As a native German, I would only consider the form "Sie wussten nicht, dass der Wasserstand so stark ansteigen wird" correct if the rising water level is in the future of the speaker. (Though "würde" would be possible even then, because it's in the future of "them".) If it's in the speaker's past, then "würde" seems mandatory to me.
In fact, I would make the same distinction in English. I would find both the following sentences valid, but with different meaning:
"They didn't know that the sun would turn into a red giant."
"They didn't know that the sun will turn into a red giant."
The first one is appropriate if the red giant was in the speaker's past (or if it is a fictional event), the second one if the supernova is in the speaker's future (and it's about reality). Is that just a false analogy from German, am I using it wrong?
In German, it's definitely correct to use the same two structures
"Sie wussten nicht, dass die Sonne sich in einen roten Riesen verwandeln würde."
"Sie wussten nicht, dass die Sonne sich in einen roten Riesen verwandeln wird."
As a native Polish speaker I always found the amount of tenses in English peculiar. What extra information is given by using future-in-the-past?
"The water will rise" -> "Woda się podniesie"
"They didn't know the water would rise" -> "Nie wiedzieli, że woda się podniesie"
Just use the simple future! We already know the context is the past ("they didn't know") so the next verb is phrased relative to that time.
FWIW, our use of the simple future here is also present agnostic. Are there languages that aren't present agnostic when phrasing sentences like this one?
"Would" in OP's example implies that the water rose after the past context but before the speaker's present. Using "will" instead implies that the water rising is still in the future.
Tried to come up with a variation that felt grammatical, without adding verbs and thereby interfering with tenses. Best I got: "that it will/would rain is something they didn't know" (which of course includes the verb "is")
I sometimes find (my native) Czech limiting because there is no past perfect tense in Czech. Likewise, English is limiting because there is no verb aspect in English (although the continuous tense is somewhat similar...in German, which does not even have the continuous tense, this is even more limiting). I find pretty much all foreign languages limiting in that they do not differentiate between the nominative and vocative cases. There is no way in English, German, Romance languages or even all other Slavic languages to differentiate between "Tibor!" (nominative, someone simply exclaiming my name) and "Tibore!" (vocative, someone addressing me). I think the Baltic languages actually have the vocative case and Latin has it too but I don't think any other Indo-European languages do.
In general, the more languages I learn, the more I realize how imprecise language is and how some finer points can only be ascertained from context.
However, I wouldn't expect this to have any big sociological implications. While it might be true that one language might be better at explaining some fine grammatical details, ordinary people rarely make use of that. How often do you hear people use the conditional perfect tense in English (including native speakers)? I think this is pretty rare. Scholars might use this to make their ideas more precise I don't think any language makes maths-level precision particularly easy and this requires a lot of specific conditionals such as "if and only if" which do not appear in any everyday language (in fact I'd say most people don't even understand what "if and only if" means).
Polish has vocative case, though it's rarely used. e.g.
"Andrzej, chodź na piwo" and "Andrzeju, chodź na piwo" both mean "Andrzej! come drink a beer [with me/us]", with the latter one using a vocative form and sounding kind of formal/official. It's still used, historically it's been used a lot more often, in fact skipping it might be a modern development (?). For example, marriage vows use exclusively the vocative form.
Actually now that I think of it, perhaps we imported the idea from the Czech language? No idea how other Slavic languages handle it, I'm pretty sure Russian has no such thing.
EDIT: I checked and actually Russian has _two_ vocative cases, one is obsolete and very similar to the Polish one, the other is a colloquial construct only for close people.
Out of curiosity, why would someone exclaim a name in the nominative case, or care about the difference?
Unless I’m very mistaken, Romanian _does_ differentiate between vocative and nominative, but usually only for common nouns (and in some declinations the forms are identical). For example, you might exclaim “Cal!” or “Calul!” (meaning “Horse!” or “The horse!”), but you would address a horse as “calule”. However, you would say “câine” for “dog” in either nominative or vocative. A very common case is to say “domn" (either “gentleman” or “lord”, in nominative) or “doamne” (“lord” in vocative, the usual way to address God or, in the past, nobles; it also means “ladies” due to phonetic coincidence).
Proper nouns (i.e. names) aren’t don’t usually take the vocative form in modern usage, and until reading your comment it wouldn’t have occurred to me it was possible to _need_ the distinction. But now that I think of it, it is in fact possible to construct vocative forms of names, it’s just uncommon to use them. (Probably the most common example is “Ioane”, the vocative of “Ion”, which is part of the title and refrain of a well-known song.)
I wanted to insist Romanian has future-in-the-past, but after thinking a bit more I think you’re right.
I might say something like “Ei nu știau că apa va fi crescut așa de mult” and I’d expect people to understand I’m stressing that the future is relative to the past sentence instead of possibly now, but I’m not 100% sure I’m not inventing this idiom under the influence of English. Certainly it’s not a usual phrasing. The usual interpretation of “va fi crescut” is future perfect (“will have risen”), and normally one would subordinate it to a _future_ tense primary sentence.
How do "letting important financial institutions go belly-up" and "printing money" relate? Wasn't the quantitative easing of the late 2000s intended to preserve banks?
MMT:ers would take issue with this argument, since in their view there is no such thing as "taxpayer money". All money is created out of thin air from the central bank. Taxes are only really needed to cool inflation.
