:
- Figure out some sort of optimized dosing schedule that trades off my need for the medication with tolerance; experiment with taking on-and-off 4 days a week, 3 days, or even only 2 days. Completely give myself over to my symptoms during the intervening days, getting nothing done and whiling my time away in a haze of motivational poverty and brain fog, so that the drug days can be livable.
- Experiment with other stimulants that use different mechanisms (do those exist?) and rotate between them in multi-day blocks. Risk becoming addicted to nicotine. (Already tried Modafinil, but turned out to be an unfortunate outlier in terms of side effects. Gives me intolerable anxiety, although somehow Vyvanse actually *decreases* my anxiety. No idea how this is possible from a biological perspective.) One problem with this approach is that I’m not aware of other stimulant medications with comparable efficacy that use different mechanisms.
- Increase the dosage on Vyvanse. I question the wisdom of this, because won’t it just plant me back in my initial position a few days later, and with only worse side effects in the meantime? If I tolerate to 30mg, why would it be any different at 50 or 70?
- Just give up and hate myself? I hope this isn’t the ultimate answer, but a deeply pessimistic, fatalistic part of me worries this will be the eventual result. I will be forced to submit to biological slavery because of the sheerest, freak accident of genetics that created my dysfunctional brain.
Have you tried getting a blood test done? I experienced worsening brain fog for close to a year and was convinced it was due to stress, or something of that nature, until I got my blood tested and was diagnosed with a Vitamin B12 deficiency (especially common in vegans and vegetarians).
Wow, that sucks. Are you young? It may get better with age. As a teenager (into 20's) I remember hating to interact with anyone in the mornings, not nearly as bad as you describe, but "Don't talk to me before I've had my second coffee." Well I'm still a bit like this.
I think doctors are best suited to comment on the pharmaceutical side, but I assume you consider these to be temporary crutches and not long-term solutions. With that in mind, some possible evidence-based lifestyle changes that are known to help:
Is your sleep schedule regular? Are you getting enough sleep? I had a similar period, not as bad as what you describe, and abstaining from all substances (coffee, alcohol, cannabis, etc.) and following a proper sleep schedule helped a lot. Get a watch or other device that can measure the depth of your sleep, because even if sleep duration is good, sleep quality may not be. If you still want/need to use stimulants, read up on when during the day the last dose should be taken to ensure you can fall asleep at a proper time. Sleep specialists these days recommend your last coffee to be 2PM to avoid compromising sleep quality for typical sleep schedules.
I'd also look at your nutrition. The microbiome is being implicated quite a bit in depression and other cognitive issues these days. Add some fermented foods and a lot more fibre to your diet. My difficulties also coincided with a lot of poor nutrition that obviously tasted good.
Finally, exercise. Not every form of exercise works for everyone. Resistance training is very good because it's not metabolically demanding, which you hinted by your reference to being drained. Then again, really vigourous metabolic exercise can help cognitive spiraling too because it really takes you out of your own head; you'll get better at it if you stick to it.
Weight training can be monotonous, but if you follow a plan and track your progress, you'll see positive improvements week after week which can be very empowering. It gives you a feeling of competence and control over your body and life that's hard to describe. Weight training will also drive you to better nutrition because "bad" foods just aren't satisfying given they lack the macronutrients you'll be craving. Just be sure to get enough fibre. I would also sprinkle in some fun endurance/metabolic exercise as well though, to change things up. Do something different, like rollerblading, challenging hikes, swimming, etc.
Another suggestion that's slightly less evidence based, but I've found very helpful and can help with morning brain fog: some kind of fasting. 16:8 intermittent fasting where I don't eat until mid afternoon works great for me, just find something that works for you. Blood sugar while fasted is pretty steady and provides a lot of morning clarity. It can be challenging for the first couple of weeks because most people just aren't used to ignoring hunger signals, but they go away if you just wait a few minutes or drink some water, and then your hormone cycles adapt to your new eating schedule. A lot of people report no longer feeling hungry outside of the eating window, which matches my experience. It's not suited to everyone though.
A lot of my decline this was triggered by the pandemic, because I couldn't exercise like I used to, and I had more time stuck inside so started overusing substances to compensate for a loss of control, and so a lot of other things fell by the wayside (like nutrition), and these all compounded each other. I'm only now getting better because things are opening up and all of this is becoming obvious in retrospect.
If you’re trying all kinds of stuff, maybe read “The Body Keeps The Score” or something. Maybe it is related to some unresolved trauma, like you’re prone to dissociate.
--Have you actually tried these pharmacological treatments for long enough times to make it to some sort of steady state? A few weeks-months, at least. And I think you're right that dosing schedules that work against tolerance can make a big difference.
--Try a ketogenic diet for a couple months. It's a giant pain in the ass, but I have similar (though less intense) symptoms and it made a very noticeable difference. A low-carb diet generally seems to cut through my brain fog quite effectively.
I'd check the blood sugar first rather than assuming it's caused by diabetes or metabolic syndrome. I think there are continuous blood sugar monitors these days.
Are there recognizably different sorts of brain fog caused by different problems?
I'm not a doctor. All I know is that I've seen people with issues that sounded like this, and each one of them had one of these problems. I agree that checking blood sugar first is easier, just in case it's normal.
Actually, getting wiped out can help tremendously with anxiety and often depression too. It also helps with consistent sleep patterns, which sounds like an issue here. You just have to exercise intensely and consistently enough over a period of time to really notice the effects.
There's the initial responses to covid, the BLM demonstrations and riots, the January 6 demonstration and riot, Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine mandates, the trucker convoy...
The odd part is that not only are they controversial but they are unpredictably controversial. You didn't know who will be on which side ahead of time.
I think those can't be scissors precisely because as you say, they are unpredictable and they easily swap sides. Those are tribal signaling shibboleths / toxoplasma of rage reflecting coordination in warfare, not scissor statements tapping into deep immutable opaque uncompromisable values. (You don't need to look up on Twitter to see whether the bluechecks endorse hearing 'Yanny' or 'Laurel', you just *hear* Laurel or *see* that the dress is obviously gold.)
On a lot of these things, I don't necessarily like either "side" of the controversy, but the "scissors" part of it comes in on the question of which side I dislike more.
I'm a huge fan of "Reign of Terror" moderation and feel strongly that if you (Scott) are looking at a comment and feeling torn about whether to delete it, the answer is yes for the love of god delete it.
Also I'd like to repeat my comment from the last subscribers-only thread on the "why does [Scott] suck" comments:
The complaints sound like classic Golden Age thinking. My own perception is that SSC/ACX has gotten better and better. Consider recent works of genius like "Diseasonality" (maybe most of the genius of that one is in the title) or the one about "no evidence" and the "kids and climate change" one. Not to mention that every time he reviews a book, the review is better than the book itself. He's an absolute national treasure. (Conflict of interest disclosure: he's been amazing to me and to Beeminder and we're in the same social circles etc.)
While there is something to be said for "reign of terror" moderation (which is a form of what I call the third school here: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/stackexchange ), it is not in general a good moderation style for maintaining a high quality, indeed, it is better suited if one prefers freedom and diversity over quality and safety. I use Scott's system as an example of the fifth school: a system with clear rules, mostly independent of the current mood of the moderator, apart from some exceptions. (such a clause is nessecary. There will always be rules-lawyers that are able to consistently break the spirit of the rules without breaking the letter. We sometimes tell users that are suspended for this is that the reason is that they were "breaking the community" on Stackexchange. Or, in the pre-CoC era, when things were nice and simple, we'd simply say they weren't being Nice) The main advantage is that the legitimacy for the rules is now derived from reason/ideas, except from a person, and that persons social power. Social power is Molochian, and hence is expensive to maintain, most of the expense being paid by the community. Another advantage is that users can self-moderate, so that things don't catch fire when the mods are asleep.
Indeed, CoC means code of conduct. Back in the day, the instruction "Be nice" was deemed sufficient, and people were trusted to be able to work out the details with eachother. However, in this brave new world, such naive ideas are not suitable with the ethos of a modern internet company. At least, this is the thought process I imagine corporate having when they start fixing things that are not broken again for reason in particular. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312038/wed-like-your-feedback-on-our-new-code-of-conduct , though note that there's been a lot discussion there.
A code of conduct can be useful, it is basically just a fancy name for a set of house rules, but I haven't seen much genuine use of it beyond physical gatherings. Anyway, I'd prefer not to fix things that aren't broken.
Of course, if it were merely a document that was telling us what we were already doing, it wouldn't have been a memorable event. There's a particular rule that states every user has a right to be addressed in precisely the manner they specify, and no other way. This is a strange rule for a platform where most people are adressed by "@username". (it's mostly relevant when talking about users, of course, but still. There is a standard that is not too much unlike the real world: just use their name) It's appears to be a rather hamfisted attempt at preventing intentional disrespect towards users with nontraditional pronouns. (note that this particular form of abuse would be covered by the "Be nice" rule)
The implication of this rule, that other people can apparently make arbitrary demands on the words that come out of your mouth when you want to talk about them, was not popular, to say the least. It was also very confusing. Most people thought that there is no problem, because we can just use their name, but no, that would too easy. Fortunately, in my experience as a moderator, this rule has never been relevant on my site (for 3 years or so).
I think you eliminate your potential audience by calling Neil Young "a washed-up singer" or "a nobody". You might as well call Joe Rogan a washed-up reality-show host.
(You need to have watched instagram for what follows.)
I love Joe, though I haven't listened to him much since he moved to spotify. The idea that we hold our past selves to today's standards is crazy. I think you can only judge someone's conduct in the past, in the context of the standards of the past. Else you get "McElligot's Pool" pulled for 'eskimo fish'. We need to stop this! I don't care who wore black face twenty years ago in college... it was a different time.
Re: the n-word. I live in Trump country. As the n-word has been absolutely banned from speech in one group of white Americans, I now hear it more often from another group. In this group it is now a 'flag' you can fly, showing group membership. Similar to the confederate battle flag. Banning speech doesn't work. And I think it might have the opposite effect than what was intended by the ban. We need to embrace our past, acknowledge past mistakes, apologize if possible, and move the fuck forward.
Joe Rogan is a national treasure, he's also human.
"My question is this. We've seen this pattern over and over again for years. Do nothing, the mob moves on; apologize and you're dead. So why do they keep doing it? Is this something that only the terminally online know? But both of these figures have been eyewitnesses to endless woke cancelation attempts. How does it not sink in?"
I knew a guy in pretty much this exact situation (much smaller than Joe Rogan). If he hadn't deleted all his posts on the private internet forum we both shared, I'm sure I could find something of his joking about "if I give these sharks just a little blood, they'll leave me alone" regarding woke mobs. He gave the sharks a big heaping helping of blood before leaving the internet pretty much entirely afaik.
My best guess is that it's very different, emotionally, to be on the receiving end of these sorts of attacks, and that overpowers your sense.
(eta: Even as somebody who wasn't personally on the receiving end, but just watching a good guy go through this shit, it was stressful to the point I vomited once during it. It's easy to be rational and calm when you have a completely detached relationship to the events.)
ETA2: Imagine that I showed you studies, surveys, metanalyses, etc, on the subject of what to do in a situation where you're being held at gunpoint to maximize your probability of survival. The main conclusion of these (imaginary) studies was that you should not go any place that the person holding you at gunpoint says to (into a car, down an alley, etc), and you should not allow yourself to get bound. Now, you read these studies and agree with me about what they mean, 90+% confidence. How sure are you that once somebody's pointing a gun at you, you won't go with them down a dark alley and get shot?
I don't see how Young's attack on Spotify was woke, unless woke means something new now. Young was always a bit of a hippie. He was angry at The Man, just as he has always been.
Also, it was obviously a publicity stunt for his preferred streaming services, particularly the one he owns.
I'm not buying that Young made a serious attempt to get Rogan thrown off Spotify. Young is no fool. He knew he would be dumped, not the guy Spotify just paid $100,000,000. Young had been feuding with Spotify for years, and this was an opportunity to give them a big fuck you on the way out, while telling people to check out the higher fidelity streaming service you can buy directly from him.
>at this point it's impossible to disagree that wokeness and Covid Zero fanaticism have congealed together into a single ugly mass.
I had never considered that before. I suppose it's possible. But even if true, I'm not buying that Neil Young is a Covid Zero fanatic or woke in any other way., unless his old-school hippie leftism now counts as woke. I suppose songs like "Cortez the Killer" have a woke vibe. But if that's the case, we are just giving old things new labels.
Hmm, well that's a cynical view of Neil. I just figured he was caught in his own 'bubble' and doesn't really know who J. Rogan is except for the left wing narrative you see in the MSM. I wonder if Joe has asked him on the show, they could have a conversation and might become friends.
“ if that's the case, we are just giving old things new labels.”
I think that’s mostly what woke/anti-woke is, as almost everything described/decried as “woke” about race-relations, sexism, et cetera is almost exactly what was taught in elementary schools in the 1970’s, and by far those that are proponents of “woke” today are the same sort of folks that were proponents then - school teachers.
What are some examples of people resisting these cancellation attempts effectively and why do they succeed? Ideally leave aside people with absurd levels of wealth like JK Rowling and Dave Chappelle. This is an underrated area I'd love to see more in-depth discussion about.
Something like the Trader Joe/Jose/Ming's controversy saw pushback coming directly from the corporation itself and very little targeting of specific people. In the case of Rogan and Shapiro, there are higher-ups (the CEO of Spotify, the Georgetown Dean) who clearly want to keep their positions. Perhaps it helps to be a faceless, low-key corporation.
There's an interesting example of this happening at the moment with Jimmy Carr, a fairly popular British comedian. He said something pretty awful during a routine (that genocide of thousands of gypsies was a positive upside of the holocaust), is now being criticised by pretty much everyone including government ministers, and is refusing to apologise at all. It'll be interesting to see if he can ride it out.
I haven't watched a ton of Jimmy Carr, but from what I remember of him that genocide joke seems par for the course. I'm pretty certain he's made pro-pedophilia/mass child sex abuse jokes worse than that. Especially those involving the Catholic church.
Jimmy Carr's routine is a series of The Most Offensive Jokes I Can Think Of, so he can't really afford to back down or apologize unless he rebrands himself entirely. That one will be interesting, because nobody should be surprised that he said something offensive.
replying to this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-motivated/comment/5034646
"Is it true that there is no highest prime number? If so, Can you provide a physical explanation for that fact?"
sure i guess i could, but explaining that particular fact entirely and in detail would take a fair amount of time and effort.
can you narrow down your question to one of the following, or propose your own narrower question? i don't know which part of this you believe to be inexplicable on physicalism (perhaps you think every part of it is inexplicable?):
-how are numbers physical?
-how is the property of a number "being prime or not" physical?
-how are mathematical proofs physical?
-how are facts about non-existent/hypothetical sets physical?
-what about when those sets are infinite?
Sure. How about “how are numbers physical?”
Or, if it will simplify things:
"if physicalism says says: "material reality is the ground of being; numbers and moral values are both physical concepts", and Max Tegmark style Neoplatonism (is that what people are calling it?) says "Mathematical reality is the ground of being. The laws of physics are just one possible mathematical structure, which acts like our local address"?
How can we choose between these two, or a third alternative which says 'tegmark is right, but moral values also exist a priori' ?
How should we, without smuggling a value system into our beliefs and positing it as correct, say there is a 'better choice' between physicalism and alternative? Why is physicalism better than casting sheep entrails unless a true objective answer as to what is good, and what is not, exists?
I had to write and link to so much, I just put it on one of my wiki pages, I hope that's ok:
https://brianpansky.fandom.com/wiki/An_Interesting_Challenge_to_Physicalism,_2022
responded there - thanks!
Tyler Cowen's recent maxim is "Context is that which is scarce". https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html
At first this struck me as trivial: context requires lots of information, something without context less, so obviously "lots of information" is a more difficult ask than something requiring little of it.
We lack lots of knowledge is trivial.
I don't think his point is about how ignorant the population is. Rather, consider the ignorance of a population as a level, in the same sense that last year's GDP is a level.
Now let's divide the intellectual world into two kingdoms: knowledge and ideas. The Kingdom of Knowledge is that level: how much people know about stuff.
It would be hard to measure what our knowledge quotient is because there is so much stuff one could know, but the measurement of knowledge in a population *could be* objective regardless of how difficult it would be to do in practice.
Now consider the stream of information most people consume today. Most of it exists in the Kingdom of Ideas. What I mean by "ideas" are either theses or something with an implied thesis. For instance:
-"Raise the Minimum Wage"
-"There's a correlation between race and IQ"
-"Diversity in management improves results"
-"We have too many regulations"
-"Gender and biological sex are different"
-"Zoning is the problem"
-"We need election reform"
-"Russia will invade the Ukraine"
-"Prediction markets are important"
-"Context is that which is scarce"
All of the above reside in the Kingdom of Ideas not the Kingdom of Knowledge.
Of course, ideas aren't worth much without context, without knowledge. That goes without saying. We want ideas but the less knowledge we have to put those ideas into context the less valuable those ideas.
So what I think Tyler is saying by "Context is that which is scarce" has to do with the ratio of our intake of new information divided between knowledge and ideas. On Twitter, on Substack, we are inundated with more ideas. But most of these ideas, good or bad by their own merits, aren't helpful if we don't have the proper knowledge base in which to analyze them intelligently.
For every tweet we probably need an effort post to give us the background knowledge to, say, get the joke.
So I think Tyler is saying that reading theses is like consuming intellectual junk food at this point, whereas eating our vegetables would be, perhaps, reading more old books, taking more classes and travelling more to new locations.
Of course, it's easier to write an idea than an effort post. This post is an example. I haven't given you any knowledge.
I want to add that knowledge != truth in my above usage. Knowledge is simply lots of information, true or not. Does that mean my division of information into the kingdoms of ideas and knowledge isn't perfectly clear cut? Probably. Knowing lots of ideas is a form of knowledge.
For Effective Atruists: Is Combatting Ageism The Most Potentially Impactful Form of Social Activism?
I argue that 15-17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West. Not only is ageism everywhere, permeating every space, infesting every mind, even those of the oppressed — this oppression is still enforced by the State. Imagine if we still had forced racial segregation. What teens face from the State every day is similar. I know many might say it’s not as bad, but I have philosophical reason to disagree. More on that later.
You have to understand that laws are ultimately enforced with deadly force if the disobedient will not yield. The government will escalate force until you die if you are serious about disobeying a law. That is, if you refuse to obey, and you refuse to accept the invalid actions of the State in response, they will kill you. Let me provide a concrete example. You know that being forced to go to a facility against your will simply for being, say, 17 years old, for 40 hours a week is an extreme violation of your civil liberties. Therefore, you don’t go. The government sends people whose job is to commit violence on behalf of the State, to commit violence on you. At first they will try to restrain you. You’re probably not strong enough to resist, but say you can knock these people out. They’ll shoot you. Their protocol says to spray you with the whole magazine-worth of ammunition. That’s what they’ll do. Maybe if you’re lucky, you knock one out for laying hands on you for illegitimate reasons, the others (they always come in packs) will aim their guns at you because you’re dangerous to them with just your hands. Most will probably just kill you right then and there. They have “qualified immunity” and won’t face any repercussions, because you were “belligerent” and “dangerous.” Maybe they’ll yell at you to get down. They won’t go away though. They’ll probably surround you and if you try to leave they’ll get “scared” and boom you’re dead. The point is they will escalate violence until it’s life or death. They ultimately enforce the law with the threat of murder.
To my knowledge, this is the only way a State can have laws. Hell, advanced restraining sounds more nightmarish than this. The point is that State enforced oppression is a big deal. If you are a 16 year old who decides that it’s your moral right to be able to travel as you please, and you try to use this right, the state will ultimately escalate violence until you are dead. They will lynch you like for exercising your civil rights. In contrast, the most decentralized oppressors can do is refuse to associate with you under various conditions. Sometimes it’s unfair, but it’s a lot different than the State sending a death squad after you for minding your own business.
So. Are teens the most oppressed? Yes. Teens are virtually treated like criminals on account of their age, similar to black people before 1960. They are treated like children, similar to women before feminism. Yet unlike criminals and children, teens don’t deserve it. Oppression is unjust subordination.
If you think they do deserve it, you’ve fallen prey to harmful, pseudo-scientific narratives that should make old-fashioned racial phrenologists blush. I debunk these narratives in my book, An Empirical Introduction to Youth. The gist is that all of the data agrees that the brain is developed by the age of 15. Even 13 and 14 year olds have judgment capacities that rival certain adult demographics. This makes sense because it would be weird for evolution to make people idiots until the age of 25 with mature, dangerous bodies. The pseudo-scientists and the media who talk about these studies lie about their findings, similar to how Stephen Jay Gould claimed that Samuel Morton lied about his phrenology findings even though he didn’t. They do this because of who pays them: foundations like MacArthur and Johnson which are run by the owner class and their hired-brains, the PMC. The owner class set up the education system in order to offload corporate overhead, such as cost of training, onto tax-payers. The PMC were and are hired to improve this system using their brains, among other things. In the process of doing so, they inject their own desires and attempt to reduce teens and young adults to something like their slave-class, which exists to make them look important, to pay them tuition, low level work for them, and so on.
If this sounds extreme, just read Foucault! Power corrupts knowledge, and deceit is a fundamental tool of power. The point is to manage your opinions and to manufacture your consent. The :”default” view on this issue, like many issues in fact, is not to be trusted. Said view only benefits a small class of masters, and is extremely harmful to teens.
Anyway, to recap: yes, teens are the most oppressed identity group. What should we do about it? I leave that to a future writing.
> in the West (...) They’ll shoot you. (...) will aim their guns at you because you’re dangerous to them with just your hands. Most will probably just kill you right then and there
Can you provide examples of police or other law enforcement shooting teenagers for refusing to go to school?
Can you provide example of that happening in Europe?
> Even 13 and 14 year olds have judgment capacities that rival certain adult demographics.
So what? you need to be more specific here, "certain adult demographics" includes groups like "people with several mental disorder"
> I argue that 15-17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West.
No, they are not (you have not even attempted to compare with other groups).
PS Are you the same person as one banned from themotte for being an obnoxious single-issue poster refusing to discuss and posting the same screeds?
> qualified immunity
That i a big problem but enormous and absurd abuse of that seems to be an USA specialty, is not limited to teenager adjacent cases and is not general West problem.
You seem to be really USA specific, have you ever visited Europe or read about situation there?
I'm surprised that some people are struggling with thinking more than 1 layer deep. Yes, the penalty for breaking most laws isn't immediate death, but if you refuse to concede your rights the State will escalate violence infinitely.
Here are some examples in case you're still having trouble thinking a few layers deep about a scenario wherein the State is trying to enforce a law on someone who refuses to accept it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/video-crazed-man-attacking-deputy-soaks-up-12-rounds-before-hes-stopped/
As for Europe, I am unsure why you think they are pacifists, sounds like a great way to get invaded by China. AFAIK they are not pacifists and never have been,
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/02/14/all-cops-are-bastards-knifeman-shot-dead-by-police-at-paris-train-station/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates
>No, they are not (you have not even attempted to compare with other groups).
I don't think you read what I wrote, then. Youth oppression is enforced by the State, so it's the worst. You can't seriously argue that some group who has equal rights and who is constantly propped up by society as important and deserving of equality is more or as oppressed as a group that is effectively imprisoned for 40 hours a week for no reason, deprived of the fundamental rights to work, drive, vote, and self-determine, subject to all sorts of State-sanctioned humiliation, and then told they deserve it and that there is no problem.
>
PS Are you the same person as one banned from themotte for being an obnoxious single-issue poster refusing to discuss and posting the same screeds?
Yes I was banned for 90 days after a moderator censored me illogically, saying I wasn't allowed to make my weekly ageism post (always a new writing on my blog btw) anymore. I told them the fact that this topic is infinitely more important than COVID, and that they have like 5 COVID threads a day, so if anything I should be posting 10 ageism threads a day. Then the moderator insulted my intellectual value, so I pointed out that he never produces any scholarship on his account unlike me, then another mod said he had good noodle stickers from her "AAQCs" (which amount to 1 paragraph evidence free bloviations that confirm biases, literally, go on there and look at them) and she banned me for 90 days.
Surely you are bringing this up because you also understand just how irrational and ridiculous those people are, and you're totally not trying to irrationally poison the well!
> if you refuse to concede your rights the State will escalate violence infinitely
Not in all cases. You may be unaware of it but most of Europe has no death penalty at all and police killing/murdering people is extremely unusual.
Even escalation to fines or prison sentence is not in play for many minor cases.
In particular, refusing to go to school may cause problems for you (or parents) but noone is going to be murdered.
I suspect that while getting shot by police is easier in USA you are not going to get there for refusal to attend school.
> As for Europe, I am unsure why you think they are pacifists
None of your European examples involves teenagers being shot for refusing to go to school. World War II in fact involved cases of teenagers being murdered FOR attending school. Germans outlawed higher education for people considered by them as subhumans in at least some occupied territories and enforced it by death penalty.
The same goes for most of the examples, only Waco siege may sort of qualify (and as far as I know "teenagers refusing to go to school" was not part of it at all).
> sounds like a great way to get invaded by China. AFAIK they are not pacifists and never have been,
I am from Europe, and in fact I worry right now about getting invaded by Russia.
> I argue that 15-17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West.
Ahh, a very interesting thesis...
> invalid actions of the State
Oh. an ideologue.
> Their protocol says to spray you with the whole magazine-worth of ammunition.
I had no idea. In fact, I must admit some skepticism.
> this is the only way a State can have laws.
Are you an American? I bet you're an American.
>Are you an American? I bet you're an American.
I'm surprised that some people are struggling with thinking more than 1 layer deep. Yes, the penalty for breaking most laws isn't immediate death, but if you refuse to concede your rights the State will escalate violence infinitely.
Here are some examples in case you're still having trouble thinking a few layers deep about a scenario wherein the State is trying to enforce a law on someone who refuses to accept it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/video-crazed-man-attacking-deputy-soaks-up-12-rounds-before-hes-stopped/
All of those examples are in America and none of them are of shot teenagers.
I think you're missing the main point that States ultimately enforce their laws with the threat of death. Whether or not a teenager has actually suicided by challenging these laws is irrelevant.
> ultimately enforce their laws with the threat of death
Untrue in large part of the world.
The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth
Author: Peter Rodes Robinson
[Photo of refugee boat]
Massimo Sestini—Polaris
How many humans are too many?
The concept of "carrying capacity" originated in the 1840s to specify the maximum weight that could be carried by a ship. Estimates of the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth vary widely though the number ten billion pops up frequently. For example sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson said "If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people." Of course this calculation means: forget about eating meat.
When it comes to cramming people on to the Earth, we are not talking about a cruise ship. More like steerage class on the Titanic or worse. Ecologist Paul Ehrlich has said that even a "battery chicken" world would not support more than 4-5 billion humans long term.
Until recently the rate of human population growth was increasing. In other words the doubling time was getting shorter and shorter, from approximately 2000 years to 700 years to 37 years! Fortunately the doubling time is now getting longer.
TinyURL.com/OneBilPop
These are the first three paragraphs of my essay. Immodestly, I believe it is well written and presents a vital thesis. If you read it, you can tell me I'm wrong (about either or both contentions). You will also find many links
Or you might find something more interesting to comment on. I hope you will read it and comment. I adore feedback.
Peter Robinson
> We can probably agree that maximizing human population is not a future we yearn for. Ecologists Gretchen Daily and Paul and Anne Ehrlich have said the optimum population is no more than 1.5 to 2 billion people. David Pimentel and others think a population of 2 billion would be optimum. Theodore P. Lianos suggests that a world population of three billion is compatible with a steady state economy and ecological equilibrium.
I think if that were true, I would have heard a lot about that by now. Just Googling "estimates of earth's sustainable carrying capacity" shows that most scientists give much higher numbers. According to one survey[1], most studies estimate a carrying capacity above 4 billion and below 16 billion, with a long tail of more optimistic and more pessimistic studies.
And despite the EA community's intense interest in existential risks, they seem to give more credence to the more optimistic takes (over 8 billion). Actually it's weird how little this issue is discussed among EAs, but I assume that's because there are no obvious signs that we've already exceeded planetary carrying capacity (if reasonable steps toward sustainability are taken, as mentioned below).
I am a bit concerned about what would happen if someone invented life extension technology that could instantly double the lifespan of most people, but the current population trajectory, which is going to stop increasing at 10-11 billion, doesn't worry me very much.
> Too many humans causes air and water pollution which threatens human lives. Humans are steadily raising the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere which leads to global warming and rising sea levels. Large portions of Miami are at risk in this century and in the longer run coastal areas all over the world are threatened. Population pressures lead to deforestation which turns rainfall into devastating floods. Clear-cutting forests makes subsequent forest fires burn hotter and longer. Encroaching on natural areas encourages viruses to jump from animals to humans which can lead to pandemic diseases such as Covid-19. Too many mouths to feed encourages destructive factory farming and soil depletion.
This paragraph is a good reminder that carrying capacity is not fixed, but depends on what technologies we use and how well we use them.
I'm no expert, but can't synthetic fertilizers keep our soil in a usable state indefinitely? If in fact the carrying capacity were only 3 billion, we should be depleting the soil, pretty much everywhere in the world, very quickly. if that were happening, tons of experts would be raising alarms, but they aren't.
I'm sure that CO2 emissions / fossil-fuel air pollution and clear-cutting can all be stopped. It is practical to completely replace fossil fuel burning with renewables and nuclear power (I guess it'll be hard to go beyond 95% reduction or so due to our reliance on concrete and jet fuel, but net-zero is certainly possible). I am under the impression that Canada, for example, has a sustainable forestry industry. Brazil destroys the rainforest as a cheap and very dirty way to alleviate poverty IIUC, but there are other ways to alleviate poverty. I quite doubt that natural virus production will increase enough to worry about (the modern world's main problem is that it spreads viruses around the world so very efficiently). Sea level rise will eventually destroy a lot of valuable real estate, I expect, but I don't expect it to change the total amount of real estate by very much, and some locations such as New York are likely to put up a fierce enough battle against the sea to actually protect themselves.
I have reason to suspect that making people more prosperous might actually increase Earth's carrying capacity rather than decrease it, because more prosperous people will deploy more of the technologies that increase carrying capacity, e.g.
- More prosperous people can afford cleaner and more sustainable energy sources (nuclear, of course, being the least land-intensive, but also wind power can be used on farmland or at sea)
- More prosperous people can afford denser multi-storey housing and denser food production techniques => reduced land use (though this is offset by eating more food).
- Reduced wood-burning => reduced air pollution
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
That sentence sounds VERY familiar .... you must be the same guy I responded to before about this same topic, when I said: I don't see why this is reasonable. "Nature" is an abstract concept, like "life" or "evolution" or "welfare"; it doesn't exist as an entity in reality and so cannot have feelings. Perhaps you mean animals, like hens and foxes. Perhaps these have feelings, but in nature their existence is usually meagre, and one will eagerly kill the other without a second thought. Humans are animals too, and they sometimes kill each other as well, but at least they have the potential to make lasting truces. This is one reason to keep humans around. Another is our unusual ability to make discoveries, so that perhaps one day we will scientifically unravel the Hard Problem of Consciousness. A third reason is that if you decide not to keep humans around, they're not going to take kindly to your decision and the resulting animosity will be unproductive.
Which led me to point out that even if 2 billion is better than 7 or 10, it's going to be ridiculously hard to get everyone on board with a depopulation plan. And then I said many of the points I just made again.
[1] https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/how-many-people-can-earth-actually-support
https://twitter.com/wyattreed13/status/1491538229497114629
In 2022, even ethnic erasure is automated.
I have to admit I get a special kind of schadenfreude from institutions blundering into dumpster fires this way.
I just asked a girl out, unambiguously, in-person, for the first time in a very long time. I was building it up in my head to be a bigger deal than it really was, like Harry Potter in 4th year. But it was no biggie. When I came into the gym all the treadmills were occupied so I was forced to take the treadmill next to her (otherwise I would feel weird about doing even that). Then there was 30 minutes of both of us silently doing cardio while I avoid looking at her or doing anything weird and I listen to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs at 2.5x speed. Then when she finished her exactly 50 minute cardio session and walked away she left her bottle behind and I said "hey you forgot your bottle" and she said she was just going to get a towel to clean the machine. (without a hook like that to give me license to initiate a conversation I would feel weird about it). Then as she's cleaning the machine I comment "so you did 50 minutes of cardio, that's a lot" and she laughed and smiled which I took as a green light, so then I just asked "do you wanna go out with me sometime" and she was like "no, that guy who was talking to me earlier was my boyfriend. Have a nice day." and I say "Have a nice day" and she walks out of the gym with her boyfriend.
What are some venues I can go to where I can feel maximally licensed to initiate conversations with strangers, but which aren't bars? I feel like cafeterias in school and university were great for this, but restaurants for adults are terrible for this. At school it was perfectly normal for strangers to sit together for a meal and talk to each other. There were countless times where random strangers put their tray the table where I was already sitting, and vice versa, and strike up a conversation. But in restaurants this is just not done -- I've eaten in restaurants approx 5000 times post-college and it has never happened once, p<0.000001. Why are restaurants so much more antisocial than school cafeterias? I'll take a stab at it. People who are going to the same school have a lot in common -- age, occupation, intelligence, etc. Whereas out in the adult world a random stranger has a vastly lower expectation of having anything in common with you. Without a high expectation of strangers having something in common it feels less worthwhile to try to talk to them. So the comparative antisocialness of restaurants compared to school cafeterias could be an example of what Robert Putnam calls "hunkering down" in response to diversity.
I am orders of magnitude more likely to initiate (and be initiated) in conversations with strangers at conferences and conventions, where we are all basically pre-screened to have something in common. But outside of some environment where people are pre-screened to have something in common, serendipitous conversations with strangers are exceedingly rare for me. No one initiates and I don't initiate either. I feel like "doing cardio next to each other for 30 minutes" is a sufficient threshold of having something in common though.
Go out dancing.
Congrats on taking the chance. It’s not easy if you are inclined to introversion. I came of age in another era - those licentious 70’s - when being healthy and not obviously dangerous was enough for a casual thing.
I met my wife at a mutual friends wedding. We really clicked so it was fate or good luck or whatever. We’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary later this year.
Keep trying. It’ll happen.
Edit
After you do get married it becomes much easier to strike up a conversation with women. The wedding band seems to signal that it’s just a chat. Not trying to get you to come home with me or anything. With that off the table it seems like everyone relaxes a bit.
> After you do get married it becomes much easier to strike up a conversation with women. The wedding band seems to signal that it’s just a chat.
You don't actually have to wait for marriage, just get a fake wedding band. ;)
I saw Richard Dreyfus use the trick in a movie once. He was hitting on Holly Hunter. When she noticed he said that was just to make women relax around him. He was a salesman. After he explained he tossed the ring into the ocean. Yes, he got the girl.
“Once Around” 1991
Not a great IMDB rating I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Modern society fucking sucks is the short answer.
I found all of my girlfriends through mutual friends, online and offline, so I'd recommend having a social life. But mine is recently in short supply as well and I don't know how to fix it, so...
One opportunity for casual hookups (and maybe something more) are music festivals and similar places where people are less inhibited, more curious, and in general open to have a good time. Maybe bars, but bars aren't really a place I'd meet any girl I was ever into.
I'm only into orchestral music and your music festival recommendation probably doesn't apply to the symphony, right?
Another thing I miss about university is that everyone is prescreened by age and intelligence. So everyone I'm attracted to at university is almost guaranteed to be of legal age (and if not they're some genius who skipped multiple grades which would counter any claim they weren't able to consent, which ought to counter the social awkwardness if I mistakenly tried to ask them out). But elsewhere that's very iffy and hitting on a person of ambiguously-legal age could be a huge faux pas if I guess wrong. I tend to be strongly attracted to people of ambiguously-legal age and even younger. (I think Crown Princess Leonor of Spain at age 16.5 is the most beautiful person in the world, still, although she peaked when the pandemic started. This is one of her best photographs from her peak: https://people.com/royals/princess-leonor-of-spain-starting-school-in-800-year-old-welsh-castle/ I think my physical-attractiveness utility function peaks within a year after they begin to ovulate and then declines with a half-life of 5 years, which is plausibly rational in evolutionary terms of maximizing offspring over marriage-for-life with a short life expectancy, but unduly taboo). Meanwhile everyone at university is also screened by intelligence. I'm in the top 2% of intelligence and I want to find a woman who is as smart as me. That filters out 98% of my potential dating prospects. I once calculated that solely on the basis of not-very-ambitious filters for gender=F, age=18-28, and IQ>115, my alma mater (50k students) had the same number of suitable partners as the entire las Vegas metro area (2.3M randos) so that out here I'm trying to find needles in a haystack which is a much higher difficulty level than dating at university (which I did a good amount of in undergrad, including a year-long serious relationship with a valedictorian 19-year-old who looked younger and at one point was serious about wanting to marry me while I was less enthusiastic. Then her friend who disliked me took her to a 3-day music festival without me and we broke up within 3 weeks of her return. Then in grad school I was living 2 miles off campus by foot, and I was much less attracted to grad students than undergrads, and everyone was a lot dumber than me because I went to my safety school, so that made the difficulty level of finding suitable people much higher than in undergrad).
Undergrads are obviously more attractive at first glance than older women, but their advantage quickly disappears once you A) talk to them and notice they're annoying and you have nothing in common B) realize after a few years you'll be at square one, and if you're into long term relationships you'll have to deal with it. Find someone who is good company and ages gracefully, and you won't mind - speaking from experience.
I think you overestimate the importance of a woman being as smart as you - there's a lot of space between yourself and a normie, and it contains interesting people. Consider expanding from whatever STEM niche you live in - personally I enjoyed dating artists, it's a nice balance from the over-intellectualized environment of my professional circle, and they tend to be a lot wittier than you in conversation which is all that matters.
I agree it is really important to find someone who is good company, beyond the physical attraction. Also hopefully attraction is somewhat malleable and due to the constant reinforcement of having sex with a partner and the gradualness of their aging I'll stay attracted to them. I know married couples who are still attracted to each other somehow at ages when that should be impossible (perimenopause and up).
I thought about dropping acid and fapping to progressively older material as a means of adjusting my attractions, by analogy to methods that were used to cure phobias and trapped priors, but I'm not sure this would work and I don't want to risk messing myself up with acid, plus from an evolutionary point of view there's nothing wrong with me and it's society that needs to stop freaking out over post-pubescent age-gap relationships. I'm not going to do the equivalent of pray-the-gay-away.
I'm pretty sure everyone is like you, to some (big) extent, but it's polite to not talk about it.
Honestly a big part of what makes attraction malleable is that in a long term relationship, theoretically you could stray for that hot young piece of ass but it's not really worth it, when you think of all you've built together with your partner. Sex is just sex, and it's not like you're thirsty.
Also, I insist on the "ages gracefully" part, a large part of which is not getting overweight.
Thanks. BTW, If I want to be highly confident in having above-replacement fertility (3 kids), I can calculate the maximum age woman I should consider dating:
From meeting to starting to try to have first child: 2.75 years
From starting to try to first birth: 1.25 years
From first birth to second birth: 3 years (assuming a year and change of breastfeeding)
From second birth to third birth: 3 years
Total: 10 years
Age of inadequate fertility: 35
35-10 = 25
So I shouldn't initiate dating anyone over 25. What a lovely coincidence that this agrees with my perception of physical beauty (and that of Leonardo DiCaprio: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/azjti7/leonardo_dicaprio_refuses_to_date_a_woman_over_25/ )
One might shave 5 years off that timeline by rushing the relationship, deliberately having twins via IVF, and not breastfeeding, but that doesn't appeal to me.
Indeed. One can find much to talk about in bed without resorting to quantum physics.
It has occurred to me that make-up is designed to make women look like they did when they were 15.
Re: meeting women. What about chamber music?
I imagine "chambers" as being snaller more intimate places where one might strike up a conversation.
I think talking at concerts is a nonstarter. Either it's loud enough that they can't hear you, or quiet enough that third parties get annoyed at you for talking during the show. Plus I would feel extra bad about making anyone feel awkward if they were "stuck there" for the duration of the show. That's why I waited till end-of-workout to ask the girl at the gym.
Classical music concerts and operas often have intermissions, with overpriced drinks and snacks, which is the ideal time for mingling.
P.S. My parents' marriage started unraveling when my father had an affair that started at a classical music festival. It is not as wild as pop music things, but you might be surprised.