Well, there's always a good counterargument in the comments -
Q. Yeah… I've been wondering if maybe my currency is pretty much interchangeable with government bonds, now. Maybe when I buy government bonds from the sort of people who own government bonds in the first place, they just keep my currency around and don't buy anything else with it. Maybe I need to inject the money somewhere else.
A. First, like many other problems having to do with deflation, this hypothetical problem, if it existed, would be one that you could solve with moar money. There is some amount of money creation that overflows into the hands of people who can buy real things, that gets things moving again and causes all the factories to work at capacity and people to be employed and flows through all the trades that people can make."
This problem does seem to be happening: the people who sell government bonds to the government take that money and invest it somewhere else. Selling that bond doesn't really increase their marginal propensity to spend on anything besides asset purchases very much, and thus we see the modern economy where inflation is low while all asset prices are through the roof. Eliezer is of course correct that this could eventually be solved by MOAR MONEY, in that printing enough money will eventually raise inflation and get the economy working at capacity. But there are real negative effects to pouring the vast majority of the money created into bidding asset prices up ever higher, and relying on the fraction the trickles down to the real economy to do the stimulative work.
I see the Central Bankers as having tried the "moar money" route, seen that most of that money is diverted over into asset bubbles, and concluded that printing even more money is not a good route to stimulating the economy. The big hurdle is not an unwillingness to print ungodly amounts of money if necessary, it's an unwillingness to go for the kind of unconventional "send everybody a check" or "fund fiscal stimulus" uses for the newly created money that would direct a much higher proportion of that money into the real economy.
"send everyone a check" has been done, a few times. In scenarios where increasing inflation is the goal, why is it not done more often? is it a separation of powers thing where buying bonds back is the central bank but sending out checks needs the government to pass a bill?
can you imagine a world where 1) central bank can just mail out checks to people at random times without any legislative approval and 2) central bank governors are nominated by the president every few years? US would become typical third world country where government gives out free cash just before every election to buy votes.
Some would argue that the (actual) risk of complete ruin would change the behavior of the institutions so they would be unlikely to get very big while also taking undue risk. Many small institutions would surely go completely bell up but their assets and obligations would be much smaller.
Institutions don’t have behavior - individuals do. It’s all about the agency problem. If you’re an executive who already has $20 million - why not swing for the fences. If you win you get a few million. If you lose you get fired.
True, but the board of directors or large shareholders may be more interested in a long term view which could impact hiring of executives, compensation structure, what budgets get approved, etc.
I'm absolutely fine with it. I don't understand why it's so widely regarded as wrong; "too big to fail" doesn't actually exist. A huge, overleveraged bank drags lots of companies and people down with it? Okay, that's a necessary risk-tolerance adjustment for the future. Now you know what kind of pitch sounds too good to be true. If you don't like the national economy being obliterated, update toward caution.
The only argument I can see as valid is that maybe the people responsible for bankruptcies should be shot, in emulation of prior times of unlimited liability where they had to shoot themselves to clear the family name.
the thing to understand here is that if you increase the personal cost for bankers of going bankrupt they are going to lend money in a much more conservative manner. Right after a crisis e.g. when the idiocies in mortgage lending circa 2003-06 are fresh on one's mind this may seem like a good idea, but reduced financing availability during regular economic times will also severely curtail economic growth. It used to be that bankers would shoot themselves when their businesses failed, and we moved away from that not just for humanitarian reasons but because it was counterproductive from economic point of view. Similar to why we now have limited liability corps rather than forcing ruin on every shareholder when a company fails. And if you look at 07-09 crisis the main issue wasn't even that bankers weren't held accountable for bad risk underwriting, it was that they were able to securitize (i.e. sell on) that risk quickly to other investors which really removed all incentives to be correct. And you could probably say that that is a step too far, but securitization also has many uses that seem genuinely helpful. Dunno am on the fence on this topic - most of the time i feel like our economy has become overlevered and we've veered to far in direction of excessive financial efficiency which, similar to just in time supply chains, may blow up in our face one day when some big unexpected event happens. Maybe it would be better to have a bit less economic growth, less risk financing etc. in exchange for stronger antifragile features . But don't call for bankers' heads without also understanding the consequences / tradeoffs that would be involved.
"The thing to understand here is that if you increase the personal cost for bankers of going bankrupt they are going to lend money in a much more conservative manner."
That's the whole *point*.
"It used to be that bankers would shoot themselves when their businesses failed, and we moved away from that not just for humanitarian reasons but because it was counterproductive from economic point of view."
No, it wasn't counterproductive, people just got impatient with the natural pace of growth. Abolishing unlimited liability was like the Boomers effectively taking out loans on future generations: a gross indulgence of greed with almost incalculable negative consequences. There's no humanitarian *or* economic reason that a guy shouldn't have to first ruin his whole family, then shoot himself, if he screws up on that scale.