I was thinking people might discuss the performance after it was over.
Also: House parties used to be a big thing before the year 2020. You sound young, so maybe you don't know what the adult world was like in the Before-Times.
Dating is mostly about developing a social network (Not a fake fucking facebook one but a real one). A male friend can be as valuable as a female friend in terms of advancing your dating prospects if he is a real friend and has some charm.
I'd say work on developing a post-plague real-life friendship group. Because what you want to do is create romantic opportunities. That's much easier with friends at your back than going solo at a coffee shop.
From your description, you never got into much of a conversation in the first place. You need to talk to a girl for 20 minutes before asking her out. That's possible at bars or coffee shops but not at restaurants. Are you seeing girls eating alone at restaurants? Or do you mean a food hall?
At a coffee shop you need a ruse. Watch Impractical Jokers for some examples. Like write an interesting email, business or personal, and say "Excuse me. Is it possible I could get your opinion on this?"
You aren't going to get into a conversation with a girl without making a large effort to make it happen. Don't ever expect things to "just happen".
Edit:
>I feel like "doing cardio next to each other for 30 minutes" is a sufficient threshold of having something in common though.
No, no. That's the wrong idea. Only verbal communication counts.
Good job putting yourself out there. I know exactly how hard that can be.
The problem you mention, not having any place that feels like you're allowed to talk to strangers, is ridiculously hard to solve. But the advice I was given is to ignore that feeling and do it anyway. You gotta stop thinking of yourself as a potential harasser and start thinking of yourself as a potential date. People do apparently get dates by starting conversations in places that are considered unsuited for that, like when you're waiting for the metro or at the grocery store. It doesn't matter if you have anything in common, you can find out later.
Now, I don't know if this is good or useful advice and I have too many psychological blocks to put it into action consistently. Best I've been able to do is ask someone out at the blood bank - unsuccessfully, but without drama. It's worth trying anyway, since it's arguably easier than finding an adult social space like a high school cafeteria.
Law Enforcement recently seized ~$400 Billion in crypto stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack (link at end). From the DOJ Statement of Facts:
>"On January 31, 2022, law enforcement gained access to Wallet 1CGA4s by decrypting a file saved to LICHTENSTEIN’s cloud storage account, which had been obtained pursuant to a search warrant."
What is your interpretation of this with respect to law enforcement decrypting someone's file? Seems like the options are:
1. Perp used a deprecated encryption method that has now-known vulnerabilities or exploits
2. Perp used robust encryption but got lazy and left the decryption tools somewhere discoverable
3. Perp used "robust encryption" but it turns out the govt can bypass it anyway via secret means
4. The word "decrypt" was used incorrectly or imprecisely in the affidavit and what the authorities actually did was something more like unlocking a password-protected zip folder
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1470186/download
Rubber hose cryptoanalitycs? Someone just gave them password?
1, 2 (leaving password somewhere), 4 seems also likely. 3 seems unlikely to be burned on something like that.
Since substack reads these comments, I think the new layout is a bit annoying in so far as I have to scroll so long to get to the post I'm interested in. I'd suggest you reduce the amount of text to just a paragraph or two in the preview
If substack is still listening, I wish I would get email notifications about replies to replies, not only direct replies to my comments.
On a computer it's not too bad. On a phone, scrolling past a bunch of posts to get to a particular one is a pain. You used to be able to click on the Codex icon and see heading links for all the posts. That was much better IMO.
The layout is bad and I assume it's a bug and will revert soon. There is no good reason to remove indexing/dashboards in terms of page navigation. Other substacks not affected.
I agree. But does substack actually read these comments? Seems like a lot to read every day.
I only have time to visit Prescott or Flagstaff. Which should I visit and why?
It depends on what you like -- I'm partial to Flagstaff for personal nostalgia reasons (and there's more national forest up there), but maybe consider Sedona and/or Jerome, both attractive small towns? It also depends on the state of the weather. Flagstaff puts ground volcanic sand on their streets in winter, so it looks kind of ugly if there was snow a few days ago that's in the process of melting (I don't know if Prescott does the same).
I just published an article on the crazy housing market, what's causing it, and whether it's now a good itme to buy a house. https://kavoussi.substack.com/p/the-housing-market-is-on-fire
I'd appreciate more meat on those bones - more statistical analysis, or hotter takes, or more actionable advice. I could get as much information skimming a discussion thread on Reddit.
In the UK there has been some controversy in Parliament and the news media. PM Boris Johnson suggested that the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, bore some responsibility for the decision not to charge a now-notorious (and dead) sexual abuser with any crimes. Starmer was the most senior prosecutor in England and Wales at the time. (Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate justice systems.) A lot of people have criticized Johnson for unfairly blaming Starmer over what was actually the decision of an unnamed junior prosecutor.
Which prosecutors tend to make which charging decisions, in which sorts of cases? If it's the lower-level prosecutors who typically make these decisions, how often are they overruled? Does it depend on the type of crime and/or the prominence of the accused?
I expect it will be hard to generalize about this.
England and Wales and the US (federal or state) interest me the most, but I'm happy to read about any country.
Below I asked about ways in which workplaces have grown woker than they were a few decades ago. The biggest surprise for me were claims that employees are now often strongly encouraged to talk about social issues at their workplaces--issues they may prefer to be silent about--with potential career-limiting punishments for remaining silent about them.
My question now is: why are so many corporations suddenly doing this? Is it:
1) They are covering their asses against potential discrimination lawsuits
2) They are focused on ESG compliance due to woke investors
3) The women in HR are True Believers in wokism and want to hear the rest of the workforce repeat the Party Line
4) Upper Management are True Believers and want to hear the workforce repeat the Party Line
5) Upper Management and HR believe that the majority of workers are now woke, and therefore it's good for morale for everyone to proclaim their solidarity in these beliefs
6) Something else?
I'm inclined to believe it is mostly about 1, somewhat about 2 and little about 3. Maybe at 70%/20%/10% ratios.
What do others think?
In the places I've seen it, I'm pretty sure it is a mix of 4 and 5, probably mostly 5. "Woke investors" is I think implausible in the general case, because most employers either don't have investors or have the bulk of their investments coming from mutual funds, pension funds, etc. And "HR Ladies" I think can't really get away with something this intrusive without buy-in from management, though they could be a contributing factor.
To me it seems like 1 and 3, in that order. Fortunately in my neck of the European woods mandating employees to "talk about social issues at the workplace" is a lawsuit waiting to happen, ironically on anti-discrimination grounds (and the employees tend to be smart enough to not fall for it, in case it comes from woke HQ).
Success of a corporation depends on good relationships with its employees, customers, investors, and regulators. So you'll see them mirror social trends in each of those populations, in proportion to how important each is to its business.
I think (3) & (4) are not causes--true believers wouldn't be put into high positions unless it was believed to benefit the company. (1) and (2) are definitely things any corporation will worry about, while (5) is something more important when there's a lot of competition for employees.
My memory is fuzzy, but I remember hearing regulators were collecting diversity stats. In industries with shortages of qualified diversity candidates, that makes the threat of lawsuits pretty scary, and so (1) would also be my guess as most important driver.
I agree with you and others here. I'll probably revisit this question in a couple weeks, hopefully with a more refined version of the question based upon the feedback here.
A political aspect of it I am interesting in exploring is: would Libertarianism help? It sounds like corporate wokism isn't driven by the government but by woke investors, woke employees, woke consultants, lawyers and fears of lawsuits. etc.
In other words, it doesn't sound like government is the problem here. It's culture.
Conservatives often say "politics is downstream from culture" but what I always assumed was meant by that is something like "todays culture is tomorrows public policy".
But in this case of corporate wokism, public policy has little to do with it. It's woke investors, woke employees, woke management making this stuff happen, short-circuiting any political considerations. In other words, this is the free market having its way. In that sense, it isn't progressive in any anti-free market sense but simply culturally progressive.
What if a Libertarian Paradise means we all spend an hour of our work day ceremoniously honoring the indigenous people who once sparsely occupied this land?
When I hear people complaining about this, the issue is often that a large fraction of the rank and file workers are True Believers (with a minority being loud and pushy but the vast majority agreeing).
It really depends if you're asking asking about mandatory seminars on X, which is all about ass-covering (points 1 and 2) or what conversation happens in the break room, which is to do with the beliefs of your actual co-workers (though an intolerant minority is capable of dictating topics)
Open office plans. Six sigma. Empowerment.
Get with the program or get out.
None of this is new; the only thing that is "interesting" about corporate wokism is the ways it is superficially similar to a complex of beliefs that are somewhere between political and religious, and there are a lot more people who are offended by being made to pay lip service to "privilege" than are offended by being made to pay lip service to "quality".
Corporate wokism has about as much in common with woke politics as Corporate Memphis has in common with Memphis. Or, really, as much as Memphis has in common with Memphis; the art style had its corrupt corporate interpretation long before Corporate Memphis was a thing.
I had the bad fortune to endure the six sigma fad working on an 80,000 line C++ program that began life on a PDP 11.
You want to have 99.99966% reliability?
With this code base?
Are you serious?
You are acting like you are serious about this.
Do I have to keep a straight face?
Edit
One too few zeroes
800,000 LOC
The build took 5 hours
I agree with you (minus limiting 3 to the women in HR). The leading factor in a lot of businesses is lawsuit prevention, and *legitimate* issues are being raised more often (see Activision-Blizzard's recent lawsuits).
For the true believers who probably get these things started at companies, I don't doubt they mean for the best with it. The problem is that they are annoying at best and puritanical at worst.
EDIT, added the next morning: I would really like to be able to put this result up on a forum I’m on where there’s an ongoing discussion of the culpability of the unvaccinated, but I am not confident it’s a good enough analysis, even by back-of-an-envelope standards. Would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve done more of this sort of thing whether my analysis is merely rough and approximate (which is OK) or fatally flawed in some way that makes the result off by an order of magnitude. And if it’s fatally flawed, what do I need to take into account to fix it?
I am in the middle of a long argument on a huge state Reddit sub about how long and how much people get to hate on those who didn’t get vaccinated. There’s a “never forgive, never forget” mentality, and people writing purple prose containing phrases like “blood on their hands.” Honestly, people sound as though they think every person who refused vaccination caused quite substantial damage — like maybe on average each non-vaxed person killed one other person.
So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, trying to come up with a figure for how many US covid deaths it’s reasonable to blame on those who refused available vaccinations. So I compared our death rates and non-vaxed rates to Canada’s, from 1/1/20 to 10/3/21, and used these figures:
How many covid deaths did the US have above the number it would have if its vaccination rates were the same as Canada’s: 670,000 deaths
How many unvaxed were there in the US as of 10/3/21: 112,200,000.
So ratio of first number to second is 6:1000, or 1/167. So you can think of this as meaning it takes 167 unvaccinated people to produce a covid death that would not have happened if we’d all been as good about vaccination as Canadians. Or you could think of it in terms of “micromorts.” Every US citizen who did not get vaccinated killed 1/167 of a person — they accumulated 1/167th of a micromort.
I know calculating antivax micromorts could be called both Aspergerish and ghoulish, but I’ve gotten sort of preoccupied with trying to figure out how much societal damage a person caused who declined vaccination. And how does it compare to the damage caused by being a smoker? Or by being someone who frequently drives when impaired by alcohol, accumulating let’s say 1000 ETOH miles per year.
Is anyone else interested in playing around with these numbers?
And if you’re not: Where might I find data on “micromorts” for other activities that are dangerous to others? Also, is there a better country to compare the US to than Canada? I want to compare us to a country that gives a rough idea of what vaccination rates it might have been possible to achieve in the US, given our size, wealth, infrastructure etc.
Thank you for working on this. I've been dubious about the venom dumped on anti-vaxers and voluntarily unvaxed people, which is not the same thing as having a strong argument.
Just driving means taking a chance on killing someone.
I suspect the greatest risk is from new variants coming from people in low-vaccination countries. Computing the risk of new variants would be really hard.
Am I missing something, or are you attributing the difference in US/Canada death rates from 1/1/20 to 12/11/20 to differences in vaccination? Because nobody in either country, outside of the experimental study group, was vaccinated during that period, and that's when most of the deaths occurred.
Here’s what I did. It was a very crude method of approximating things, and skipped over all kinds of stuff including what you point about about virtually no vax in year 2020. Also, it only included data thru 10/3/21, because that’s the latest Canadian data on one of the graphs I used.
OK, so I got excess deaths in 1/1/2020 - 10/3/2021 (i.e., deaths beyond what would have been expected for that period based on recent years) for US and Canada. From here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-covid?country=USA~CAN.
Total cumulative excess deaths
US: 817,000
Canada: 17,000
Calculated Canadian excess deaths as fraction of population:
17,000/ 38 million = .00045
Multiplied US population by fraction above. This gives how many excess deaths US would have had if we had managed the virus as well as Canada.
.00045 x 330,000,000 = 147,000
Subtracted US excess deaths if we’d managed virus like Canada from actual US deaths:
817,000 - 147,000 = 670,000. That’s how many lives would have been saved if US had managed virus as well as Canada. For purpose of this analysis, assumed that getting population vaxed is the only virus management strategy that matters.
So then I looked up vaccination rates for US and Canada as of 10/3/21 on this table:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Counted as unvaxed anyone who was neither fully nor partially vaxed. Fraction of US unvaxed on that date was 34%, number of unvaxed was 0.34 x 330,000,000
= 112,200,000.
Divided number of death attributable to US bad virus management (here considered to consist entirely of falling short of Canadian vaccination rates) by number of US citizens still entirely unvaxed at end of period examined:
670,000/112,200,000 = .006 = 6/1000 = 1/167
So whaddya think, John?
[Edited] I think you did a similar mistake to the one John mentioned, though not the same one.
1. Excess deaths in Canada in January and February 2021 probably shouldn't be in your calculation because (i) Canada's vaccine supplies arrived later than the U.S.'s, (ii) it takes a week or two for vaccine-induced immunity to take effect, (iii) most deaths happen two or three weeks after infection - so I'm just guessing here, but even if all the elderly people in Canada got their shots around the beginning of February, it wouldn't prevent deaths until the end of February.
2. More importantly, the U.S. had 2.56x more deaths than Canada before Jan 31, 2021, so the obvious conclusion is that most of the difference between deaths in the U.S. and Canada is not caused by vaccines. After the end of February, the difference in the death rate between the two countries did increase to about 3.5x, though, which I would guess is related to vaccines in large part.
Let's try to get John's numbers. It's complicated, because there were points in time when some parts of the US has excess doses, even while other parts of the country had too few. Also, the same situation in Canada applies.
I -think- it is safe to say that, as of August of 2021, everybody who wanted to get vaccinated had the opportunity in both countries, however.
Using ourworldindata's Covid Death data (I'm not using excess mortality for a variety of reasons), ~292,000 people died in the US between August 1st and today. ~8,000 people died in Canada over the same timeframe.
That's ~2.1e-4 deaths per capita in Canada, and ~8.8e-4 deaths per capita in the US, for a difference of ~6.7e-4 deaths per capita, in the post-vaccine period. There's the start of John's figures, but as I got this data, I noticed that Canada had fewer deaths before vaccines began.
So what about the pre-vaccine period? Let's just consider the period of time from March 1, 2021, to December 1, 2021. (Technically vaccinations began on December 14th, and it would take time for those to take effect and start changing death rates, but even numbers.)
The US had ~783,700 deaths; Canada had ~29,700 deaths. That's ~7.84e-4 deaths per capita in Canada, and 2.4e-3 deaths per capita in the US, for a difference of 1.65e-3 deaths per capita.
Okay, so: Vaccines lowered the death rate of Canada from 7.84e-4 deaths to 2.1e-4 deaths per capita, a reduction of 73%. Vaccines lowered the death rate of the US from 2.4e-3 deaths to 6.7e4 deaths per capita, a reduction of 72%. So vaccines were about as effective in Canada as they were in the US, despite the different vaccination rates.
Without assuming that whatever factors caused a higher death rate in the US than Canada prior to vaccination stopped about the time we started vaccinating, those numbers are close enough for me to say that this calculation suggests that we cannot actually say that unvaccinated people caused any deaths at all. Including their own.
At this point I notice I'm confused. I could blame a correlation between the factors that caused a higher death rate in the US than Canada for erasing the signal, I guess; I can plausibly argue that the excess deaths in the US relative to Canada was because more people in the US were behaving irresponsibly, and these same people also refused to get vaccinated. If this is the case, I predict Canadian support for Covid restrictions will be higher than that in the US. However, when I look up polls in Canada, it looks like Canadians generally had slightly less popular support for, for example, stay at home orders, than in the US.
So I can't just say that the unvaccinated people were causing problems before vaccinations were available; that's just trying to salvage the hypothesis when the data conflicts with it.
Okay, suppose that the difference between 72% and 73% is, in fact, significant. That ends up being the difference between 6.7e-4 deaths, and 6.6e-4 deaths per capita in the US; so an additional 1e-5 deaths per capita from the difference in vaccination rates. I'm also going to use the "full vaccination" rates; 64% in the US, 80% in Canada, for a difference of 16%; this 16% "additional unvaccinated" caused 1e-5 deaths. Double this to account for the people who aren't vaccinated in either country, with some wiggle room for partially vaccinated people, and I get 2e-5 per capita deaths, caused by unvaccinated people. Multiply by the population, and unvaccinated people in the US added an additional ~6,680 deaths to the total.
And I'm back to being confused, because I'm pretty sure that figure is wrong, as it, with the other data, implies some kind of weird decision theory puzzle is true in the real world, and vaccines are only effective for people who would choose to get vaccines, and if you wouldn't choose to get a vaccine, the vaccine wouldn't help you anyways.
I'm going to conclude that either I've screwed up a step in the analysis, or the analysis fundamentally won't work for this.
Error observed looking at this with fresh eyes:
First, a typographical issue, I stated the data started on March 1, 2021, but really it started on March 1, 2020. Second, I'm comparing a 21 month period of time pre-vaccines to a 6 month period of time post-vaccines. So actually this is overstating the overall effectiveness of vaccines by ... a lot. Like, basically, the entirety of the death reduction from vaccines disappears.
And for nearly three of those months, Omicron has been dominant.
I notice I'm really fucking confused.
This complicates the math a lot, but would it help your analysis to consider the most heavily vaxxed groups are the elderly and those most likely to have complications from COVID? And the least likely to get vaccinated are those who are young and healthy. That tracks the information I've seen, and also indicates rational thinking on everyone's part. Those least likely to die are most likely to avoid vaccination and because they were very unlikely to die, the overall death rates don't actually move much. If a large number of people with low risk profiles did get vaccinated, it would actually make the vaccine seem less effective, because they change the numerator (number of people vaccinated) without changing the denominator (number of people dying).
Roughly 1,000 children (18 and under) in the US have died of COVID. That's out of 73 million. If the vaccine were 100% effective against death and all children were vaccinated, that 1,000 lives saved would make almost no difference at all in your calculation. Adding 73 million more to the "vaccinated" list, there drastically changing the ratio of vaccines given verses deaths, would therefore make it seem like vaccines did nothing.
What I think happened instead is that the at risk populations of both Canada and the US took the vaccine early, and we got most of the benefit of vaccines by say, April 2021. After that most of our efforts getting people vaccinated was of less use.
Edit: And this actually overstates the effectiveness/need for vaccines in the under 19 group, because most of those 1,000 deaths happened before anyone under 18 was even eligible for the vaccine. Assuming only a few hundred potential lives saved and a less-than-100% effectiveness at preventing death (most of the children who died were immune-compromised or otherwise at greater risk), even complete vaccination of all children would have made virtually no difference whatsoever to the number of deaths from COVID.
Interesting results as I'm digging through the numbers of deaths more. Total US deaths from COVID of *all* people under the age of 50 was just under 62,000. Most of them died before vaccines were available, so maybe 30,000 total died after vaccines were even available. The amount of lives possible to be saved at that point, even with near perfect vaccine effectiveness and uptake, is not enough to move the needle very much on total deaths. Compare that with over 668,000 who died that were 65 or older.
We needed to vaccinate the older and the medically compromised, and the rest didn't much matter. I think we succeeded very well, and mandates were functionally worthless because we had already achieved almost all of the gains by the people who most needed them getting vaccinated without the mandates.
That's basically my guess about what's going on, but it seems really, really weird for society to be that good at risk calibration.
Thanks for doing this so I don't have to :-)
But yes, this. You can't just assume the difference in death rate in the US vs Canada is due to vaccination. There are other relevant differences in their COVID mitigation strategy, and there are relevant differences between US and Canada generally (e.g. population density). The fact that there was a substantial difference in per capita death rates before the vaccine was available, not only proves that but provides a decent quantitative estimate.
So, as Thengskald has done, you use *that* to estimate a baseline for the relative death rate and then use the *difference* between that baseline and the actual death rate during the vaccination period to try and get the death rate specifically due to vaccination differences.
And find that the result is lost in the noise.
Thank you Thegnskald for taking this on. I don't have time rn to take a careful look at your calculations and thoughts, but will later today. If you have any appetite for further wallowing in stats, here are a few other considerations:
-I'm pretty sure that most vaccinated people overestimate the amount of death and destruction caused by failure to get vaccinated. So in calculations like mine, I'm in favor of simplifications that are going to overestimate rather than underestimate the number of deaths that can be attributed to people's willful failure to get vaccinated. I'd like to present a figure and be able to say, "this is probably an *overestimate* of the number of deaths caused by individual's refusal to accept available vaccinations."
-Failure to get vaccinated leads to increased deaths in 2 ways: The unvaccinated person is likelier to die of covid, and is also likelier to kill someone else by infecting the other person with covid. But of course as soon as the original unvaxed person dies he stops being a vector. This creates a sort of mobius strip in the data, or maybe a coupla linked mobiuses, and how does one handle that? I didn't even try in my crude calculation.
-What got me started on this project was the scenario that seemed to underlie the most rageful purple prose on the Reddit covid sub I follow: *Here I am vaxed and boosted and my life is STILL terribly restricted because of all those non-vaxed mofos, who have killed lots of good folks like me and my kids and might very well kill me & my kids too if we resume living the way we used to.* One part of deconstructing this scenario would be to have an estimate of how many vaxed people have been killed by the non-vaxed. I'm guessing that number is *quite* low, for 2 reasons: First, the vaccinated are far less likely to die of covid than the unvaccinated. Second, vaxed people tend to moved in vaxed social circles and unvaxed to move in unvaxed ones. So a particularly useful pair of numbers to extract from the data would be "vaxedmorts" and "unvaxedmorts" -- i.e., if someone never got vaccinated, what fraction of an unvaxed person has he "killed," what fraction of a vaxed one?
Which country had the best chemical weapons in WWII?
The Germans had a fairly substantial stockpile of nerve gas bombs and shells by the end of the war, well in advance of anything the rest of the world could offer. But there are some things even Nazis won't do - either because the Head Nazi had had a very unpleasant experience with chemical weapons in the last war, or because as Bullseye notes pretty much everyone had figured out by then that chemical weapons aren't worth the bother against a serious army.
Or possibly this...
"According to Hermann Goering, the main reason was the Wehrmacht was dependent upon horse-drawn transport to move supplies to their combat units, and had never been able to devise a gas mask horses could tolerate"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare#Nazi_Germany
It didn't matter. WWI proved that chemical weapons weren't worth the trouble.
Explained here: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
That article was much more persuasive than I'd expected it to be. Thank you for linking to it.
I'd been expecting the argument to be based purely on the existence of countermeasures like gas masks, NBC suits, and atropine autoinjectors; and on the technical difficulties of using chemical weapons effectively on a large enough scale to matter. While there's a fair amount to these arguments, I think they're often overstated: they reduce chemical weapons use against a prepared enemy to a marginal advantage (forcing use of inconvenient countermeasures, use as a terror weapon against soft targets, and potentially doing a lot of damage against troops in the field when you manage to catch your target unprepared to use their countermeasures in time) rather than a proverbial silver bullet, but a marginal advantage is still an advantage.
Empirical examples I'd been prepared to cite in favor of chemical weapons still providing a marginal edge: continued use by both sides in the later years of WWI even after countermeasures were developed and deployed, the Iran-Iraq War, and the effort the US has put into deterring use of chemical weapons against us (first by building a VX gas arsenal, then by adopting our "WMDs is WMDs" policy and threatening to use nukes to retaliate against chemical weapons use).
The article did make argument similar to that, but the key piece for me was the additional argument about "Modern System" armies, specifically that chemical weapons are no better and are often worse than conventional weapons when used by or against a "Modern System" army, while acknowledging that chemical weapons do in fact have at least marginal utility in conflicts where two "Static System" armies are fighting one another, specifically discussing one of my intended counterexamples in the process.
That leaves that American "Gas us and we'll nuke you" policy unexplained though, although I don't think that's a fatal defect. For one thing, talk is cheap. Even modest-sized chemical weapons stockpiles are cheap on the scale of the American military budget. Combine that with military conservatism in the face of uncertainty over how things would play out on the battlefield (recall that there hasn't been a full-scale shooting war between Great Powers since 1945), and even if we're 95% certain using chemical weapons against the US Army would be useless, that last 5% is worth at least a bit of effort to deter. In addition, the policy also serves to deter use of chemical weapons as a terror weapon against civilian targets (we have the technical capability to distribute masks and suits to the whole civilian population, but civil defense is a bit of a taboo due to a combination of politics and successful Cold War era Soviet propaganda) and any of our allies that may still have Static System armies.
> we have the technical capability to distribute masks and suits to the whole civilian population
When Covid started we had trouble distributing surgical masks to the whole population. Why would gas masks be easier? Or do you mean “have the technical capability” in the sense that we can technically put people on the Moon?
(Re-reading what I wrote, it looks sarcastic. I’m genuinely asking, don’t know how to avoid making it look like that.)
For Covid, the problem was scrambling to do it immediately at the start of the pandemic. It takes time to ramp up manufacturing and arrange distribution of hundreds of millions of anything.
Making gas masks and glowbug suits for everyone on short order in an emergency would likely have been quite a bit harder than making surgical masks or N95 respirators for everyone, but that's not what I was thinking of. I was imagining a scenario where some major strategic rival decided to build a massive arsenal of nerve gas weapons as part of their strategic deterrent, and the US decided to counter this by ordering and distributing (or at least preparing to distribute) protective gear in parallel with the ramp-up and well in advance of any likely use of the weapons.
Israel has something like this as part of their civil defense program, stockpiling enough gas masks and protective suits for everyone and handing them out when there's a particular reason to fear chemical weapons attacks in the short to medium term. I attribute Israel doing this and the US not doing this to radically different threat environments and correspondingly different political attitudes towards civil defense, not to Israel having a particular technical capability here that the US lacks.
Okay, yeah, from that point of view it makes sense.
Long-time lurker here, commenting for the first time. I realize this is going to sound like a troll post, but I have a serious question I want to ask.
By now, it seems to be common knowledge in the rationalist community that the IQ gap between different races is partly due to genetics - Scott himself has acknowledged that the evidence seems solid to him. However, the scientific community at large continues to reject this view and bully dissenters such as James Watson, for what appear to be ideological reasons; the experts in the relevant fields appear to be complicit in this, which shows that even highly competent people are not immune to being misled. From this, I can conclude that the scientific community has failed at the task of upholding high epistemic standards in the face of ideological pressure, and every claim that it makes is now potentially suspect, especially if it is related to politicized subjects, including global warming, the safety of COVID vaccines, or the (lack of) efficacy of conversion therapy for transgender people.
Given the above, please tell me how a layman such as myself is supposed to trust any claim that is presented as the scientific consensus.
> it seems to be common knowledge in the rationalist community that the IQ gap between different races is partly due to genetics
I don't think that's true. I think what's common knowledge is that a child's intelligence depends somewhat on their genetic code, which is passed down from the child's parents. I've also often heard that black people have lower average scores on certain tests.
But it is not at all clear nor obvious that the *genetic component* of IQ is correlated with *skin color*, and I don't know of any rationalists who have studied the matter and presented a conclusion one way or the other.
But I did see Shaun rebut The Bell Curve pretty effectively on YouTube[1], and it seems clear that there is a segment of the population that VERY much wants to believe that black people have lower IQs because of their genetic code and *not* because of their environment (or English skills - often rural African students are not so good at tests written in English).
This indicates the issue is politicized, which raises the standard of evidence for me*; it means I need to know that the person claiming this relationship (from skin color to intelligence) is not a right-wing hack who wants very much to "discover" that relationship. Of course, there are also left-wing hacks spouting nonsense (like that nasty woke editorial in Scientific American[2]) but they are pretty easy to spot, since they typically imply that one's genetic code cannot affect intelligence at all.
[* Edit: mostly what I mean by this is that my standard of evidence is normally low: if something is not politicized and I hear a couple of scientists saying it's true, then I am strongly inclined to believe it. But once controversy becomes apparent, hearsay isn't enough and we have to go examine the evidence. The more controversial it is, the more carefully we should look. And this is extra tricky because even if you have a university degree, it's tough to evaluate papers by oneself, so there is a need to evaluate and listen to experts.]
If you tell kids they are no good at something, or if you tell kids they lack talent, that's likely to make them less willing to keep trying, and thus, less skilled. (I don't know if this is a rigorous result, but I saw a demo of this effect on adults in the pop-sci show "100 Humans"). With that in mind, I do think it would be unreasonable and unwise for a rationalist to claim without strong evidence that black people somehow have worse genetic codes that make them dumber on average. Even if we had solid evidence of this, it's not just a bad look politically, but also, contributing to a "black=dumb" meme could have a side effect of harming black kids' actual scholastic skill, and maybe even their intelligence. (also, of course, we should not be telling kids "your parents were dumb so you're statistically more likely to be dumb too". Though yeah, if we shy away from uncomfortable science too much or for too long, I guess that is a bad thing too.)
So if it were proven that that is true, but we only talk about it in hushed tones, that would be okay with me. Obviously - sigh - the woke people would be persecuting the scientists who discovered this, which I guess might be a good reason to speak up, but luckily I don't know of any scientist who actually believes this for strong evidence-backed reasons. You mentioned James Watson, and I notice that Wikipedia doesn't cite any studies Watson has done that support his view. Plus he talked about "Chinese being intelligent but not creative because of selection for conformity" - come on now, has Chinese culture selected against creativity for many thousands of years straight? This is prima facie implausible, and remember that evolution is a very, very slow process.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
[2] https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1477024429141942273
You are neglecting to recognize that erroneously attributing group differences to environmental causes, rather than genetic causes, may have undesirable consequences as well, in that measures will be introduced to compensate for "systemic discrimination", and those measures will become progressively more drastic as they fail to achieve the desired effect. Scott has talked extensively about this in his posts about women in STEM fields.
Assuming discrimination without clear evidence, or attributing group differences to environmental causes without clear evidence, or just generally being dogmatic, is also bad. But here are some obvious environmental differences that could be relevant:
- different wealth levels
- different nutrition levels
- different education quality
- people reading their native language vs a language they are unskilled in
I think there's probably lots of evidence that these factors affect how well people do on tests, but I'm not steeped in this enough to know where to get the evidence. (edit: and the Flynn Effect strongly implies that environment is important, without telling us which aspects of environment matter.) Luckily I'm not here to prove that all these environmental factors definitely affect IQ test results, I'm just here to say you can't reasonably reach a definitive conclusion while ignoring any of these factors (or any other potentially relevant factors).
I wish the entire discussion would shift from the poorly-defined abstraction "Intelligence" to "Problem-Solving in Any Given Environment". As humans adapt and evolve to different environments (with correspondingly different sets of problems) we would expect to see different specializations emerge. That would moot the entire issue of whether one group is 'smarter' than another. And instead of telling a population of kids 'you have a genetic disadvantage at X' we could instead say, "your ancestors are really good at X because they lived in an environment where Y was really challenging for humans". OK, maybe that's not super-inspiring, but it's better than what we have now, which as you note, is a group of people who seem REALLY motivated to find ways in which people whose skin color is different from their own have different scores on IQ tests.
Well, g factor[1] is a thing, and I haven't heard any good arguments that it's "meaningless" or should be ignored. Of course, g factor is not the only factor, so IQ (or similar) test results vary (would vary when taken by the same person) depending on what exactly they are measuring. But I think that, just as some right-wingers want to think "blacks are genetically dumber", some left-wingers want to think "really we're all equal, everybody just has different skills". And I haven't seen anyone do a good job defending either of these ideas... but even if I did, I would worry about whether the bottom line[2] was written first.
Most modern specializations didn't exist in the ancestral environment, e.g. I don't know how to complete a sentence like "Perhaps I am talented at computer programming because my ancestors lived in an environment where _________________." And again, evolution is very slow, so whatever the mysterious factor is, it would have to be in place for thousands of years. For that factor to affect one skin color but not another seems to require a lot of stability - consistent selective pressure in one broad racial group but not another (or opposite pressure in the other). Again I haven't seen that proposition seriously defended. (edit: though possibly genetic drift could do something here?)
On the other hand, the conclusion that "a child's intelligence is affected by their parents" is just something I would expect from basic evolutionary theory and agreed-upon facts. Although all complex adaptations are presumed universal[3], human intelligence and talents do in fact vary from person to person, including among people living in similar environments, and various respectable-sounding things I've heard lead me to think that there's a genetic component to the differences. But differences in intelligence/skills shouldn't be complex adaptations, so probably what we're seeing is akin to the alignment of engine parts: if all parts are aligned perfectly, the engine works very well, and every misalignment or small gap between parts reduces the engine's performance. A child will have a mix of "alignment settings" from zis parents, which usually produces an engine that performs similarly to the parents, but could also, by chance, produce much better or much worse overall alignment than either of the parents. Also, some parts of the brain are specialized for certain tasks, and I expect there will be "alignment settings" that only affect those parts, which could give people talents or shortcomings that are outside the g-factor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line
[3] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind
I don't have an answer to "perhaps I am talented at comp programming because my ancestors ..." but I bet given time and effort we could come up with some pretty interesting speculations.
It's interesting also to think of culture as an evolved adaptation, which would itself drive further adaptation (as, over time, people evolved to better adapt to their cultural environment), which would itself drive further adaptation, and so on. And then of course humans alter their environment over time as well...
So a lot of potential entanglement!
I find it hard to take seriously the idea that we are all born genetically tabula rasa, but I recognize there are indeed people who argue exactly that. I tend to think in terms of populations (and individuals) having some degree of genetic specializations based on their unique evolved environments, rather than having a single trait (generalized intelligence) conferring advantages or disadvantages vs others.
G.I. is always going to be slippery because someone has to decide what it is and how to measure it--and that is invariably going to be political.
Well...as I tried to explain, complex adaptations should be expected to be universal ([3] above), and the g-factor is far from being a single trait (highly polygenic). I am not aware of evidence that defining it has ever been "political" and I certainly don't think it should be. If a partisan-affiliated or partisan-sounding scientist tries to define it, that will be a good reason to be more skeptical of the definition. Usually in science there are multiple definitions proposed by different scientists, and the most reasonable definitions produce highly correlated measurements (e.g. there are many ways to estimate global warming, and the half-dozen groups estimating average surface temperature change all get similar results. I believe the same is true of intelligence tests. I don't think anybody reasonable wants politicians or partisans involved in decisions about how to do these measurements!)
Steve Sailer is fond of noting that the position of NFL Corner is invariably occupied by people of a certain skin color. Does "ability to play NFL Corner" fit into your definition of g-factor? Does my ability to deduce what g-factor means without looking it up on Wikipedia? Why or why not?
I suspect we both believe average global temperature is well-defined. We might disagree as to how best to measure it, but there would likely be no disagreement between us as to what, exactly, we were trying to measure.
In contrast we have no such definitive agreement as to what "intelligence" is. We might agree to define intelligence as "the score a person gets on an IQ test," but that's hardly satisfying, because it implies intelligence depends wholly on the test's construction--or more accurately, on the test's creators.
And thus it becomes political. That does not imply that intelligence is not real (nor consequential!) -- it just means we have no objective definition of it, nor even an agreed-upon definition of it, and therefore (obviously) we have no good way to measure it.
You aren't supposed to. Life's harder than that. You have to be smart and skeptical and forage around for the truth.
I think an extremely important job these days is "person who helps other people find people they can trust." Not sure if there is a catchy job title for this (there ought to be!), but I think Scott is an excellent example of such a person. Given the state of the media these days I don't see any way around cynicism regarding "scientific" consensus. But there are people who are trying hard to come up with a best approximation, given the best available evidence, as to what is true in any given moment. They are worth finding. So to answer your question, find good Trust Arbiters, and let them do most of the work.
Don't trust consensus, trust results. Disparities haven't gone away despite massive efforts; there are your results. The experts can't get any results, and until they do you can disregard them. They don't know anything if they can't get results. Moldbug is useful here despite all his shortcomings; see his "Clearpill pt 2" essay for what he says about power disrupting truth. It does disrupt truth greatly; if you can get canceled for saying something, you're not dealing with science and there is a high risk that the consensus is distorted by power away from truth. Results don't need to cancel; I can preach the flat Earth and keep my job, but if I give my judgment on genetic difference between racial groups (which comes down to me predicting new study results accurately + predicting that genetic modification will get rid of disparities) based on the massive amount of evidence I have sifting through, it's over for my career. That's not a sign of trustworthiness.
> the theory of relativity, *which is still wrong*
I would refrain from calling a description of reality that is indistinguishable from perfect "wrong" - it takes a lot of meaning out of the word "wrong", even if the theory is superceded later.
>If it's "common knowledge in the rationalist community", then the rationalist community is wrong. There are still plenty of holes in that hypothesis that do not square with real world data (eg: there is no observed IQ gap between the white and black children of US military personal raised on oversea US bases).
What study is this? I think I know the one but I want to make sure. If it's a different one I somehow haven't heard of, I'd love to see it, although at this point there is so much evidence contrary to what you're saying that what you speak of can simply be said to have not replicated. Given our political climate it's easy to imagine why that may be.
May I ask your qualifications on this topic? Me, I've written multiple essays on it, I've read dozens of studies, hundreds of block posts, and 10 or so books on the topic. I consider myself to probably be in the 98th percentile of expertise on this subject. It's always good to know where others are when it comes to this because it's somewhat complicated and it's probably not worth debating, eg flat earth, with someone doesn't know any physics or geology if you're an expert physicist or something.
Why do you care so much about proving your superiority over your fellow man?
You sound quite offended. I hope you can get over that and be more rational in the future.
You ignored my question on your background in this topic, which is a bad faith tactic. Readers should therefore assume you're not very well read in this topic, and indeed, I can say as a relative expert that your objections here are more revealing of a low level of contact with the field than with anything having to do with the field itself. One thing I like to make clear on this topic is that it's a serious, complex area of scholarship, and before you can make judgments on it you have to read a lot of stuff. It very much seems like you're pretty low-info on this topic, so I find your judgments inappropriate. If you know you are not very well-read here, especially compared to me, I think it's most appropriate to show a little epistemic humility.
That said, let's see why I think this, other than your bad-faith ignoring of a main part of my post.
>I can't find that particular study, but it's not like it's the only piece of evidence against that theory.
You make this vague statement against "that theory." From my very well read POV, this sounds like a flat earther making a vague claim against "that theory" that the Earth is round. What do you have to back this statement up?
>It largely fails to explain, for instance, why economic outcomes are so uniform over sub-saharan africa, denoting homogenous IQ rates, which makes 0 sense if IQ is strongly linked to "race", since there's more genetic diversity in sub-saharan Africa than in all the rest of the world combined. There should be more IQ variations between different groups of black Africans than between Europeans and Asians.
This is all you have to back that statement up. You can't find the other study you referred to, and now you have these statements. The problem here is that you're assuming IQ and economic status of a country are 1:1 and nothing else factors in here. The correlation between IQ and SES is about .5 and it's the best known single predictor of SES (Strenze 2007). So the idea that IQ variance has to produce a lot of economic variance is a Stubborn Assumption. In 1st world conditions having a gene pool that produces a lower IQ does largely cause black economic underperformance because the US is largely a meritocracy, especially at incomes under $200,000 a year or so, and especially for intelligence. In Africa it's more than plausible that, for instance, there is a threshold effect where having an average IQ under 80 and not having access to welfare from Europeans leads to bottom-barrel economic conditions. Such a threshold could cause very little economic variance compared to genetic intelligence variance. Furthermore, you've also failed to consider that we are only concerned with genetic variance that impacts intelligence. How much variance do sub-Saharan Africans have in skin color compared to Europeans? The idea that the "lots of African genetic diversity" meme that is very common in race denialist literature implies "lots of genetic variance in IQ among Africans" is a low-information Stubborn Assumption.
You have not recognized your Stubborn Assumptions as such because the reality is that they're hard to notice unless you're familiar with the broader body of evidence. You're evidently not very familiar with the broader body of evidence, so these assumptions seem fine, maybe you're not even consciously aware of them.
I know, however, that the broader body of evidence essentially proves, as much as science can ever prove anything, that like everything else evolution happens above the neck, and the US-black US-white IQ gap is highly, highly genetic. Yet it very often happens in this sphere that people who are not very familiar with the evidence come up with some reason Igbo Scrabble scores imply that the US black-white IQ gap is highly environmental. So far all of these are based not on evidence, but on Stubborn Assumptions that link these two disparate topics together uncritically. Therefore, I coined the term Stubborn Assumption Cherrypicking, or SACing, to refer to the phenomenon when someone who is very low information thinks they can debunk a whole field of study from their arm chair with one or two idle observations plus one or two Stubborn Assumptions. "If the Earth is round why can I see the Twin Cities from here? They're supposed to be under the horizon." (I have seen this with flat earths for real actually, besides assuming a wrong horizon/observation distance, the answer is that light refraction can cause things which are under the horizon to appear as if they are not, especially near water. This is complicated and it's a hardly noticeable Stubborn Assumption to ignore this).
I'm saying this because I don't want to be your personal SACing debunker, so if you SAC again I'll have to ignore it or go over it much more briefly. I hope this commentary has given you the tools to recognize when you or others might be SACing; it's a common fallacy that I see in this sphere that the Overcoming Bias types must have missed.
If you would like to become more acquainted with the evidence, see my essay here: https://juliusbranson.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/an-examination-of-the-causes-behind-the-black-white-iq-gap/
>Let's cut the noise.
At least you're acknowledging that you just ignored my whole post. What is it with you and ignoring things that make points you dislike? I will give you credit for half acknowledging that this is what you're doing at that you have no expertise here.
What you need to do though is get less haughty with me. You need to have some epistemic humility; if you know you don't know much compared to another guy, you probably shouldn't try to tell the other guy what the reality is as if you're on high. That's what I do. When someone knows more than me, I just ask questions. I have epistemic humility.
So you are dictating to me, quite arrogantly,
>The vast majority of experts reject the idea of a strong link between race and IQ, which you and OP are certain exist based on your own research.
This is wrong. The experts are not quite as wrong as you think, although quite a few "experts" are still quite wrong: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2020/04/expert-opinion-on-race-and-intelligence/
The reason for the wrong ones are incentives and low information, as always. You seem to be lacking in familiarity with how the Cathedral operates but suffice it to say that most "expertise" is see-through. This is because cranking out a paper and advancing your career is not the same thing as actually knowing your stuff. I've been on the inside of this process numerous times in STEM and I know it for a fact. See the 1st three chapters here: http://thealternativehypothesis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AltHypeReader.pdf
>There are only possible two explanations for why this is happening:
So as we've seen, I really don't think you're in an epistemic position to dictate to me what the two possible explanations are. You display 0 humility in this statement, like your others, and still like your others you are wrong. You are absolutely certain, like the other things, based on little to no actual information, that there are only these two explanations and no others, and yet once again you are wrong.
The third explanation is that the portion of "experts" that are wrong on polls (no where near all in this case, probably because the evidence is so overwhelming) are victims of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. There is no conspiracy of professors. One man in particular has gone over this at length specifically for people of your persuasion, here you go: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-2-of-5-a-theory-of-pervasive-error/
Now please, instead of ignoring this whole comment and responding with some other arrogant gish gallop, that will in all probability, based on my last 3 replies to you, just get eviscerated like your other random classifiers, read my links and learn something, challenge yourself, gain expertise. Grow!
Just to clarify, I am not saying that the scientific method is invalid - just that the scientific institutions in the West might be corrupt, similarly to what happened with Lysenkoism and Japhetic linguistics in the Soviet Union.
Scientific institutions are many and varied. They are hardly homogeneous. It should take more than a handful of examples before you decide to throw out all expert knowledge.
Politics allowed so this. Mitch McConnell grows something resembling a spine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us/politics/republicans-censure-mcconnell.html?referringSource=articleShare
If you can’t get past the paywall;
WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, pushed back hard on Tuesday on the Republican Party’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and its characterization of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse,” saying the riot was a “violent insurrection.”
Yeah, that was the first time I was impressed by McConnell. Even I was skeptical of the term "insurrection", but I guess the incident really did rattle him.
Is Ageism Against Youth Rational?
https://criticalagetheory.substack.com/p/is-ageism-against-youth-rational
The risk-taking part isn't meaningless but it's also not the whole story - there are other issues, like being physically large enough to see over the wheel and reach the pedals, and sufficiently-trained hazard detection.
Are these things highly variable in people of all ages? Yes. Could a battery of tests discriminate on these measures more accurately than an age cutoff? Yes. Does age *correlate* fairly well with these things? Yes. Would the increase in complexity of law have a social cost? Yes.
In the particular case of driving there is also the issue of wanting people to have full criminal responsibility for manslaughter before handing them the most common tool of manslaughter yet devised (this is similar to the attribution problem with killer robots - it fundamentally breaks the laws of war if it's possible for war crimes to happen without a war criminal who cares about the punishments). The previous four rhetorical questions apply to that field as well, but the social cost of complexity in that case is far greater.
> discrimination against youths is simply ageist
Then this kind of ageism is correct. I do not care about quality of specific study, it is self evident to me that 13 year old should not be allowed to operate deadly pile of metal on a public road without proper supervision. And that is without going into even more obvious cases (sex, drugs, contracts).
Yes.
I think that pretty much everyone that 8 year old should not be able to drive car, enter in serious contract, take loans, have parental rights, be able to buy drugs or be claimed to be able to consent to sex?
And at most you can ague which age should be applied to that - 18? 16? 21? Something else?
Does anyone else think Glenn Greenwald's latest (about the Joe Rogan/Spotify censorship campaign) is a little over the top? I agree with him in spirit, but the rhetorical heat level makes me uncomfortable. So does the word choice "liberals" to refer to an essentially authoritarian faction within the democratic party that wants literally the opposite of the root of the word.
"I agree with him in spirit, but the rhetorical heat level makes me uncomfortable"
This has always been my experience with Glenn for the 10+ years I've been following him. The rhetoric is sometimes entertaining but not helpful, sometimes utterly destructive and pointless, but he's usually 'correct' in a sense I care about so I still follow his work. I do wish he would tone it down a bit at times, but as Mr Doolittle points out he's also copped at least as bad as he gives so his reaction is mostly understandable.
Glenn has a personal history of getting censored and attacked for unpopular reporting. First when he helped Edward Snowden, and then more recently when he tried to write about Hunter Biden. Both times it was by people calling themselves "liberals." He uses the word on purpose because his targets self-identify with that term, and he sneers it because of the fact that it means the opposite of what many "liberals" actually do.
Was he actually censored (as in a government institution used legal means to prevent his views from being published) or did people just vehemently disagree with him and refuse to engage with him (by choosing not to publish his writing or choosing to no longer do business with him)?
I guess that depends on some information that the public doesn't have. Regarding the Hunter Biden report, he claims that the company that he worked for broke their contract with him and forbid him to write the story (at least the way he wanted to, which he says was in his contract to do). Breaking a contract to prohibit him from publishing does seem to go beyond "no longer choos[ing] to do business with him." You can read his take on it here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept
For clarity, I do consider "censored" to go beyond official government action, and to include private actors censoring for political reasons as problematic.
In regards to Edward Snowden, the government clearly went after Snowden for blowing the whistle on illegal activity. How much Glenn was affected or targeted by *official* legal action is up for debate and depends on information we probably can't ever see. He was threatened with arrest by people in Congress, though it's hard for us to determine if they were at all genuine instead of grandstanding. That they "attacked" him for his actions is without doubt. Here's his Wikipedia page if you want to read more on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#:~:text=Greenwald%2C%20who%20was%20not%20detained,a%20ruling%20from%20Supreme%20Court
"I'm still a liberal. It's those people who aren't liberals." (GK Chesterton about the Liberal Party, by memory so possibly not verbatim)
What is up with the options for responding that appear below each post? As of this thread we now have the option to report comments. As of last night, evening of 2/7, there was a Report button, and also a Give Gift button. The latter allowed the reader to donate money to pay for a month's or a full year's subscription to ACX for the writer. This morning, the Give Gift button is gone, but meanwhile somebody sent me a heart in the night, liking a comment I'd made. How did they even do that? There was no 'Like' option when I was on yesterday evening.
So wutz up? And while I'm talking about options, would like to express my preferences:
-I'm delighted to have a Report button
-I want the option to send someone a "like." It makes posting here feel more real and satisifying -- it least it does that for me. It adds an element that's there in spoken conversation, where people's facial expressions let the speaker know when they are moved or amused or othrwise taken with his ideas. (On the other hand, I wouldn't want accumulated like votes to appear alongside posts -- that feels like high school.)
-I didn't like that give gift thing as a way of expressing approval. Seems unreasonable to have to pay $10 to tell someone you liked their post. And it seems like many recipients would find the gift useless, because they already are subscribed for the year, do not want to subscribe at all, or have no need of a little ACX scholarship. And it seems like the money basically is a donation to Substack.
I see the "Give gift" option for some comments and not others. I guess it only appears for people who are not currently subscribed.
The browser extension is https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
I think there is a browser extension that allows likes. You can 'like' someone's comment if it shows up in an email. At least that option is there for me.
Incivility is *way* down. I put up a post on Open thread 206 complaining about the degree of incivility, especially instances of flat-out PVA, Primitive Verbal Abuse. That was a month ago, and I can't remember seeing a single instance of it since. Worse thing I've seen since is occasional sniffiness and irritability - "you're continuing to argue back despite my clarifications, seems like willful refusal to consider my point" kind of thing. And that stuff is just par for the course.
So no PVA is great. I'm delighted by the absence of turd-dropping harpies zooming over the conversations here, but am not sure why they're gone. Doubt that my posts convinced any harpies to change their ways.
Scott, did you ban a bunch of people?
Everybody else: Do you agree that civility level is much improved?
Personally, I think it's improved, but I think part of it is because "I hate you, you are (enemy tribe) and you deserve evil to happen to you" has been mostly replaced with highly weird and esoteric ways of saying the same thing. Over the past week, I've been repeatedly accused of engaging in "frame manipulation", which as far as I can tell just means "you think that things I find good are bad or vice-versa and refuse to use my nomenclature, and this is a personal attack on me and morally evil instead of a strong disagreement."
I still prefer this over "I hate you, go die" because it at least is trying to have some kind of elevated discourse, but I suspect part of it is more "adaptive camouflage" instead of a genuine attempt at civility. But maybe I'm just being uncharitable.
Yeah, I was vaguely aware of an exchange with you and someone else that had that tone, but it was about some topic about which I had neither thoughts not feelings so I just skimmed over that part of the thread. I have a vaguely worked-out idea about debates -- how the people involved are of course feeling angry and eager to win, but that the best debates are the ones where the emotions are just fuel for the process of articulating and angling acute points. The emotions are burned up in the process. Sounds like what you're describing is like an engine with poor combustion.
Having read Scott's blog for a while, I find that there are two main factors that vary from time to time. One is individual actors who bring heat to discussions. They can easily respond to a dozen different people and add nothing of value to the conversation, which can make it seem like a lot of incivility (especially when people respond to them angrily in return). A few well placed bans can often fix that (marxbro comes to mind as a recent ban that probably made an actual difference - more from people no longer responding to his sealioning). The other factor is in individual discussions. One or two heated topics or threads can feel like a lot of incivility, compared to the low baseline.
That said, yes, I have noticed less incivility as well.
Self promotion: A few days ago I published a book review of "Where is my Flying Car". (This book previously appeared in the ACX book review contest). https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/notes-from-who-stole-my-flying-car
Please consider subscribing to my Substack if you are interested in Progress Studies, metascience, or AI. I feel optimistic I will have a couple posts on those subjects published in the next few months.
Hey, have you guys heard of ZDoggMD? I just discovered this guy and loving it. He's a sort of rationalist / scout mindset type of guy, but with a different branding. As a doctor, he's doing a lot of videos on vaccine misinformation lately, and I think he's doing a fantastic job.
Great video (if a little dry) on the divisions in society, "Covidiots Vs. Covidians? An Alt-Middle View": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZIJ0ekD_HE
Another example: here he's arguing against hydroxycloroquine king Peter McCullough using the FLICC analysis framework without explicitly naming it (Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking and Conspiracy theories): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pcIbVvHI2c
And like myself, he's promoting a political middle: "If you like the way we talk about these things, join our tribe of alt middle people. We're trying to change discourse. We're trying to fight social media and big tech's dominance on weaponizing our hatred of each other. We're trying to think clearly. We have a good time." But unlike myself, he does a good job :)
Then in another video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpH1kpkkwAg) two doctors have this conversation that makes my heart flutter:
> Yeah a lot of the people who used to love me hate me, and you know, and people who used to hate me love me. [...]
> Honestly that's why I like to do a show with you, because I know this about you, you've been consistent. In fact, I reached out to you years ago, prior to Covid, because I saw your work. And I said, this guy is as skeptical of how medicine does its business as I am. A that was a kinship right because we both share that particular compass. And what's interesting is what i've had to learn, what I've had to grow into myself, is understanding how how to to look at another side compassionately and be able to speak to them in a way that is accepting of who they are without giving up the fact that I actually think what I'm saying is right and I need to persuade you. So that's been a change for me that Covid helped to accelerate. And the truth is, if you're not allowed to change, grow, or have strong opinions, because you're afraid the audience is going to abandon you, then that's a bad [business] model, right, it means you're dependent on clicks. [...]
> So your survival mechanism is that you, probably to a large degree, you're willing to tolerate massive losses in your audience?
> Yeah I am, in fact I'm willing to tolerate it going to zero, i just don't care, but it took me a long time to get to that point. [...]
FWIW I prefer text too.
Like Thegnskald I much prefer reading to taking somebody in via videos. But I will check him out, and hope to be pleasantly surprised. I looked him up and he is on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram but does not seem to have a blog. Here's an article about the guy: https://www.chcf.org/blog/the-curious-case-of-zdoggmd/out.
I have basically zero patience for information presented in video format for a variety of reasons. Does he have any text work?
Wow, it's as if I'm the only one here that enjoys videos. 2x speed anyone? But I think it's important to have more rat-adj or "alt-middle" thinkers on video... because lots of people don't like reading so much. I don't know if he does any text work.
WARP, a rationality camp I help organize, is open for applications for ~another week! Relevant for 16-19 year olds.
What? A 10-day programme on applied rationality. More details at https://warp.camp/.
Who? Students between 16 and 19 years old. Usually 20-30 attendees and a dozen staff. Organized by the ESPR team (https://espr-camp.org/).
When? 22nd March - 1st April 2022.
Where? Oxford, United Kingdom
Price? Free! OpenPhil generously covers the whole cost of the program for participants.
I am trying to find a book review scott published on SSC possibly 2019ish. Subject was on the Holocaust, and I think the gist of the analysis was that Jewish populations did worse (by far) in areas that were effectively stateless when the Nazis invaded, and were (much?) better protected in areas with strong functioning governments. Assuming I am not hallucinating this, If anyone could give me the book title and even better a link to the review I would be most grateful. Thanks!
I'm pretty sure the book is _Black Earth_ by Timothy Snyder, but I'm not finding the review.
That was probably this - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/30/book-review-eichmann-in-jerusalem/
Section IV discusses which countries did more or less to protect the Jewish populations. It doesn't look like Scott himself comes to that conclusion about the correlation with having a stronger government, but maybe people in the comments talked about that.
thank you but pretty sure this isn't it. I was thinking maybe a review of "Black Earth" but as far as I can tell, Scott never did that on SSC.
Are you sure? He (or H. Arendt) discusses the treatment of Jews under different governments as well as their own leadership in the second half of the article.
I have a distinct memory of Scott having a strong emotional reaction and calling it (paraphrasing) one of the most depressing books he'd read. But I've searched through SSC's archives and I can't find anything that fits. Sometimes I think I have memories of other universes. :)
I actually searched through a bunch of SSC articles with references to Jews and Nazis (it was a slow night) and couldn't find anything that seemed to fit better (to what I understood from your description). For example, this is one paragraph from the Eichman article:
Other interesting profiles include Greece (hopelessly depressing), Slovakia (very Catholic, in favor of killing Jews but got in a bunch of fights with the Nazis about ethnic Jews who had been baptized into Catholicism), Hungary (ruled by an admiral despite being landlocked; otherwise hopelessly depressing), Belgium (deliberately left the trains unlocked so the Jews could escape!), Holland (kind of like France; the local Gentiles tried to help, but the assimilated Jews sold out the refugee Jews in the hope of placating the Nazis; the Nazis were not placated; three-quarters of Jews died), and Poland (I don’t even want to talk about how hopelessly depressing this one is).
hmm...that's got to be it. Thanks for your persistence!
One obvious explanation is that if the government is strong and is hostile to Jews, the Jews would have already been killed or driven out. So this would not prove that stronger governments protect Jews on the average--you're literally seeing survivorship bias.
In this case "strong governments" = governments that protected the rights and safety of their citizens, Jewish people included -- even after they were invaded
Was going to try and submit this via the AC grants, might still, but going to post here-
I have a proposal that doesn’t require any funding. I am hoping you might write a post on David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative.
It is essentially a trans-humanistic argument that humanity is ethically obligated to use technology to guide its own evolution to reduce suffering asnd maximize eudaimonic and “hedonistic” states. By “hedonistic” we do not mean “wire head hedonism.” We mean raising the baseline of mental health in a similar way in which Bayesian rationalism aims to raise the “sanity” wireline.
We know that much of a person’s baseline happiness is determined by genetics. In the short term, we can use technology to improve this basis for everyone. But long term, towards a post-human future where mood states and spiritual states might be comparable to the MDMA experience. There is already top down stimulation technology developed by IARPA’s brain project for PTSD that works “too well” in terms of curing depression and creating euphoric states. But this is just a narrow framework of what could be possible. There are experiments involving electromagnetic fields that induce a temporary form of ablation of turning off neural circuits temporarily to determine their function. There was a story (and I would have to dig to find the link because it was years ago) where someone who had previously only been able to draw stick figures was able to see the world as an artist and while this EM field was in place, draw realistically detailed art.
There is the possibility, not that far in the future, that people can not only improve their states of well being, but not be limited by their genes and experiences to access different modes of consciousness and being.
Pearce’s view is ambitious and comes from a negative uiltitarian standpoint where he emphasizes the abolition of suffering. I sympathize with this, but I don’t see that the basic idea necessarily has to be conditional on accepting negative utilitarianism or any specific ethical system as a prerequisite with whatever philosophical baggage that entails. Pearce and many who support the HI advocate for the abolition of suffering in all sentient creatures. In the extreme long term, this means a re-engineering of the biosphere.
However, I along with Pearce and others have started something called the biohappiness initiative. The aim is not adoption of the HI as a specific dogma, but opening the Overton Window to discussion of these considerations. This is ethically urgent as humanity is already in the time where the decision we make now will influence the future in incredibly dramatic ways. I see this as as intersecting with existential risk.
For sure, many will be wary of such a utopian ideal. And wary for good reason. But the important thing to understand is the beginning of these changes is already happening, and if we collectively stick our heads in the sand and adopt a “wait and see” approach, the evolution of this will be an extension of the current condition in which these dynamic forces began to shape.
Governments, corporations, and specific visionaries will push these things along a Fabian gradient. Much like the early days of the internet, when engineers understood that the principles they established then would have dramatic consequences in the future, we can’t afford to wait, as in the case of the internet, till these things have become such a part of the fabric of our society they can’t be reversed and re-engineereed in hingsight. If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.
We already see talk of how Elon Musk’s neuralink hips could cause orgasm. Imagine a metaverse that directly connected to the brain where instead of the “soft” dopamenergic push of Facebook’s tricks, one had induced orgasms to reinforce behavior.
Or the experiments where people’s sense of ethical judgements can be altered. Or the technology that can read images from peoples mind and even insert them (if you’re skeptical of any of this I can provide links but I think you are better informed then the average person on these matters.)
Or Xi Jingping’s combination of big data and mood monitoring helmets. It is not hard to see how any number of nightmarish dystopian possibilities could evolve.
Or, to put things in terms of conventional existential risk, how when people integrated more and more with technology, the “runaway ai” scenario could look more like the Borg then Skynet.
Musk already has stated his goal is to combine machine and human intelligence and understands the risks, but feels it is the only way to stop the purely AI singularity.
We are summoning a kind of techno Moloch that can runaway with nature of humanity in a way where this really will be “the dreamtime”, and no push to say “no we shouldn’t” will stop whats already growing and evolving. For the same reasons we can’t just play civ and design the perfect society, we cant stop this change. Even if such things we’re banned in the US, we can’t stop Jingping or Putin- but as you understand its deeper then that.
But we can imagine an actual dreamtime. We can open up and accept the inevitable, and realize we can’t go the luddite route. The only way out is forward. Towards a difference between literal heaven and hell.
My aim in asking you to cover this is to get our ideas into the Overton Window of discussion. I do not expect you to agree with everything Pearce says. I don’t myself. But the ideas as a counterpoint to the “digital copy upload” version of transhumanism which is more popular at least is worthy of discussion. If nothing else then as a counterpoint to the current trend of discussion which strikes me as not unlike Huxley’s Brave New World, where he later admitted he presented two insane option and only later wish he had included a saner option.
The entry to Pearce’s work is Hedweb.com.
There needs to be a discourse, at least amongst the tech minded crowd, where there is something more then just “we need to summon a lesser a Molloch to fight the bigger Molloch.” It seems to me that for all of Less Wrong’s success at raising the profile of existential risk, no one has any solutions that don’t involve creating the very thing they are afraid of (like proposals to create a global AI to find and shut down existential risk). I believe the HI, or at lest the general thrust of it, is a sort of “third” or “fourth” way, and really the only chance we have of avoiding disaster.
-David Kinard
"There is already top down stimulation technology developed by IARPA’s brain project for PTSD that works “too well” in terms of curing depression and creating euphoric states."
Got a link for that? I just googled IARPA + PTSD and found absolutely nothing except a single study comparing 2 common PTSD treatments, EMDR and Truama-Focused CBT. Both treaments were found to produce moderately decent results, and to work about equally well.
The crackpots/visionaries (YMMV) at qualiacomputing.com have covered these topics extensively.
I agree with you 100%, a future without superhappiness is wasted potential. I'm interested in learning about IARPA’s brain project for PTSD. Is there a paper or website that you could share? I've read a lot about brain stimulation and it would be good to know if this is something novel.
You claim that Pearce is opposed to wireheading, but from the way you're describing his goal, it sounds bad for similar reasons. It might not be wireheading in the strict sense of "sit in a chair pressing the 'pleasure' button all day and doing literally nothing else," but being able to control your own emotions to the extent of making yourself happy whenever you want sounds like a softer version of the same thing. There are good evolutionary reasons we didn't develop to control our own emotions, and being able to do so would argue destroy the impetus for much of what makes us human. "My entire family just died horribly, but I still feel happy because I can just make myself feel happy whenever!" isn't any kind of enlightenment or paradise, it's something that most people would rightly consider a mental disorder. (In fact, "being happy all the time regardless of circumstance" is an existing mental disorder. Pearce's proposal is different in that people would theoretically be free to choose other emotional states, but given the opportunity to simply choose happiness, it's hard to imagine they would choose anything else.)
Suffering because your family is dead is the normal reaction, expected by society, but that doesn't make it good. Because, in addition to your family suffering, you are now also suffering. A negative emotional reaction to a negative thing doesn't make that thing any better.
Unless your response to death is to declare death your enemy and do what you can to prevent it.
How do you get that from "raising the baseline of mental health" and "abolishing suffering"? There are already people out there who naturally seem to be positive and happy all the time, without any "wireheading" drawbacks.
I mean one could take it too far and I guess that would be a disorder, but I think most people are on the other side of the line of optimality, more on the side of melancholy than necessary. And if, hypothetically, people were "flipped" about the optimality axis - biased to much toward happiness rather than biased too much toward experiencing suffering - that sounds like it might be a better tradeoff than the one we have.
Are you sure you'd be able, at your lowest, to resist modifying yourself into something less than human just to stop suffering?
Given how we already have huge problems with very blunt wireheading instruments (opiates, cocaine) I think there will be a literal lost generation with, hopefully partial, societal collapse. Whatever society emerges on the other side will have a sane approach to wireheading figured out (which may be just tabooing the whole process).
I don't think the problems associated with extreme highs (opiates) necessarily translate into problems with targeted techniques to prevent suffering that do not create highs.
Note- If anyone knows if Scott has a contact email for this sort of thing, I would greatly appreciate it.
His email is included in the actual post...
Interesting essay on public intellectuals! Interesting example (Thomas Friedman. I agree!).
The ones that deserve to fade, I think, have strong opinions on hard questions in areas they know nothing about.
But they stay around if they market themselves well.
Lots of average thinkers say outrageous things for attention, to stick around.
Which leads us to...who is the audience for these public intellectuals? What is that audience looking for from public intellectuals?
If you want to impress seriously smart people with your ideas, you're only going to have a small, niche audience. I'd be satisfied with that if I were a public intellectual.
That was interesting! I'm not sure if anyone saw that, but the comment said "asfasadfasd" for a few seconds and then changed to the spam one. I guess the substack spam filter doesn't work on edited comments.
So Julia, I'll give you credit for figuring your way around the spam filter, but... is this a manual process? Is this forum really the right target for this kind of spam?
It’s still there after 15 hours. Apparently an effective weird trick. Much better than the one weird trick to remove belly fat. Is it possible that no one has reported it?
[Edit] I reported it and it was deleted. I guess everyone thought it had already been reported.
I saw it last night, evening of 2/7, via Safari on iOS Mac. Reported it at approx midnight EST.
I reported it too.
It’s hidden from me in Safari on my phone but visible in Windows with Chrome. [Edit - It's hidden on my iOS Mac with Safari too. Looks like a browser dependent issue.
Looking for opinions / experiences with a similar situation (I amconsidering a job offer)...Thanks!
Synopsis:
I am currently working for a more or less consultation company, doing data science and machine learning. The company has grown considerably over the past 2 years, from a startup of a few dozen people to a mid sized company of almost 200 (and growing). The work is shotgun-like, we do all kinds of data science and ML but this also means it is not too focused (although not everybody does everything) and projects usually last a few months to a year. I can learn quite a bit of this and that but it is not that focused. I learned A LOT about business and thinking about it when doing data science though, I doubt I could learn it as much elsewhere. There are also a lot of people who know a lot about specific ML-related things I don't know yet and want to know. The pay is average to perhaps somewhat below average in the field (it is supposed to increase company wide this year though and I would likely get a bit of a promotion on top of that which would probably translate to a 10-15 percent increase or so in pay)
We have a client/partner company where I've been leading a data science project (for the past year or so). The company is a startup which recently got funding from their main investor and are looking for others. It is run by two business guy and all data-related stuff has been done by us. They want to boost their development and are looking for an internal data science team (they will need data engineers as well) and they offered me a position leading that team. The pay offered is extremely good compared to my current pay (twice as much, in fact). However, being a startup (and there is competition in their field which might be a bit head of them), they may easily crash and burn. I also have an option with my current company payable in about 2 years which I would lose and which is good enough to cover quite a bit of the difference (though not all).
I am quite confident in my data science and business skills, somewhat less so in my data/platform engineering and DevOps abilities (or MLOPs, though I feel nobody has really figured out proper MLOPs yet) but I suppose I understand these well enough to recognize people who actually understand it very well and who would therefore be good additions to the team. The founders are entirely business people and the "tech" part of the job would be up to me entirely because of that. I think it might be interesting to build something almost from scratch like that but at the same time it is a bit risky. I am in my early 30s so I guess I can afford a bit of risk though :)
To summarize, I guess the main motivations to stay where I am are familiarity, more security and a lot of ML-oriented people I think I can still learn a lot from (probably the last thing is the main motivation for me). The main motivation to take the offer is the pay, focus on one clear thing (instead of working on 2-3 disparate projects at any given moment and having fairly limited time to code) and simply the fact that it is something new that I have not tried before (setting up and running a focused team like that).
Take the offer. It pays more, and doesn't seem to be obviously worse.
Current job might give you more depth (specific ML knowledge) but the new job will give you more breadth (engineering side plus management side). Breadth will be more important for your future career.
Even if the startup crashes and burns in eighteen months, once you can say you've led a team your career prospects drastically improve.
I think I would learn a bit about engineering even in my current job. Management in terms of leading projects with teams of 3-4 people and project ownership in general is what I've already been doing in my current job, though this would definitely be a lot more "holistic".
I am not completely convinced about the founders though in terms of their business skills (they're quite alright personally), so perhaps this is the one thing in which it is clearly worse (our CEO is definitely someone who has proven to have skills to turn a small group of 10 or so people into 150+ sized company within 5 years and with no external funding (the no external funding bit is of course easier for a consultation company which. at the end of the day, mostly sells labour).
But you are right that having such an important role in a starting product-oriented company is something I don't have experience with yet.
If the start-up isn't offering substantial equity, I would punt. The way you get rich is ownership of something that works out well. That's what compensates for the fact that almost all start-ups are short-lived.
They offer 2 percent in ESOP. I discount the value a lot though, in fact I am not really considering it much in my decisionmaking since as you say, start-ups tend to be short-lived. My reasoning is that the pay should be good enough to compensate for that and if it actually is successful, the ESOP is a nice bonus (though 2 percent aren't a lot unless they become really wildly sucessful which I doubt) They also offer a further increase in pay after another successful funding round.
Well my impression is kinda meh. 2% is pretty cheap, if you're one of a handful of near founders. If they're offering a way above market salary instead, that seems like a danger signal to me, like maybe they think either the company will fold or they won't need you around for all that long -- anybody can pay a very handsome salary for a short time. To my mind your current set-up bespeaks a little better biz judgment, paying people in a new company market to a little under with the promise of a stake a little later. That's financially sound, plus you prioritize those in it for a longer term. (I'm assuming here you're not drastically underpaid, because if you *are* then you should 100% jump ship, you don't want to work for people who don't recognize your value.) You've got to weigh $$ against working conditions for yourself, but I personally put a premium on really superior top management, as that is both hard to come by and a daily burden when it doesn't exist.
Any chance you could discuss this frankly with your own top management? I mean, if they offer you a bigger equity stake in the current venture that might make the decision easy. If it were my company, and I had someone I valued very highly, I'd want them to let me know the situation, so I could make them happy if it was worth it to me. But YMMV of course.
I think i could discuss this, in fact my current company has minority share in that startup and I was already discussing this with my boss, basically saying that if they offered something extraordinary, I would consider it but I'd rather stay if their offer was not that special (I did not know the exact offer yet at the time but my boss wanted to discuss it, he knew about the offer since the founders discussed it with him as well).
In my current company I don't have an equity though, only an option whose value is based on company business performance (but with a fixed range based on specific business goals being met) and which is payable in about 2 years from now (provided that I keep working there full time or close to full time throughout the 2 years). But you're right that if this were increased a bit, that might make it easier as you say.
I read John Gray's "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" and I found it to be a very good description of the differences in how my wife and I behave/communicate and how that leads to conflict.
Now, I've read a few popular psychology/self-help books before, so I wouldn't have been surprised to see a few vaguely plausible but quite general claims that kind of make sense, so that you could fit them to your reality like a horoscope. But this was more than that. I read many of the accounts of arguments couples had had and thought, "Wow, that's just the kind and sequence of things we said when arguing about X the other month, with the male/female roles matching."
To what degree are the claims the book makes about typical differences in male/female behaviour/preferences true? There's a summary of some of the key claims here:
https://fourminutebooks.com/men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus-summary/
I haven't been able to find a good discussion of this online. There are plenty of people who say, "This book is amazing and saved my marriage." as well as those who say, "This is a terrible book because it perpetuates sexist stereotypes," but not much else. I found one paper where someone did a survey of "romantic gestures" in the book suggested for men/women and didn't find men/women preferred them as the book might suggest, but that's about it.
John Gray makes a number of dubious-sounding claims about hormones and nutrition elsewhere, but he's not an expert on biology or medicine, so I don't have much faith in those. On the other hand, he has claimed that before writing his book, he was a celibate "monk" for nine years, then had sex with hundreds of women over a couple of years and asked them to "tell him their stories". If true, I suppose that may be a bigger data source than most social science studies.
Men are from a fixer-upper planet that's going to take a whole lot of work to be really nice, women are from a pure unredeemable hellscape? That can't be right, can it?
Ha ha. I suppose that's the astronomical interpretation.
The surface of Mars is Frozen, so you can fix this fixer upper with a little bit of love.
I recall from a BSD fortune that Biblical hell has lakes of molten sulphur, so must have a temperature between 115 and 445 degrees C. But the mean surface temperature of Venus is 464 degrees C. So it can't be a literal hellscape!
Venus has very high air pressure, which changes the melting and boiling points. I looked at some phase diagrams, and I'm not totally sure, but I think sulfur would indeed be liquid on the surface of Venus.
The big thing Venus has going for it in terms of interplanetary colonization is that Earth-normal air is a fairly powerful lifting gas in Venus's atmosphere, and the upper bands of Venus's atmosphere where the pressure is about the same as Earth's at sea level also has a fairly reasonable temperature range of ~30-120ºF, so floating cities are theoretically possible.
There are a few downsides, though: the colony/airships would need to be either constructed in place (out of what materials?) or transported interplanetary distances fully-assembled, either of which involves extreme engineering and logistical challenges. The colonies would also need to be build to withstand Venus's atmosphere, which is still highly corrosive at that altitude even if the temperature and pressure are reasonable. And then there's the question of what you're going to do on a floating Venusian city that's going to be worth all that effort and risk.
Here is a pretty good takedown of Gray's book: https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/10417940209373229
Thanks for the link.
I read the paper. The introduction is snarky and presents a straw man. The second half is a critical (read: social justice) analysis in which the author asserts a "blank slate" position on male/female personality differences. This doesn't invalidate the remainder, but doesn't fill me with confidence.
The first half cites results from a number of studies, mainly on when and to what degree men/women feel cherished/needed and how they respond when stressed. (I haven't looked up the individual studies.) My reading of the analysis is that there are small differences, which mostly agree with the directions of Gray's claims. However, because the differences are not large, the idea that men and women behave as if from different planets is hyperbolic (but then you knew that already).
I have not read the paper, and believe your critique of it. I def have a bad attitude about the book, some of it justified by title's absurd implication that male-female communication differences are enormous, some by my life experience and reading of social science research, both of which tell me that it's a virtual certainty that there will be considerable overlap of male and female bell curves on almost any variable.
Additionally, I was irritated by what I experienced as a sort of subtext about the author's personal skills with women, in the account of how he researched the book: After 9 years as a monk, he went into penis turbocharge mode and bedded *hundreds* of women, who found him to be such a perceptive listener that they happily confided in him about their communication experiences with menb while basking in a post-coital glow. Seems like the book's subtext is: "Had a 9 year dry spell? Read me and you too can go turbopenis and fuck hundreds of babes who will like you and confide in you."
I haven't read the book but from the summary, it seems like it teaches valuable communication skills. The contentious bit would be whether the different personalities it tries to bridge are as rigidly gender-correlated as the title implies.
Suppose I'm upset for some reason. There is definitely a problem-solving mood and a need-a-listener mood, and I seem to get more of the former while my girlfriend gets more of the latter. However, there are definitely moments when treating me like I'm "from Mars" will just make me more annoyed.
So... "the good parts aren't original, and the original parts aren't good" seems to sum it up.
I think John Gray is from Uranus.
I have no idea whether Gray's claims about men and women are true at a statistically significant level, let alone whether they are true at a noticeable-without-regression-analysis level.
But an existence proof for them being incorrect as stated is trivial - just find one woman who argues like Gray claims men do, or one man who argues like Gray claims women do; I don't even have to go outside my household to do that.
My guess is that if you believe what he says, rather than translating it into what he might in fact mean, you'll make an ass of yourself.
OTOH, those cross-purposes arguments are really really common. People with "good soft skills" can fairly reliably figure out how some other person works, and adapt their communication.
Maybe some people with meh soft skills can improve their poor track record with heuristics like this.
Thought experiment: imagine that many people really do tend to match one or other of Gray's communication patterns. Imagine farther that the pattern match is somewhat gendered. Let's say 60% of men are "male" patten, and 40% of women, and vice versa.
Now let's take Joe Clueless. He personally follows the male pattern, and currently treats everyone he encounters as the same as him. He's wrong 50% of the time overall, but 60% of the time when dealing with women, and only 40% when dealing with men. If he adopts Gray's theory, and assumes all women follow Gray's female pattern, he'll now be right 60% of the time, with all the improvements involving his dealing with women.
If men with Gray's female pattern and women with Gray's male pattern are less common, he improves even more.
He's still made of fail compared to someone with decent interpersonal skills.
But if his wife or girlfriend happens to follow Gray's female pattern, it might just save the relationship.
OTOH, if he starts treating male-pattern women as female-pattern, those relationships will somewhat predictably go straight to Hades.
And ditto for Jane Clueless, a female-pattern women with similar social aptitudes.
For what it's worth, John Gray acknowledges that a lot of what he says are generalizations that may be untrue for some people. In the introduction (of the edition I read), he writes:
"I make many generalizations about men and women in this book. Probably you will find some comments truer than others... after all, we are unique individuals with unique experiences. Sometimes in my seminar couples and individuals will share that they relate to the examples of men and women but in an opposite way. The man relates to my descriptions of women and the woman relates to my descriptions of men. I call this role reversal. If you discover you are experiencing role reversal, I want to assure you that everything is all right..."
The summary I linked doesn't mention that, and I can see how claiming generalizations were universally applicable would offend people, and applying them universally would make many inter-personal relationships worse (not just romantic ones). In any case, taken literally, the title is provocative, as "a real dog" points out.
There's something in your model that I think needs refining. The way the book is written sounds like it's mainly targeting people in long-term (heterosexual, monogamous, etc) relationships. (OK, Gray seems to have rewritten basically the same book several times, and one edition is about workplace relationships.) In this case, the outcome will be more binary, as Joe Clueless only applies Gray's ideas to one relationship (with his wife Jane). Then it's potentially either a big success or a terrible failure.
Also, what happens if Joe Clueless is married to Jane Clueful? Presumably she can at least communicate with Joe as he wants, which will diffuse a lot of arguments. Do they both have to be initially clueless to get a significant benefit?
Regarding sexist stereotypes, this is what Eugenia Cheng says about it in her book x+y:
"Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray is a famous and divisive example, but I actually found it rather useful. I didn’t take it to mean that all men behave in the “Mars”-type ways, but it helped me to recognize when someone (of any gender) was behaving in one way while I was behaving in the other, and thus helped me to communicate better and resolve situations that might otherwise have become ever more antagonistic. It helped me understand things like why I am resistant to advice when I tell someone about a problem in my life (because I am seeking validation, not a solution—in a Venus-like manner). I take the book to be really saying, “Some people, in some situations, are from Mars, and others, in other situations, are from Venus, and it’s often men who are one and women who are the other but not necessarily, and you might be both at different times in different situations.” That is a somewhat less catchy title.
Somehow the imagery is much more vivid and arresting when it involves a very distinct dichotomy between two completely different things, but our need for something vivid and arresting can get in the way of a nuanced understanding."
I agree with that interpretation...the goal is to figure out how to relate to individual people, even if there are "typical differences in male/female behaviour", you're still just talking to the one person. In my mind it's a book about making a serious effort at understanding the person in front of you, and how hard that can be sometimes, and just how different people can be from each other; it's not a book about how men and women are different.
Pretty Venerean take.
Have a Martial (?) take. If you're upset, try to remember to say whether you want listening or advice. It's possible that which you want will change in the course of a conversation.
If you talking with someone who's upset, ask them whether they'd rather have listening or advice.
I'm inclined to think that people who don't like the idea of saying which they want are worth avoiding, but I lack experience, so this is a guess. This rule doesn't apply to small children.
I found the same thing. I found it very difficult to work out why my good lady was arguing in such an unproductive fashion before I read that book and discovered that we were both aiming for different goals in the conversation.