Well I don't necessarily (fully) disagree, have commented elsewhere that I think financialization may have gone too far and made system fragile. But how do you unwind what's already been done? It would involve decades of economic pain at a minimum and current generation taking it on a chin in massive way for sake of future ones/to repent for sins of past ones. If we cant get our act together for say addressing climate change what you are talking about is an order of magnitude harder still.
this has already been done? Post GFC there've been new standards for banks and resolution tools for regulators to allow banks to fail without bail outs. I’m not an expert but banks hold much more capital and their shareholders would be forced to bail-in. Banks will be allowed to fail, and the theory is this time it won’t bring down the rest of the financial system
An outright collapse of a big bank would have major economic flow on effects (especially if depositors are wiped out, but also through other types of entanglements). But there are options in the government arsenal that prevent that outcome while still being reasonably incentive compatible. You can broker a takeover by another bank (as the US FDIC usually does when small banks fail). You can also nationalize - i.e. become the owner. Governments from certain ideological backgrounds will be very uneasy about that option, as is the case in the US. But they still partially did it in 2008, being careful to avoid owning a controlling share. The US taxpayers became ~40% owners of some of the largest banks. Those shares were then gradually sold back in the open market over the next few years.
The regulatory evolution that has happened since that event has involved a bit of shifting away from the (perhaps quixotic) idea of preventing bank collapses, toward facilitating more smooth transfers of control.
The option of issuing more currency in order to inflate your way out of a bank crisis would probably "work" but have serious side effects
The problem here is that we do not have a lot of information on the counterfactual, i.e., what would happen if we do let these firms go under. The way people think about this issue is probably hugely shaped by the experience of the Great Depression (1929) when 'too big to fail' institutions actually failed (monetary policy was not as expansive as it should have been) and the result was a much worse economic collapse than the Great Recession (2009). Decision makers aware of this history are probably very reticent to let institutions fail again.
That said, there is a compromise between the two positions which is what some Chicago people would support: "punish the people, save the institutions." This strategy is far from perfect, as you'll still be saving (passive) investors who knowingly took a risk and under the rules of capitalism should shoulder the cost when things go south. However, it does force the people that actually make decisions in these TBTF institutions think hard about whether they are taking excessive risks.
So this is basically solved now (well, 'solved' in one way, in that risk has now been largely pushed out of the banking system) via much more restrictive regulation post-crisis and 'bail-in' legislation (I'm more familiar with the European context, but banks are a bigger part of the European financial system anyway so it's more important in any case).
It's a case of where regulators and legislators saw the problem and acted on it pretty effectively. There are also 'bigness' penalties in the form of higher capital requirements (which continue to get higher as the banks get bigger) and stricter rules overall.
Where the critique goes wrong is assuming that the only thing banks do is provide funding, which a central bank could do just as well if you view it from the 20,000 foot level. What banks do is 'allocate' capital (not always perfectly, but better than randomly) where this is expected to more-than-reproduce itself.
There are arguments that banks aren't the perfect vehicle to do this, or that maybe just spraying money into the economy is better than selectively funding businesses based on analysis, but the coordination and capital allocation function requires bigness, and is very labour-intensive (and the many attempts to automate lending have gone rather poorly thus far outside of the micro-level).
I think there's general consensus that letting Lehman fail was a mistake. It started a domino effect leading to much worse problems. There's just too much contagion when large financial institutions fail. I think Yudkowsky's article does not address just how interconnected things are and how much value destruction occurs with a large bank failure.
I think everyone agrees this is not a good state to be in, so people have been trying to come up with solutions to either (a) let institutions fail in an orderly, non-contagious way (b) ensuring institutions don't fail through tighter regulations. The response to GFC included a bit of both, but personally I'd like to see a lot more of (a). An extreme idea I like is to have an "instant bankruptcy" process for large banks, where equity holders are immediately wiped out, and debt holders become equity holders, and the bank continues to do business uninterrupted.
If you want to learn more, some of the GFC memoirs were good--it's been many years since I read them, but I recall Hank Paulson's was a good source what actually happened during GFC. Some of the good financial bloggers (e.g. Matt Levine) have covered a lot of these topics in the past as well, but might be some effort to find all the articles.
My friend recently opened an account in Kazakhstan, but it wasn't easy: you need to first get a Kazakh tax id to do that. I also heard that Georgian banks were willing to open an account after signing a statement that you don't support Russian aggression, but it may have changed since.
https://wise.com/ is an option. They are like.. a quasi-bank? Very easy to sign up but you might want to investigate whether their level of bankness is enough for you.
If you're willing to travel somewhere, then at least a year ago the Polish bank "PKO" was letting anyone open an account without having Polish residency (or a work/study visa, etc).
My friends with Russian passports signed up for Wise on March 11 and received their cards successfully (although they had to ship them through Poland). Or was it disabled later than March 11?
Ah, ok, maybe it's not a problem then. I know that they stopped money transfers to Russia, so I was assuming that they might have stopped opening accounts as well.
It seems that it's relatively easy to get working visa in Portugal: you need to prove income of just 700 euro per person. Here's the list of countries with different conditions: https://nomadgirl.co/countries-with-digital-nomad-visas/
I have e-residency and it's great. However, e-residency doesn't help you with opening a bank account — or at least it didn't several years ago.
E-residency lets you easily open a company in Estonia. You still need a personal bank account (in Estonia or elsewhere) because you can't just use the corporate bank account as a personal one. All corporate account expenses need to be business-related.
When I was opening a corporate LHV account (LHV is a big Estonian bank), I had to travel to Tallinn. I didn't need that for my corporate Wise account — but then you can just open a personal Wise account without e-residency.
Our company is cooperating with a UK company with a mostly Russian (and partly Ukrainian) dev team. The company moved all or most of their devs out of Russia two days after the invasion started (they are definitely no Putin supporters...which is also why we are still collaborating with them). Curiously, they moved their team to several countries - Turkey, Georgia, Armenia. The guy we are mostly working with is currently in Georgia after having moved from Armenia where he was relocated to initially (not sure why, visas maybe?).
I assume those guys would know quite a bit about how to deal with your situation (including the bank account etc.) and could help with some tips if you'd like Cr.
I think they moved the team abroad as a precaution but with what's been going on in Russia since I doubt a lot of them will be keen to come back. Also, if you're a software developer they might be hiring.
I think the chances are slim in the EU, some countries (like ours) have banned all Russian citizens from entering, other are less strict but opening a bank account is not likely a realistic option for Russians anywhere in the West.
Let me know if you'd like me to connect you with them.
Can you tell me more about EU countries banning all Russian citizens from entering? I was aware of travel bans for specific individuals, and of golden passport programs getting closed to Russians, but not of travel bans for all citizens.
(On the question of why one might want to move from Armenia to Georgia: both Armenia and Georgia are visa-free for Russians to enter; you can stay in Armenia for 6 months, and in Georgia for a year. If the choice was his, it could be that he knows more people in Georgia, or had better leads on finding housing. Also, as best I can tell, Georgia is making more gestures towards aligning itself with the EU, which might make it a more viable long-term proposition? If the choice was the company's, things like taxes might come into consideration as well.)
Well, the Czech republic stopped giving any new visas to Russians (with the exception of prolonging the visas of Russian students already studying in the country). This was implemented 3 weeks ago I think. I think Poland is doing the same.
Most other EU countries are not so strict though and since we are in Schengen, Russians can still technically come here (if they get a visa in Germany, they can still come and stay in the Czech republic for its duration because the visa is valid everywhere in the Schengen zone.).
Thank you for explaining the Armenia/Georgia situation (I am surprised Georgia is so open to Russians though, given that Russia is supporting the Southern Osetian seperatists). I am not sure whether he could choose which country he would move to at first (when leaving Russia, I think this was also done in a hurry) but perhaps when he then moved to Georgia it was his own decision. I guess I could ask.
All visas for Schengen for Russians are done in Estonia, and the system is overrun trying to process the Ukrainians. A Serbian friend of mine couldn't get a working German visa as the consulate in Belgrade told her they stopped processing all visas until the backlog is done. So unless those Russians have a Schengen visa already (which is unlikely as the old visa policies were quite strict) they are unlikely to get an EU visa now or soon.
Very important point - you can open a bank account in Georgia, even if you are a non-resident (and I've heard there are middle-men who can do it for you, so potentially there is a fully-remote option), and that means you would be able to work (remotely) and get paid right away...
If anyone in the Boston area wants to donate clothes, childcare supplies, etc. for Ukrainian refugees please contact me at: metacelsus at protonmail dot com, and we can coordinate.
My girlfriend and I will ship them to her cousins in Poland. Their village is now hosting 50+ refugees, many of whom had to leave quickly without taking all their belongings. We will ship them on Friday. We can get a pretty good deal on bulk shipping through a Polish agency.
Note that I do *not* recommend buying stuff to donate, it's more effective to donate the cash. But, for example, if you have extra clothes your kids have outgrown, you could donate them.
It may be worth consulting what is needed - many donation points in Poland are flooded with clothes.
BTW, sending money may be far more effective (cheaper to send, prices are likely lower in Poland, faster to arrive). (though if you want to donate clothes it should not stop you!)
Project Kesher (PK) is a grassroots organization that has been serving the needs of women in the Former Soviet Union and Israel for 25 years. PK has a network of staff and volunteers on the ground in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. My wife has been on PK's Board for 15 years. I can vouch for their integrity and their ability to be nimble and efficient. They have already helped many women and families get to safety. Dollars go far in the region. A few hundred dollars can make all the difference.
You would still apply normally to research labs/graduate school, but you'll have an advantage in admissions because you'll effectively be free for the lab you join. At many graduate programs here you apply directly to a professor's lab, and this scholarship is being publicized to professors. If accepted to a lab or graduate program, the school will then help you with a student visa.
If you are curious about graduate school in Canada and want more information about the admissions system, please contact me at:
I know a few people in Europe and the Middle East who I can ask to host. One of them (in Turkey) has already taken someone in. But no guarantees. I've also fled countries before (though not specifically Ukraine) and could give some basic advice if that'd be helpful.
I can also help with advice on remote work and the legal implications of working in a different country than you were previously. I think it's a better bet than temporary PESEL cards since it's not time limited to eighteen months. Though maybe the Poles will bet that they'll get extended? Anyway, sometimes companies won't hire because of the precarious status.
If you're hosting or trying to host refugees, be aware that a) you might register at some platform/organization and never hear back because they might be forbidden from brokering accommodations (trafficking laws, I think), and b) if you're not asked to register and just get to pick up people, no questions asked, that is very bad and very bad people could exploit that.
My parents are going through that process in Germany right now, the org that I volunteer at can't legally allocate people though they've tried, and a lot of folks are sitting on their empty rooms willing to help and can't find a way to make it happen safely.
Also, don't donate duvet covers and pillow cases. We're running out of space, and they're rarely requested (pretty much only for newly-opened emergency shelters and when people move into their own apartments). Out last donations from the 2015 Syria crisis were only distributed last year, and actually went to Ukraine.