I was using speech to try to solve the problem while she was using speech to help her consider the different aspects of the problem.
Once I recognised that behaviour, and stopped trying to solve the problem, everything made sense.
I’m skeptical. I see a lot of variability between individual men and individual women but don’t see a great different between one group and the other. Maybe it should be something like men are from Iowa and women are from Illinois.
This is the issue I was actually hoping for some insight/commentary on.
I'm aware of some differences in the "Big Five" personality traits, and of the people/things difference, all of which have been discussed on this blog and its predecessor. But these traits seem quite low-level compared with claims like "women want men to listen to them while men desire solutions to problems". That sounds like a stereotype.
Research on stereotypes (for example, Jussim/Crawford/Rubinstein) shows they are often true qualitatively. But has anyone looked at these stereotypes specifically? Obviously something like that is going to be quite hard to measure empirically, but I imagine you could devise an experiment involving recording arguments and coding what each person talked about.
For a literary take on the matter read Virginia Wolfe’s “Orlando”
There are tests that try to determine gender. I took one once and they weren’t sure if I was a guy in spite of my years of eating rusty spikes for breakfast. [I wish didn’t have to do this but: Joke]
Maybe I should have used a magnifying glass to fry ants instead of taking the thing away from my brother. I dunno.
What is a very fascinating aspect of your favorite historical group that has never been implemented in a video game in a representative way? Consider the Socii system of the Romans as a potential example. Examples can be political, religious, administrative, etc. Don't limit yourself to war games mechanics.
After reading Bret Devereaux's article on the logistics of the Mongol hordes (a slow-moving base camp with the sheep moving between grazing lands, supported by hunters traveling much longer distances on horseback) I really want to see it implemented in a game. It almost reminds me of XCOM 2's mechanics with the Avenger.
Nomadic groups in general are hard to represent in a traditional cities-and-borders sort of wargame. Have any games done a good job with that?
They aren't a real people, but I like how the Beastmen factions (imagine if the Greco-Roman nature monsters were demonic, hated humans, and lived in the HRE) work in Total Warhammer II. Your army's units don't have upkeep- instead you have a pretty strict cap on how many of the non-fodder units you can recruit, which you raise by building a reputation through military aggression (this attracts more monsters to your banner). This reputation determines a bunch of other things (want your hordes to start stronger? Spend reputation points. Want the unique commanders with special mechanics for their horde? Spend reputation points. Want an extra horde? Reputation points.) The income you get through burning cities to the ground is spent on upgrading your hordes' camps, which lets them field-recruit replacement units and adds passive bonuses to them in battle. The only permanent settlements you build are giant monoliths to your evil gods, which then mark all the surrounding territory for aggressive raiding and razing and (once you're done with the raid-and-raze phase) poison the land so that the other factions have to smash the monolith (and the army guarding it) to reclaim their lands. Burn enough valuable settlements and dedicate the land to the elder gods, and you win. Your army itself also vanishes when encamped (Beastmen lurk in the forests and mountains away from the trade roads) and can take shortcuts through impassible forests, swamps, and mountains (because they can take paths "civilized" armies baggage trains can't), although they can't just pop up out of nowhere and attack over the Alps.
It encourages a very unpredictable, aggressive playstyle while also avoiding one of the biggest problems horde factions run into in cities-and-borders games (Other factions immediately reclaiming the territory you torched).
The Dharma Kings of Tibet. Tibetans get stereotyped as a bunch of humble saffron-robed pacifist farmers so heavily that the fact they had three kings who were simultaneously VERY Buddhist and VERY warlike is completely glossed over.
I'd love to see a video game that covered either side of the wars between the Tibetans and the Qiang and Xia peoples.
This is a really weird question. What do you mean implemented in a video game?
My favorite historical group are the early Royal Society scientists, Hooke and Wilkins and Christopher Wren and all them. The inventors of the experimental method, and specifically biology, computer science, and... architecture where your buildings don't fall down, respectively
Nothing remotely related to any of these people or their philosophies or their lives has anything to do with video games, so I don't really know what to comment on. Is this the kind of example you were looking for?
Something like the Roman Socii system has never been effectively implemented by a strategy game, even those ostensibly about Rome.
can I get money to push anti climate legislation?
as a hedge against the very remote possibility the cathedrals' orthodoxy is wrong
The orthodoxy of "global warming is coming" seems to not be worth hedging against.
As for the orthodoxy of "this will be disastrous for the human race", I'd invest in Siberian agriculture.
How is this for a hedge:
The current climate change orthodoxy states that coal is very badwrong (or badong) and makes Jesus cry . This has resulted in coal fired power plants in places like the UK being demolished and replaced with renewables like wind, which has weakened the resiliency of their power grid and resulted in a few blackouts. How about instead of outright demolishing these plants they're mothballed or kept in service at significantly reduced capacity so that they can be reactivated if it turns out the threat of climate change is overstated and non-nuclear green energy can't power an advanced industrialized nation.
Sorry my dude, but climate science is settled, which is why we need all these research grants for climate science. If you don't believe me just look at this graph I found on reddit of global temperature increase that conveniently begins at the end of the little ice age.
And then I point out that none of the past temperature reconstructions, not even that magenta one on the bottom, show a 1°C global temperature increase in a 50 year period. Do you (A) move the goalpost, (B) argue all global reconstructions of the past are wrong but YOU know The Truth, (C) argue current global temperature records are a hoax, (D) change your tune or (E) stay silent?
https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1492955687776927744
MODERATOR ACTION: This whole thread fails all three of the "true, kind, necessary" criteria. Poster is banned indefinitely.
I see. You're a hard one to read.
Wrong about what? Wrong that the climate is changing? That's very unlikely. Wrong that disaster is looming? That's very likely. However, there really isn't a plausible short position in the former, and there doesn't seem to much action on the long side of the latter. I can't think of any asset class that's being severely underpriced by a market that thinks it will become worthless due to climate disaster, or conversely that's being severely overpriced by a market that thinks it will become fabulously valuable due to climate disaster. So far as revealed-preference goes not many people seem to be acting on a belief in climate disaster in the short-term, whatever they might say.
This tracks a lot of my thoughts. Theoretically you could buy a lot of oceanfront property in areas that are supposed to go underwater in <10 years for practically nothing, but in practice those properties appear to still be priced as if they wont go underwater at all.
Renewable power technology seems like an area that could be overpriced, but it's either pretty close to expected price or, if it's actually too high now, likely to remain too high for the foreseeable future.
That's not hedging, that's actively sabotaging yourself. It's the equivalent of taking a short position against the same equity you have a long position on.
I don't know exactly what an equivalent hedge would be in this situation. Maybe investing in something that doesn't actively contribute to climate change, but would benefit greatly if climate change turned out to be incorrect. Like maybe investing in agriculture in regions that are projected to become less fertile due to climate change.
Seems like there's not a lot that an extra dollar given to you could accomplish that Exxon et. al., haven't already done?
For the political and moral philosophers on here: Do you consider Marxism as an ideology (as originally intended by Marx) to be fundamentally deontological or consequentialist in nature, a mix of both, or something else altogether?
I've always considered Marxism to be a hard consequentialist ideology, since it seems largely centered around a sort of "the ends justify the means" logic (though I suppose that could be said about most ideologies). But recently I heard someone arguing that Marxism actually exemplifies the flaws of *deontological* thinking, since the Marxist worldview - despite its claim of scientific objectivity and "historical materialism" - is heavily rooted in moral axioms and value judgments which are simply taken for granted. And I think he had a point there, though I always considered the axioms of the Marxist worldview to be epistemological rather than moral, but maybe they're both. Another person in the discussion claimed that Marxism combined both deontological and consequentialist thinking (and in his very critical view, it combined the worst elements of both, though some may find that overly harsh).
I suppose an argument could also be made that Marxism was rooted in virtue ethics (see: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/v/i.htm#virtue), though that seems like a bit more of a stretch to me. And I've occasionally heard people say that Marxism was an egoist or nihilist ideology, but that usually comes from either 1. anti-Marxist conservatives who don't really know what Marxism is and just think of it as generically evil, and also think of egoism/nihilism as generically evil, or 2. leftists who are egoists or nihilists themselves and also nominally Marxist, but only adhere to Marxism for tribal signaling reasons and/or because they think it would personally benefit them. In both cases, I think it's safe to say that those people don't have a great understanding of what Marxism is, and the idea that Marxism is either egoist or nihilist in nature seems rather obviously wrong to anyone who's actually familiar with it.
In common usage, "the ends justify the means" excludes "the means" from "the ends" so that we don't worry about the eggs we broke to make the omelet. A true consequentialist includes "the means" in "the ends", so those broken eggshells - and the ripple effects produced in society by those who care about those eggshells - as part of "the ends". Thus "the ends justify the means" is a different (and less respectable) idea than consequentialism.
Now, a utilitarian consequentialist is looking for a very good and very likely outcome (as good as ze can get), not merely an outcome that one finds plausible and appealing in some idealistic way. (Marx always sounded to me like an idealist.) Maybe he was not utilitarian but rather egoist, which I think is a form of consequentialism, but not the usual kind. Regardless, I strongly doubt he behaved as a serious modern consequentialist would, specifically: thinking through consequences carefully; taking risks (and consequences) of failure seriously; considering many possible courses of action and public policies in an effort to discover the best available distribution of consequences.
How can I strongly doubt this without actually reading Marx? Aside from the fact that almost no one employs consequentialism well, and Scott's characterization of Marx as expecting his desired outcome would happen magically, there's the material fact of how communist regimes turned out in reality, and the lack of interest in Marx from consequentialists I respect.
Edit: perhaps I'm being unfair by implying that badly-done consequentialism isn't "real consequentialism". I guess I have a tendency to avoid lumping the bad in with the good, lest good consequentialism look bad by association. Edit 2: note that I'm not a philosopher as you requested, maybe that was obvious since I didn't read Marx.
You will probably be interested in Bernard Yack's perspective in *The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche*. I have only read the reviews. Quotes from reviews:
"Freedom for Kant was defined as autonomy, as freedom from externally conditioned objects of desire. He recognised, however, that autonomy was to be employed as a measure of human behaviour; it was not a goal one could expect to fully realise. It was Kant's successors in the 1790s who demanded that Kantian autonomy become the goal of political association and social interaction. The French Revolution was an important catalyst, raising hopes for integral social regeneration and moral renewal. And classical models of harmony seemed to demonstrate that the dehumanising spirit of modern society was historically contingent, simply the most intractible modern obstacle to the 'realisation' of a human autonomy in harmony with nature." (Vincent, Stephen, 1988. History of European Ideas 9(3))
Yack classes Marx as a Left Kantian. The Left Kantians' “criterion for the evaluation of principles of political association is a kind of extension into the public realm of the categorical imperative employed to evaluate the goodness of the will in the precincts of personal morality. According to Yack, the Kantian left is characterized by 'the conviction that man is justified in rejecting all political institutions that do not embody the capacity for autonomy,' and this conviction necessarily yields 'dissatisfaction with, and determination to replace, any social condition that does not fully reflect and embody man's humanity.'” (Reynolds, Charles, 1987. Soundings 70 (3/4))
I lack the background to analyze this, especially the objections in the critical and lukewarm reviews. But there's a reason I was motivated to read every review I could find. Yack's idea seems something like a missing puzzle piece for what I hadn't been able to grasp about the background of Marxism. And not only Marxism.
Perhaps I can suggest a merging of ideas. At the time that Marx wrote, he was leaning very heavily on empirical observations. In the 150 years since that time, much has changed about the world and about how capitalism is practiced. Approaching the world of 1890 through the eyes of Marx is consequentialist, while approaching the world of 2020 through the eyes of Marx has taken on a morality that bridges the differences between what Marx could have known about society (i.e. prior to welfare, Medicare, Social Security, and Democratic Socialists Scandinavian countries) and what is different now. To take 150-year-old writings as perfectly coherent given advances in society requires an almost religious devotion to the underlying ethos. That is, a nearly religious sense of morality imputed to the underlying goals, reinterpreted into modern day Marxism.
I think it's safe to say that anyone who reads Marx and doesn't see egoism plainly written in his work has a particular reading in mind when they start, just as somebody who reads Atlas Shrugged and doesn't notice that the central complaint of the book is how rich and powerful people appropriate other people's work and use it to bribe the lower classes to maintain their own control over society probably has a particular reading in mind when they start.
Alternatively they have a conception of egoism which excludes most egoistic philosophers, in which they conceptualize man as something other than a social animal. Stirner is a decent start at an understanding of egoism in these terms, and echoes of the egoistic union appear, not coincidentally, in Atlas Shrugged. Egoistic philosophy tends to focus on the negative, however; on the ways in which existing society does badly, not in the ways in which it could do better.
Essentially, in a social animal such as man, egoism leads naturally to mutualism, and even, in a very narrow and technical sense, altruism (explicitly not Comtean altruism, but rather biological altruism), in the same way evolution, which is similarly self-interested, leads to these same elements.
I have a hard time reading Marx because of that egoism. You might be using the term in a different way though. I’m thinking of all the asides sniping at rival thinkers.
Edit:
Yeah pretty sure you meant it in another sense. Just did a search on egoism + philosophy. Ethical egoism huh, imagine that.
Marxism as written by Marx or as practiced by Marxists? Because Marxism as written by Marx has little ethical content. Marx is largely uninterested in morality because he considers it a superstructure determined by underlying material conditions. Morals are just a result of the world-historical materialist moment you find yourself in. It's dependent on your mode of production. If you are born in feudalism you will have feudal morals. If you are born in capitalism you will have capitalist morals. If you are born in socialism you will have socialist morals.
Marx actually attacks the idea of morality per se. The idea of making a more just world is an incoherent concept to Marx and he attacks it as such. Marx is actually surprisingly hostile to modern left, even the modern far left. Marx has an entire rant about how things like minimum wages or equal pay or whatever are nonsense. He also wasn't a big fan of the welfare state or income redistribution. And not just for accelerationist reasons. The modern American far left has much more in common with left anarchism like Kropotkin than Marx. Something which the actual remaining Communists like the Chinese have noticed and criticized.
But Marxism as practiced has always been a melange of far left beliefs. To use the terms of this blog, the ideology was not the movement and the movement marinated in a more generic form of far left politics. A lot of utopians call themselves Marxists while ignoring that Marx spilled a lot of ink talking about how pursuing justice or vague utopian ideas was a terrible waste of time.
As practiced? Yeah, Marxism is often practiced as a deontological morality. Though again, this is more from other far leftists than Marx strictly speaking.
>the actual remaining Communists like the Chinese
This is an overly casual statement and one I think needs some unpacking, because if it's accurate, surely you don't expect it to be self-evident to everyone?
If China's leadership is made up of actual remaining Communists, then was Deng Xiaoping likewise? If he was, was Mao?
Yes, I expect it to be self-evident to everyone. Nothing about China's commitment to Communism is subtle. The majority of the world's self-proclaimed Communists party members (nearly a hundred million of them) are CCP members. It's highly inconvenient for certain western socialists to admit the majority of their movement is made up of loyalists to totalitarian one party states. But it is nevertheless true.
Of course, not all Communists support the Chinese interpretation of Communism. But the straight up denial that they are Communists is delusional. It's like the type of extremist Protestant who is highly invested in demanding that Catholics aren't really Christians.
Yes, China's leadership is made up of Communists. Deng Xiaoping was a Communist. So was Mao. And Hua Guofeng, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. Chinese Communist Party members are Communists. The Pope is also Catholic. And Biden, I have been reliably informed, is a Democrat.
"But the straight up denial that they are Communists is delusional"
A definition (such as "actual Communist") cannot be delusional. That's a category error.
Furthermore, I have no opinion on what an actual Communist is and who qualifies.
All I was doing in my previous comment was drawing attention to the fact that millions of people think there were some important changes after the Cultural Revolution.
The group of people who took power and shaped China over the next few decades represent a historical course that we can imagine going the other way.
Millions of people think it was a Big Deal, regardless of whether they were for it or opposed, whether they're Chinese or not, whether they think it was an improvement or not.
The only type of person I would expect to say "China is run by actual Communists and it is self-evident to everyone" is someone actually running China now. I would not count on Mao, if he was resurrected, agreeing.
> The only type of person I would expect to say "China is run by actual Communists and it is self-evident to everyone" is someone actually running China now.
Or somebody who thinks that the definition of a word includes the way the word is used by most people. And most people would say China is Communist, and most people who identify as Communist are Chinese. So, the CCP is communist under conventional ways of using human language.
"Actual" qualifies "Communist" in what I wrote. You're addressing me as though that word was not there. Conventional ways of using language include adjectives.
Suppose I said that it's not clear the US is run by regular (non-Blue Dog) Democrats.
And in response, someone said that the US is run by Democrats under conventional ways of using human language, because Democrats have the House, Senate, and Presidency right now. That's not a rebuttal.
The modifier matters; it is distinguishing people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema from Democrats in general.
Does the analogy help?
You are equivocating. If you want to argue China is no longer Communist then come out and say it. Make your case. Don't pretend you have no opinion and then hint and gesture.
> The only type of person I would expect to say "China is run by actual Communists and it is self-evident to everyone" is someone actually running China now. I would not count on Mao, if he was resurrected, agreeing.
I'd expect it to be said by the vast majority of Communists and the international Communist movement. Did you know the CCP and the CPUSA both attend an international conference of Communist Parties together? Along with about fifty other countries' Communist parties. There is a narrow view, popular among certain western leftists, that that is not "real" Communism. But the vast majority of self-proclaimed Communists both by total population, world influence, and number of Marxist theoreticians disagree.
Now that doesn't mean they're wrong any more than the greater number of Catholics disproves Protestantism. But it's a parochial view that says the opinion of Communism from a dorm at Berkeley is more correct and important than the view of the CCP. Likewise, the people who think the constant furious study of Communist doctrine and Xi's constant references to historical materialism are all just a lying grift are... well, to say I find their theory badly supported is an understatement.
>But it's a parochial view that says the opinion of Communism from a dorm at Berkeley is more correct and important than the view of the CCP.
This is a made up argument between imaginary people, and I wish you'd stop trying to rope me into such.
But it raises the question for me - the CCP is something like 6% of the population, no? So why *would* their opinion be privileged?
I don't know how it works in countries where there is one party and a relatively small percentage of the population belongs, but it is *clearly* not a "party" as in Western democracies.
The way I figure it, on one side of the debate you've got 95 million Chinese Communist Party members, who will tell you that Communism is whatever the CCP says it is.
And on the other side of the debate you've got Marx and Mao, and they're both dead.
I was gonna write something to the effect of "And by that logic, the earth was at the center of the universe until around the 1800's, when suddenly the sun was at the center instead!", but I think I like this formulation better.
I've always thought Marxism was plainly consequentialist. He considered himself a scientist in developing a theory of how things *must* turn out due to the real world laws of History, which is governed by dialectical materialism. He's commonly (and fairly) lumped in with the Classical Economists (Smith, Ricardo, Mill the elder).
Whatever normative stuff exists in Marx coexists peacefully with all the reams of data he gathered in the British Library, ploughing away at his (since disproven) ideas of "Scientific Socialism."
Over on reddit I heard the new term "sanewashing" to refer to a situation where
* A radical fringe produces a new term like "defund the police" and mean it in a literal sense.
* Due to luck or some other reason the term becomes widespread and associated with the tribe.
* More moderate and influential members of the tribe try to redefine the term to something within the overton window "we mean more money for social care".
Sort of like a bailey organically forming around a motte. But without the people in the bailey ever agreeing with the motte. I don't have any deep thoughts but I thought it was an interesting word and wanted to share.
I think you're describing a thing that happens, but I don't think it happens often enough or successfully enough that we really need a word for it.
In particular, no amount of "sanewashing" is going to make the people who mean it literally and seriously, go away. They've got no place to go, you're(*) literally claiming their ideological territory and redefining it as your own. But on top of the "radical fringe", you've got a lot more people who don't have a particularly strong concept of what policy changes they want but very much do want drastic results which the proposed "moderate"" proposals will never deliver.
And the opposition, will never believe you don't mean the literal version. Or if the smarter among them do, they'll mostly be smart enough to know that painting you as an advocate of the literal
So, the most likely outcome of "sanewashing" is failure and defeat. Weakened by tribal infighting with the radicals who won't give up, and handing the enemy the near-superweapon of a literally extreme position to argue against and incite fear of, is not a winning combination.
The second most likely outcome is I think that you get mos of the radical version anyway. The radicals always wanted that, and you probably had to compromise with them (but not them with you) to avoid the destructive infighting. The policy-ambivalent will want that as soon as they realize the moderate compromise isn't a really big win. Your coalition had the strength to win in spite of the enemy casting you all as radicals, and momentum is a thing, so you overshoot.
Actually getting the moderate policy proposal implemented in any significant way seems like the least likely outcome.
But there should be examples of it working at least occasionally. Does anyone here have any off the top of their head?
* Casting "you" in this discussion in the role of the sanewasher for simplicity.
And so following my advice Biden in effect bluntly called Defund the Police stupid last night. :)
"In particular, no amount of "sanewashing" is going to make the people who mean it literally and seriously, go away"
There's an approximation. Organised movements can withdraw official membership from those embarassing.
Wow. A footnote to a blog comment. I love it!
Edit
You describe the problem well. The fringe is extreme not just in it's policy ideas , they are also entirely unwilling to make a sensible compromise.
It seems this happens a lot in politics. I'm reading Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook". The British CP is described as entirely extreme. Old friends joke darkly that if they were in the Soviet Union one of them would have shot the other as a traitor.
The only solution that comes to mind is when something idiotic is put forward by the fringe the more moderate part of the coalition bluntly calls it stupid.
I saw a gentler approach in the Twin Cities. To their credit, the local media interviewed several Black families in predominately Black North Minneapolis. These were ordinary citizens not the folks at the barricades. To a person they said defunding the police was not a good idea.
This gives some balance to people paying attention but it won't prevent the issue being used as a cudgel against the Left.
That slogan was so obviously damaging the sane portion of the left should have disowned it immediately or maybe said it came from The Proud Boys disguised as BLM activists.
On the other hand, think about what "sanewashing" looks like from the point of view of one of the sane people.
You're out there protesting sensibly in favour of something sane. Now some less sane people show up at your protest (an experience very common on both sides) and start protesting in favour of something less sane.
Do you:
a) Turn around and immediately start fighting (whether physically or metaphorically) the less sane people to ensure that the purity of your sane protest is not tainted by less sane versions of itself?
b) Fully embrace the messaging of the less sane people? Or...
c) Argue that "Well actually I guess that the slogans of the less sane people could be interpreted as actually calling for this sane thing".
You could argue that (a) is the most intellectually honest thing to do, but nobody wants to spend all their time trying to purge crazies from their own side; if you do this then every protest movement immediately degenerates into an internal shitfight. It's easy to see how (c) is pretty tempting. And I've probably done it myself without realising.
> Now some less sane people show up at your protest (an experience very common on both sides) and start protesting in favour of something less sane.
I d) worry about media showing the crazy person's signs with me in the background, and become less likely to attend protests in the future.
> You're out there protesting sensibly in favour of something sane. Now some less sane people show up at your protest (an experience very common on both sides) and start protesting in favour of something less sane.
True. If you get on a bus to DC to protest the premature demise of the human race or another pointless war you will get there and run into a hard headed individual who demands to know, “Do you support the oppressed xyz minority’s insurgency in country ABC? Do you? Yes or no?”
You aren’t going to reason your way out of that confrontation.
Sanewashing is about a movement that *at its core* is made up of crazies, not just about a movement that has crazies show up. If crazies start showing up, you need to figure out what the core of the movement is in order to know whether it's you or them who are misled.
Warning signs include "the crazies are historically connected to the movement" and "the slogans of the movement don't take a lot of interpretation to support the crazies".
Is there a difference in the outcome?
Motte -> easily defensible position
Bailey -> hard to defend, valuable/lucrative/powerful position
Normal motte & bailey -> the same group of people by default advocating for the bailey, but retreating to the motte when pressed
Sanewashing would be a motte arising in the midst of an extremely indefensible bailey, except that that motte insists that in all circumstances the motte is real and the bailey doesn't exist.
So, sanewashing doesn't really fit the motte & bailey model.
Finding a catchy and comprehensible term to describe the strategy of the Motte and Bailey (which literally no one who isn't a geek understands) is desperately needed. While strategic equivocation is certainly better than medieval fortifications trivia, it may not be *that* much better. But "sanewashing" may be just the pithy and sticky term we need to really capture the issue. Thanks for sharing!
The airplane-and-black-box fallacy? (nah I don't have a good idea)
Sanewashing isn't exactly the same thing as motte and bailey though. Motte and bailey is basically a combination of the equivocation and bait-and-switch fallacies, it's a tactic where someone tries to smuggle in extreme views by equivocating them with more acceptable ones. Sanewashing is different because it occurs on a group level rather than an individual level, and it's not really an intentional attempt to deceive; there's one set of people in the "motte" and another set of people in the "bailey," and they don't really cross into each other's territory or even seem to recognize that the other group exists; they both use the same slogans, but have different (yet earnest!) beliefs about what that slogan means.
Both terms refer to the same situation, where you have a bunch of basically-sane ideas and a bunch of crazy ideas coming from the same mob. This is one of those situations that looks very different when you're in the mob versus when you're outside the mob.
If the mob are your enemies then you can see that _clearly_ the mob is actually in favour of the crazy ideas, and are just using the sane ideas as some kind of cover.
When you're actually inside the mob, though, it feels different. It feels like you're trying to make a sensible point, and it's not fair that your opponents keep focusing on that tiny lunatic fringe with the crazy ideas.
BLM is an example on the left, that Canadian trucker convoy is an example on the right. Supposedly some idiot showed up at the rally in Ottawa with a swastika flag, and now all of a sudden "truckers shouldn't have to get vaccinated if they don't want to" has been declared the motte of the bailey "Nazism forever lol".
Report from various other blogs:
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The Zvi responds to Bounded Distrust.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/on-bounded-distrust/
"The difference is that Scott seems to think that the government, media and other authority figures continue mostly to play by a version of these rules that I believe they mostly used to follow. He doesn’t draw any parallels to the past, but his version of bounded distrust reads like something one might plausibly believe in 2015, and which I believe was largely the case in 1995. I am confused about how old the old rules are, and which ones would still have held mostly true in (for example) 1895 or in Ancient Rome.
Whereas in 2022, after everything that has happened with the pandemic and also otherwise, I strongly believe that the trust and epistemic commons that existed previously have been burned down. The price of breaking the old rules is lower, but it is more than that. The price of being viewed as actually following the old rules is higher than the cost of not following them, in addition to the local benefits of breaking the old rules. Thus the old rules mostly are not followed."
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ACOUP, a professional Roman historian, responds to Were There Dark Ages? (an old SSC post, which he's probably not aware of).
Part I: Words: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/
"In this sense there really is a very strong argument to be made that the ‘Romans’ and indeed Roman culture never left Rome’s lost western provinces – the collapse of the political order did not bring with it the collapse of the Roman linguistic or cultural sphere, even if it did fragment it."
"And so when it comes to culture and literature, it seems that the change-and-continuity knight holds the field – there is quite a lot of evidence for the survival of elements of Roman culture in post-Roman western Europe, from language, to religion, to artwork and literature."
Part II: Institutions: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-ii-institutions/
"If on politics we have a bit of a mix between decline and continuity, when it comes to the cities that made up the old political system, the ‘decline and fall’ knight strikes a clear blow: the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later. The institutions that had maintained it (like the curiales) largely vanished, replaced in some cases by local ‘notables’ and in other cases by ruralization."
"Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages."
Part III: Things, coming on Friday. ACOUP has promised a discussion of how life changed for the typical person in this part.
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My own blog has been laying out a simple model for what it would take to transition electricity production from mostly fossil fuels either to solar & wind or to nuclear.
Part 1: http://thechaostician.com/generating-electricity-without-fossil-fuels-part-i-overview-of-alternative-power-sources/
How should we generate electricity?
Currently, the majority of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, especially coal and natural gas. Burning fossil fuels has given us access to tremendous amounts of energy and has made modern civilization possible. Without them, we would have had trouble feeding ourselves, let alone obtaining our current standard of living.
Unfortunately, burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that warm the global climate. And they will run out eventually. What other sources are available?
Part 2: http://thechaostician.com/generating-electricity-without-fossil-fuels-part-ii-the-perspective-of-the-grid/
In this post, we will take the perspective of the grid. How do each of these power sources impact the functioning of the grid?
Part 3: http://thechaostician.com/generating-electricity-without-fossil-fuels-part-iii-a-simple-model/
This post will put together the results of Parts I & II in a simple model to test different strategies for moving away from using fossil fuels to generate our electricity.
The simplifications in the model will make the transition away from fossil fuels look easier than it is. But they should be a fair comparison between the different strategies we might use.
In Part 4, coming on Thursday, I will compare these strategies and describe what I think the best policies are.
I'd be curious if you have any commentary on the wordcel vs rotator spectrum: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
"My tribe good and pure, your tribe bad and evil" is the least interesting argument in the world.
true, it really does boil down to that
Does anyone know of grants that a non-profit can apply for in the Seattle are to acquire computers for daily use?
A local non-profit is looking for somewhere between 8-12 laptops - in some cases they can make do with Chromebooks, but in other instances they'd need Macbooks (because of software dependencies). Factoring in support contracts, I'm thinking roughly USD 10k.
You know how children are easily entertained? They play the same games for hours, they watch their favorite movies over and over and so on. Some of them would even eat the same food every single meal if they could.
I wonder if that has something to do with the way they learn. Supposedly there are some topics like language, music and multiplication tables that are said to be easier to learn while you are a child. Learning those topics involve lots of repetition, and children are apparently more tolerant of repetition. Is that really true or just folk pedagogy?
If true, is there a way to induce this state of mind? If there is, what would be the drawbacks?
I don't know about children having more tolerance for repetition when it comes to actually learning useful things. I think adult me would be able to learn to play a musical instrument much faster than child me could, because adult me has more discipline. Adult me is capable of spending hours doing a fairly boring task if there's going to be a payoff, whereas child me would get distracted and go goof off doing something more fun.
I've heard a theory that they only absorb something in pieces, and so they replay something or re-do it until they've fully assimilated it, and move on to the next thing. Could this be? Not sure how valid it is
That's neat, I was going to respond with the same thing. It seems they miss a ton of details on viewing a movie or something, and then each additional viewing actually adds instead of repeats.
I'm sure that there's more to why they want to keep re-watching than that, but that's been my guess about how they can tolerate the repetition.
Well my toddler will ask for the same bedtime story every night for 1-2 weeks, and then move on to a new one. And I recall when Blues Clues first came out they would air the exact same episode very day for a week. They said that the research showed it was the best way to engage with toddler, who will watch silently on the first day and by day seven would point out all the clues and answer the hosts when they asked questions.
It seems weird to me to say that children learn language quickly because they are "tolerant of repetition". My model is that children learn language quickly because it's the ultimate "immersion" experience -- they're practicing all day every day. It seems to me that what you're calling being "tolerant of repetition" is just enjoying watching TV, talking to people, and engaging with the world.
I've never heard anyone say it's easier to learn multiplication tables as a child.
So I'm on the side of "folk pedagogy".
I think the neuroplasticity aspect is more important than repetition.
I'd thought of mentioning that, too. Not sure if/how it ties in to the original poster's assertion (that I agree with) that children can be obsessed with watching the same movie over and over again. Maybe just two unrelated phenomena.
Also there's a ton of data coming out of the altered transcriptome of first pregnancies (nulliparous mothers) vs subsequent pregnancies from scRNAseq of various model organisms
Nulligravida or nulliparous? The distinction seems crucial here, if one is wondering about the complex microscopic interaction between mother and fetus, which would be lots more interesting than mere intracorporeal effects, I think.
Nulligravida!!! Thx for the correction - mainly uterine lining and blastocyst transcriptomics are a bit different during the first implantation- but not in any gene sets that are obviously interesting/impactful
So, I've been tapped to review a battery science-related paper by a journal editor who is a friend of mine. I've done peer review before, but those were on shorter papers with a focus on specific technological advances; this is closer to a review paper. Does anyone have any tips on how to do it well? I'd like to do a good job on this.
The greatest success in peer reviewing is not rejecting a bad paper, but helping make a mediocre paper better. And maybe you've got one of the bad ones that has to be rejected, but for your first pass at least assume that the paper is worth publishing and try to offer advice on how to improve it.
If it's a review paper, then you need to look at it from the point of view of a relative newbie to the field. Review papers aren't *only* for newcomers, but that is an important part of the target audience. Look for the things that were left out because "everybody knows", but really only veterans know. Make sure that the depth of coverage is reasonably uniform across all areas of the field, not diving too deeply into the things the author knows best and ignoring the rest. Make extra sure that all the terms and jargon are defined.
And, +1 to everything Carl Pham says.
Unless you are a super duper master of the field, your primary job should be to ensure that the article is crystal clear and comprehensive, and that's about it. Make sure all the important statements are clearly stated, reservations and hedges clearly laid out, important assertions backed up by math, figures, or at least references which directly address the point. Imagine you're a new graduate student trying to get a one-stop review of whatever issues are covered here -- make sure that hypothetical reader can either find thoroughly documented info here, well organized, or at least can start his literature search with a good grasp of the search terms needed, the authors' names to be looked up, maybe even other and previous review articles. It goes without saying to make sure symbols are well-defined, equations are completely explained, no mystery jumps in logic or math occur, graphs and diagrams unmistakable and unambiguous. This is kind of drudgy work, but future readers will thank you for it.
If you want to go beyond that to make sure they cover all the areas of the subfield that are relevant, you can do that, too, but that would require a formidable mastery of the field.
Also pragmatically make it great/be harsh because my go to suggestion to friends who don't know what to do with their life is to go into Chem E to work on battery chemistry to make batteries capable of making renewables actually convenient/not absurd. And it would be great to have a review that amalgamates all the technical challenges.
Sorry, I'm a former ecoterrorist raised by people in geology/hydrology/energy-sector adjacent work.
Be honest, be nice, but be constructively critical on what needs to be added or subtracted or reconfigured to create an actually useful comprehensive up-to-date review so that lazy PhD students will make it a go to citation and it functions as a sort of historical snapshot of understanding right now with an eye on how future developments could unfold
Is there any data repository on families around the world and their offspring # and gender ratio?
Whenever I meet another family with seven daughters like my mothers I definitely think there's gotta be some weird LINE1 biology/methylation/TET dysregulation requiring rhox or something going on in the Dad's spermatogenesis but then I remember I should look at actual empirical data
It also could be there's some factor killing off the sons before they make it to term.
Parental stress has been linked to higher likelyhood of female children, see eg https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2007/11/15/stress-city
Well don't overlook more plebeian explanations, like a slightly atypical delta in hours/days between peek horniness and ovulation.
I vaguely recall reading about an extended French family where they always have daughters.
I'll google at the doctoral reception later, but if anyone has a link
You are sent back in time to 1939 take over the Emperor of Japan's body and mind. Your task is to direct Japanese government and military policy so as to ensure the long-term survival of the Japanese Empire. What do you do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territories_acquired_by_the_Empire_of_Japan#/media/File:Japanese_Empire2.png
The obvious answer (ignoring the issues about how I as Emperor can actually control Japan) seems to be to join the winning side. Declare that Japan is a British ally, sink a few German ships in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and forego any future territorial expansion, concentrating on consolidating what I've already got.
Meanwhile, Japan very quietly starts acquiring and enriching uranium...
The Japanese often claimed to be liberating territories from colonialism. You could decide to actually do it and gain the support of the people.
1939 is too late and the Japanese Emperor was not well positioned to intervene at that point...
Right after the Battle of France when the UK is at its most desperate (July 1940) I offer to send planes, ships, and weapons to help defend the UK in return for the UK recognizing Japanese guardianship of Asian colonies of countries that have been conquered by the Nazis. If the UK doesn't go along I tell them that the Nazis have developed nerve gas that they will use in an invasion of the UK and suggest that UK intelligence use their sources to confirm that the Nazis indeed have such gas. I tell the Japanese army that the US will soon have atomic weapons and so we really, really shouldn't anger America by taking more and more of China. I tell John von Neumann that if he moves to Japan I will let in 10,000 Jewish refugees and then set him to work developing computers.
> I offer to send planes, ships, and weapons to help defend the UK in return for the UK recognizing Japanese guardianship of Asian colonies of countries that have been conquered by the Nazis
This may well work. It would be tempting for the British to give the Dutch East Indies to Japan in return for help.
> If the UK doesn't go along
The implied threat of Japan siding with Germany and Italy may well be persuasive, as those three together have a larger navy than Britain.
The U.K. had enough gas masks for their entire population. The ease of defending against gas is part of the reason no one used it in WWII.
This makes one wonder why governments didn't have enough N95s for their entire population in 2020.
> The U.K. had enough gas masks for their entire population
These protect against breathing it, however nerve gas enters through the skin.
This would be a lot easier if starting from 1933. But from 1 Jan 1939, here goes...
A crash program to fix Japan's biggest military weaknesses in 1939, which were:
Navy: radar, decent AA guns, ASW.
Army: decent tank, SMG Panzerfaust/bazooka equivalent.
Japan's main economic weakness was lack of oil, so a crash program to ramp up shale oil, coal and iron ore production especially in Manchuria.
Diplomatically: make peace with China. Japan can't afford a long war, and it wasn't possible to win it quickly.
Japan really needed raw materials, which could be got from either Siberia or the Dutch East Indies. To this end, encourage Indonesia nationalists to rise up against the Dutch (when the time is right). Train and arm them.
Regarding foreign policy, Japan needs to make sure never to fight a war against USA as it will lose. A war against one of UK or Russia, provided Japan is allied with Germany (and Italy in the case of war v. UK), is winnable.
It would make sense for Hirohito to go on a foreign policy tour of Europe. Impress on Germany and Italy that they need to fight one enemy at a time (no invading Russia while still at war with Britain!), and that Japan would be happy to join in a war against either Britain or Russia but not both at the same time. Suggest to France and Britain that the join with Germany and Japan in dismembering Russia. Suggest to Poland that it forms an alliance with Germany and Japan against Russia, and point out to them that Japan has intelligence that if they don't Germany might invade Poland, and conquer it quickly, so that Poland is better off allying with Germany and Japan.
As part of the peace deal with China, suggest that China joins the anti-Comintern Pact. The USSR didn't have any friends, and if a powerful group of countries attacked it they would win.
If WW2 in Europe progresses as it did historically, help Indonesians rise up against the Dutch and give military assistance to the new Indonesian state in return for raw materials and trade. Ditto for the Vietnamese against France.
>Army: decent tank, SMG Panzerfaust/bazooka equivalent.
Comment on this specifically: This is not a helpful suggestion. Japanese afvs were pretty much optimal for their intended use, and 1939 is WAY to late to try anything like a US style crash program if you want to design a whole new tank branch.
Their big tanks were, of course, fucking stupid. They also never really existed in the wild. The tanks they actually deployed worked well at supporting infantry and cruising though jungles and broken terrain, which is what they needed.
Was shale oil production practical in the 1930s?
Yes, it was quite big in the early 20th century.
If I'm Poland, I assume that no alliance is going to stop Germany from invading me.
Countries rarely attack their own allies, it's considered bad form.
No one is better known for bad form than Hitler.
The Germans didn't really attack their own allies in WW2, except for when they arranged a coup in Hungary towards the end of the war, when Hungary was about to defect.
The issue is, it was not a coincidence who their allies were and who were not. Hitler's strategic objectives always included annexing Danzig and the corridor, and re-establishing Poland and other pre-WW1 empires' subjects as non-independent client states to Germany. That is why their attempts at bringing Poland into Anti-Comintern Pact in the early 30s never worked out.
I'm not familiar with Polish political history, but I have heard the analysis that antisemitism was just as widespread in Poland as it was in Germany, and Hitler had the option of allying instead of invading if he wanted to. Given that he was ruthless, deceptive, and generally evil, I am skeptical that a positive statement from Japan would have changed his mind.
They weren't allied with the USSR, but they did have a nonaggression pact with them.
Negotiate with America to keep gas imports, commit fewer atrocities for moral reasons and to prevent people from disliking Japan if they see pictures of atrocities, only engage in conflict for the explicit reason of gaining more resources. It's a huge mistake to attack America because the Pacific Ocean has fewer resources than any other direction. Reducing internal strife also seems important. Saving face was too important relative to learning new things in the military, but that level of cultural shift seems really hard.