Then what should you donate? Food: shelf-stable, ready to eat, the less equipment it requires to make and eat the better. Hygiene products. Pain medication. New underwear. Handwarmers. Heaters. But the bottleneck is efficient distribution, at the Polish/Ukrainian border there's so many different orgs and folks active helping, but no central distribution of donations, so pick some organization that does the distribution and find out what they, specifically, need.
Don't go there yourself unless you know what you're doing or have contacts there. A friend of mine is in Chełm right now and has to constantly translate and mediate between people who drove there with a vague intention of helping and the people they're trying to help.
Similar situation on Slovak/Ukrainian border. There don't seem to be a problem with brokering accommodation though. I've offered my flat, got people there the next day. (Yes, sounds dangerous, but human-traffickers so far seem to pick people up in person at the border instead of pretending to offer accommodation.) Maybe some kind of cooperation can be arranged? Say, the org in Germany can do the vetting of the people offering accommodation, an org in a country with less red tape the actual distribution? Anyway, if you want to get in contact with the people on the ground in Slovakia, drop me a note. sustrik at 250bpm dot com.
A Ukrainian colleague recommended Nova Ukraine (https://novaukraine.org/) as the most direct way to help refuges and victims of war on the ground in Ukraine.
The situation in the bordering countries, at least in Slovakia, is chaotic. There's a lot of volunteers helping, but the state is not keeping up. Cooperation is kind of ad-hoc, not really centralized, volunteers are getting tired and overwhelmed by the sheer number of refugees. What's really needed now IMO are managers, people able to organize large-scale cooperation, people able get funds where they are needed the most etc.
I guess a lot of effective altruists are hanging out on this forum: I think it would be important to find out what are the most effective causes w.r.t. refugee crisis. It may not be the most effective cause overall, but given that there are funds earmarked for it and people and organizations just donating without having much idea what specifically to donate to, it would be good if those funds are distributed to places where they can do the most good.
I suggest donating to People in Need, which is a Czech humanitarian organization with long track record, that is apparently doing a lot of things both on the borders and inside Ukraine. Their English page for Ukraine is currentyl here: https://www.peopleinneed.net/8-most-frequently-asked-questions-ukraine-8565gp
This seems like it might be a good way to determine the amount of actual management which is required in order to be effective. Everybody wants to avoid overhead in charitable work. I'm not certain anybody has done a good analysis to see what the appropriate range (including minimum) is.
> Everybody wants to avoid overhead in charitable work.
But that overhead is what's needed. We need low-to-middle-managers who can tell 50 untrained volunteers what to do and know what to do with a bunch of random donations.
Why can't you leave? At any rate, I'd suggest applying to remote jobs. There's a real demand, especially if you can speak English, and anything from TopTal to a remote job board should be a gold mine. Happy to help if this is new.
Like 100k+ other households in the UK, I have registered my spare room under the UK govt's Homes for Ukraine scheme (https://homesforukraine.campaign.gov.uk/). Under this scheme, refugees placed with a UK host will have full rights to live, work and access healthcare, benefits, employment support, education, and English language tuition in the UK for three years.
In theory, I and other prospective hosts should now be matched by the govt with a refugee. For obvious reasons I have low confidence in the govt's ability to do this speedily. If you or anyone you know is a Ukrainian refugee in need of UK accommodation, we can speed this up by coordinating directly. It's a small room in a small house with small children in it, about an hour outside London by train in the South East of the UK. Further details available on request at 0pedunculate at gmail dot com; if my house isn't to your liking or gets taken soon, almost everyone I know is also offering rooms through the scheme so we can probably find a place.
To those fleeing from Ukraine: I heard that Moldova and Hungary are not very friendly towards Ukrainian refugees. The family that we are hosting went through those countries and report troubles with the locals in Moldova and unwillingness of Hungarian officials to help. It's better to flee through Poland and as soon as possible move towards Western Europe, since Poland is already full with refugees.
To those willing to host refugees: eu4ua.org is one of ways to directly offer help.
The Hungarian government went to almost-fascist levels of hostility to refugees during the Syrian crisis. They are in theory friendly to refugees this time, but 1) all those anti-refugee campaigns six years ago probably left a mark, 2) they intentionally crippled some refugee support systems back then and those haven't fully recovered since, 3) the government is just pretty incompetent in general.
I don't think it's a terrible idea to go to Hungary but if I was free to pick as a refugee I would probably prefer Poland (and then Western Europe).
I don't think their opposition to being flooded with "differently-cultured" migrants has anything to do with fascism. That's like saying "almost democratic levels of degeneracy" — your team will cheer, but it's meaningless: just two "boo" signs stuck together.
How is it "fascist" to not have your country unwillingly filled with foreigners? That's completely absurd. No country has an obligation to accept this and the lesson from other european countries is clear: it makes your country worse off.
It's like saying you have a 'fascist-level" of hostility towards homeless people because you call the police if they try and break into your house.
>I heard that Moldova and Hungary are not very friendly towards Ukrainian refugees.
I can't speak to Hungary but for context, Moldova has taken the highest number of refugees per capita of any country.
An estimated 350,000 Ukrainian refugees in Moldova right now, a country with a total population of 2.6 million. So ~13% of the country is refugees. Additionally Moldova's per-capita household income is like $2,500.
For this reason I don't think it's fair to characterize Moldova as unfriendly and I think a better could be made they are the most friendly, competing with Poland.
It's now a tough life for Russians who are willing to move abroad fleeing from war but are treated as non-refugees at best or declined visas/entry and are harassed at worst.
One would think that a sane strategy is to actively enforce brain drain by sucking in each and every specialist trying to leave Russia, but so far we have yet to see a western country realize that.
A Russian friend of mine has been unsuccessfully trying to migrate to USA for many years now, - having legally stayed for several years there he was further declined all attempts to get new visas.
A few months before, he started the procedure of requesting a Canadian visa instead, but now that the UA/RU conflict broke out the process has been put to a halt.
Any recommendations for how an experienced Russian 3D animator could enter Canada or USA these days?
Unfortunately I don't know much about the situation in Canada and the US. The only thing I heard was that friends of my friends tried to request asylum in the US by entering from Mexico, but did succeed. I don't know all the details, but I think they were stopped already on the Mexican side.
This is just a speculation, but if your friends are already in the US, maybe they could also try to ask for asylum? With the current situation in Russia any Russian citizen opposing the war can plausibly end up in jail. This possibly makes sufficiently strong grounds for getting an asylum. And in any case the process will take at least months during which time they will be able to stay in the US.
I see. In that case I would maybe start by moving to some visa-free country like Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan or Cyprus and then applying for a digital nomad long-term visa in some European country, say Portugal or Czech Republic. This will obviously depends on whether they are able to prove that they have remote work with which they can support themselves.
The Czech republic won't be an option right now, we are currently not issuing any new visas to Russian citizens (including tourist visas, although Russian students currently studying at Czech universities are allowed to stay). You could theoretically still come with a Schengen visa but the Czechs are probably the most hawkish NATO nation right after the Poles and while in the media people sometimes talk about the need not to equate all Russians with Putin and good examples of civil resistance in Russia are highlighted, I don't think it is the best country to go to for Russians right now. I mean the national theatre is cancelling Tchaikovski's plays from this year's program. Also, we have our hands quite full with Ukrainian refugees already who are likely going to amount to 5% of the total population in a week or two, so I would not expect much effort to process political asylum requests from Russia.
Georgia or Armenia seem like a good bet. Our company is working with a UK-based but mostly Russian company which evacuated pretty much all of their dev team out of Russia two days after the invasion started. They are currently in Georgia, Armenia and Turkey (for some reason, different team members are in different countries).
EDIT: It seems I was wrong, the Czech republic is still issuing humanitarian visas for Russians. But I guess you'd need to somehow prove you are being persecuted in Russia, I'm not sure what the exact rules are.
No idea about Canada or USA short of marrying into them, but I did recently learn that Brexit forced UK companies to get much better at sponsoring work visas -- maybe that's a more promising path?
Getting into the US/Canada is a relatively hard process and probably impossible with the end of embassy services. It's easier to immigrate to some of the less popular countries (some of which can be quite nice). Plus it'll be easier to immigrate to the US as a non-Russian down the line.
"As a non-Russian" meaning stay somewhere else until you get their citizenship, then move to the US, possibly revoking your Russian citizenship in the process? That's a very long-term plan.
Yes because these are all long term plans. Emigrating to the US takes about three years just for a green card and multiple years after that to get citizenship. Three years is enough to get citizenship in another, easier country. And some will give you a green card right off the plane. Also, you'll be able to use documents from your new country instead of Russia if there's any geopolitical unpleasantness.
My point is if you need something RIGHT NOW and you're not a refugee (as most Russians won't be) then other countries will let you in much faster. And if you still want to get to the US you can still do so later.
The only immediate way to get US residence is to find a spouse. Even work visas with a job offer take 3-6 months.
Agreed that if you need something now, US / Canada is not the easiest way to get it, but emphasis is on "need" in that sentence. I can imagine wanting US/Canada or nothing, in which case I'm dubious that the right way is by first getting yet another citizenship. Whether wanting US/Canada or nothing is reasonable will presumably depend.
Canada is hard. I couldn't get a temporary resident visa for my own wife to visit me here. Edit: I should have mentioned that Canada is willing to give visas to highly skilled workers. (and Ukrainian refugees specifically.)
So I'm an American paramedic who lives in Ukraine, currently in the west, my family and I have set up an NGO focusing on getting medical supplies and other nonlethal aid (radios/drones/body armor) to the Territorial Defense in the city of Ternopil, and elsewhere.
I know we're all rationalists here, and you should prioritize giving to thoroughly vetted organizations, which I 100% encourage you all to do.
However, I've found a gap, and I'm doing my best to to fill it, so if anyone from the Astral Codex Community wants to throw caution to the wind help out a rando anyway, our page is:
We're all volunteer, so all the proceeds go directly to buying supplies. Alternatively if you have medical supplies you think may be useful, in Europe, feel free to get in touch and we'll chat about it. Thanks so much ya'll!
My friend, senior data scientist, would love to get out of Russia if only she had a job offer from a first world country, which is not an easy thing to get in current situation. I believe there are a lot of people in similar situation, myself somewhat included.
It would be great if there was some kind of program for Russian immigrants, providing them remote jobs in tech with minimal fuss.
They pay well and have a nice and accommodating company culture. Some people are remote-only.
They've also set up a Ukraine Relocation Initiative, which gives preferential treatment & relocation help for refugees ("For any individuals displaced as a result of conflict - in the Ukraine or any other country"). https://jobs.jobvite.com/funding-circle-uk/job/od2Yifwf
(There's a bonus in it for me if I get engineers hired, so I would appreciate a message if someone does successfully apply, but no big deal.)