I think if Japan had found alternate fuel sources and had just disengaged entirely from America, that would have kept Japan from being destroyed. They might have been invaded anyway once Germany collapsed, and I don't think they had enough strength to stop 1940's American military unless they somehow developed an atomic bomb themselves.
> I think if Japan had found alternate fuel sources
There was -- and is -- lots of fuel (shale oil and coal) in Manchuria, and Japan should have made maximum efforts to develop it.
You are missing the fact that none of those choices were done by the Emperor. The hallmark of Japanese government in the 30's (and 40's) is that mid-level officials and military officers all did whatever struck their fancy, and the central government was basically impotent to influence them in any way. As a transplanted emperor, there's no plausible way you can rein in the Kwantung Army that doesn't involve a very bloody civil war, and I wouldn't bet on you winning it.
Plus 1. If this was going to be done, you'd need to start in the Taishō era and try to hold on to actual political power while spending the next decade stamping out alternate power centers. 1939 is waaaaay to late to steer Japan in any direction.
There's two ways to take it, though. One is that the OP just means you're put in charge of Japan, civ style, in 1939. What's your best play? The second is that you replace the emperor, and have to work within those constraints.
Is there anything the emperor could have done, given his role, if granted foreknowledge of how the next few years would go?
As far as I understand it...well, I'm sure he could do something but he didn't have many good options. At that point the Army and Navy were in control, fighting with each other for dominance and doing whatever they wanted while still coordinating against their enemies. Hirohito was the Emperor but, like....it wasn't that many years before this that a faction of the Army tried to take over the government and claimed they were doing it for the Emperor, and they kept up the fight for a good while after the Emperor came out and said "Stop doing that." Everybody said that whatever they were doing was for the Emperor, and nobody could control the Army or Navy, but if you tried to stop the Army and Navy then that would reveal that you don't actually have control over them, so mostly people in the government tried not to do that.
On the other hand, Hirohito did approve the Pearl Harbor attack plans shortly before they were carried out. If he refused to approve it, would it have still happened? Maybe. Maybe not. It definitely would have been a gamble: if he refused to authorize the attack and then the Navy backed down and followed his order, then he would have a much larger opening to direct policy and to make his wishes manifest. But if he refused to approve it and the Navy went ahead and did it anyway (which they very well might have, the Army started the war with China without any authorization and everyone just went along with it) then he would be in a bind. If he insists at that point that he did not approve the attack...well you can't pull a Pearl Harbor and then say "Whoops! That wasn't what I told them to do! Can we go back to being at peace and pretend this didn't happen?" If he vocally opposed the war at that point he'd be threatening to tear the country apart, right when it needs to be unified to survive the multi-front war they're in.
Still, in this hypothetical you have two years of runway before Pear Harbor becomes relevant. If you started throwing your weight around right away...well, it could work. But generally Japanese Emperors are not the type to throw their weight around. Meiji was the exception, but when he took the reins of power back in hand there wasn't really any functional government there to effectively stop him. Hirohito would be facing a lot of entrenched power centers. I mean I can't imagine he'd get assassinated but...well, people only have the power you give them. If the Emperor won't play ball, maybe everyone will just pretend he is just to save face.
Maybe outright reveal to have supernatural view of a possible future? There could be some way to prove it or at least make it plausible.
That's a good point. Japanese foreign policy was dysfunctional, for this reason.
I'll admit I'm too lazy to pursue the primary sources used by The Scholars Stage blog author, but one of their statements seems false on the face of it.
"By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking."
What the what?! I can't think of any painter in the last two centuries who peaked in their 30s or 40s. The visual arts is something that seems to benefit from continued to practice and innovation into old age. Many novelists continued to producing good work well into old age. Music is not my forte, but many of the great classical composers continued producing until they died. Popular music may be a different story, but I'm not convinced.
https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
This paper lists dozens of artists whose most expensive painting was before age 30:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2013.843912
https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/10400419.2013.843912
And all baseball player's most expensive baseball card is from when they are 20 years old (aka their rookie card).
Most expensive doesn't necessarily mean best, when the novelty of "Van Gogh's first painting" carries a premium even if it's not nearly as good as their later works.
Could be the good ideas problem, where you approach the limit of technical skill and use your best idea; and if you can't come up with new shit/don't have a goya style breakdown you just keep making less inspired versions of your best idea.
I’m not convinced either. See Leonard Cohen.
Edit
BTW your comments on psychedelics last thread were pretty helpful. There is a Minnesota Psychedelic Society near me but they get tied in knots trying to stay on the right side of the law.
I had met a couple guys that both had 12 year old sons that were talking about learning to lead with love during their experiences. I wanted to learn more about what they were thinking when Covid came along. I haven't been able to talk to them in a couple years. One of these days things will approach normal and we can see each other's face in real life. I hope.
I have a theory that bands age less well than solo artists because a band is more about a particular moment (these four people find unexpected depths of creativity by bouncing their ideas off each other) and trying to keep the same dynamic 20 or 30 years later just doesn't work. While solo artists can keep applying their own particular talents to new situations (i.e. new collaborators or styles of making music).
As to classical music, there's been a lot of ink spilled about "Late Style". I was talking to someone the other day who said, roughly, that it wasn't surprising that I found mid-period Stravinsky boring but late Stravinsky interesting. Because Stravinsky settled into a respectable rut in the middle of his life, but near the end he was trying new things again.
I would agree with you about bands. Also, there's pressure on bands to revisit their past hits in their concerts, and certainly there used to be pressure from labels (not sure if there is anymore) not to change a successful formula.
The movie Soylent Green was set in 2022. This review fact-checks every aspect of it (cannibalism wasn't the only thing it predicted), and concludes it was comically wrong.
"The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously."
https://www.militantfuturist.com/review-soylent-green/
I think it was a trope in a lot of old science fiction stories that meat would become unobtainable for most people because of overpopulation, and I think of it every time I go to the grocery store and see "Beyond Meat" or whatever.
I am hoping for cruelty-free artificially grown real meat soon. That too was predicted, The Space Merchants comes to mind.
But people used to say a lot, that science fiction isn't about predicting the future. The only reason, in my opinion, that people judge some stories harshly, is because certain *other* stories sparked the imagination of the people who *created* the future (present), and so *they* look prophetic.
As a person who really wanted lab grown meat to be a thing, this article was a splash of cold water to the face: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
There are some fundamental, unaddressed challenges to scaling the technique to the point of being economically competitive with animal meat. Essentially, the capital costs are enormous due to the requirement of high grade clean rooms, massive stainless steel vats, cost of amino acid feedstock, etc etc. None of the startups in the space have shown a good answer for these challenges, and the CEO of one of the companies interviewed was shockingly frank about their likelihood of failure, basically saying, "Well, we'll make the stainless steel vats REALLY big, and uh, hope for the best?"
I agree with what I think the goal of the article is, to prevent the industry from getting government subsidies based on speculation. And to the extent they are attacking a *particular* company and plan, I'd trust that they have a point.
But as far as the general concept of lab-grown meat being impossible, well, if practical fusion power is still respectable to believe in...
Entertaining article, thanks! (I can’t imagine how anyone could take Snowpiercer seriously, though)
The left/right Fuck GMO alliance is so god damn weird.
Is there a decent graph/table on what ages people have their first kids at? It is really easy to find an average, but hard to find a listing of what percent of of first kids where born by women age 20 vs 21 vs 22...
I would predict the data would show two peaks around 18-22 and another in the 30s. I think the increase in the average age that we see is due to the 18-22 peak shrinking and with smaller growth in the peak that occurs in the 30s.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html The graph at the top of this article sounds exactly like what you are looking for and it also shows exactly what you have predicted.
The public intellectuals article was recently featured on Thinking About Things (http://thinking-about-things.com) which is why it was probably in someone's mental cache. Highly recommend the newsletter, it often features blogs I've never heard about.
I subscribed. Enjoying the first news letter this morning. Thanks Sami.
Since the last politics-allowed thread, I read the latest Human Freedom report by the Fraser Institute. Given their political leanings, this is basically a report on how libertarian each nation is.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/human-freedom-index-2021.pdf
I want to bring up Hungary, which got a special call-out in the section which discusses the countries with the biggest changes in score from 2008 to 2019:
> Hungary's rating decreased from 8.41 to 7.73
If Hungary had maintained its score of 8.41, it would be the 30th most libertarian country. With it's score of 7.73, it ranks 59th. Looking at the historical data for Hungary (page 187), which only goes to 2008, its score does seem to start decreasing once Orbán came to power in 2010. This is driven by a reduction in personal freedom. Econ freedom stayed around 7.5 +/- 0.10, but personal freedom fell from 9.11 to 7.88.
I remember when Scott reviewed Orbán in the dictator book club, many people countered that he wasn't a dictator. Seeing the above motivated me to lookup Hungary in The Economist's Democracy Index. Again we see Hungary's score decline year over year when Orbán is in power: 7.21 down to 6.56. This still places them in the Flawed Democracy category.
So it may have been premature to call Orbán a dictator, he is definitely pushing the country hard in that direction. I think he fits being in the Dictator's Book Club regardless.
"Libertarian" is not the opposite of "dictatorship". It's entirely possible to have a libertarian dictatorship, if that's what the dictator wants. It's even more possible to have a near-libertarian dictatorship if the dictator has only limited state capacity which he focuses on maintaining his regime's security with a side order of luxurious living for a small ruling class. Everyone else can have fun, get rich, do whatever makes them happy so long as it isn't anti-dictator political activism, maybe having to bribe the occasional cop or bureaucrat but with all of them combined taking a smaller bite than e.g. the IRS.
In practice, liberty is anticorrelated with dictatorship, and I'm not saying that Orbán's Hungary is in any way a "libertarian dictatorship". But the anticorrelation is far from perfect, and I wouldn't use a "human freedom" index as a direct indicator of whether a country is or is not a dictatorship.
I very much agree. I had a similar discussion about Poland, and my take of it is that:
"Is Poland a dictatorship?" -> Clear No. It's not even Hungary.
"Has Poland moved into that direction?" -> Clear Yes.
I just want to say I super respect the use of data to (try to) answer what initially struck me as a definitional problem.
It just punts on the question of definitions, ceding it to whoever puts together these indices.
It does, but IMO it is still going to be much better than what random laypeople will come up with.
RE: Yoram Bauman and the Utah ballot initiative
I'm a resident of one of your high-need signature counties for the Clean the Darn Air ballot initiative. I read the 2020 initiative and I vaguely remember not supporting it last time around. Then I read through the proposal and I still don't support it. I'll provide my objections and give you a chance to respond.
1. I support getting rid of the regressive grocery tax, but why are you proposing to replace it with another regressive tax? I own two electric cars and no gas cars. I have an electric lawn mower and snow blower, and I have solar panels on my roof. If anything, this legislation would be financially beneficial to me, since I buy groceries. The only reason I'm able to avoid the additional carbon tax is because I'm well off. Many of my neighbors are also well off and are similarly able to avoid much of the financial burden from the proposed carbon tax. Those heaviest hit would be my friends and family who are less well off, with no solar, electric vehicles, etc. Thus, this is a heavily regressive tax - probably more so than the grocery tax it proposes to replace.
2. I understand the need to get rural support as a practical matter in getting this bill passed. I don't support the proposition to gain that support through a direct wealth transfer from cities to rural communities. Much of the natural beauty of Utah would be better served if fewer people were incentivized to settle on every square inch of it. If people in rural communities are having a hard time making ends meet unless they move to the city, why encourage them to stay?
I do support what you're trying to do. Of the many different cities/states I've lived, the Salt Lake Valley sometimes has the worst air quality I've seen. This is a problem of geography (there's a weather phenomenon caused by the mountains and the nearby lake that traps the air - and all local emissions - in a 'bubble' across the whole valley). It can't be solved by moving the mountains, so the only viable solution to the air quality problems is to reduce local emissions. The power plants have all been moved outside the valley, so the main source of emissions comes from vehicles. Trucks are especially bad culprits, since lots of people use them as daily drivers, and they're particularly popular around here.
I'm on the side of cleaning up the darn air. But I don't see the sense in trading one regressive tax for another in order to make that happen. The burden should not be primarily borne by the poor, to the benefit of the rich, in order to make the air quality better. If you come up with a different approach, I'm open to supporting future initiatives.
Brown energy is cheaper than green energy. Ergo, any efforts to switch to green energy is going to be regressive. The solution is to offset the regression with some sort of citizen dividend. Either that, or replace one regressive tax with another.
On the other hand, billionaires with yachts and private jets burn a lot of brown energy. A carbon tax would hit said billionaires pretty hard.
I think there's a strong version of this claim and a weak version of this claim.
Strong version: Switching to green energy cannot be done without some burden on the poor.
Weak version: Switching to green energy cannot be done without disproportionately burdening the poor.
The strong version is something I can accept and work within. I'm not asking to put all the burden on the rich and middle class. The weak version violates a lot of my moral intuitions.
Depending on how strongly you want to define it, I think it's fair to say there has been some social unrest in the last 5 years related to perceptions of unjust inequality. Would it be wise to implement policies that are fundamentally designed to increase that inequality?
It's one thing to tolerate inequality as an unavoidable part of how our economic system functions. It's another to intentionally design an economic development strategy with increasing inequality as a key part of the policy mechanism.
The Utah bill tries to balance the regressive nature of the tax with a match of the EITC, which is a step in the right direction. The problem is that gas and electricity bills are paid throughout the year, while the EITC is a one-time lump sum.
Despite the specifics, this mirrors the general problem: Proposals to institute a carbon tax are most strongly supported by the financially well-off for ethical reasons related to stewardship of the environment. Meanwhile, opposition to the proposed tax is most strongly voiced by those who oppose it for ethical reasons of their own, in not instituting regressive tax policies.
I know a lot of economists prefer the idea of a carbon tax because it uses the price mechanism to internalize externalities. And that's great in theory, but in practice it's a tax on the poor as the rich can afford to transition away from widespread use of dirty power. If the tax were already progressive (e.g. a road usage charge or a $/kWh charge indexed to income) the incentive would be more closely aligned with those most able to respond to it.
Why isn't solving the regressive effect as simply as crediting each taxpayer an equal portion of the revenue collected? That would turn the "stick" into a "carrot". If you drive an average amount, then the tax doesn't cost you anything, but you can *save* more by driving *less* than if there was no carbon tax.
Ensuring the money isn't used for general purposes, and selling it politically is an exercise for the alert reader.
It’s rightly perceived as a class war. Greens are generally voted for by the top end of society. I wonder, by the way, why we haven’t banned private jets yet.
What percentage of carbon are they, globally?
A little googling suggests private jets emit about 33 Mt of CO2 per year, within a global CO2 emissions budget of 43 Gt, so about 0.077%. Aviation as a whole appears to account for about 2% of global CO2 emissions.
I enjoyed the article about public intellectuals. Scott(or anyone else) what young upstart should we be reading, keeping an eye on?
That article was recently featured on Thinking About Things (http://thinking-about-things.com) which is why it was probably in someone's mental cache. Highly recommend the newsletter, it often features blogs I've never heard about.
Somebody I know came up with a term for something we're both aware of: "Other People's Shit."
The thing being pointed at is this amorphous blob. It's fashion, but it isn't fashion. It's politics, but it isn't politics. It's nostalgia, but it isn't nostalgia. It's having shelves full of stupid plastic figurines that represent the media you consume, but it's that, for everything; you have your shelf full of mass-produced political views, media consumption, musical preferences; all in place of being a person; it's reference comedy, but instead of comedy, it's reference culture.
I know too many people, at this point, whose political opinions are whatever political opinions they think they're supposed to hold, whose media consumption is whatever media consumption they're supposed to engage in, who are nostalgic for whatever it is currently fashionable to be nostalgic about. It's the most boring zeitgeist in history: Have you seen the new Marvel TV show? Isn't John Carpenter's synthwave the best? September 6th was a coup! Look at my new Funkopop, isn't it so me? Isn't rickrolling the best?
I'm not talking about fashion trends themselves, or the fact that people share common cultural influences and so tend to have lots of things in common; it's something else, almost a state of fear of not being part of the thing, of not having the shelf full of the right things. It's Family Guy as a lifestyle.
And I'd love to be complaining about the next generation, so I could be shaking my fist at them, but honestly, they seem way better about this specific thing than my own. And it isn't like other generations don't have fashion that everybody buys into, but it's not that; I struggle to name exactly what it is, but I find it incredibly cringeworthy. It's a little bit corporation-as-identity, but the corporate part isn't even necessary.
And as I look at fashion, and generations, this reference culture thing is something the baby boomers and millenials share in common. You could say it originated with generation x, and observational humor a la Seinfeld, except it's even more evident in what Christmas songs we hear every year, and what music keeps getting trotted back out. And it may look like baby boomers are the opposite in some respects, but it's an opposite which is also the same thing - I Can't Drive 55 is almost the theme song of their generation, a compulsive refusal to buy in, which becomes its own kind of buy in.
The silent generation, generation x, and generation z, have almost an oppositional attitude, culminating in generation z finding it gauche to reference memes. Not that generation Z doesn't have its own fashion, with its own legacy; the heritage of ratfink is evident in their memes, inherited from their parents, inherited from their parents in turn - but their fashion looks, at least from the outside, more one-and-done; their nostalgia more specific and less shared. "Other People's Shit", or reference culture, could also, from the perspective of the other generations, be called something like poser culture, if that helps illustrate the difference.
And also maybe at least one of the positive aspects of the culture, because it is not inherently exclusive.
It seems that the peak of this would be the mid 1960s, when literally 1/3 of all music sales globally were albums by the Beatles. Over the decades since then, mass media has gradually been diversifying again to give us something as diverse as what we had in the decades before broadcast, but stratified in a different way than geographic, as it used to be.
Report: Album As Good As ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Comes Out About Once Every Month
https://www.theonion.com/report-album-as-good-as-sgt-pepper-comes-out-about-1820302213
For the prediction contest update.
Re: Q4 2021, that's not an issue, because people presumably answered based on what was actually written in the question. I can see tossing it based on the "Scott recommendation" part, though.
The Bored Apes one is more of a problem. Please don't change the target there, because then either everyone who has already entered needs to notice and go back and change their prediction (not going to happen), or else you'll end up with a mix of what people were predicting. So either leave the contest judged as the original stated, or else decide to throw the question out completely.
Yep, this seems right to me and is probably what we'll do. I'm leaning towards keeping the recession question.
(I'm Sam, one of the people running the contest.)
I've been thinking a lot lately about being "ahead of the curve" and the benefits it can incur to your life. Namely, a good heuristic for achieving wealth, fame, status, etc. is being one of the early-adopters of something small before it achieves immense growth. We see this as basically the lingua franca of startups, where everyone wants to hop on the next Google or Uber rocketship. Most cryptocurrency projects - especially the scammy ones - use "getting in early" as their prime marketing funnel. If you bought Bitcoin in 2011, you're very wealthy now.
Was curious if any SSC/ACX readers have strategies they use to hone this type of behavior. Are there communities or blogs or forums you read and spend a lot of time on? Areas you live? The type of work you do or the people you work with?
My strategy is to assume that in everything I don't know about, the efficient market model is right. There is no point to studying public information that other people can process as well as I can in deciding how much a company's stock should be worth because the market is already doing that. Buy stock in a company if you know something the market doesn't, not in the sense of insider information but of understanding, that is important enough to substantially increase the expected value of the stock. When the Mac came out I had been using my own computer for years and already knew about the Xerox Parc work with graphic interfaces so could see, as my colleagues at Tulane Business School couldn't, why the Mac was something different and better, hence a reason to buy Apple stock.
That approach has worked for investing. On the other hand, my attempts at inventing computer test taking software c. 1985 and computer programs to supplement econ textbooks a little later went nowhere beyond the programs I wrote for my own textbook — because I don't have the abilities or interests needed to convert a clever idea to a successful product. So one question to ask yourself is what sort of ahead of the curve insights you are actually competent to make use of.
I was in early on bitcoin, as well as an early employeee at both Uber and Twilio (ie worked for both in 2011), years before IPO’s for either. So I think I’m qualified here.
My answer here would be: try to think a bunch about the future, spend time around people doing the same, and MAKE BETS to calibrate your intuition. Most of these will bets fail, many, spectacularly so. Then, learn from those failures and try again.
In 2012 one of the best investments I made was bitcoin. The best was convincing the woman who is now my wife to move in with me as a roommate. The worst investment was buying $100 worth of hostess mini donuts when hostess was bankrupt. I figured I could freeze them and resell them on eBay later, for a huge profit. And this is an example of a cheap failure.
Lest you think I’m a bajillionaire, I was indeed early at Uber, twilio, and bitcoin. But the bitcoin investment was tiny- I saw it as an asymmetric bet and didn’t really “get it” until 2016 or so, when costs were much much higher. And I left both Uber and twilio before any shares vested, to join a gaming company that raised a million dollars from a Saudi prince before it crashed and burned and we sold it to a cryptocurrency Scam artist turned politician. The net result there was that I walked away from options at Uber which are now with maybe $100 million, in exchange for some neat stories i can tell. Finally, years later, I can say that yes it was worth it. But regret of that size takes some time to work through.
I was hospitalized for mental health issues 5 times in 2012-2013, and spent a few years rebuilding myself before finally getting to a point where I’m now doing well.
My point in all this is that I think I was ahead of the curve on many things because I lived an ~extremely~ volatile life for a few years (2010-2013). This volatility let me learn a ton about how things work, but there was definitely a cost.
I would love to be able to say that the worst investment I ever made was buying $100 worth of hostess mini donuts.
Thanks for sharing your story. Makes me think how important it is to move on mentally from the opportunity / sunk costs of walking away from options (of which I've walked away from my fair share of them, however none of them resulted in anything unlike your story).
Wow. That was a ride of a story. Sounds like you've had quite the crazy life so far. I appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with me.
It definitely seems like a function of your appetite for risk, where by far the riskiest (perhaps to the point of foolishness) are people that put a lot of money in Bitcoin or current Big Ns. A little bit to the left of that you have startup founders, and then all the way to the right side of the spectrum are people that major in something like tech or medicine, invest in the S&P 500, live in LCOL areas, and do what makes them happy with a comfortable life. Neither decision is really "wrong" or "right" - just a tradeoff of what you value.
Does anyone have data on health and safety of babies sleeping on their stomachs vs backs? I know the “official recommendation” is that back sleeping is best, and the understanding I have is that this recommendation comes from a correlation in studies on SIDS, which is still poorly understood.
I’d like to see analysis of multiple factors and the tradeoffs involved, if any such analysis exists.
I remember digging into this, and this is entirely from memory. My sense of what I found was: the seminal studies on SIDS do show a convincing difference (convincing to me, at least, and I was going at it with skepticism) in SIDS relative to back-sleeping vs. not - and I remember feeling convinced by how they accounted for other variables. (I.e. the N didn't seem too small, they didn't seem to be doing shady things...) HOWEVER I found, for example, that a child who was sleeping on his stomach to start with has less SIDS chance (though more than a back-sleeping one) than one who ended up on his side/back after never sleeping that way.
I had a baby who REFUSED to sleep on its back and I spent many anxious nights with it on my shoulder, in my lap, anything, sort of on her tummy, etc.... And also I don't know if many moms would admit to putting their child on their stomachs - it feels so taboo to admit. (Also this becomes moot once they are able to flip themselves over anyway.)
I don't have the time now to recreate all that research. But this is more or less what I did - I searched until I found a page with actual references to actual studies, and then followed their footnotes and read abstracts/papers where I could access them. So to get the ball rolling:
This book chapter goes over the evidence, with lots of references - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513376/.
Next, CDC's "Resource Links" includes a document with "Evidence Base for 2016 Updated Recommendations for a Safe Infant Sleeping Environment". That is very thoroughly referenced and you can go down the list of references.
https://www.cdc.gov/sids/ResourceLinks.htm
Also, here's a paper that argues agaisnt Back-to-Sleep.
https://iahp.org/reassessment-sids-back-sleep-campaign-12232014/ It has a lot of references you can dig through.
I'm sure there's more but digging through the footnotes in all of these should bring you to the original abstracts where they get their percentages and conclusions from.
Best of luck!
Emily Oster almost always has a blog post or book chapter for any, "But what does the actual data really say about kids and X, and what are the limitations of that data and our understanding?" question.
Here is a jumping off point: https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/back-sleeping-and-sids-new-research
+1. Was writing the exact same thing and you beat me to it.
If the US had a much smaller population, would it still be anywhere near as wealthy per capita? America famously has quite a bit higher income per capita than most other developed countries- $63k annually per the UN & World Bank, versus $45k for Germany, $40k for Britain, $39k for France & Japan, etc. Let's write an alternate history where North America is just physically a much smaller place, so despite becoming an independent country only so many Europeans could settle here. (Or, more interestingly, the North American continent became a bunch of different smaller countries, as South America did).
That higher income- is it just a return to scale for America? Like, if Germany had a population over 300 million, would it also have a much higher average income? This would be my intuitive guess- there's some network effects to being huge, so more & more businesses are founded and productivity gets improved when you already have a huge population & economy. I am a bit skeptical of the jingoistic, America's success is due to its unique culture argument. To argue against this point though, the few developed countries that have higher incomes are very small- Norway and Switzerland, with Iceland and Denmark coming pretty close to the US.
So- would the US be poorer per capita if it had Germany's population? Would Germany be as wealthy or wealthier than the US per capita, if it had America's population? Bit of a common sense note, of course there are minimum cultural prerequisites needed to become wealthy (Nigeria, Pakistan and Mexico are obviously not, despite being near or above Japan's population). My question takes for granted that developed countries have a baseline level of cultural competence/stability, then you add the larger population into the mix
I have seen several discussion of the large wealth gap between the US and other industrialized countries (like Germany, France, UK) recently. Mind that the size of the gap, in the unadjusted values given in this post, is a historical exception.
You can find historical data here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_projected_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
The US have always been in the higher part of industrialized countries in the last 30 years. But the ranking and the gap to other countries fluctuates a lot.
In 1995, the US were behind Germany and Austria, and en par with the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
In 2000, the US were far ahead of all these countries, more than 50% ahead of Germany, France, and Belgium, and about 40% ahead of the Netherlands.
In 2005, the US were again pretty high on top, but the gap to the Netherlands had basically vanished.
In 2010, the US were a bit lower in the ranking, similar to the Netherlands and Austria, but still ahead of Germany, France, and the UK.
In 2015, the US were again higher, and ~20% ahead of the Netherlands, Austria, and UK.
In 2019, the distance to NL and AU is again 20%, but the US are more than 50% ahead of the UK.
I think the gap *is* real and consistent if you control for things like exchange rates, but it is smaller than the 63k vs 39k-45k comparison suggests. Be careful when you try to build theories on numbers from a single year. This plot from ourworldindata is adjusted for a few things:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maddison-data-gdp-per-capita-in-2011us-single-benchmark?yScale=log&time=1955..latest&country=IDN~ARG~KOR~FRA~GBR~AUT~USA~DEU~NLD~CAN~CHE~DNK
Luckily someone has already done a "smaller US" experiment for you, and it's called Canada. (It's not physically smaller than the US, of course, but in practice you can just ignore the top two thirds).
What's Canada like? It's rich, but not quite as rich as the US. I think that Canada is what you get if you combine all the US's cultural, institutional etc advantages without the sheer size needed to dominate the global economy.
Then we did the same experiment twice more in the Southern Hemisphere, and we got Australia and New Zealand, which economically look a lot like Canada.
An advantage all of these former colonies have over the Old World is that even the big ones like the USA are much more sparsely populated, so there's more natural resources per capita.
I do think the USA has some cultural differences beyond sheer size, mind you - almost certainly related to the fact that it's the only one in your reference set that won independence via rebellion. I note that while the USA is richer in the sense of GDP per capita, I'd rather live in Australia, Canada or NZ (I'm Australian, and love it here, and have previously remarked that of all the many countries I've visited Canada is the only one that seemed as good, though Scandinavia was close)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area "optimal size" seems to be the term used in economics for discussing countries/languages.
An Inconvenient Truth about the American Way: part of our wealth is our elbow room. The United States has a low population compared to its carrying capacity. We still have enough surplus nature that sub median class people can engage in the gentleman's sport of hunting. We have bigger homes and bigger cars than Western Europeans because we have more space per capita.
Soon after we opened the immigration floodgates in the mid 60s, working class wages stagnated for decades, and the national debt has ballooned into the unsustainable range.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
We only closed the immigration floodgates in the 1920's. In the years before and after WWI annual immigration was about one percent of population, I think a higher ratio than we have ever had since then.
True, but the 19th century was also a time of expanding borders for America - I could see immigration pressure have different results when all land is owned compared to the historical results in times when there was empty frontier in need of people. (Not actually commenting on optimal immigration levels today, just on the merits of comparing to 19th Century American immigration)
Immigration was not particularly relevant to the wage-productivity divergence. Outsourcing, sure, somewhat. Labor market concentration, sure. Adoption of anti-inflationary policy, sure. Decrease in union power, definitely. But the effect of immigration was negligible.
And what causes a decrease in union power? How about supply of labor?
According to James Burke's "Connections" mini series, labor got a big boost in clout after the Black Death.
Adam Smith noted how labor had clout in the American colonies due to the high ratio of land and capital with respect to labor.
The bigger homes and bigger cars has nothing to do with the national population divided by the national acreage. If that was the explanation, then Canada and Australia would have larger homes and cars than the United States, and Sweden and Finland would be closer to the US and the Netherlands would be farther from the US than other European countries.
These are about a set of policy choices in the mid 20th century that prioritized expanding urban areas to make more room for cars and houses rather than prioritizing other economic ideas. Even the Netherlands has had plenty of space to expand for dwellings and automobiles, despite their high nation-level population density.
Key phrase: "carrying capacity." Australia is mostly desert. Canada is mostly frigid. The eastern half of this country get a lot of rainfall. The climate is a bit more continental than Western Europe but it is considerably less brutal than Russia or the Stan Lands south of Russia.
Southeast Asia, including parts of China, gets a similar moisture from the south weather pattern. Note the enormous population density. The US is pretty empty by comparison.
I"m not sure that's going to help here:
https://www.elledecor.com/life-culture/fun-at-home/news/a7654/house-sizes-around-the-world/
One important thing is that the infrastructure investments of the 19th century (canals and railroads) and of the 20th century (interstates) did a lot to damage local economies, but helped big businesses get big nationwide. Because of that, American big businesses were big enough to be the big ones at the era of globalization.
If the United States had been smaller, then it wouldn't have so much been the American businesses that had that advantage.
I think you’re on to something here, but you have to ask, return to Scale of what?
India and China are much much larger than America. But they are also much much poorer. So if there are wealth returns to scale, they can’t be due to population alone.
I have an answer that i think makes sense, which I can share if you’d like.
It's not just a return to population scale. It's primarily a return to greater economic freedom during the past (when the population was much smaller), which is also when most of the growth difference occurred. The U.S. still grows faster then Europe, due to it's still slightly free-er economy, especially in the labor markets, compared to most, but not by as much.
Relatively recently, some of the Nordic countries have figured out enough economic freedom (combined with a welfare state, but losing much of the governmental interference) to compete.
Plenty of countries have become rich by not following the US route.
You say that as if it contradicts my comment, so I'll restate the premise and give a couple more examples.
All else equal, more economic freedom in a country equals more economic growth.
Examples abound, everywhere from China (which began it's much more rapid catch-up growth only after the CCP loosened up economically and re-introduced more market-based reforms) to Venezuela (which rapidly destroyed it's economy by nationalizing most industries and introducing ever more severe price and regulatory controls).
Do you have contrary examples where a country become more economically free, and the economic growth rate slowed way down, or became much less economically free, and the economic growth rate accelerated as a result?
This isn't a controversial premise amongst economists, not even left-leaning ones, who tend to content themselves with arguing that economic growth isn't as important a result as whatever X policy/effect they prefer to it.
I mean I said “plenty of countries have become rich by not following the US route”. That’s still true of China, not being fully communist doesn’t make it fully capitalist. No Asian country has followed the US route either.
As to your question - yes I do. The USSR collapsed after it became more economically free.
China isn't rich, it's got a per capita GDP comparable to Russia or Iran, barely above Mexico, and one sixth of the US.
They're richer than they were when the government was actively starving peasant farmers to death, but that's not saying much.
It’s very close to being a higher income country. And at present rates of growth will be as rich as the west per capita in about two decades. Which will, in total GDP, make it the worlds biggest economy by far. Mexico isn’t a poor country either. China has a GDP per capita that’s 6 times India for instance.
I think you're switching the order there, the USSR collapsed, _and then later as a result_ it became more economically free, averaging, for example, a 7% annual GDP growth rate the decade after the deregulation and tax reforms of 2000 and 2002.
In contrast, there's good reasons the Russians call the 70s and 80s the "Era of Stagnation".
Edited to add: China isn't fully capitalist, but it's still an example of more economic freedom = higher economic growth, as are the other Asian countries. Compare South Korea/Japan to their neighbors.
> later as a result
I have no particular opinion on the distinction, but I think there is a widespread narrative, that glasnost/perestroika was started as a way to save the existing order of things, and led to the dissolution of the USSR against the will of the people who started the ball rolling.
Is the cliched view driven by Russians or non-Russians and is there controversy around it? I don't know.
But I would guess there's some truth if you were to claim the USSR collapsed in the middle of economic liberalization, so not strictly before or after.
I discovered this blog in the middle of last year, and since then I've also read hundreds of archived posts on slatestarcodex. After all that, I have two questions/confusions:
1. What is Scott's political position? I know it seems like a simplistic question and an attempt to force a large set of nuanced beliefs into a meaningless label, but is there some rough description (like "left-leaning centrist" or "evidence-based conservative" or "anti-government utilitarian")? I'm trying to make sense of him focusing most of his criticism on the left while voting for Elizabeth Warren, for example, and other things like that. Every time I think I've grasped his general stance I read something else from him that doesn't fit.
2. The "rationalist" label. It was my understanding that rationalism is an approach to knowledge that takes logical argument as its fundamental basis, while empiricism takes experience or evidence as fundamental. Kant and Descartes vs Hume and Heidegger. But the "rationalist community" seems to be built on evidence and experiment and suspicious of pure reason. Is the word being used to mean empiricism or am I misunderstanding the community? I've never seen this addressed.
I think above any political label you can put on Scott, the most appropriate label is "Independent Thinker".
The thing called "rationalism" has little to do with rationalism as the term misunderstood in mainstream philosophy. It s better understood as part of a pattern where a succession of small, insular groups engage in a very self confident style of amateur philosophy. Unlike other cult-like groups, they claim to have a strong orientation to science, logic and reason, and to be able to implement them much better everyone else.
Examples include Yudkowsky's "rationalism", Critical Rationalism (particularly David Deutsch's version), Ayn Rand's Objectivism and Korzybski's General Semantics.
In more detail, This kind of Thing is characterised by:-
• Being science-orientated , but having much more specific claims than "science good"
• Being largely outside of mainstream academia etc
• Being an insular group that mostly talk to each other
• Having difficulty in communicating with outsiders , in any case, because their own theories are expressed in a novel jargon.
• Centering on a charismatic leader, with a set of mandatory writings
• Having an immodest epistemology..which claims to be able to solve just about any problem..
• ..which is based on a small number of Weird Tricks
Yudkowsky's rationalism places a premium on the ability to change one's mind in the face of evidence, but also to gather evidence that could potentially change one's mind, and Scott is in that sphere.
When I read Atlas Shrugged, I noted not only how darned certain Rand was about everything (well, Yudkowsky isn't far off in this regard) but also how the story was structured to insulate her heroes from criticism; attacks on her philosophy came only from the weakest of strawmen. See Yudkowsky criticizing Objectivism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
So whereas objectivism got cultish and then closed, rationalism tends toward this vaguely opposite problem: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pvim9PZJ6qHRTMqD3/p/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC
Interesting.
I'm also a little confused as to why Scott supported Warren in the primary.
Just by my own casual judgement, she seemed like the "wokest" of the top 4 candidates. I understand Scott wanting someone smart, but I would also have pegged him as disagreeing with Warren more than with, say, Bloomberg. Also, my own judgement and the judgement of some smart people who I trusted who looked at lots of graphs was that Warren was more likely to lose to Trump than Biden was. And as it played out, that very well could have happened.
And also: "41: (12/6/21) In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error."
Did something big happen in December that I missed?
I recommend reading Wikipedia's article about Warren. Whatever she is, believes, or does, she's a heavyweight. Just because she's attacked like AOC is doesn't mean she's equivalent, she's spent 40 more years doing stuff. She's 73 and what she's done in her life should speak for itself, but she's treated as a generic Democratic woman politician by the right and when progressives defend her, they don't always realize she's not. I can't think of an instance where I read something about her that was as respectful as one would be of a 73 year old male politician.
Every damn piece of propaganda these days is made of claims that are supposed to be rejected, that are supposed to be outrageous, but that smuggle a false premise in that takes root without examination.
Didn't Scott write "I think I voted for Warren", as if he couldn't remember for sure for whom he voted? Since I have trouble believing Scott couldn't remember exactly how he voted, I took his statement to mean "Just so you know, I'm left-leaning" with the name "Warren" as a stand in for someone obviously on the left, while not wanting to explain or necessarily reveal for whom he really voted because that wasn't the point of his statement.
I think you're correct that that's how he worded it, but what you're suggesting does not sound to me like something Scott would do.
All this speculation reverse engineering Scott’s thinking always seems odd to me. It’s not like he’s dead or only shows up as often as the cicadas.
I was more than a little confused. She seemed to me like precisely the candidate who would annoy Scott the most, and he'd also talked about how her brand of obsessive social justice was electorally poisonous. I thought he'd have voted for Yang, or maybe even Bloomberg. Honestly even Biden seemed more likely than Warren.
I didn't expect him to vote for Bernie, but I really don't understand how Scott has such a bad perception of him. Policy-wise, he's very clearly a run-of-the-mill social democrat of the Northern European variety (not a socialist or communist), and he manages to avoid the woke crap more than almost any Democratic politician. His chances in a general election are definitely subject to debate, but I don't think that explains Scott's dismissive attitude towards him.
By the time the primary circus got to California, the only remaining candidates were Biden, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Warren. Without wanting to start a whole thread on which of these candidates is the least bad, it's not completely unimaginable that a reasonably sensible person (who for some reason votes in Democratic primaries) might think it's Warren.
Not saying it's completely unreasonable, just rather surprising given his own past writing and the other candidate options you listed. I think a reasonably sensible person would recognize that voting in primaries is important, and the Democratic one seems like a fine one to vote in.
In my opinion (most) voters weigh cultural signals far too much. You’re likely right that Scott and Warren are far apart culturally. But she had, relative to president candidates, solid rationalist bona fides. Culture is a distraction and an emotional cudgel in politics, and if you find yourself focusing on it, you’re likely losing the thread.
I agree that focusing too much on culture issues themselves is unwise, but acknowledging their impact on a candidate's electability is perfectly prudent.
Completely agree.
I'd say a reasonable exception can be made if the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party have effectively no chance of being able to actually achieve their goal of eating people's faces, but a decent chance of being able to pass their great tax plan. Changing tax policy is fairly easy in a modern liberal democracy, putting people in concentration camps is extremely hard and arguably all-but-impossible.
The nefarious Leopard Party might not be able to get their Face Eating bill passed, but they can slip some face nibbling language into a 1,000 page Keep the Government From Collapsing bill no one has the time to read.
For example the anti gun left in this country has virtually zero chance of outright banning guns in one sweeping action, but they're still able to make small consistent gains to make gun ownership a pain in the ass in an effort to slowly snuff out the "gun community". The current establishment prefers persistent smothering repression rather than sudden jack booted violence.
As a working class guy with a working class tax return (ie I don't itemize) there are some culture war issues that affect me way more than tax policy. Red Flag laws for instance skirt all of our normal constitutional safeguards and will definitely result in unnecessary deaths.
I appreciate the phrase "face nibbling".
I would have thought, a couple of years ago, that much of what the woke is doing every day was impossible.
Thanks for replying.
Re. rationalism: I hadn't seen that post. I'm still a bit confused about the name though. Does Yudkowsky/Scott "rationalism" have ANY connection to rationalism in epistemology? That they "share a name, nothing more" can mean they're entirely independent or they're similar/related but not the same.