I can help with this in a general sense. But the visa process is hard and more or less impossible if you're still in Russia right now. Not to mention remote work is too. (Yes, sanctions affect remote work.) Likewise, remote jobs can't get you a greencard unless the company converts it. My suggestion would be to leave for wherever will take them. Once they're out of the country (even on a tourist visa) remote work becomes possible and they can nomad for a while until they find a permanent place to stay. (And they should really look at some second world places. It's a lot easier to get into, eg, Thailand or Argentina than the US. And those are not bad places to live at all.)
LinkedIn pushed this at me: https://boards.greenhouse.io/equilibriumenergy -- an acquaintance works there. If this is of interest and you or your friend would like a chain of personal introductions, you can reach me at lastname at gmail.
Yes, hence the deafening silence from those who were claiming right up to the 24th of Feb that US claims of an imminent invasion were propaganda and that of course Putin had no intention of invading.
Can you give a particular example of this? Because while I would not say the will of the Russian army has “imploded,” there is evidence that their morale is decreasing dramatically in response to stiffer than expected Ukrainian resistance.
People talk about this encirclement of the main Ukrainian force in the Donbass, but how is it inevitable? It would require a Russian military thrust of hundreds of miles and encirclement could be prevented by the Ukrainians retreating a much shorter distance.
Fixed fortifications are not vitally important in modern war. Equipment is, but (1) it isn't as important as trained people to use it, and (2) Ukraine is being supplied with new equipment.
Ukraine is fighting a protracted war. Trading space for time is in their interest, even if it means abandoning fortifications. Their goal is to live to fight another day in an area they can defend, and to make it difficult for Russia to kill them.
The Ukrainians have retreated from their positions north of Kiev, and around Crimea, and they've retreated substantially from their initial positions facing the DPR and LPR, and they've always retreated in good order. They've never allowed themselves to be encircled that I know of except in Mariupol, which is unusually important and also an unusually good place to make Russians die, and *maybe* in the Chernihiv-Nizhyn salient, where they seem to be holding out quite nicely and from which I think they can break out from if they need to.
The Ukrainians are fighting defense, and the way you do that is not some comic-book "Never Retreat, Never Surrender, You Shall Not Pass!", but trading space for time and dead Russians. Retreating is *hard*, it takes skill and discipline to do it without turning into a rout, but it's how you win on the defense. If you do it right, it's costly enough - for the other side.
At the current exchange rate, costly enough that the Russians will run out of army before they've conquered half the Ukraine. And if the Russians run out of army, the Ukrainians can take back the land.
If the Ukrainians are smart enough to retreat before they are encircled and/or destroyed, that is. But they've done that every time it's mattered so far, so I don't see why they would stop now.
Presumably they were wrong because they were repeating Ukrainian propaganda. I would be shocked if anyone serious has already pirouetted on their position.
Well, I guess the sister comment is right that people who make excessive statements like this are either pushing propaganda (for the right side? but still) or are simply exaggerating a lot. Neither of those will post a post-mortem.
That being said, as someone who (silently) hoped this, for a short time it really looked like the invasion will fail quickly. The operational side was horrible, global reception was really bad for Russia and it looked like there are major economic and morale problems coming in Russias army. There was definitely a hope that Russia stops the invasion given how badly it failed in the beginning. More abstractly, I think a lot of people simply saw a trendline going off the cliff and extrapolated from there.
As of right now, though, it seems that Russia got its shit together or at least secured the funding to keep the invasion going, which (IMO) means that the Ukraine is in a really, really bad position now - the world can't help much more and it's very likely that if this comes down to who can support a war longer, Russia has very good chances. I'm hoping those three days are similar to "Russia will invade Ukraine in 3 days", but I'm not too optimistic.
The GDP of just the US and Eurozone is 22 times larger than that of Russia. Pretty sure the world can outlast Russian economic resources without even working up a sweat. Whether they will sustain an interest in doing so is another story, of course.
Russia can raze ukraine to the ground while we wait for the sanctions to work. Also, we in italy for example still have no way to substitute russian gas in a short time horizon.
Danke, though this German winter was mild and a very sunny spring week now. Anyway: gas for private heating is cut last, gas for electricity second, gas for factories/companies first. Even a few hundred-thousands out of work is a hard sell. With Diesel at 9$+ a gallon, already - 2,20€/liter, hope I got the conversion right. AFAIK we do not pay Putin today's market-price for e.g. north-sea Brent, but a longer-term one/different base. - We better keep our economies in good shape to win a war of attrition. I do not expect Putin to suffer from a few billion € less if it is short time only.
Well, first of all, what do you think they're trying to do already? It's not like Russia is just messing around to date and have vast resources yet to commit. Secondly, who says we're just waiting for sanctions to work? There's a good reason the Ukies have been able to wipe out so much Russian armor, and it's not enthusiastic use of Molotov cocktails ha ha. Apparently they're going to get some hot new drones, too, and the open story is this is to use against tanks and stuff, but I think it more likely we hear still more stories of Russian generals mysteriously dying. I'm a little doubty they'll get Harpoons to take out Russian Black Sea fleet ships, because that seems very provocative indeed, but maybe they'll get targeting info and do the job themselves, who knows? Third...come on. If your *lives were at stake* I'm sure you could figure out some way to do without Russian gas. Might be damned unpleasant, but you could do it. So it's more a question, as I said, of what the rest of the world has the interest and will to do.