Re. politics, let me be more specific. My confusion is not "he criticises the left, but he's on the left? That's impossible!" It's more like "he suggests extreme thinking and identity politics on the left are very harmful, yet he voted for someone who seems (from my non-American perspective at least) to embody both of them".
And I'm confused as to how anti-tribalism explains this. Is the "woke left" not a tribe itself? My impression of Scott is: he is not part of the woke movement, he criticises them more than any other faction (left or right), and he is left-leaning more generally. And I'm wondering what ideological or philosophical characterisation best explains this.
None of this, by the way, is intended as any kind of criticism. Only curiosity.
Warren built her career on being a smart technocrat. She wrote a book, and her campaign was long on policy specifics. Her political base was the college educated middle class. The college educated middle class was (and is) on board with woke stuff, so she said woke stuff. But my impression is that it was a bolt on - something she said because the voters she was chasing wanted her to say it.
Assuming Scott had the same take, she makes sense.
"Rationalism" around here does not mean the traditional sense of "continental rationalism, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." It would be more helpful for you to think of it as analytic philosophy, with particular interests in decision theory, Bayesian epistemology, AI risk, experimental psychology, and behavioral economics.
I think one factor is that you're overestimating how extreme-left and identity-politics-focused Warren looks from inside Blue America. Especially in 2019/early 2020- I think she's moved a bit more in that direction since then in ways I find disappointing (and I infer Scott feels similarly).
"he suggests extreme thinking and identity politics on the left are very harmful, yet he voted for someone who seems (from my non-American perspective at least) to embody both of them"."
Consider the alternatives. You don't avoid extremism, identity politics(or science denial) by voting R.
He’s referring to the Democratic primary not the general.
The "woke left" is not, in fact, a tribe itself; things aren't that well sorted. Also, Scott is generally opposed to strategies, rather than ideas.
Consider two concepts which may be more familiar to you, depending on your own experiences: A Christian who does their best to live by the Bible. And a Christian who tries to make everybody else live by the Bible. The difference there is important.
Scott, and most of us here, oppose, categorically, the people who want to make everyone else live by their own Bible-equivalent; it doesn't matter if their Bible equivalent is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Wokeness.
And most of us are basically fine with people who simply do their best trying to personally live up to their own idea of what being a good person means.
As a philosophy professor, my take on the "rationalism" name is that it has very little to do with the classical philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism. They're interested in rationality, which means reasoning well with whatever tools you have. As opposed to the 18th century debate, which is about whether reason is somehow a better tool than the senses. Some contemporary philosophers are still interested in this foundational question about where knowledge ultimately comes from, but I think this movement grew up somewhat outside academic philosophy, and therefore didn't choose the same terminology.
(If anything, I think it's more connected to the "skeptics" movement of the 1970s-90s, that eventually gave rise to New Atheism. These "skeptics" are of course not skeptics in the philosophical sense of thinking we can't know anything, but just in the weaker sense of doubting particular outrageous claims.)
1. When you've rejected christianity, nationalism, and anti-lgbt sentiment, all of which are commonplace if not venerated by the Republican party, you end up voting for Democrats in most if not all national elections. Additionally, Elizabeth Warren, while being on the far left by national politician standards, is by no means an extremist when it comes to internet leftism. If you're a 6 on the "right to left" scale, you can still vote for an 8, and be critical of the 9s and 10s.
2. The "rationalist" label, as used by myself, Scott, and other members of this blog, is a philosophy outlined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and is completely distinct from the philosophy Descartes and Kant advocated. Here is quick summary of the virtues of the philosophy: https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues, and here is the founding text of the philosophy, known as "The Sequences": https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality. Some of it's out of date—some of the text quotes psychology experiments we now know fail to replicate, and it engages in late-oughts political discourse at times which now seems a little silly, but I think it stands up if you read it in that lens. (Also, if you enjoy fanfiction, you can read the Harry Potter fanfiction about rationality here: https://www.lesswrong.com/hpmor. We try not to take ourselves too seriously)
That all makes sense. But regarding Warren, it just seems to me that electing her would have pushed everything even further left. Surely these internet trends in some sense follow the political situation; they don't come out of nowhere (sjw/woke followed Obama, the evangelical online movement followed Bush, and so on).
And I'll add that although I follow some aspects of American politics very closely, not living there means I probably don't have a real sense of the level of tribalism. Is there really virtually no such thing as varying your voting habits now and then? Everyone always votes for the same party no matter what? It sounds more like almost-war than democracy..
"But regarding Warren, it just seems to me that electing her would have pushed everything even further left."
I don't think Scott is part of the political right, or even the anti-left. If he's anti-woke, he's anti-woke from a principled-liberal position. If he's in any sense libertarian, it's in the sense were the libertarians are well off the normal political axis and not just a special flavor of the right wing.
Scott is pretty clearly in favor of smart/rational rather than dumb/ignorant, and I think at least somewhat in favor of technocratic rule over populist rule. Warren is on the political left, which isn't going to be a problem, and she's woke, which maybe is, but the Elizabeth Warren who e.g. wrote "The Two-Income Trap" is presenting herself as a smart thoughtful technocrat, and that's going to appeal to a lot of rationalist (Bay Area, not Cartesian)
I think the perception of internet trends following political situations is going to vary a lot based on your own personal experience from these times. In my case, it seemed like the SJW/woke stuff peaked in the 2016 election and began declining once Obama was gone and Trump was in office, and also that the end of the Bush era coincides pretty well with the rise of New Atheism. So rather than being a furtherance of the previous political situation, internet trends seem to represent more of a backlash.
Yes, that's what I was getting at: wokeness developed and peaked under Obama; the president is a powerful cultural figure and his rhetoric has great influence on society.
Although it's my impression (and I think the impression of many commenters here) that wokeness is more institutionally entrenched than ever, even if there are fewer militant advocates of it. Similar to how gay marriage and obamacare remained in place after Obama left office, and the war on terror and occupations of various countries continued when Bush was gone. Once you elect someone, many of the agendas they implement (both policy and cultural) are irreversible.
What are the best examples of wokeness being institutionally entrenched? I don't dispute that it is, I'm just wondering.
I don't think the woke stuff is irreversible in the same way as gay marriage or Obamacare. It still feels like a phase to me. I think there are some good elements of recent social justice advocacy, even if they're often overshadowed by the absurdity of the rest, and I think those gains will remain due to their actual merit. But some of the more plainly illogical stuff is so plainly illogical that it just can't hold itself up for long. The emperor won't get away with wearing no clothes forever.
>I don't think the woke stuff is irreversible in the same way as gay marriage or Obamacare.
Not related to your main point, but I don't see Obamacare making it past 2025.
I think it's stuff like Diversity Officers and trainings. My job is having us do a couple of hours about this every month or so for six months.* The trainings are prepped by an office of three or four professional HR people. It's their job to do this kind of thing, so I assume something or other in this vein will be ongoing. I would call the creation of jobs specifically intended to inculcate the ideology to be its institutionalization, as those jobs, and by extension that ideology, now has an independent office and staff.
*I don't myself mind this much, as I agree with a lot of it and can tune it out and cruise the internet if I'm bored or frustrated. But for the dedicated anti-woke it's probably pretty unpleasant.
It kinda feels like almost-war right now.
However, elections are very responsive to the people who *do* vary their voting habits. See, Glenn Youngkin.
I think you should contemplate this question, to understand Scott, and much of the commentariat here:
Is criticism helpful, or harmful?
Concerning 1., Scott tries to describe his position at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/ (though that was nearly ten years ago and he's doubtless changed his mind on *some* things).
But I think he'd say, as to why he criticises Internet leftism a lot despite being broadly left-wing, that this is because he rejects tribalism, and indeed, finds it more important to give "constructive criticism" to his own side, the side which he *wants* to see be right and efficient, than to keep piling on the opposite side which he already disagrees with.
Concerning 2., there is an old post where Scott answers this exact question. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/27/why-i-am-not-rene-descartes/
I've been experiencing a lot of problems posting comments recently. The Chrome tab for ACX randomly hangs when trying to post a comment. Sometimes the comment gets posted during such a hang, sometimes not. Anyone else notice this recently? Just happened to me now. This started happening maybe a couple of weeks ago.
I’m experiencing similar problems on my iPad, with Safari. I’d seen things hang when posting a comment before, but today even scrolling is barely working.
Yes, I and others have had similar problems. I suspect the JavaScript for comment threads wasn't written or tested for the volume that posts on this blog achieve.
I've become a bit addicted to optical illusions. Some of the most astonishing are still pictures that look like they're moving.
Examples:
https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/bd2d28bf83fa904314c720abc99f9d81
https://greenwoodcalendar.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/spinner2.gif
So I had a printshop do some nice quality prints of these, and... the printed versions aren't moving when I look at them!
My best guess is that some Bayesian subconscious part of my brain knows that printed images never move, while on screen images often do, and interprets them accordingly.
Another theory is that I need better prints.
I welcome your insights or speculation!
This is interesting! Not sure if I've seen any printed optical illusions recently, but when I was a kid, I had lots of optical illusion books, and illusory-movement ones like these worked just fine in print. I have no idea why printed and digital ones would be different for you.
Your first hand experience implies pretty strongly that I just need better/different prints.
Two other people have the same experience with these prints as me, so it's probably not that my brain/eyes are weird.
Maybe you need worse prints? Print is usually 600dpi and up, while the screen is typically 90dpi . Maybe there is something about the higher quality combined with the original source that provides the visual cortex with enough clues that it can tell it's not moving. Or maybe there are surface highlights or something in looking at them by reflected light, instead of by direct light (as you would be on the screen), which give additional hints to the cortex. You could try looking at them through a pane of glass maybe.
Interestingly, I find they only move if I look directly at them. If I look sufficiently to the side they stop moving. I vaguely recall that the fovea is very good at color discrimination, but areas further out are better at detecting movement.
These images only move when I move my eyes - if I stare steadily at one point on them they stay still. Possibly you're looking at prints differently - maybe try running your gaze around the edge in circles?
I don't think I've ever looked at printed images of these sorts of illusions - I would have assumed they would move just as much!
Some hypotheses I have if they don't:
Perhaps the colors aren't quite as bright or vibrant - instead of pixels shining light, they're just reflecting ambient light.
Perhaps the presence of shadows or other ambient light effects eliminate the effect that is creating the movement.
Both of these seem like things that could be fixed by getting a fairly bright diffuse light source.
Another test - can someone hold the print up in front of a camera while you look at it through Zoom? Could transferring it back to a screen make it work, or does getting it on paper once ruin the effect even after putting it back on screen?
It would also be interesting to see just how sensitive the effect is to the precise colors used. I imagine that CMYK printing gives slightly different results from RGB pixels, and I wouldn't be totally shocked to discover that there's some subtlety in the color contrast that makes these work.
Are you really saying the printed versions don't move at all? Not even a little bit, like frozen versions of the screen ones?
If so, I'm surprised. I have no suggestions as to why, but neither of your posited theories sound particularly convincing.
So, I'm similarly baffled and intrigued!
P.S. Did you ever get into magic eye illusions? I ask because they obviously work just as well on screen as they do printed.
Not that that solves anything...
If I try hard, I can get maybe 5% of the effect from the screen. On screen I don't to try at all.
Google says that "magic eye illusions" are those hidden 3D images in what looks like noise that came out in the 90s. After some practice, I learned how to unfocus just enough to see them.
I haven't commented on why you suck before, but I have spent quite some time thinking on it, because I, too, enjoy reading you less, and recommend you less, than I used to.
One reason is that since you moved to substack, I read every one of your posts, regularly, instead of once in a while a bunch of those that look most interesting to me. Of course the average quality/relevance to me goes down that way.
Another thing is that (I think) more of your posts are presupposing agreement on some basic ideas you wrote about before. From your end, no reason to stick to the broad, general question when you can use your answer as a step-stone to reach higher. From the reader's end, you become a lot less interesting or relevant to those that disagree with you on the first step.
A third is that the more I read from you, the more I learn about you, and the better I identify areas of disagreement. The first contact with a new idea is strange, foreign, fascinating, but over time you figure our whether and how to integrate it into your own worldview, and at that point you're over it and don't need or want exposition to the raw, unintegrated form of the idea anymore.
And lastly I'm just personally very disinterested in prediction markets and special economic zones, think AI risk is ridiculous, and want more neuroscience, rumination on cognition, and tidbits from science and history that I wouldn't encounter on my own. I am not sure if the ratio has changed or just seems like it to me.
Ditto re prediction markets, special economic zones, and AI risk.
Imagine the perfect storm, a long 6-part disquisition on an evil superintelligent AI that arises as a result of entrepreneurs in a special economic zone attempting to game prediction markets, in particular predictions of AI risk.
Double ditto on prediction markets etc. But worst for me was Georgism. I was wondering if there was a way to set up an 'anti alert', some way of notifying me when the word 'Georgism' hadn't been mentioned in a while.
Re: suckage in general though, I think a lot of it is frustration about something that's (probably) not Scott's fault - it's the low yield of usable output. The whole point of having insight is to operationalize it. The reason I look to Scott (and others) for insightful critique on culture war issues is that I'm looking for a way to win! The things that struck me about the 'Why Do I Suck" article was all of the culture war subjects Scott was bored of and has moved on from. At first my reaction was anger - these are live issues! These are fights that need to be won! You don't just get bored and wander off the battlefield! You suck! But on further reflection it's obvious that I'm just displacing my anger. My real frustration is with how intractable culture war issues are, not with Scott. Nonetheless, Scott moving away from important culture war topics due to ennui /does/ seem like a bit of an indictment of the rationalist project. If we cant use reason to solve problems...
Which brings me to /anosognosia/. Is Scott /really/ bored of the topics he claims to be bored of, or is this a coping strategy? If I spent untold hours thinking and writing about an important problem and failed to turn all that work into a usable stratagem to solve the problem I'd count myself disappointed, not bored. And I guess this is the crux of the matter - if I did cope by claiming to my readers to be bored of the problem instead of owning up to my disappointment, then my readers are just gong to be disappointed on my behalf. I'm hereby dubbing this 'Anosognosic Displacement'. /Someone/ has to be frustrated by a paralyzed limb. If the owner of the paralyzed limb isn't frustrated, then the people around them get to be frustrated instead.
I loved the Georgism stuff. Best idea I've learned about in a long time. Though that wasn't Scott...
I thought that odd too. The culture wars have intensified if anything - many things being codified into law were totally left field a few years ago.
This is also my trifecta of reasons for "why Scott sucks" lately. (To be clear, I don't actually think you suck, Scott, at all).
I think prediction markets are an interesting concept, I just don't share Scott's apparent degree of confidence that they work well or will work well.
Regarding AI risk - and I've said this before - the discussion doesn't seem to have changed in years. Which is frustrating I guess, but it just doesn't make for interesting (or productive, apparently) reading.
And the special economic zones seem like a fantasy that only fringe libertarians could imagine working out well. So I wonder if Scott has some stuck priors on the merits of economic libertarianism.
I turned Scott's short allegory from his Ivermectin article (about aliens, space plague, and brain implants) into an audio drama. I reached out to Scott and received his blessing, so I'm glad to now share it with you.
Teaser (1 m 30 s): https://twitter.com/TheProgramAS/status/1488888506894192640
Full episode (18 m 30 s): https://programaudioseries.com/22-JN-antivirus-solutions-for-home-and-business/ or search for the latest episode of "The Program audio series" (full title) in your podcast app
Much more than you wanted to know request: Uyghur situation in China. I still feel unsure about the facts on the ground, it seems like there is something bad going on there but also like it's not a genocide in the WW2 sense. Is it "cultural genocide" in the sense that Westerners use the term? Are there large-scale forcible detainments happening? Is it uniform, is it based on political dissidence, is it well-understood by the Chinese citizenry? I would like to know more. Also, if somebody has a good overview of this situation I would love to be directed that way.
I met a Chinese citizen in grad school who was very opinionated about it. The conversation wasn't very long (most of it was taken up by a Vietnamese student unsuccessfully trying to talk him down) but he was very supportive of anything being done to the Uyghurs- he kept calling them terrorists. I didn't know beforehand, but apparently there is an extremist movement for Uighur independence (under the name East Turkestan) and they are responsible for a few small-scale terrorist attacks. Nothing 9/11- level, but it's my impression that the Chinese government is trying to make sure everyone in China knows about it.
It doesn't help that the *US* designated at least one independence group as a terrorist organization while trying to get Chinese buy-in in the fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party says they recently got taken off that list.
The rumors I've seen is that for both Uyghurs and Tibetans, most children are now taken from their families and raised as Chinese. I think that counts as cultural genocide..
Maybe there is more solid confirmation that "rumors", but I haven't seen it.
Based off of one of Amy Chua's books, this seems to be a more violent and forceful version of China's standard policy for minorities- they're treated poorly, but allowed full rights if they take on Chinese names, customs, marry a Chinese person, etc.
Westerners don't use the term "cultural genocide" in anything like a uniform way. Our paradigmatic understanding of genocide is that you take all the people who belong to a particular culture and kill them. But we also have a concept of genocide where you do it by raising the next generation in a way that they are unaware of the cultural signifiers of their parents and just grow up with the culture of the surrounding community.
Both of these things were done by governments in the Americas to the indigenous communities. France very famously did the second to its minority communities in the 19th century. Hitler's Germany famously tried to do the first.
"Genocide" is one of those dumb terms that should be abolished. It variously means "a really really terrible thing involving mass murder" and "a usually bad but sometimes defensible thing not involving any murders".
I assume you are aware of the extensive reporting from western media. If you want primary sources a good place to start is Xinjiang Documentation project https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca
Xinjiang victims project https://shahit.biz/eng/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxtHBfWaWYQPNgfvdvSDn4A
A terrible comment.
MODERATOR RULING: I received a report using the "report comments" function, saying that this was a terrible comment. I cannot deny this is true, but under the circumstances I am not going to take any action.
A terrible reply
Is there a good example of a situation in US history where a government entity was created to solve a problem, and it was later determined that this government entity wasn’t able to solve the problem, so the governmental entity was disbanded?
The only relevant situation I can think of that fits the general shape is prohibition. Are there other such examples?
FDR's WPA was disbanded in 1942, because it was clear the program was no longer needed as US transitioned to the full employment of a war economy. The CCC was also disbanded at some point. And the National Recovery Administration was also terminated at the end of the Great Depression.
The Department of War and the OSS were disbanded and replaced by the Department of Defense and the CIA. Immigration and Naturalization Services was replaced by various sub-departments of Homeland Security.
I don't know of many cases where an entity was created to address a problem, and then people just gave up on the problem, rather than creating a new entity to try to address a related problem in a different way.
There is a long list of defunct federal agencies. Here’s a few:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51652/11-defunct-federal-agencies
Thank you!
I assume that you mean federal government? My guess would be that you could find plenty of low stakes committees that gave up on local problems
Anyone know whether this fits for the end of Prohibition, perhaps locally?
Forced sterilizations? Some institution connected to scientific racism?
The first is a practice, not an entity.
Thanks; these are good areas to look further. But did these stop because they were seen as ineffective at “solving the problems,” or because they were wrong?
For that matter, were they actually disbanded, or were they repurposed and possibly renamed?
Morally wrong or factually wrong?
On 5 (Why Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives) - does anyone have ideas how to avoid such fate?
I recommend one of the many Ted Talks on creativity.
Tentative: Root-Bernstein said that scientists could make discoveries when they addressed practical problems outside their specialties.
Hypothetically, taking a year or two sabbatical to take a crack at something new and/or getting more experience might help.
My first thought was that public intellectuals become too busy to learn new things. Aging might also be an explanation. I also consider it possible that people only have so many insights, and when they're used up, they're used up.
There's a real problem here, that may be insoluble for an individual. An analogy...
Consider vacuum tubes. They were advancing rapidly in design, reliability, and efficiency. A bit before 1960 they looked unchallengeable. Transistors couldn't handle enough power and were too unreliable. But transistors had an "easy" path to improvement, and vacuum tubes didn't. Incremental gains were still happening, but nothing major. The expertise used to build vacuum tubes didn't easily transfer to building transistors. So about the time of the IBM 7094 there was a switchover.
A name that could be applied to the process is "sunk cost". When one spends a lot of time and effort developing expertise in an area, one become unwilling to switch. Even in retirement I'm a computer programmer, though now it's a cost sink rather than a source of funds. But my way of thinking has been channeled through years of successful results. If I could switch to being an entertainer, it would now be much more rewarding, but I don't think that way and haven't developed those skills.
For who?
A major culprit named in the article is, basically, success; journalists no longer travel between war-torn streets, and instead travel between boardrooms. Like comedians, success dries up their well of insight, until all they have to talk about are airplanes, hotels, shopping experiences, and corporations.
What does this kind of success look like for Scott Alexander? Would he no longer have the experience of being just another voice with no real home, trying to speak out against a world which is fundamentally hostile to his ideas? Does he now have the internet equivalent of traveling from boardroom to boardroom? (Would an anonymous identity count, or is that experience fundamentally different because he has somewhere to return to?)
Which, if we look - yeah, his commentary has changed from being, in an abstract sense, about what it's like to be another anonymous voice, to what it's like to be a public voice. But also he tried very hard not to be a public voice, and, like, this new blog exists for a reason, and it wasn't his choice.
What would it look like for you?
The article mentions a bunch that sound reasonable to me. Do you object to them or are you looking for more ideas?
I think that shameless self promotion outside of classified threads (ie. spam), should be considered reportable. And yes there a particular annoying commenter I have in mind. Any other thoughts on this?
Scott has previously mentioned that people shouldn't spam the open thread with self-promotion, with the boundary for 'spam' intentionally undefined so people don't rules-lawyer it. I agree that excessive self-promotion should indeed be reportable, but I wouldn't go around reporting every self-promoting post of a particular user, just one representative post.
Does the report button also serve as a way of ensuring our gracious host sees our most insightful comments?
This is why we can't have nice things
If the only use we can find of a tool is as a weapon, perhaps we don't deserve nice things.
This sounds deep, but it's actually really dumb. It's like advocating for the use of fire alarms when you want to gather an audience.
It would indeed work for that purpose, and would likely result in you getting banned for abusing the report function, so you better make it count.
Re: Public Intellectual Shelf Life: what of C S Lewis?
Reading his collected correspondence there's this moment toward his late 40's when he worries to a friend that he's made his mark and is more or less done publicly, and it takes you a moment to realize that he hasn't written Narnia yet. And then he hands the world _Till We Have Faces_, which is a book I'm now going to stop thinking about so I don't start to cry again. Meanwhile _Letters to Malcolm_ is as good as anything he wrote earlier in life. Maybe he died just as the well ran dry but I wouldn't bet on it, and he probably qualified as a public intellectual by the time he gave the first _Mere Christianity_ address, so that's conservatively a 20 year high.
The Christian part of me would like to chalk it up to God growing larger the older you get, but that feels a little like special pleading. Are theologians outliers in general? Or is he just personally an outlier? Or am I missing something in the chronology?
I thought this was a fascinating discussion of what age influential philosophers do their most influential work at: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2010/05/at-what-age-do-philosophers-do-their.html
Turns out there's not much of a peak - for every Hume or Marx whose most influential work is written in their mid-20s, there's a Kant or a Mill whose most influential work is written in their mid-50s.
Could interpret that as a transition from coming up with ideas to finding ways to spread them. Eg he wetits novel theology early them finds ways to package it in kids books, which are successful but don't contain anything new
I'd agree if he hadn't kept up the nonfiction as he aged. But i think he did (or maybe I'm just overly partial to Malcolm).
The post specifically calls out novel-writing and the humanities as fields that tend to peak later, which would seem to work in Lewis's favor?
It hadn't occurred to me that theology was a humanity, but of course it is, so this is a good point. Now I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly the boundaries of a public intellectual are...
I think one key distinction is writing to the general public rather than mainly for a high-context academic audience.
I think that blogger's comments on the creatives is just plain wrong. Most painters are developing their craft and their art continuously into old age. Many classical composers continued to develop their art into old age. Musicians frequently get better until their physical health prevents them from playing anymore. As for poets, most contemporary poetry is so ephemeral, it would be hard to say — but of the poets of the established 19th and 20th canon, they seemed to have been producing innovative work well into old age.
If I recall correctly, the well did run dry for fiction. Didn't Lewis say he was no longer getting the visual images that were starts for novels?
Did he? I missed that if so. He had a couple novels half finished upon his death (The Dark Tower, and that one about Helen of Troy).
He'd abandoned Dark Tower back in the early 1940's, well before his death. The Helen of Troy novel only had a couple scenes, not even half finished.
I would guess a novelist is not the same kind of "public intellectual" that Greer writes about. It's easy to think of many great authors who kept publishing good works throughout their career. Similarly, scientists are also a kind of intellectuals, and they often keep doing good science.
Novelists need wisdom, which requires life experience. They need to have a deep understanding of what makes people tick and institutions tock. Note that there are prodigy poets but no prodigy novelists. Tolstoy published Anna Karenina at age 50. Philip Roth published American Pastoral at age 64. I'd guess healthy novelists peak between the ages of 30-60.
That may be a clue. Novellists tend to write at a high level of abstraction presented as a low level. If there are many possible ways to translating the high level into the lower level, then the expression may be more durable. I feel lots of uncertainty about this, but it seems plausible.
FWIW, I found C.S.Lewis quite unconvincing as a religious presentator. And he often presented views that I found boring, unconvincing, or stupid. "The Great Divorce" was adequate, but "The Screwtape Letters" was much better. "Out of the Silent Planet" was interesting, but "Perelandra" was not, and "That Hideous Strength" was a waste of paper. I got the impression that they were primarily liked by those who agreed with him before the opened the book.
OTOH, novellists are basically entertainers. If the "sell the birthright for a pot of message" they quickly decline in quality...but this doesn't mean they stop being entertaining. I really like Xanth despite the strong moralistic message, because it's entertaining...though it's also because "Gee, I wish things were like that" in a lot of places.
But what *is* a "public intellectual"? Do you limit it to folks like Dawkins and Dennett? Do you include Andy Warhol? If you mean "A speaker to the zeitgeist", then there's a clear reason why their time is limited implicit in the meaning of zeitgeist. One doesn't ask why most athletes have a short time at the top, but for one who plays with ideas things are harder to see. However is may be the same thing. If a "public intellectual" is one who presents interesting new ideas that are worthy of consideration, then a clear limit is the number of interesting new ideas that are worthy of consideration that they can develop. And "interesting to who?" is an important question here. Music styles change, and there appears to be no particular logic as to how they change, except that the music one likes as a teen won't be the same as what one likes 10 years earlier. Perhaps the same is true of "intellectual styles".
While you're grading his novels, what did you think of _Till We Have Faces_? I found _Perelandra_ decent and OotSP dull. _That Hideous Strength_ is, as you say, a waste of paper. And I loved Divorce and Screwtape, though they're barely fiction. I would tend to agree that Lewis is fantastic if you already agree with him, and probably quite mediocre otherwise.
Your point about zeitgeist is interesting and suggests that theological public intellectuals may be more or less susceptible to falling off based on how much they center eternal theological truths vs getting caught up in the Zeitgeist. So N T Wright or Ravi Zacharius can go on forever (well, until certain things come to light) while Rachel Held Evans or The Liturgists are likely to fade.
Perhaps our definitions of fiction differ, but I find it hard to figure out why you would say "Divorce and Screwtape, though they're barely fiction". I consider fantasy a subcategory within fiction. (I gave up on him after the books I mentioned, so I have no idea about "_Till We Have Faces_". Despite occasional moments, calling his general level mediocre is quite generous.)
The fiction in those two books is a thin veneer designed to let him philosophize, rather than a story with strong themes. Or, put another way, the story is there to serve the philosophy, rather than a philosophy informing the story. If that's still fiction, then fair enough.
I promise basically everything else he wrote is better than the space trilogy, with the possible exception of _The Pilgrim's Regress_.
The case is weakened if you drop the novels, but his nonfiction stands on its own.
Fact-checking the US President
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/fact-checking-the-us-president
A Reader's Story on her concerns about the mRNA vaccines
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/a-readers-story-on-her-concerns-about
Inflation renamed - Cost of Living Crisis
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/inflation-renamed-cost-of-living/comments
UPDATE - Correlation between Increased Mortality rates and the Vaccination programme in England
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/update-correlation-between-increased
Thanks Scott!
Six users reported this comment and asked me to ban you for it.
Technically I've stated people are allowed to post links to their own stuff in Open Threads about twice per year. You haven't posted more than that, so you're within the letter of the law. But users were still upset about the blatantness of the links, the culture-war-ness, the fact that lots of people thought they were pretty wrong, and the fact that some of them are to subscriber-only posts they can't read without paying you.
I don't think you did anything officially wrong, but I agree with them that this is slightly obnoxious, so I'm giving you a minor warning, where four minor warnings = one ban.
No problem, I won't link to anything else. Like I said, I thought that's what the Open Threads were for so apologies.
As to the last link, the ONS data would take a lot of effort to make any sense of.
Their article contains some important disclaimers, such as:
"The age-adjusted rates are not equivalent to measures of vaccine effectiveness; they account for differences in age structure and population size but there may be other differences between the groups, particularly underlying health, which affect the mortality rates." (No kidding, the people who got vaccinated are probably quite a bit different from the ones who did not. E.g., I would assume just about all the population of nursing homes got vaccinated, whereas some healthy old people who lived alone did not.)
"Changes in non-COVID-19 mortality by vaccination status are largely driven by the changing composition of the vaccination status groups because of the prioritisation of clinically extremely vulnerable and people with underlying health conditions, and differences in timing of vaccination among people who were eligible." (I.e. the drop in the deaths among unvaccinated people is partially because the sicker people got vaccinated and are now on the other curve.)
That said, there was a lot of bad stuff going on besides coronavirus and vaccines, such as people suffering from lockdowns, hospitals being overwhelmed, people not being able to get medical care for conditions they had, people not getting their usual checkups, nursing homes not allowing relatives to come in and help, etc. (This is not UK, but it's a rather striking example of how bad things were: https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/06/06/dartmouth-college-student-suicides/ )
Someone needs to crunch the ONS data so it stops being confusing and actually becomes useful.
Good points, thanks! How would you crunch the data to make it less confusing?
I don't deserve credit; I mostly just reposted some of the disclaimers from the article.
They do attempt to un-confuse their data down in the paper. They post separate graphs for people who were healthy, and for those who were more sick or less sick. I'm not sure if this is enough, but it's a lot more helpful than the combined graphs.
I'll have to read it very carefully to see what they covered, what can't be covered, and what can be improved on.
Suppose you are present at the US constitutional convention, and you’ve somehow managed to convince everyone that factions are going to be a thing. What would you change, aside from using approval voting? Anything? Would you make the factions official government entities with specific rules?
Madison argued that factions were the saving grace of a large republic, because with a sufficient number of them, and a sufficiently divided populace, it would be impossible for any one faction to gain lasting dominance --- so they would, in the interests of their own survival when out of power, agree to limit the central power of government, and become (reluctant) champions of individual liberty.
I think he was on to something. I tend to credit the fractiousness we see to today to the ability of the Internet to strengthen factional ties considerably -- they need not degrade by separation in time or physical distance, the way they always have before. Communication that reinforces shibboleths and checks ideological purity is far less costly. As a consequence, we form fewer but much stronger and more durable factions, which each have a greater hope of acquiring and retaining power. So we are no longer as (grudgingly and self-defensively) supportive of liberty and individual variation.
I don't think there's anything you could fold into the Constitution that would help. It was written with great intelligence and awareness of the usual things that kill republics. The changes that in retrospect seem unfortunate and pointed in the direction of the imperium in which most republics seem to die (the Federal income tax, the direct election of Senators, the metasis of the Commerce Clause, the Federal Reserve system) were all very popular at the time, and had some substantial positive effects that hid their inherent centralizing tendencies a long time.
There's no way in hell that the representatives at the constitutional convention will go for this, but here's what I would want them to do:
Voting stuff:
1) Approval voting for senators, with equal-population districts drawn in a way to maximize locality. (Purposefully vague—the legislature can pass laws that change how "maximizing locality" works as technology advances)
2) Use a national party-list proportional representation system for the house.
3) Use approval, something ranked and condorcet, or maybe STAR to do a national popular vote for the president.
Non-voting changes:
1) The house, senate, and president all have 80 days (~approximately the lame duck term) to respond to actions of the other. If the house passes a bill, the senate must vote on it, or it gets passed by default. If the house and senate pass a bill, the president must sign it, or it becomes law by default. No more pocket vetoing. The same goes for presidential appointments; they must come to a vote or they get approved by default.
2) Each president appoints one supreme court justice per term. Supreme court justices serve 9 * 4 = 36 years; so the last 9 presidential terms each get one justice. Right now, that would mean we'd have 1 trump, 2 obama, 2 bush jr, 2 clinton, 1 bush sr, and 1 reagan justice. What about retirement and death before 36 years? I'd allow justices to appoint their own replacements, or vice-justices, and have those senate-confirmed. That would mean we'd have.
3) Better system for presidential succession. Basically anything you can imagine is better than it currently is. (the real text starts on page 20 of this pdf: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_continuity_of_government.pdf)
While I would advocate approval voting, it's not due to political factions existing. Still a good policy.
I think I would bring up for debate the idea of having the constitution recognize them and specify some hard rule for which parties gets to appear on the ballot. As a not American, I find it really strange that individual states can decide what parties are options on your ballot.
I might entrench the filibuster in the constitution (or something like it), and advocate for a clear term cycle on supreme court justices. Maybe a couple other similar things to make a 50% majority less effective
I would do the opposite on the filibuster. Codify a talking filibuster at most (which was the original filibuster format, to be clear), ideally none. The current US Senate filibuster is absurd and no other legislature has anything like it, they generally have talking filibusters, usually with limits. Requiring a supermajority to pass legislation was a feature of the government laid out in the Articles of Confederation, and the complete dysfunction of that legislature was the very reason for the Constitutional Convention.
Fundamentally, if your faction (or coalition) commands a majority of seats, your faction should get to implement its agenda to the extent that its members will support it. That is how Canada works, it's how the UK works, it's how Germany works, how France works, along with virtually every other representative democracy on the planet. And while all of those countries have their own dysfunctions, their legislatures can pass significant legislation and the US Senate apparently cannot outside of the limited framework of budget reconciliation bills, and that has been the case for over a decade at this point.
A majority should be a mandate. Treating it like it isn't means the legislature cannot do anything unless the population is very strongly unified behind a specific faction. When the legislature cannot accomplish much sans incredible national unity, power concentrates in the executive branch, as we see in the United States, because decisions still have to be made and policies implemented. In the US, aside from the President, that branch is completely opaque and does not answer to the public in any sort of direct way beyond confirmation sessions that are almost entirely a formality if the President's party holds the Congress. It also forces many issues to be litigated via the judicial branch, increasing the politicization of your judicial system in a way that seems clearly harmful. Bostock (discrimination protections for gay and trans people) and Obergefell (legalizing gay marriage) were judicial decisions when they should have been legislative ones specifically because with the current filibuster your Senate cannot pass anything meaningful on any issues that don't directly impact finances or are judicial appointments without a supermajority. And yes, changing that might theoretically mean things see-sawing back and forth as two polarized parties exchange power, but in practice that is not what was see in other countries (the major parties generally converge a fair bit on both policy and rhetoric, since they can't talk a big game for their base/more extreme members and then use the convenient excuse of the other party obstructing them to explain why they didn't follow through on their ambitious plans despite having a majority, so they end up losing seats in a subsequent election) and the US already does a great deal of that see-sawing via executive orders.
Who says decisions have to be made? The US survived very well for 3/4 of its lifetime without the Imperial Presidency making sweeping decisions that reached into every corner of average life, and there is no obvious reason why that could not have continued indefinitely. I think you take as an obvious axiom an assumption -- that there *must* exist a big central government, because problems cannot be solved any other way -- which is not only unexamined but deeply suspect. There are not many cases where problems are better solved by a central authority dictating one solution to 300 million people than by the spontaneous organizations of those people.
Leaving aside the question of whether the federal gov't is the best place to solve problems - the US was also missing the 60 vote threshold for most of its lifetime. Until 1970, filibusters were rare, and 51 votes was enough for most things. I think Nancy is arguing that the Imperial Presidency is partly the result of the crippling of the Senate via the modern filibuster.
First, from everything I have read, the supermajority rules in the articles of confederation was the least of their problems.
That aside, I think that the core of our disagreement probably is around whether we agree that a majority should get a mandate. I personally don't think so in general, but I also think that such a setup leads to a two-party system like we have now (i.e. each party is just fighting for the bare majority). I think it would be much harder for two parties to compete for 60% of the vote, and it might help to break the party system.
Also, almost every severe change that's proposed in congress, I oppose. I tend to be in favor of pretty slow incremental changes, so that's why I like the filibuster (it slows down majorities).
I would also be tempted to try to put a word limit on bills, but that’s not directly related
Have Senators appointed by their Governor with the advice & consent of the State legislature rather than selected directly by the latter. Better chance the 17th is never enacted, keeping the Senate more orthogonal in incentives & behavior to the House.
Are factions going to be a thing once you institute approval voting?
Yes. As long as you've got a collection of representatives that are trying to get bills passed, there's going to be a need to trade favors - I'll vote for your bill if you vote for mine. Once you establish some relationships about who you trade favors with, you'll set up a faction. It might not be an ideological faction - for most of American history, the parties were pretty orthogonal to the ideological divides. (The big difference between the Whigs and the Democrats was about tariffs and construction projects, and they specifically avoided the cultural issues of the time including slavery; the big difference between 20th century Republicans and Democrats was more about big vs small business rather than cultural issues include Civil Rights.)
I think you might be overly narrow on what counts as "ideology" to think "cultural issues" must be more central to it.
I'm actually mainly focused on using "ideology" in the sense of "liberal"/"conservative", in any of the ways those terms have been used. Other than the Republicans of the 1850s-1870s, I think every major party in the US before the 1990s included prominent liberal and conservative wings within its ranks, however the words "liberal" and "conservative" were used at the time. Name a decade, name a party that was prominent in that decade, I'll name a liberal and a conservative, both prominent, in that party in that decade.
I would expect factions to emerge naturally from the way people are distributed and clustered across opinion-space.
Probably. Approval voting in theory incentivizes candidates to move towards the center, but you still need to make decisions for and against things. If some of the electorate wants peace and some of it wants war, it's doubtful that you could get a compromise candidate going on "war, but only a little bit."
Hasn't "war, but only a little bit" been standard US foreign policy for the last 70 years?
I call it "imperialism, but really half-assed."
I was trying to come up with a binary issue, rather than something like taxes where "taxes at 10%" and "taxes at 20%" could easily meet in the middle at 15%, but in hindsight that's a bad choice of example.
Slavery, maybe? I don't think approval voting would lead to a middle-of-the-road candidate calling to abolish slavery and replace it with Jim Crow laws.
How about legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level?
The difference between legalizing and decriminalizing is that legalizing means putting something under the full panoply of licensing and regulation, while decriminalizing means pretty much letting people do it, maybe with some limits.
The middle position on slavery would be something like "abolish slavery over a period of decades while compensating slaveholders". This is closer to what happened in the rest of the Americas, and the rest of the Americas managed to avoid having civil wars about it.
> Slavery, maybe? I don't think approval voting would lead to a middle-of-the-road candidate calling to abolish slavery and replace it with Jim Crow laws.
Hold the vote in the right decade, and it probably would. "Black people are inferior, but that doesn't justify slavery" was a common opinion for a while.
I think the common opinion was "black people are inferior in such a way that slavery was a necessary part of the path to uplift them from savagery, probably for another generation or two, but if the last generation was enough then it's still less important to cut off slavery in exactly the right generation than it is to avoid massive social upheaval, so let's talk about a long-term master plan to phase out slavery".
And political master plans that last more than two election cycles, have a poor track record of actually coming to pass. "Slavery is an intolerable evil that must be abolished right now!", I don't think was ever a middle-of-the-road position.
What if anything could be done (by governments or with business arrangements) to make it more likely for people to live in extended families? Might remote work do a lot in that direction for some families?
Maybe remote work could be the big deal enabling extended families.
I don't mean that extended families would necessarily live in the same house, but let's say that everyone is within fifteen minutes of each other. Social contact and help are *convenient*.
I don't know that it would be a better world that way. I think the present world is commercially convenient and makes it relatively easy (not actually easy) for people to get away from abusive relatives. Unfortunately, it also breaks up families where people are good for each other and might have something to do with demographic collapse.
Change building standards so that the minimum dwelling size is 4000 square feet with six bedrooms.
One social factor currently inclining against extended families living in close proximity is the pattern of people selling their houses upon retirement and moving to "sun belt" states, particularly Florida or the desert Southwest. Motivations are warmer climate (cold winters being particularly inhospitable to the elderly) and cashing out home equity once living near work is no longer a factor.
There are various options to discourage this. One is simply to wait for organic factors to stabilize population distribution so more people live in sun belt states to begin with and property values equalize between states. Remote work will help with this, by allowing still-working families to relocate to the sun belt for similar motivations.
Another would be to push YIMBY reforms in non-sun-belt states, to lower the cost of living there, while simultaneously dropping policies that subsidize home ownership over renting (mortgage interest deduction, FHA loans, mortgage securitization, etc) so fewer people will have home equity to cash out.
The nuclear option would be to ban residential air conditioning. Sun belt migration is largely a phenomenon of widespread residential air conditioning changing the balance of utility between hot summers in the south and cold winters in the north, with retirees taking the forefront of the migration because they aren't tied to their current location by their employment situation the way working-age adults are.
The nuclear option might avoid moving wholesale to the Sun Belt, but it wouldn't prevent the (upper) middle class scenario where two properties are owned, one in the Sun Belt, one in Canada / the Northern states. My parents own a property in Arizona; I don't think they've turned the air conditioning on for more than a week every year; by the time the air conditioning is required, it's time to come back to Canada for the summer.
And it is my understanding that the gated community in Arizona where they live during the winter has its population drop by more than 80% during that part of the year when air conditioning becomes a necessity.
Another social factor against extended families living in close proximity is the 'go away to college at end of high school' effect, which often leads to grown children finding a home/career/future-plan combination which leads to them living some distance away from their parents house.
As a recently retired person with no intention of moving to Florida - I want neither a hot climate nor an old folks ghetto - I wonder how common such a move actually is.
I’m in the same part of life and am happy to remain in Minnesota. BTW How about that being able to do what you want thing? Every day!
I do have older sibs and cousins in Florida and New Mexico though. It depends on what you enjoy I guess. I like the big small town feel of Saint Paul and actually enjoy shoveling snow. Other folks want a beach or have aches and pains that are worse during cold weather.
I love deciding what to do every morning, with such a wide open field.
My impression is that families are pretty scattered even before retirees move to Florida.
Remote work is huge.
So is extremely fast transportation. The 15 minute radius changes a lot if we have hyperloop networks.
Would hyperloops actually do that much? Wouldn't take at least fifteen minutes to get to the hyperloop, and the same to get to a destination?
Possibly - but what they enable is much much larger working radius. Think of it like remote work for everyone, even people who need to be present. This would enable families to all relocate to a single location without their members changing jobs or possibly even schools.
Good point.
I want to leave the below here, to see if anyone has any reactions to it. I don't think I agree with it, but it's a perspective you don't often hear. The person answering the questions is late author Toni Morrison.
I think there's maybe something to the idea that people have a hard time raising a family because we have norms for when you're supposed to develop a career and all, that were based around the model of men working and women at home; and now women are in the workforce but the norms are unchanged, and aren't designed for people to take substantial time off for childrearing.
..................................................................
Q. This leads to the problem of the depressingly large number of single-parent households and the crisis in unwed teenage pregnancies. Do you see a way out of that set of worsening circumstances and statistics?
A. Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility. I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community — everybody — to raise a child. The notion that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a patriarchal notion, that a woman — and I have raised two children, alone — is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don’t know. It isolates people into little units — people need a larger unit.
Q. And teenage pregnancies?
A. Everybody’s grandmother was a teenager when they got pregnant. Whether they were 15 or 16, they ran a house, a farm, they went to work, they raised their children.
Q. But everybody’s grandmother didn’t have the potential for living a different kind of life. These teenagers — 16, 15 — haven’t had time to find out if they have special abilities, talents. They’re babies having babies.
A. The child’s not going to hurt them. Of course, it is absolutely time consuming. But who cares about the schedule? What is this business that you have to finish school at 18? They’re not babies. We have decided that puberty extends to what — 30? When do people stop being kids? The body is ready to have babies, that’s why they are in a passion to do it. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it .
Q. You don’t feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?
A. They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, ”Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me — I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don’t want to pay for it.
I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black — or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about. We don’t care whether they have babies or not.
Q. How do you break the cycle of poverty? You can’t just hand out money.
A. Why not? Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich get it handed — they inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s shared bounty of class.
I don't have anything to add, but since you're asking for reactions, mine is "Hell yeah. Preach." I've never seen this put this well and I absolutely agree with it.
This all sounds amazingly right, and prescient to me. And it seems to line up with a lot of the ideas of the rationalist community too. We need extended households of one sort or another to provide meaningful families, and focusing on preserving the man-work-woman-raise-kids-no-one-else-around model is just struggling with something that only barely worked for a decade.
Did Morrison know that, back when the Patriarchy was running things, divorce courts facing the decision between placing the children with the broken family headed by a man and the broken family headed by a woman would almost invariably choose the latter?
It depends on the time, and perhaps the place. At one point, the children pretty much always were placed with the father.
Some of Morrison's takes are better than others. A woman can be the "head" of a family without family being broken, whether "head" means "primary income earner" or "the adult who has final call on decisions", which are roles that don't necessarily have to fall on the same person. (The person who earns more has some latent leverage if there ever is a dispute, but it can be offset by charisma / assertiveness of personality.) And of course, many aim at collaborative responsibility and decision-making.
However, no matter who is/are "primary decision-maker", a family where the father of the kids (or at least some of the kids) is present is quite different from a family where there is no father contributing anything at all. Two parents who are present can provide more resources (that is, people who can do adult things) than one parent. If you count that each parent brings their the grandparents and make an assumption that parental grandparents are more keen to participate if the father is present, after the two generations of single parenthood the family loses 2-to-6 in "responsible adulting resources available" compared to two generations of nuclear families.
It is quite curious sleight of hand that Morrison conflates "single parent household" with case "woman is running a family". Sounds like it is Morrison advancing the patriarchal notions here. It shouldn't be impossible for a woman to be the head of a family if the father sticks around?
I can't think of a family in which one parent (in a two-parent household) has the final call on all decisions. Among other things, whether one parent has a dominant influence varies with the nature and circumstances of the decision, and with the age and sex of the children (assuming we're talking about decisions about children), and to the extent you can identify parent with decision area it usually ends up some complex pattern the couple work out over time, in which sometime's it's mom and sometime's it's dad. Which is why "go ask your mother/father" is something kids hear all the time, when the pattern is ambiguous.
Do you know people who have a religious belief that the man should be in charge?
My immediate reaction to your *phrasing* is to query whether you consider two (or three, or four) males raising children together to be better for the children than two (or three, or four) women raising children together. Or for that matter, whether you consider the children of a single father better off than the children of a single mother.
Probably, you didn't quite mean what you appear to have said, and are implicitly comparing single female parent only with heterosexual couple. Thereby missing the point Morrison makes about even a couple not being enough.
Saying that "even a couple isn't enough" is moving the goalposts - sure, a wide community might be better than a isolated 2 parent household, but an isolated 1 parent household is even worse (and it has nothing to do with gender, gender didn't even feature in the question, only in her answer)
As to whether men or women are better at raising kids, I expect a homosexual couple (either kind) to be approximately equal to a heterosexual couple - the main benefit comes from raw numbers.
Can't disagree with some generalities here, there always will be exceptions to everything, there are people flying to the moon and lottery winners all the time but most people are those people. I do wish everyone well but selling the idea to teenagers that single parenting is simply an alternative lifestyle without the highly likelyhood of a lifetime of financial, emotional, logistical personal burdens along with the likely associated child development challenges is mostly wishful thinking.
Don't believe me? Single mothers are much more likely to be poor than married couples. The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2018 was 34 percent, nearly five times more than the rate of 6 percent for married couple families. Essentially the same for whites and blacks married and unmarried.
Elementary school children from intact biological families earn higher reading and math test scores than children in cohabiting, divorced-single, and always-single parent families. Adolescents from non-intact families have lower scores than their counterparts in intact married families on math, science, history, and reading tests.
Adolescents living in intact married families or married stepfamilies (with stepfathers) performed similarly on the Peabody Vocabulary Test, but adolescents living in single-mother families or in cohabiting stepfamilies (with their biological mother) did worse than those in intact families.
Over 75 percent of low-income children entering adolescence are living in single-parent households - data from the U. S. Department of Labor’s Panel Study. There are 100's if not 1,000's of these studies out there.
None of that is in dispute. She's simply saying that that isn't fated to be always the case in all societies, it's simply the way ours evolved.
To draw an example from my own life. My grandmother grew up (poor) in a small town in the bootheel of Missouri. When she got married and moved out of her parents' home, she moved to a little house in the same neighborhood. Her mom was right there. An aunt was close by. One of her adult sisters was there. My grandfather's parents and brother were close. And my mom remembers these people, and being raised around and by them. My grandmother and grandfather weren't alone, there was family all around them. (Friends too I think, but I'm vague on that.) That's what Morrison is talking about when she says that two parents were never enough, that this was always easier, and usually done, in the context of close-knit communities.
And in *that* context, according to the argument, single parenthood wouldn't have been that bad. If my grandfather had been a cad, my grandmother would still have had her mother, sister and aunt, at the least. Probably more, in terms of cousins that I've met once or twice or friends I've heard mentioned here or there.
How we do single parenthood right now makes it shitty. But it's not the only way, it's just our way.
"Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility."? First tye question was about teen parents. Second, Ask any single parent and they will tell you that raising a child while single is a hellish way into poverty. The statistics are undeniable
Third, if you want a "community" to inculcate your child with their values and morals you're losing the greatest parental opportunity of your life to pass them on to future generations. Today's public schools teach children to obey because someone in charge told them to not because it's morally correct.
Therefore so many other problems with these answers my fingers don't have the time here.
Raising a parent with no support is a hellish way into poverty. The problem is that we've conflated being unmarried with having no support. Her point is that being married helps a bit, but it's still not enough support. What you really want is a whole household that raises a family, not just one two adults on their own.
The "community" doesn't have to be a government-run public school. It could be your friends from church, or from the bowling league, or from your rationalist book club.
Fascinating. I've reared 5 children, the oldest a touch over 30 now, and I can't say the parenting value contributed by school, friends from church, the bowling league, book clubs, neighbors, daycare staff, traveling salesmen, US representatives, the entire General Assembly of the UN, or strangers in the street approaches a millionth of a percent of the value contributed by their mother on alternate Sundays.
I'm curious what kind of weird American family could even say something different -- as in, Mrs. Schmo down at the bowling alley with whom we sat every Tuesday from 5 to 7pm like clockwork, why, she had just as much influence on me as my own mother! Who says things like that? I mean, unless your mother was rather a waste of space in the first place and you were effectively reared by wolves, or one is talking about some extremely restricted area, like who taught a person to cuss or change the oil in the car.
Exactly the problem. In any century before the 20th, the average person would have grown up in a household with many adults, and in the 20th century this has become literally unthinkable.
In 1890, the median US household size was four people, down from five in 1790. I can't readily find a breakdown by age, but that's hard to square with "growing up in a household with many adults". I mean, four people *could* be one child, two parents, and one aunt/uncle/grandparent, but that's not the way to bet.
Thank you John, very value add comment that dispelled me of the clearly mistaken notion I also had that pre 20th century, familial household units were much larger. Out of curiosity, where did you find this data ? Was there any distribution across income groups included? The question of resource availability in this context as an argument for communal child-rearing has me wondering what different household sizes across income groups were like in previous centuries as well.
There’s some truth here, but also a bunch of confidence around areas I don’t think the author really understands.
I do think it might make more sense to develop cultures around the idea of extended clans living together and people having children at 16, but you’d need them to still be focused on their education since their younger brains are better suited for learning. I think there are huge issues with our educational systems being wasteful, for example. When the author says “rich people are just given things”, she’s right to some degree, but wrong about how well the inheritance of class could be replaced by the state. Parents who teach you about investment because they are skilled at it themselves will be infinitely superior to a bundle of cash from the state, and bad habits taught by state employees who, almost by definition, are not skilled at allocating capital.
Is this a puzzle where you combine the first letters of all fallacies to form the secret phrase?
I do think it is true (or at least plausible enough to warrant serious discussion) that the difficulty of raising children in the 21st century is a social rather than individual problem. In particular, when I look at the "daily time parents spend with children" curves ( https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids ), comparing them both with 50 years ago and with Eastern countries, I'm getting the impression that we somehow managed to push both sexes back into the kitchen, at least for those who have kids... that, or 1965 was an outlier that should have produced wolfchildren everywhere. Part of this is probably parental priorities, but I'm definite that child neglect laws form a significant incentive and need to be dialed down quite a few notches. Not seeing the political will for it so far, though...
Communal co-parenting a la pods will probably be a great help, but I'm not seeing the amount of grassroots organization so far that it would take to set it up. All over the world, educated people have somehow lost the skill to form friendships and informal organizations without mediation by institutions or apps. Solve *this* and parenting will fall out as a bonus.
Interesting data table.
On what basis are you making the claim that loss of skill enabling friendship forming without mediation is exclusive to educated individuals? Or is even occurring ? Curious to see your source.
If one was to claim that this supposed skill loss is illustrated by educated parents spending more time with children than their uneducated counterparts, then how do we address Denmark seeing such a dramatic and matched increase in mothers' time spent with children regardless of education level - with the gap widening substantially between non-educated mothers and educated fathers ? Or France for that matter, per the data provided above, seeing a decline in educated mothers' time spent with children while educated fathers time is increasing ?
It seems unlikely that this systemic social issue can be reduced to an issue of child neglect laws placing onerous demands on parents and friendship skill loss since 1965, but I'm genuinely curious to see the pieces of the puzzle that sparked your comment.
My claim about loss of social skills among the most educated is unrelated to my claim about time spent with children (which holds across educational cohorts). The latter is based on data, the former on my anecdotal observations. It's just that both are contributing to the mess we are in.
When the covid lockdowns began, I expected essentially every high-earning educated community to get some private teachers to organize learning pods for their kids. But months passed and I haven't seen any hints of this happening on a large scale. The sort of self-organization that our grandparents seemingly did without thinking appears to have gotten much harder for my generation.
Thanks for sharing the Scholars’ Stage article
Idea to increase birth rates: Similar to women's quotas have parents quotas for professorships, boards of directors, government positions, etc., conditioned on taking 6 months parent time.
I fell like people compete for status much more than for money, so one-time cash handouts for babies seem not as attractive. It would reframe getting children from a career hindrance that has to be compensated to an advantage in your career. Also it costs almost nothing, much of the bureaucracy of managing quotas exists anyways. It increases parents in visible high-status positions and pushes institutions and companies to accommodate them. Since it's required by law, employees who get pregnant are appreciated by the company (as the quota has to be filled anyway) instead of met with "why now?".
Why aren't at least states like Hungary, Russia etc who really seem bound on improving their birth rates in any way possible doing this?
Is there a flaw that I overlook?
I would say one of the biggest reasons we have lower birth rates is that in many cases a family needs two incomes to get by. I think there's a cycle where governments get more taxable income and corporations get more workers at a lower pay rate, but over time, the population declines.
That's not the whole story, but I think it's a big part. One trend I've seen as well as I've gotten older is that people like me (mid-40s, kids are mostly teenagers) really like the 9-5/40 hours thing, and the younger go-getters who can burn through 55-60 hour weeks are often preferred. Now, I depend more on the income: I've got a family that needs to be fed. But I've got the band concerts and games and church stuff that comes with having kids, and I'm defensive of my time. It's probably better for a company to have a bunch of younger people who can work nutty hours who don't have distractions of ye olde family life. In the short term, anyway.
See _Sex and Destiny_ by Germaine Greer. It's about the idea that the best society is Family-centered, high birth rate, most people die before they're old. Greer spent some time (in her twenties?) among Greek peasants, and was favorably impressed.
One of her points is that business sucks labor out of families. See _The Railway Children_ by Nesbit. A mother tells her children wonderful stories. When things chance and she needs money, she writes children's books for pay and has less time for telling stories to her children.
Back to Greer. If you pay attention, you'll see some bad aspects. Barren women are low status. If you aren't in a good family, you have nowhere else to go.
Still, if you were doing a utilitarian calculus and started with basically affectionate, competent people, that sort of peasant society might not be a bad deal.
I don't think fatherhood is a career stopper (at least for the upperish positions where you are likely to have affirmative action). The last US presidents all had kids, as far as I can remember (?). For mothers, things might be different.
Also, this may add a facet of age-discrimination: if you are selecting for parents, you are (mostly) selecting against 18 year olds.
I think affirmative action is very different depending on the field. AA on board membership feels basically meaningless to me --elite female board members might just as likely vote against the interests of (female) workers as their male colleagues. AA on things like college admission is a double edged sword. It can probably help minorities in certain professions, but might also attach the stigma of succeeding because of quota, not merit on the minority. I think standardized admission processes (e.g. on test scores) are probably better in the long run.
Financially speaking, raising a kid is a daunting prospect. Moving up one step on the pay-grade ladder will probably not matter up. And having kids so one can go to law school will likely result in people going even deeper into debt.
The other question is if you want to raise the overall birth rate or the birth rate of a particular sector of the population. AA-like measures are likely to affect the birth rates among college-educated professionals more than for factory workers, for example.
Re Age based discrimination: Well it's only a quota, it's not 100%. I would say the current system discriminates (indirectly) against parents and thus indirectly for 18 yo (adjusted for skill level I think most would prefer 18yo for 30 yo), and thus the AA would counteract that.
I think college educated have the lowest birthrates anyway so that would only counterbalance.
I think the highest factor is societal opportunity cost. You don't wanna have a completely different livestyle than your firend circle.
In some countries (e.g. Israel for a Western example) children get you in new more social circles than they get you out of. So there is a social incentive for children, even if it is a financial burden. Also, most financial burden is really social. Westerners have much more resources at hand than poorer countries but have less children, even factoring in living costs ---> the real cost is social.
So I think linking children to higher status + plus lots of people in your social bubble (your job) having children is a good incentive.
What about people who are infertile?
Adoption?
People might not be good parents to children they just had to get a better job.
Maybe, but don't underestimate the biology. The ambivalent expectant parent who falls in love with their baby is a trope for a reason.
The same would hold for cash incentives. But I actually think that people who are qualified for good jobs are above average parents, not because they have necessarily better character, but they probably aren't meth addicts or in prison.
We are having an ACX/LW meetup in Budapest this Saturday.
Anyone interested is welcome to join us.
Further information:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/aYCtjDYpbtrLHjzwD/new-budapest-meetup
Does anyone alse find default substack font for articles awful? Default font used for comments is much better, imho. But perhaps I just have idiosyncratic preferences...
How about having the occasional review thread? Not ambitious contest reviews, but just relatively short reviews of books, movies, etc.?
I think people might complain that it clogs the ACX frontpage by adding yet another type of non-longform post to the blog. I don't know if I personally care so much about that problem though, and I do enjoy reading the opinions of all the fun folks here. I think I would like to see something like this once in a while. Otherwise I will just start asking for recommendations in the OTs!
What do folks think the 1/6 event at the Capitol means? I tend towards that it was bad because of threats, deaths, and vandalism while not feeling very sure that it means high risk of ending democracy in the US.
Technically a coup attempt, but the most pathetic coup attempt I am aware of. I'm certain there are others, but a coup attempt that pathetic anywhere other than the recent history of my own country is probably not even going to reach my attention. As such, not a serious threat to democracy, and coupled with Trump's various other attempts to overturn the 2020 election, proof that our democratic safeguards are in at least marginally good working order.
But, claiming that there's nothing wrong with a pathetic coup attempt because it was pathetic, that this was "legitimate political discourse" (yes I know about the retcon), sets the floor higher for the next attempt and that is dangerous. And on the other side, treating a pathetically ineffectual coup attempt as if it were a clear and present danger that very nearly ended democracy in America, risks overreaction in the other direction.
People on both sides are making way too big a deal out of it.
Thanks. That's very sensible.
1) A sufficiently large part of the country finding itself unable to trust election results for whatever reason, resulting in something like January 6, is very bad. When elections become completely untrustworthy, that tends to be the end of democracy.
2) A lot of people were charged with nothing more than coming into the building, hanging out there while wearing pro-Trump gear, and posting something the judge didn't like on Facebook. A number of these people are going to jail. (See, e.g.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2021/1213/I-had-fun-lol-How-social-media-is-shaping-Jan.-6-riot-sentences .) Since people demonstrating inside Capitol in support of leftist-approved causes rarely or never go to jail, this looks like retaliation against people with unapproved political views.
When a large part of the country is no longer able to trust elections, and when people can go to jail for something people with other politics don't go to jail for and for expressing unapproved political views, are you quite sure we even have a democracy still?
You're presenting as a Republican apologist who thinks that this country should be a democracy instead of a republic. So why are you not a Democrat?
I tried to make two points, both of which I thought were common-sense. Either they did not come across right, or they were scissor statements.
1) One of the signs of a country that is not democratic is that, if there are elections, the results aren't meaningful in any way and not taken by anyone to represent the will of the people. Think Soviet Union.
We've gone from "ballots cast today are in those 3 boxes over there, absentee ballots are in that box, all postmarked, everyone who requested an absentee ballot is on record, some military ballots are delayed, but other than that we should be done counting by midnight" to, in many places, "ballots are in an unknown number of containers all over the building, some of these containers aren't sealed, some don't have any custody chain info, ballots were sent to everyone who's ever lived in our county, we have no idea how they were returned since we have a lot of drop boxes, we have no idea how many of them are still supposed to come in, we also have a pile of ballots submitted in some new way that we need to check for what in it is or is not legit, and there's two more weeks for ballots to come in." The predictable result is an all over erosion of integrity and trust, where nobody really knows if elections matter anymore.
We are not quite at the Soviet Union situation yet, because so far it's only some parts of the country that went down that rabbit hole. Nobody implies that elections are untrustworthy in, say, New Hampshire. But if the government manages to pass a law mandating that kind of chaos all around the country, we will be getting a lot closer.
Here's what's possibly the worst of 2020, and it's not even a Trump race. This ended up lasting into February:
https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2020/12/whats-going-on-in-the-brindisi-tenney-race/175398
I'm pretty sure that having elections that are so chaotic that the results can no longer be understood or trusted is overall detrimental. I can't see why this is a controversial point of view, so I guess we're in scissor land.
2) You have two sets of people committing the same infraction, hanging out in the Capitol while trying to make a political point. (To be clear, I'm not talking about people who actually assaulted someone or damaged property - of course, they should absolutely be in jail. I am talking about the ones who waltzed into the open doors to take selfies.) One set of people gets a free pass, the other set of people gets arrested and jailed, and the judges decide what kind of sentence the individual perpetrators get based on whether they wrote "lol" on Facebook (real example from the link I posted).
So people's political views and political speech ("I had fun lol") land them in jail, even though the infraction was the same that people with other political views didn't even get arrested for.
This looks like political persecution to me, and I think this is really bad. Again, I can't see why this is at all controversial, so I guess we are in scissor land again.
About the same number of people died from 1/6 as died from the Boston Massacre. I viewed it as a clear example of Republicans showing their true colors.
How many people did the protestors kill?
According to Wikipedia: “Five people died either shortly before, during, or following the event: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes. Many people were injured, including 138 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.”
I remain deeply confused about why three people just happened to die of "natural causes", in a relatively small crowd, in the space of a couple of hours.
I believe there were a couple of fatal heart attacks among the protesters. Older people, too much physical exertion, too much extreme emotion I would guess. Not sure about the third.
Your position is confusing. The common theme between the Boston Massacre and 1/6 is that agent(s) of the sate opened fire on a riot in progress, but you're conflating the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre with the rioters of 1/6, who didn't kill anyone. The 1/6 rioters are much more similar to the Bostonians who were throwing clam shells and clubs at the Brits.
As to the question of which side is in the wrong, a better analogy might be the Baltimore Riot of 1861: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_riot_of_1861
Oh, I see why the analogy isn’t clear : I was thinking of both events as “public acts of political violence which have an outsized impact due to their symbolic effects, despite the relatively small number of casualties.”
It was a just about perfect demonstration of Trumpism in action - a clueless lashing out against the powers that be, at their symbolic seat of power. It's no threat to American "democracy", because it continues to serve the interests of both business and political elites well enough, and in practice it's them who decide the form of government.
The event on its own had a low risk of ending democracy, I think. There are various plausible means by which it could have escalated into broader unrest or delayed the process for longer or maybe even killed some legislators, but a coup takes a certain amount of groundwork so that when you say "Hey, ignore what the law says, I'm president now" people actually obey instead of looking at you like you've lost your mind. I don't think that groundwork was present.
The argument that it was bad (I mean, worse than it looked) is "a coup that isn't punished is a dress rehearsal." Trump (or whatever Trump-like figure follows in his wake) now has some useful information on how many people support overturning an election and what actions could improve the odds of success next time - maybe getting state legislatures on board, maybe coming up with better legal justifications and spreading the Big Lie more in advance, maybe finding a more spineless VP, maybe coordinating with groups like the Oath Keepers that apparently had an actual plan for assaulting the Capitol instead of just smashing the windows and milling around aimlessly. It wasn't a victory, but you can see the shape a successful coup might have had.
+1. The scenario that concerned me the most was the possibility of Democrats being captured or killed and Republicans using some legal tactic or other to block their replacements, creating an all-Republican government. It seemed to me that Trump did *attempt* the outreach needed, to governors and to corporations, and other powerful figures, but only after it was clear he'd lost. He got too arrogant and complacent and got caught by surprise. If he'd started preparing before the election I'd have been much more worried about his chances.
I think it was bad and an eroding of our democratic values. I think the Democrats spent four years doing the same thing, and I worry that the Democrats are still doing it. Biden recently said that if we don't nationalize our elections (aka pass his voting bill that would, among other things, override state election laws in favor of national laws) then they are potentially illegitimate. That's dangerous, in the same vein as Trump's comments (though Trump is an idiot and doesn't allow his team to do damage control like Biden's team does).
I am worried about the future of democracy in the US, but not necessarily from a Jan 6 type event. I think Jan 6 itself could have been much worse, and future events could make a repeat more likely, but the bigger issue comes from attempts to overturn the election results through ostensibly legal means.
The vote being tallied and certified depended on the acts of a bunch of state and local officials, and the rulings of various courts. They mostly did the right thing. But the people who did so, generally took office at a time when their actions in this sort of situation were not a partisan issue. The question is whether they now have become one, so that people who want to win local and state races will have to take positions in favor of overturning elections if they want to win. Especially if people involved in the attempts in 2020 go unpunished (including if trump wins and pardons them).
As an example, trump seems to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. Whoever his running mate is would immediately be asked if Pence should have tried to overturn the election. Trump knows this and would only pick someone who would say that Pence was wrong.
As for Jan 6 itself, I think the main danger would have been from a combination of (i) Pence “declaring” trump to be the winner, (ii) the rioting disrupting the proceedings and preventing Congress from saying anything otherwise, so that the last "official" thing that anyone has said is "trump wins!" and (iii) the military moving in to “secure” the area, acting as a show of force and presenting this all as fait accompli. I don't know if that was the plan, or how coherent a plan there was; it seems like trump's actions are a combination of never wanting to back down, and thinking that chaos is good for him. There also seem to be some loose ends, like Pence reportedly not wanting to be driven away because he didn't trust where the driver was going to take him.
I agree with you it--it was a lot of violence and property damage that accomplished nothing. It seemed like most of the protestors had no concrete plan for how to turn physical presence in the Capitol into a coup--the sentiment was that it would just happen. Maybe it's part of a trend toward politics becoming more symbolic or even mystical/ritualistic.
Was there even any meaningful property damage? Some guy wandered off with a lectern, I'm not sure if it was returned later (it's kinda hard to carry home).
Protestors don't necessarily have to see a straight line between "protest about thing" and "thing gets changed", they just want to protest. It's a shame that legitimate concerns about election fraud got lost in the media freakout about some guy with a silly hat.
One common thread between QAnon and the 2020 election overturning stuff/Jan 6 is a (professed at least) absolute certainty that trump will somehow prevail against his enemies. For QAnon, whatever the details, the theory always ended with a grand reckoning and final victory, with the Democrats all going to GITMO or being abducted by aliens or whatever.
My memory of Jan 6 is also that many Republicans (including some influential, normally levelheaded people) were expressing insane levels of confidence that trump would somehow manage to win, and on Jan 6, they were not only shocked at what happened at the Capitol, but shocked when it finally hit them that yes, Biden was going to be President.
I wish I could find it now, but the head of some local county Republican party sent a letter around, AFTER Jan 6, saying that he had 100% certainty that trump would be sworn in on Jan 20. Supposedly at 11:59 am on Inaguration day some people were still expecting some last second deus ex machina.
What you said about republicans could be applied to democrats in 2016, that took a long time to even realize that Trump had a chance, and were in strong denial for a long while. They even talked about impeachment for a long time.
I’m with Nancy Leibovitz here. The New York Times was certainly not trying to claim Trump’s election was illegitimate or stolen, and I don’t recall any other liberal-tilting MSM outlets doing that either.
But I keep hearing people making this claim - always without evidence. I’d love to see actual examples of this.
Not to nag, but Lebovitz. Note spelling. You did better than many.
At least he didn’t call you by your sister’s name.
Sorry. Autocorrect wanted to fight me, and maybe I gave up too soon.
Republicans love to make this comparison but it strikes me as an odd one. Democrats certainly hoped that scandal would drive trump from office, but that's not the same as trying to overturn the election itself (in part because impeachment comes after the guy is already President, and results in Pence becoming President). This sort of thing always happens to some degree. Before 2016, people were saying Obama wasn't born in the US, with the idea presumably to get him out of office, a cause most prominently supported by....
For the election itself, Hillary conceded the next day, and Obama brought trump to the White House the day after that, called trump the President-Elect and said he'd do everything to support the transition etc. Other than some scattered individual efforts, Democrats were not really hoping, much less expecting, much less believing with certainty, that trump would somehow not take office.
I don't think it's that odd considering all the talk around impeachment during 2016-2020. My point is a relatively vague "people seem worse than before at accepting the reality that there is a president from the opposite side", and that seems to lead to bigger and bigger consequences.
Do you really think "the President, who was already elected and inaugurated, committed impeachable conduct" is the same as "the President-elect didn't actually win"?
Merits of the arguments for each one aside - ask any Democrat what was the chance that trump would actually be impeached, convicted and removed from office, and they'd have probably said "absent some compelling new information, probably not, and even if he was Pence would be President". For all the impeachment talk, Democrats didn't impeach until the Ukraine thing happened, and even then understood it would likely fail. Like, to give you an idea here is an SNL skit from early 2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CKGA9w-B6A
Becca: "So I have to wait two more years for him to be out of office."
Mueller: "Honestly, probably six"
And SNL is super anti trump.
Meanwhile, in mid-December 2020 - after the electoral college had already met and voted - the Washington Post called every Republican member of Congress and found that the vast majority did not acknowledge that Biden had won, and a majority answered "yes" to "Do you support or oppose Donald Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/congress-republicans-trump-election-claims/
Being thrown off balance by Trump's rather surprising victory isn't the same as denying that he won. I don't think I've seen anyone denying that Trump won, there were just efforts to figure out how the Trump victory snuck past them.
There were a lot of people claiming that Trump only won because he was basically a Russian spy and Russia's other spies basically rigged the election for him. And, yes, per "bounded distrust", at the highest levels that narrative was pushed by people who very carefully and artfully worded their statements to be not-technically-lies, I don't care. Someone "winning" the presidency because a bunch of nogoodniks rigged the election on their behalf is a bad thing whether they are foreign or domestic nogoodniks, and so is falsely accusing someone of that.
The relevant difference is that Trump's opponents decided that the correct remedy was to impeach Trump (and probably Pence right after so that Nancy Pelosi would be President), whereas Trump and his supporters favored the "have someone, anyone, declare that the officially certified electoral results don't count". Since we have a well-established legal and Constitutional process for impeaching Presidents, with reasonable safeguards, whereas nullifying elections is an unprecedented ad-hoc thing, that's a significant difference.
It's also an interesting problem if hostile outsiders "cheat" by dumping damaging information just before the election, so they affect the actual vote.
Thanks, that's a very good way to put it.
Here's Hillary Clinton calling Trump an illegitimate president: https://abcnews.go.com/theview/video/hillary-clinton-calls-donald-trump-illegitimate-president-66010832
Also, what Lucas said about four years of making up a story about Trump to try to get him impeached, using very high level officials throughout the intelligence community in the US. Some of these officials knew prior to any investigation that the Steele Dossier was made up and also funded as opposition by the Clinton campaign, and they did it anyway.
> I don't think I've seen anyone denying that Trump won
You may have missed 4 years of accusation of "Russian meddling" and stuff like that.
Ah yes I remember when BLM protestors attempted to overthrow an election with the help of democratic politicians how could i forget
Are you visiting from an alternate universe? In this reality we didn’t have any statues of Founding Fathers torn down, no neighborhoods were burned, and there was no “storming of the White House.” Just out of curiosity, what does “BLM” stand for in the world you came from?
Yeah, I'm cool with the latter. Peace!
This is what happened to the police station arsonist at the Mpls BLM riot.
https://www.atf.gov/news/pr/staples-man-sentenced-prison-12-million-restitution-minneapolis-police-third-precinct-arson
Anyone identified doing damage in Minneapolis or Saint Paul during the riots has been or will be prosecuted.
If the president wants you to convince his VP to throw out certified election results and you attack the US capitol building live on television you should and will be prosecuted.
If the people who stormed the Capitol on 1/6 had been met with the same level of force that the BLM protestors were met with, the steps of the Capitol would have looked like this:
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/210106172554-03-blm-george-floyd-protests-file-exlarge-169.jpg
So yes, I do want BLM protestors treated the same way the 1/6 protestors were - that would be considerably better treatment than what they actually got.
(Or we can flip it around and say that the 1/6 protestors should have been crushed before they made it to the door of the Capitol, that would also be equitable, but I have a policy about not wishing harm on strangers on the internet.)
You really think that every single person in that entire crowd is facing the full force of the federal government right now? And that they'll face the maximum possible sentence for everything they're charged with? Guaranteed, 100%, a clean sweep of every last revolutionary? What an optimistic view you have of the FBI's reach and will to pursue justice.
To me it looks like they're getting the low-hanging fruit - the people stupid enough to post videos of themselves breaking and entering on Facebook. Plus the more organized groups like the Oath Keepers which were seriously planning their attack and sending text messages full of evidence to each other.
But even if I accepted your incredibly slanted description of what's happening as the truth, I would still say that it's better than what happened to the BLM protests. Why? Because the police in the BLM protests attacked a lot of people who didn't commit a crime at all. There's videos of police committing drive-by shootings with pepperballs and baton rounds. Shooting at journalists who aren't doing anything to threaten them. Shooting at people just standing on their front porch.
If the police could *only* target the people who broke windows, trespassed on government property, or threw something at a cop, that would once again be a massive improvement over what they actually did to the BLM protestors.
Recently, I came across the work of Robert Kegan and Ken Wilber on "Development". I would define development as a life-long series of processes of personal improvement inclusive of education, learning, parenting, self-improvement, etc.
Whereas, the "science" of development has mostly focused on children, Kegan and Wilber take a more life-long view. I have found some of their conclusions very helpful. I'd like to know if there are other advanced thinkers on this topic that I'm missing. Does the ACX community have any recommendations to further my research?
Note: Wilber focuses a lot on spiritual development, which is a bit of a foreign territory for me. He also tends to be defined by that part of his work. At this point, spiritual development is not the avenue of research that I'm looking for.
Well, apparently there are people that call themselves "Keganist" https://deconstructingyourself.com/dy-006-pattern-nebulosity-guest-david-chapman.html David Chapman's work is recommend e.g. this post on being stuck on stage 4.5: https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge.He also appears to be a fiction in Ken Wilbers "Boomeritis" https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence Feel free to ask for more specific recommendations if you want to.
Thanks. I have come across David Chapman and his Meaningness.com.
To be more specific: Wilber's AQAL framework (the way I understood it), introduces a matrix of sorts: with stages of development on one axis, and facets of humanity/intelligence on the other. I am interested in the hierarchy based on experience and competence... but also on the splitting of human facets/intelligences (cognitive, creative, athletic, aesthetic, musical, emotional, interpersonal, spiritual, humor, etc.) along a number of independent and semi-independent trajectories.
I am attracted to the idea of a stage-based multi-disciplinary development matrix, kind of like a Whole Earth Catalog, but more of a Whole Life Curriculum.
So there are the "multiple types of intelligence" researchers out there which may be relevant. And also, perhaps more practical applications of development across said multiple intelligences. That said, I have seen more written on using different intelligences to approach a core curriculum. I'm more interested in reversing that and developing divergent curricula to develop divergent-ish intelligences.
Hope some of that makes sense.
(I was the man on mobile) While there is some truth to multiple intelligences, I don't think they are as independent or divergent as you think. For example, insights from seemingly distant subfields of mathematics regularly get combined to advance understanding. Of course, while fields of mathematics differ, they share a common framework that allows them to be mixed. So, we'll need a method of combining the systems, which is a meta-rational task. My model of the "varieties in intelligence" is perhaps closer to some sort of multi-dimensional Pareto frontier. While it may be interesting (and useful, if you need more of a certain type of intelligence) to model movement along the frontier, I'm more interested in advancing the frontier, myself. We could try to do some dimensional decomposition, but I think the vector space model of intelligence is a bit limited. In particular, I don't think it would be surprising that intelligence has non-linear behaviour. (in fact, it frequently has discontinuous behaviour).
I’m also interested in “multiple intelligence”, since I’ve always had a gut level suspicion of “IQ is everything” arguments. This is largely because I’ve known many people who have high “intellectual” intelligence, but low “interpersonal” and/or “physical” intelligence, for example
I’m sort of inventing my own category names here - hence the scare quotes. But I suspect the first is much easier to measure with a pen and paper multiple choice IQ test than the other two I mentioned.
Other commenters, who - unlike me, have actually read whole books on intelligence - pushed back when I brought up this idea in an Open Thread a few weeks ago. They seem to prefer G - generalized intelligence, which was a new concept to me. I wasn’t convinced but didn’t do much follow up research, TBH.
(If I can link to that conversation here, I’ll edit it in, before Substack eats my comment)
EDIT: Go to Open Thread https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-191-madridzurich-meetups and search for IQ
Anyway, I’d love to see this explored more on ACT.
Perhaps we can avoid the "IQ" trap, and the "genetic" trap, where a lot of these conversations often end up by avoiding the word "intelligence" and focusing on development.
It was way more difficult than it should have been (Substack commenting is still really flakey IME) but I was able to add the link.
I agree that terminology is extremely important, but it will be difficult to avoid using the word intelligence when discussing development, methinks.
What would it look like if development beyond some point in late adolescence was branded as “spiritual development”, that it was difficult to do, and religions were mostly bags of heuristics that for the right prescriptions (be loving, patient, kind, other-focused, humble) and couldn’t find a way to tie the prescriptions together into a theory without invoking supernatural claims?
Well, this is quite common. But we're slowly secularizing useful yet mysterious traditions such as meditation into mindfulness. This is also part of what I'm trying to do: demystifying alchemy, secularizing a form of magic. Of course, making scientific frameworks for these poorly understood techniques requires quite the cultural and intellectual basis, but I think that especially the roleplaying and gaming communities have made enough progress to help here.
Perhaps that's not unlike a wholesale replacement of competency value with badge value, which does not seem like such a foreign construct these days.
Sorry, not sure I understand. Can you explain?
The way I understood your comment is that religions may have an underlying mission of human development that can be corrupted by a supernatural dogma. ex. Start with the golden rule, end with indulgences. Maybe I projected the corruption onto your comment.
Well, it may look like "Moral Code of the Builder of Communism".
My suggestion for the ACX grants: next time, give them a classier name.
It sounded like several of the grants you were awarding were for people to further their careers in fields you want to encourage, including in academia. For an academic, the line on the CV saying e.g. "Rhodes scholar" can be more important than the actual money. By contrast, "Astral Codex Ten grant recipient" sounds like a weird internet thing.
Okay, it *is* actually a weird internet thing, but you can probably increase the impact with no extra cost by dressing it up a bit. Call them "Foresight grants", or something.
Amusingly, I think there already is another weird internet thing called "Foresight grants"
It's possible that the award, with its current name, will gain prestige if its winners go on to achieve impressive things.
Why is more prestige than the award currently has important?
I'm not sure how you make something *sound* classy unless you use a name that already exists. "ACX Grant" sounds totally like a plausible small thing I haven't heard of, and if you add "competitive grant funded by a touchstone of the rationalist community", then it sounds fine. People who know of it will respect it, and for people who don't, it's going to be hard to do much more (though it's probably helpful to not have the word "Astral" in there I suppose).
You can make things sound somewhat classy by constructing it from elements with classy connotations and which overall triggers readers' heuristics for "this is the sort of name that classy things have". Once a name becomes tied to a reputation, that reputation will dominate how the name sounds, but to someone who's never heard of it before, connotations and heuristics will shape the first impression because there's nothing else on which to have an opinion of it beyond your prior for "thing I've never heard of before".
A useful illustration here is an anecdote that P.J. O'Rourke has recounted about his early career writing for "underground" hippie newspapers. He was on the staff of a paper called "Harry", named thus because the editor had asked a young relative what they should name it. A friend of his had also founded another underground paper, called "The Chesapeake Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts". O'Rourke teased his friend for having a paper with a boring name, and the friend replied:
"Twenty-five years from now, your curriculum vitae will say 'Writer for Harry', and mine will say 'Editor of The Chesapeake Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts'."
I wish to submit my vote for bestowing the recipients with a title "Alexander GOC Scholar."
GOC = Getting Out of the Car
Yeah, it is silly. But on the other hand, Google Summer of Code sounds a bit silly too, but is quite established thing today.
Agree, although classier isn't quite what I would ask for. Something more Scott-esque.
If you look at the titles of a lot of Scott's posts they are, if anything, more distinct than the articles themselves. They're creative, funny, clever and very memorable.
Maybe it has proved impossible for Scott to come up with something in place of 'ACX grants', that has the four characteristics I mentioned above. I think that is just about forgivable.......
But keep working on it!!
Agree and responding to signal boost.
"Rhodes scholar" sounds impressive more because the name has been around for a while and acquired a reputation. "Rhodes" is just the surname of the guy who bequeathed the initial endowment of the scholarship fund.
Renaming ACX grants might improve how it looks on a CV in the short term, but keeping the name consistent would speed the process of accumulating a positive reputation.
I agree that "Rhodes scholar" sounds impressive mostly because of its reputation - but I think that part of its impressiveness is that it isn't a nonsense acronym with an "X" in it. Scott can't copy the first part (yet), but he can at least copy the second part. (Sorry: I wasn't clear enough about this in my original comment.)
I also agree about the benefit of keeping the name consistent - which is why I advocate changing the name *now*, when there's only a single round's worth of consistency to be lost.
Good point.
Seconding this: I received a scholarship to fund my PhD research, and 'impressive sounding scholarship on my CV' was probably at least as valuable as the actual money.
I'd like to hear a SSC take on what's going on in Ukraine.
It might be a nice exercise in how to apply Bounded Distrust principles, by breaking down statements from the various parties involved.
I wouldn't expect much. His dictator book reviews seem to be among his weakest content, because good sources on such topics are extremely hard to find (non-existent?). So he ends up with something like the default Western mainstream position, because nuanced contrarianism is both hard to discern and tends to get drowned in the opposite side's propaganda of even worse quality.
Obligatory Yudkowsky: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
I don't think there are any scientific publications to base "Ukraine/Russia situation: much more than you wanted to know" on.
While Scott also does less rigorous political-ish pieces (e.g. dictator book club), he wisely picks out topics where most of his readership is not entrenched in one side (e.g. Modi, not Trump or Biden).
After reading "Why Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives" (linked above), I would consider it a warning sign if Scott found it necessary to have a public opinion on Ukraine. (Unsurprisingly, the exemplary Mr. Thomas Friedman does in fact have a published opinion on three randomly picked hot button topics, namely "Ukraine", "abortion", "sixth January".)
If Scott has a special insight into the Ukraine situation, by all means let him comment on that. If not, I would much rather read about his take on Arabian Nights, FDA/fluvoxamine, cactus persons or whatever else weird niche topic he digs up.
(Also, it seems that substack does not keep a copy of drafted comments around if a tab crashes/is closed. Probably a ploy to get people to rewrite their comments more compact.)
I wouldn't see it as a red flag if Scott talked about anything. I think OP-Ed are incentivise to claim to have insight into a topic, so if they stray from their area of expertise in order to deal with the issue of the day they might be faking.
Scott (IMO) does a much better job than average op-Ed writer at being transparent about his uncertainty and his approach.
Even if he starts with no special knowledge of a topic I'd expect him to investigate what is out there deligently and dispassionately and let us know what details he found mattered and what context the popular narratives are missing
If you want to have a better-informed-than-almost-everybody opinion on Ivermectin and Covid, it's not _that_ hard, especially if you start with the major advantage of understanding medicine as well as a typical doctor. All you need to do is to read every single paper that has been published on the subject, which is a thick but manageable pile of reading.
Having a better-informed-than-almost-everybody opinion on Ukraine sounds much, much harder. You can't possibly read everything that has been written on the subject. Worse, most of what has been written on the subject is in Russian or Ukrainian, and if you're reliant on English translations you're looking at a tiny and probably biased tip of the iceberg. Worse, while scientific papers are usually written in good faith, political writings are usually full of outright lies, which will take forever to disentangle.
I keep reading on the internet about how much woker US Corporations are now and that everyone has to bite their tongues or be sent to the gulag. Perhaps I am merely fortunate to have not experienced this yet.
But I'm curious what specific things one can't say now in a professional work environment that one could say with impunity 30 years ago. You could certainly get fired 30 years ago for saying something that might be interpreted as racist or sexist. Generally, smart people figure out quickly to avoid talking about politics and religion at work.
What's a concrete example of something one can't say now in a "woke workplace" that they could say 30 years ago?
For me it's not about what I _can't_ say, because I've got no desire to chat about controversial or potentially offensive subjects at work anyway.
The problem is the sorts of things that I am obliged to hold my tongue and listen to, which offend _me_, but which I know I can't express objection to without damaging my career.
Example: here in Australia there's a sudden (last couple of years) trend towards opening meetings with something called an Acknowledgement of Country, with the words "'I begin today by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we <gather/meet> today, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present". This is a bizarre shibbolethic ritual, especially in a country which has generally prided itself on informality, but I know that if I object to it then it's the beginning of the end for my career.
That does sound insane. Sounds like a good situation to go 50 Stalins on. Instead of objecting, go all-in. Make your acknowledgments longer and longer. Go into gruesome detail about historic events. Make everyone else uncomfortable. If someone taps you on the shoulder and suggests you are going long, shed a tear. Suggest a minute of silence. Stretch the minute into 5. Go full Good Soldier Svejk.
Public schools in the US, start many gatherings with the Pledge of Allegiance. (I find it a little creepy/weird.) On the other hand I like singing 'the star spangled banner' before sporting events.
"I don't really think about social issues much, I'm just trying to do my job."
"We can't make hiring and firing decisions using race or gender."
"Our clients want us to avoid social issues and to not make hiring and firing deicsions using race or gender."
"We have a pretty good system for identifying talent and promoting the most talented people, no matter who they are."
"Can we keep corporate email for work purposes and you take your personal conversations to another outlet?"
Tech company, not bay area.
>"I don't really think about social issues much, I'm just trying to do my job."
I find that one most interesting. Employees are FORCED to talk about social issues at work?
My job is the development and design of widgets - nominally. Now it also invovles (being seen to be) taking active and proactive measures to address structural inqualities in the widget-development-and-design space.
I have been repeatedly asked to talk about certain social issues at work, with the implication that it will affect my pay and promotion prospects in the future. Not sure if that counts as "forced" in your book.
Yes, this was added as a part of my yearly review process.
I would count that as forced.
Maybe not to talk about it, but being neutral is considered a kind of betrayal. A lot of these policies run more on anger and impulse than thought-out strategies.
Being neutral equals supporting status quo, which is now considered to be a political stance. For what it's worth, I agree, everything is political, but the fact that the status quo politics are seen as broadly unacceptable seems to be an unusual situation.
>“I’m learning a foreign language” when you don’t have relevant ancestry.
I've never seen even a hint of this one. Can you expand a bit?
"Aiming at an arbitrary ratio of men to women employed is pointless and delusional."
They literally had the current ratio published quarterly alongside the usual productivity metrics at my prev. workplace, I swear:
"X growth: 17%"
"Y increase: 20%"
"women: 38%"
Publishing the ratio and noting that it's a problem is very different from having a specific arbitrary target.
There's a space between "don't actually care about the number" and "aiming at an arbitrary ratio". You can think that ratios closer to 50% might be, other things being equal, better, and thus care about the number, without thinking that every ratio other than 50% is bad and wrong.
That final claim is the one that keeps getting made. But I haven't heard anyone point to anything other than James Damore as evidence of this. And Damore didn't just say one sentence. Did anyone in the 1980's do what he did and not face consequences? That's the claim that needs to be justified here - that there was a change.
"There are natural differences in interests between men and women, and these differences are sufficient to explain gender imbalances in some fields."
This is kinda the opposite of something you can't say, but: pronouns in screen names/email footers. At my university, it was required for professors to have their pronouns listed in their Zoom name and in email footers, as well as announce them on the first day of class (though the latter may have just been the one college on campus). At my current job, we are heavily encouraged but not required to do the same.
At my workplace?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing has changed since 1992 in terms of what’s socially allowed speech wise.
Best that I can tell the change happened from 1962 (before I was born) to 1982 (when I was 14 years old).
> Absolutely nothing has changed since 1992 in terms of what’s socially allowed speech wise.
Depends on the industry. In software development, it's not that uncommon for HR to send out policy statements to the effect of, "we're hiring but we're ignoring all applicants from white males".
Granted that there’s memo’s on pronouns or some such that wouldn’t have been around in 1992 but at the shop floor level folks talk in almost exactly the same way on exactly the same stuff as then, maybe slightly cruder - I blame retirements and young men growing up watching “South Park” and listening to Howard Stern, but the difference isn’t much.
An obvious example is anything anti-gay. 30 years ago you could loudly proclaim that you don't like gay people, or could refuse to hire them as official written company policy. That's probably not what you're looking for in terms of "woke" but it does help illustrate how far some things have moved.
Not all organizations are like this, but in many you could get in trouble/fired for "deadnaming" a trans person, misgendering, using the wrong pronouns, etc. 30 years ago no one would have known what any of those terms meant. Racial slurs used to be fairly common (I've heard several bosses drop the n-word specifically as racial slurs). Some of that still goes on, but way way less common or accepted than it used to be.
A LOT has changed in 30 years.
>30 years ago you could loudly proclaim that you don't like gay people
I doubt this was the case in most Fortune 500 companies 30 years ago.
No offense intended, but I take it that you are too young to remember that time clearly then. Even in the 2000s it was common for people to be outwardly anti-gay. Proposition 8 in California (banning gay marriage) passed in 2008. Obama and Hillary both officially denounced gay marriage options into Obama's first presidency.
The 90s was when people could get beat up on the street for looking or acting gay.
Being anti-gay-marriage and being anti-gay are not the same thing; one doesn't have to be pro-everything-gay-people-want to be not-anti-gay. There were, and I expect quietly still are, a fair number of people who were sincerely both pro-gay and anti-gay-marriage.
But on the general point, even explicitly anti-gay was still on the edge of the Overton window in most of the United States in 1992. You'd have to have worked at it to get fired for that outside of e.g. San Francisco, and if you pulled it off it would be for grossly violating the norm against being loudly political in the workplace more than for the specific political position.
Would any corporation fire somebody for the Damore memo 30 years ago?
The Damore memo always reminded me of the 1996 Tom Cruise movie, "Jerry McGuire", in which Cruise's character sends out a memo to the whole company at his sports management agency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Maguire
"After criticism from an injured player's son triggers a life-altering epiphany, he writes a mission statement about perceived dishonesty in the sports management business and his desire to work with fewer clients to produce a better, more caring personal relationship with them. In turn, SMI management sends Bob Sugar, Jerry's protégé, to fire him."
Why is Cruise's character fired? For rocking the boat. You don't circulate a memo around your company that is going to piss off management without expecting to get fired. Although the content of Damore's and Maguire's memos may have varied drastically, they more or less got fired for doing the same thing.
I wonder how much sense young people today could make of the Jerry Maguire storyline. Although it was a huge hit at the time, it doesn't seem to be a popular movie now.
My understanding of the situation, though It's been a while, is that Damore's memo was posted on a small internal sub-forum and almost all the circulating was done by people who were opposed to him
I fail to follow your analogy.
Would anyone have sent something like the Damore memo 30 years ago?
Why not? Feminism was about a century old by then, so it's not like nobody thought to consider the reasons for gender imbalances and whatnot before the last decade.
You could probably find a company somewhere that would have had an issue with it, but that would certainly have been the exception - especially on a forum meant to be open to discussion as with the Damore example.
I haven't been working long enough to know what you could _say_ 30 years ago, but I'd guess that workplace dress has changed. I've seen cultural appropriation accusations for Hawaiian shirts and African and Asian printed fabrics, and those definitely weren't considered out of bounds for white people in old tv shows or fashion books/magazines.
Although I think 30 years ago you wouldn't have been allowed to wear those things on any day other than Friday.
I don't think you would have been allowed to wear them on Friday. A lot of Casual Fridays in the '90s meant "you don't have to wear a tie, but please don't wear denim".
I had heard about "Aloha Shirt Fridays" from my parents in Canada in the 1980s, and checking Wikipedia, it looks like "Casal Fridays" actually grew out of an "Aloha Shirt Fridays" movement that originally started in Hawaii but spread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_shirt#Aloha_Friday):
In 1965, Bill Foster Sr., president of the Hawaii Fashion Guild, led the organization in a campaign lobbying for "Aloha Friday", a day employers would allow men to wear aloha shirts on the last business day of the week a few months out of the year.[34] Aloha Friday officially began in 1966,[35] and young adults of the 1960s embraced the style, replacing the formal business wear favored by previous generations. By 1970, aloha wear had gained acceptance in Hawaii as business attire for any day of the week.[33] Unlike the court dress required in most jurisdictions, attorneys in Hawaii may be allowed to wear aloha shirts in court, though this varies among individual courts.[36]
Hawaii's custom of Aloha Friday slowly spread east to California, continuing around the globe until the 1990s, when it became known as Casual Friday.[33][34] Today in Hawaii, alohawear is worn as business attire for any day of the week,[20] and "Aloha Friday" is generally used to refer to the last day of the work week.[33] Now considered Hawaii's term for "Thank God It's Friday" (TGIF),[37] the phrase was used by Kimo Kahoano and Paul Natto in their 1982 song, "It's Aloha Friday, No Work 'til Monday",[38] heard every Friday on Hawaii radio stations across the state.
Interesting. I had never heard of Aloha Friday. My memory of Casual Fridays is of men wearing polo shirts and kakis instead of a button-down shirt with a tie.
Ditto. My second internship was like this. Ties daily, but polos on Friday.
I was under the impression that the problem is not about what you shouldn't say but what about you should say, and that lots of people complaining about "wokism" are complaining of having to say/do things they don't believe in. For example, discrimination during recruitement to favor minorities, participating in inclusion workshops, stuff like that.
These certainly aren't fireable offenses but a few examples of phrases that are discouraged in my workplace are "guys", "whitelists" and "blacklists" and "master-slave" in the context of database replication. So much so that significant engineering hours are spent expunging these words from the codebase and documentation.
Holy crap. That's nuts. We still use whitelist and blacklist where I am.
We ended up with replacing ‚a‘ with ‚o‘ in blacklist, and that was it …
At Google they changed whitelist to allowlist.
That is crazy.
If you are or aren’t seeing these stories, it says more about your online activities than anything else. There are plenty of first hand accounts out there, if you go and look for them.
It does some. Still hard to get a sense of what is actually *typical*.
Can somebody help me find a less charged word to use in an argument about Wordle? I was trying to explain to somebody that I don't like the fact that Wordle's "Share this neat pattern with your friends! Compare your results!" billing encourages people to spam my social media feeds with daily reminders that the game exists. It reminds me of the Dark Age of Farmville and other cheap MMOs that only survived by incentivizing their players to give the game free advertisement on social media. I described its psychology as "exploitative", and when someone else said that it also reminds them of cheap Facebook MMOs, I agreed with them, but after that the conversation quickly got bogged down in discussion of how most MMOs try to get players to spend as much money and time as possible on them, and since Wordle is "free and doesn't take long", people said that I wasn't right to say it was "exploitative like an MMO".
I think "exploitative" is a perfectly fair word for something that tricks people into telling everyone they know about it on a daily basis, but I realized that if other people reserve that word for games that specifically try to make the player spend money, I might be Worst Argument In The World-ing. I tried to think of an alternate word, but all I could come up with was "manipulative" which has the same problem. Is there another word that better sums up my gripe?
You can't win this with a rational argument. There are tons of people who just want to be involved in what the masses are doing. You don't want that. It is an unresolvable conflict. The answer is to use filters, especially on Twitter, to simply block Wordle.
I think there's a really important distinction between two things, that Wordle separated but nearly everything else doesn't. One is spamming others for virality purposes. The other is being addictive and asking more time from everyone who uses it once.
DrawSomething was particularly bad in doing both of these things together. Civilization is particularly bad on the second, but not on the first. Wordle is unusual in being bad at the first but good on the second.
If you don't like seeing stuff that interests your friends but not you, your only worthwhile options are (a) get off Facebook, or (b) suck it up, like I do with all the cat photos.
I have always wondered if people who don't like cat photos even exist. Now I know.
Wordle doesn't give any incentive to share your result. People do it because they want to. Presumably because they had a particularly interesting pattern or they like seeing others' results.
Bewordling?
How about "anti-social"? As in, encouraging behavior that is disruptive to others.
The phrase "dark pattern" also comes to mind, although that might be stretching common usage a bit.
"Annoying"
"Spam-incentivizing"
I don't think you'll win a strong front on arguing about the psychology, because it's really hard for you to do that without people interpreting that as you saying (in so many words) "You are morally-wrong to enjoy Wordle" or "You are a victim of Wordle" (I assume your complaints don't actually rise to this level). I think it's pretty fine to just say "It's annoying, I don't want my feed clogged up by people's Wordle Cubes" unless you want to try to browbeat others into not playing Wordle.
Why didn’t the US succeed in banning TikTok? Maybe someone with a legal background could help me understand why the executive order failed. I can see reasons why we wouldn't want almost 100 million Americans using a highly addictive, effectively Chinese government-owned tech app. The downsides of banning of course would include the loss of some people’s incomes and maybe a dangerous precedent for government control of online platforms?
I an not an American but banning an app which does nothing illegal via an executive order seems kind of incompatible with the freedom of speech (?)
Yes, I would be concerned about this too.
Is that sufficient as an answer, though? That the courts would prevent the ban?
Not just that the courts would prevent the ban, but that even Trump couldn't figure out a way to even begin to phrase the ban that wouldn't be just laughed at by the targets. Would Apple or Google have removed the app from the store just because the President said it was unAmerican? They would just laugh and promote the app with that endorsement!
The US government needs authority to do something. If they don't have the authority then they can't do it. This has been solved by very, very generously interpreting various enabling acts. For example, basically all regulatory authority like OSHA comes the Federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce. The... generous argument being that all economic activity affects interstate commerce.
Trump tried to ban TikTok by using the IEEPA which deals with international commerce and national security in states of emergency. Trump basically declared TikTok a national emergency. TikTok sued and won on the grounds that the existence of TikTok was not a national emergency.
Biden removed those orders and has made comments about new standards but hasn't actually done anything other than order new reports and intelligence investigations.
The US could ban TikTok either through a direct ban or (more common these days) a new regulatory agency. But either thing is bound up in wider politics about regulating the internet. In particular, the Democrats really want to domestically and the Republicans are reflexively suspicious of regulatory agencies right now.
Thanks, very helpful. Republicans do seem more vocal on the TikTok matter, and in general when it comes to cyber relations with China.
Most importantly, the fact that Trump wanted to ban it means that it needs to be even more awful than him for the Democrats to agree, a condition which TikTok seems to fail (barely?)
What potential problems might Chinese owned TikTok cause?
Essentially the ability to influence the US population. Or in the words of this inconclusive paper: manipulation, censorship, propaganda, control, and influence.
http://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1527742/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Huh, how do you feel about twitter banning Trump?
Ambivalent.
OK, I hate Trump, but I hate the 'manipulation, censorship, propaganda, control, and influence.' that banning him involves more.
Wait, is it censorship for Twitter to ban him? I thought it would be censorship for the government to ban them from banning him.
What other internet properties have been banned? The courts will sometimes order a domain name seized/disabled, but a) this is usually only a temporary setback and b) the site in question has broken a specific law. There is not some kind of general “ban stuff from the internet because it’s socially pernicious” power hanging around, for the President or anyone else. Is there?
Not a ban as in a national firewall, but there are tons of websites where I can’t make an account and am not allowed to use (sports betting comes to mind).
That’s a payments thing. There are a lot more restrictions on commerce than content.
Gambling is illegal in most of the US. What's illegal about TikTok?
Nothing.
Advice on motivation and brain fog?
I think I am basically suffering from pathological under-stimulation of my frontal cortex. Every day I struggle against debilitating brain fog paired with raging impulsivity, desperate to have the presence of mind that makes me feel competent, functional, and alive. I have tried Vyvanse, Adderall, Welbutrin, Cymbalta, etc., with mixed results: the stimulants often helped enormously for a short while (usually a matter of two or three days or so), but as I took them I developed a tolerance which completely undermines their effects. Wellbutrin unfortunately didn't pair well with my anxiety, and Cymbalta has taken the hysterical edge off of the neuroticism while turning my impulsivity into pathological listlessness and avolition, where I just wallow in my bedsheets all day. It beasts panicking, I suppose; but my grades are going to suffer if something doesn't change soon.
What is so strange is that there are other days (or, more often, stretches of a few hours here and there) in which the fog lifts somewhat or entirely and I feel remarkably better. I can think, write, speak, etc. without any feeling of impairment whatsoever. Better, even: people tell me that I can be strikingly articulate and knowledgeable, but this is only said of me when I experience a parting of the fog.
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and am currently treating it with CPAP, and it does make me feel more refreshed by my sleep. I notice that on the days without CPAP, I feel much worse. Sadly, none of the cognitive symptoms have subsided despite about two months of treatment, causing me to fear that I have suffered from permanent brain damage.
I wake up in the mornings gasping for air intellectually. My mind is a disorganized, haphazard array of random, incomplete sentences. Or else it is just blank and vacant, with thoughts only occurring to me with great difficulty. *"Chair... Shoes... eh, eh.... walk! Yes,* I wanna walk. Sh-sh, sh....*Shower!* Need, Ne...Ne... I... I... Need, I need, I need, need, a sh-*shower!*" is essentially my internal monologue in the mornings. I will talk to myself with the hope of jump starting my brain, but the effort is usually hopeless and my thoughts come out in hideous, elliptical, self-interrupting and inarticulate sentences.
I have learned not to meet people for coffee in the mornings or allow any extended social interactions, because when I do I alarm people by my shocking lack of basic self-awareness (like walking away after paying for my food/coffee and leaving my credit card or forgetting to pick up what I just paid for; forgetting people’s names who I interact with on almost a daily basis) and confused/jumbled speech.
I experience the brain fog in involuntary physiological cycles; my mind is obliterated in the mornings and slowly becomes tractable in the afternoons and extremely vivid and clear in the late evenings. Conversation helps. Sugary foods and soda helps. Intense exercise can wipe me out, but a walk or something more relaxed can help. Feeling appreciated/impressive/socially desired and enjoying an adrenalizing experience helps (clubbing, drinking with friends, etc.). The fog usually happens with a lot of neurotic and unhealthy/self-critical thoughts and, weirdly, rampant impulsiveness that pervades my body, driving me to while my life away in a hedonistic blur.
My life is vibrant and thrilling when the fog is gone and my cerebral function is restored; I feel focused, accomplished, and extremely capable. Otherwise, I am a shell of my true self and burn with a feeling of waste and loss. Please share your thoughts and offer any ideas you may have about improving cognition, awareness, intellectual engagement, etc.
I wish so badly that I had endless reserves of energy to draw from in order to accomplish my goals. A latent part of me is tempted to begin pursuing options around electroconvulsive therapy, just so that I can resolve my mood problem without the need for antidepressants. I’ve had enough of having my brain on factory settings, and feel strangely unperturbed by the idea of permanently changing it for the better.
I am in desperate need of effective treatment for my lack of motivation, and become a vastly more functional human being on extended release Vyvanse (30mg). If not for the tolerance problem, I would literally be among the happiest and most fulfilled humans to ever live.
What can I do to overcome this? Some solutions I have been thinking about so far:
- Figure out some sort of optimized dosing schedule that trades off my need for the medication with tolerance; experiment with taking on-and-off 4 days a week, 3 days, or even only 2 days. Completely give myself over to my symptoms during the intervening days, getting nothing done and whiling my time away in a haze of motivational poverty and brain fog, so that the drug days can be livable.
- Experiment with other stimulants that use different mechanisms (do those exist?) and rotate between them in multi-day blocks. Risk becoming addicted to nicotine. (Already tried Modafinil, but turned out to be an unfortunate outlier in terms of side effects. Gives me intolerable anxiety, although somehow Vyvanse actually *decreases* my anxiety. No idea how this is possible from a biological perspective.) One problem with this approach is that I’m not aware of other stimulant medications with comparable efficacy that use different mechanisms.
- Increase the dosage on Vyvanse. I question the wisdom of this, because won’t it just plant me back in my initial position a few days later, and with only worse side effects in the meantime? If I tolerate to 30mg, why would it be any different at 50 or 70?
- Just give up and hate myself? I hope this isn’t the ultimate answer, but a deeply pessimistic, fatalistic part of me worries this will be the eventual result. I will be forced to submit to biological slavery because of the sheerest, freak accident of genetics that created my dysfunctional brain.
Have you tried getting a blood test done? I experienced worsening brain fog for close to a year and was convinced it was due to stress, or something of that nature, until I got my blood tested and was diagnosed with a Vitamin B12 deficiency (especially common in vegans and vegetarians).
Wow, that sucks. Are you young? It may get better with age. As a teenager (into 20's) I remember hating to interact with anyone in the mornings, not nearly as bad as you describe, but "Don't talk to me before I've had my second coffee." Well I'm still a bit like this.
Have you thought about transcranial magnetic stimulation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation
I think doctors are best suited to comment on the pharmaceutical side, but I assume you consider these to be temporary crutches and not long-term solutions. With that in mind, some possible evidence-based lifestyle changes that are known to help:
Is your sleep schedule regular? Are you getting enough sleep? I had a similar period, not as bad as what you describe, and abstaining from all substances (coffee, alcohol, cannabis, etc.) and following a proper sleep schedule helped a lot. Get a watch or other device that can measure the depth of your sleep, because even if sleep duration is good, sleep quality may not be. If you still want/need to use stimulants, read up on when during the day the last dose should be taken to ensure you can fall asleep at a proper time. Sleep specialists these days recommend your last coffee to be 2PM to avoid compromising sleep quality for typical sleep schedules.
I'd also look at your nutrition. The microbiome is being implicated quite a bit in depression and other cognitive issues these days. Add some fermented foods and a lot more fibre to your diet. My difficulties also coincided with a lot of poor nutrition that obviously tasted good.
Finally, exercise. Not every form of exercise works for everyone. Resistance training is very good because it's not metabolically demanding, which you hinted by your reference to being drained. Then again, really vigourous metabolic exercise can help cognitive spiraling too because it really takes you out of your own head; you'll get better at it if you stick to it.
Weight training can be monotonous, but if you follow a plan and track your progress, you'll see positive improvements week after week which can be very empowering. It gives you a feeling of competence and control over your body and life that's hard to describe. Weight training will also drive you to better nutrition because "bad" foods just aren't satisfying given they lack the macronutrients you'll be craving. Just be sure to get enough fibre. I would also sprinkle in some fun endurance/metabolic exercise as well though, to change things up. Do something different, like rollerblading, challenging hikes, swimming, etc.
Another suggestion that's slightly less evidence based, but I've found very helpful and can help with morning brain fog: some kind of fasting. 16:8 intermittent fasting where I don't eat until mid afternoon works great for me, just find something that works for you. Blood sugar while fasted is pretty steady and provides a lot of morning clarity. It can be challenging for the first couple of weeks because most people just aren't used to ignoring hunger signals, but they go away if you just wait a few minutes or drink some water, and then your hormone cycles adapt to your new eating schedule. A lot of people report no longer feeling hungry outside of the eating window, which matches my experience. It's not suited to everyone though.
A lot of my decline this was triggered by the pandemic, because I couldn't exercise like I used to, and I had more time stuck inside so started overusing substances to compensate for a loss of control, and so a lot of other things fell by the wayside (like nutrition), and these all compounded each other. I'm only now getting better because things are opening up and all of this is becoming obvious in retrospect.
I hope some of this helps, best of luck.
If you’re trying all kinds of stuff, maybe read “The Body Keeps The Score” or something. Maybe it is related to some unresolved trauma, like you’re prone to dissociate.
--Have you actually tried these pharmacological treatments for long enough times to make it to some sort of steady state? A few weeks-months, at least. And I think you're right that dosing schedules that work against tolerance can make a big difference.
--Try a ketogenic diet for a couple months. It's a giant pain in the ass, but I have similar (though less intense) symptoms and it made a very noticeable difference. A low-carb diet generally seems to cut through my brain fog quite effectively.
Could it be a low blood sugar problem?
A lot of that does sound like possibly blood sugar-related issues. Definitely worth getting checked for diabetes or metabolic syndrome.
I'd check the blood sugar first rather than assuming it's caused by diabetes or metabolic syndrome. I think there are continuous blood sugar monitors these days.
Are there recognizably different sorts of brain fog caused by different problems?
I'm not a doctor. All I know is that I've seen people with issues that sounded like this, and each one of them had one of these problems. I agree that checking blood sugar first is easier, just in case it's normal.
Stimulants aren't really addictive. Especially not in typical medication doses.
Have you tried exercising?
Nicotine might be worth trying, too. Gwern has a good writeups on it.
Do keep a journal to see what works for you in the long run?
Apropos sugar: have you tried getting into ketosis and seeing what effects it has on you?
"Intense exercise can wipe me out, but a walk or something more relaxed can help"
So exercise probably isn't the solution.
Actually, getting wiped out can help tremendously with anxiety and often depression too. It also helps with consistent sleep patterns, which sounds like an issue here. You just have to exercise intensely and consistently enough over a period of time to really notice the effects.
I just realized that the past two years have been full of scissors statements.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
There's the initial responses to covid, the BLM demonstrations and riots, the January 6 demonstration and riot, Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine mandates, the trucker convoy...
The odd part is that not only are they controversial but they are unpredictably controversial. You didn't know who will be on which side ahead of time.
I think those can't be scissors precisely because as you say, they are unpredictable and they easily swap sides. Those are tribal signaling shibboleths / toxoplasma of rage reflecting coordination in warfare, not scissor statements tapping into deep immutable opaque uncompromisable values. (You don't need to look up on Twitter to see whether the bluechecks endorse hearing 'Yanny' or 'Laurel', you just *hear* Laurel or *see* that the dress is obviously gold.)
Thanks for the fun story link. Reminded me of the Monty Python skit, where the military develops a joke so funny it kills you laughing.
I dunno how unpredictable these things are - most of those examples seem to shake out in a pretty standard Red vs. Blue tribe way?
On a lot of these things, I don't necessarily like either "side" of the controversy, but the "scissors" part of it comes in on the question of which side I dislike more.
I'm a huge fan of "Reign of Terror" moderation and feel strongly that if you (Scott) are looking at a comment and feeling torn about whether to delete it, the answer is yes for the love of god delete it.
Also I'd like to repeat my comment from the last subscribers-only thread on the "why does [Scott] suck" comments:
The complaints sound like classic Golden Age thinking. My own perception is that SSC/ACX has gotten better and better. Consider recent works of genius like "Diseasonality" (maybe most of the genius of that one is in the title) or the one about "no evidence" and the "kids and climate change" one. Not to mention that every time he reviews a book, the review is better than the book itself. He's an absolute national treasure. (Conflict of interest disclosure: he's been amazing to me and to Beeminder and we're in the same social circles etc.)
While there is something to be said for "reign of terror" moderation (which is a form of what I call the third school here: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/stackexchange ), it is not in general a good moderation style for maintaining a high quality, indeed, it is better suited if one prefers freedom and diversity over quality and safety. I use Scott's system as an example of the fifth school: a system with clear rules, mostly independent of the current mood of the moderator, apart from some exceptions. (such a clause is nessecary. There will always be rules-lawyers that are able to consistently break the spirit of the rules without breaking the letter. We sometimes tell users that are suspended for this is that the reason is that they were "breaking the community" on Stackexchange. Or, in the pre-CoC era, when things were nice and simple, we'd simply say they weren't being Nice) The main advantage is that the legitimacy for the rules is now derived from reason/ideas, except from a person, and that persons social power. Social power is Molochian, and hence is expensive to maintain, most of the expense being paid by the community. Another advantage is that users can self-moderate, so that things don't catch fire when the mods are asleep.
What does "pre-CoC era" mean?
Indeed, CoC means code of conduct. Back in the day, the instruction "Be nice" was deemed sufficient, and people were trusted to be able to work out the details with eachother. However, in this brave new world, such naive ideas are not suitable with the ethos of a modern internet company. At least, this is the thought process I imagine corporate having when they start fixing things that are not broken again for reason in particular. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/312038/wed-like-your-feedback-on-our-new-code-of-conduct , though note that there's been a lot discussion there.
A code of conduct can be useful, it is basically just a fancy name for a set of house rules, but I haven't seen much genuine use of it beyond physical gatherings. Anyway, I'd prefer not to fix things that aren't broken.
Of course, if it were merely a document that was telling us what we were already doing, it wouldn't have been a memorable event. There's a particular rule that states every user has a right to be addressed in precisely the manner they specify, and no other way. This is a strange rule for a platform where most people are adressed by "@username". (it's mostly relevant when talking about users, of course, but still. There is a standard that is not too much unlike the real world: just use their name) It's appears to be a rather hamfisted attempt at preventing intentional disrespect towards users with nontraditional pronouns. (note that this particular form of abuse would be covered by the "Be nice" rule)
The implication of this rule, that other people can apparently make arbitrary demands on the words that come out of your mouth when you want to talk about them, was not popular, to say the least. It was also very confusing. Most people thought that there is no problem, because we can just use their name, but no, that would too easy. Fortunately, in my experience as a moderator, this rule has never been relevant on my site (for 3 years or so).
Code of Conduct, I think.
I think you eliminate your potential audience by calling Neil Young "a washed-up singer" or "a nobody". You might as well call Joe Rogan a washed-up reality-show host.
I haven't really been following what's going on with Joe. I found this, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/05/joe-rogan-apologizes-racial-slurs-circulates-00006011 which also has a link to his instagram post. https://www.instagram.com/p/CZlnH8MAb8L/
(You need to have watched instagram for what follows.)
I love Joe, though I haven't listened to him much since he moved to spotify. The idea that we hold our past selves to today's standards is crazy. I think you can only judge someone's conduct in the past, in the context of the standards of the past. Else you get "McElligot's Pool" pulled for 'eskimo fish'. We need to stop this! I don't care who wore black face twenty years ago in college... it was a different time.
Re: the n-word. I live in Trump country. As the n-word has been absolutely banned from speech in one group of white Americans, I now hear it more often from another group. In this group it is now a 'flag' you can fly, showing group membership. Similar to the confederate battle flag. Banning speech doesn't work. And I think it might have the opposite effect than what was intended by the ban. We need to embrace our past, acknowledge past mistakes, apologize if possible, and move the fuck forward.
Joe Rogan is a national treasure, he's also human.
"My question is this. We've seen this pattern over and over again for years. Do nothing, the mob moves on; apologize and you're dead. So why do they keep doing it? Is this something that only the terminally online know? But both of these figures have been eyewitnesses to endless woke cancelation attempts. How does it not sink in?"
I knew a guy in pretty much this exact situation (much smaller than Joe Rogan). If he hadn't deleted all his posts on the private internet forum we both shared, I'm sure I could find something of his joking about "if I give these sharks just a little blood, they'll leave me alone" regarding woke mobs. He gave the sharks a big heaping helping of blood before leaving the internet pretty much entirely afaik.
My best guess is that it's very different, emotionally, to be on the receiving end of these sorts of attacks, and that overpowers your sense.
(eta: Even as somebody who wasn't personally on the receiving end, but just watching a good guy go through this shit, it was stressful to the point I vomited once during it. It's easy to be rational and calm when you have a completely detached relationship to the events.)
ETA2: Imagine that I showed you studies, surveys, metanalyses, etc, on the subject of what to do in a situation where you're being held at gunpoint to maximize your probability of survival. The main conclusion of these (imaginary) studies was that you should not go any place that the person holding you at gunpoint says to (into a car, down an alley, etc), and you should not allow yourself to get bound. Now, you read these studies and agree with me about what they mean, 90+% confidence. How sure are you that once somebody's pointing a gun at you, you won't go with them down a dark alley and get shot?
I don't see how Young's attack on Spotify was woke, unless woke means something new now. Young was always a bit of a hippie. He was angry at The Man, just as he has always been.
Also, it was obviously a publicity stunt for his preferred streaming services, particularly the one he owns.
I'm not buying that Young made a serious attempt to get Rogan thrown off Spotify. Young is no fool. He knew he would be dumped, not the guy Spotify just paid $100,000,000. Young had been feuding with Spotify for years, and this was an opportunity to give them a big fuck you on the way out, while telling people to check out the higher fidelity streaming service you can buy directly from him.
>at this point it's impossible to disagree that wokeness and Covid Zero fanaticism have congealed together into a single ugly mass.
I had never considered that before. I suppose it's possible. But even if true, I'm not buying that Neil Young is a Covid Zero fanatic or woke in any other way., unless his old-school hippie leftism now counts as woke. I suppose songs like "Cortez the Killer" have a woke vibe. But if that's the case, we are just giving old things new labels.
Hmm, well that's a cynical view of Neil. I just figured he was caught in his own 'bubble' and doesn't really know who J. Rogan is except for the left wing narrative you see in the MSM. I wonder if Joe has asked him on the show, they could have a conversation and might become friends.
Neil Young would be a _perfect_ JRE guest. 90% probability they’d get along like gangbusters.
Yeah if he was on I would definitely watch. "Keep it Rockin' in the Free World". It would be great for both 'brands'.
“ if that's the case, we are just giving old things new labels.”
I think that’s mostly what woke/anti-woke is, as almost everything described/decried as “woke” about race-relations, sexism, et cetera is almost exactly what was taught in elementary schools in the 1970’s, and by far those that are proponents of “woke” today are the same sort of folks that were proponents then - school teachers.
What are some examples of people resisting these cancellation attempts effectively and why do they succeed? Ideally leave aside people with absurd levels of wealth like JK Rowling and Dave Chappelle. This is an underrated area I'd love to see more in-depth discussion about.
Something like the Trader Joe/Jose/Ming's controversy saw pushback coming directly from the corporation itself and very little targeting of specific people. In the case of Rogan and Shapiro, there are higher-ups (the CEO of Spotify, the Georgetown Dean) who clearly want to keep their positions. Perhaps it helps to be a faceless, low-key corporation.
Sam Harris seems to resist quite well so far.
There's an interesting example of this happening at the moment with Jimmy Carr, a fairly popular British comedian. He said something pretty awful during a routine (that genocide of thousands of gypsies was a positive upside of the holocaust), is now being criticised by pretty much everyone including government ministers, and is refusing to apologise at all. It'll be interesting to see if he can ride it out.
I haven't watched a ton of Jimmy Carr, but from what I remember of him that genocide joke seems par for the course. I'm pretty certain he's made pro-pedophilia/mass child sex abuse jokes worse than that. Especially those involving the Catholic church.
Jimmy Carr's routine is a series of The Most Offensive Jokes I Can Think Of, so he can't really afford to back down or apologize unless he rebrands himself entirely. That one will be interesting, because nobody should be surprised that he said something offensive.