I disagree. Don't get me wrong, i am pro ukraine but we really have little alternatives. We cannot even import it via ships because we have very little in terms of plants that can process liquid natural gas. We shifted to coal, but we import coal from Russia. All plans to make us independent from Russia are on a time scale longer than ukraine can survive
I have less hope that the invasion falls apart, and slightly more hope that Putin and Zelinzky come up with a deal that makes it look like Putin won, but doesn't make concessions so bad that Russia will just rinse and repeat in 4 years. Putin needs a win after the embarrassing show, and he might prefer a fast win without further losses, then the potential repeat of Afghanistan.
Oh yeah? What about the victory lap essay that got accidentally posted after 2 days announcing the capture of Ukraine? What about that airdrop into Hostomel airport on the first day?
Because morale is the most important thing in war, and it is almost impossible to measure in peacetime.
The unit-level cohesion of the Ukrainian army was a big unknown before the shooting started. The experience of 2014-2015 wasn't particularly favorable in that respect, and while the Ukrainians had eight years to improve on the lessons learned, there was anecdotal evidence that they hadn't learned what they needed to. So it was at least plausible that, when faced with a Guards Tank Army bearing down on them, the Ukrainians would cut and run and not stop until they reached the Polish border.
See also Afghanistan last year.
Anybody predicting that this *would surely* happen, was overconfident and full of themselves. But predicting that it *could* happen, maybe even that it was more likely than not, was reasonable until the first day's results were in.
Same. I saw a lot of "look at this convoy out of gas," "look at these troops abandoning vehicles," "Why isn't Russia crushing Ukraine utterly like they were expected to" types of coverage, but I haven't seen anything on message boards or in media about how Russia would be *defeated*. Even the most pro-Ukrainian stuff I've seen has taken for granted that Russia will eventually win the conflict (even if only to settle into a protracted counter-insurgency).
I think Kei and Beleester below really hit the nail on the head with this.
(1) this isn't an example of the predictions you're talking about, it's someone else saying they've seen those predictions. It's the old Trump-style "people are saying..." rhetorical play.
(2) Also, the predictions referenced aren't predicting ""implosion of the Russian army" they're predicting it "becoming a spent force." I (at least) read the first to be a total collapse/defeat, while the second would indicate exhaustion/inability to advance. That seems to be what Michael Koffman, the guy Alexander Lanoszka is quoting, means by "spent force."
"Exhausted in terms of combat effectiveness. What follows next I don’t know. Maybe a ceasefire where both sides reorganize and resupply, maybe a settlement. It depends on the course of the war and the situation in Russia. End."
"That’s not indicative of either side winning, or the war ending. I can’t predict how the next few weeks will go. Just looking at it from my limited perspective, I see this phase of it as bounded, especially given how the war began."
So maybe we're just all operating on different definitions of "implode"... when you refer to "'Russian army will implode in 3 days' type statements," how do you define the word "implode" as used in that sentence?
Yes, I've read and watched quite a bit of Michael Koffman on this conflict, and if anything he's been consistently making the point that the Russian Army should not be underestimated and never came close to saying they will implode in 3 days.
Koffman's main conclusion is that the way Russia will have to fight in the military campaign to 'win' a military victory ensures that Russia's political goals - the reason for the invasion initially - can not be achieved.
agreed! unfortunately i did not catalog all these statements when i came across them, and I guess my twitter search skills are not great (i dont have an account, so looking at old posts is difficult)
*however*, I am just some random ACX poster. I figured it would be worth at least a few points of microevidence if someone with that accounts credentials had the same observations. He also does link to one example, but unfortunately it is at the upper end of the prediction times.
Perhaps another question to ask, is why did my media viewing habits expose me to these predictions, when most others did not? i dont know!
I don't know why you think ACX would be able to explain why someone on Twitter thinks what they think.
That aside, they said "becoming a spent force," not "collapse." If they mean that Russian forces are at the point where they can't push their offensives further, that's in-line with the expert opinions I've seen. Here's the ISW assessment from yesterday, for comparison:
"Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated."
("Culminated" is war nerd speak for "too exhausted/disorganized/unsupplied to keep going.")
My point is that Twitter is the Fountain of Infinite Pundits, and I don't know this guy from Adam. Without other context I don't know why I should care that they heard someone else speculating on collapse in 3 days.
I mostly saw statements of this type from people who were just being overly optimistic and hopeful. I didn't see anyone say the Russians will implode in 3 days and then follow that up with thorough reasons why it would happen. I don't take such statements to be "predictions" in the formal sense. More just wishful thinking clouded by excitement.
<i>According to the available information, Russian occupation forces operating on the territory of Ukraine have ammunition and food supplies for no more than three days. </i>
This looks like the official Facebook page of the Ukrainian General Staff. It has since been reprinted by many sources. The claim was made early morning on the 22nd, so we have 2-3 days to see to which extent it was true.
Tbf, it's one thing to read it and think "yeah sure ok", it's another to witness in real time the combination of fog of war + propaganda + whishful thinking + hysteria that turned any discourse on the Ukraine war into a mess of 99% unconfirmable bullshit.
Exactly to the contrary. In the last discussion on the topic, I thought Kiev would fall in a matter of weeks. I've now updated significantly away from that position after hearing from sources I trust about the level of Russian incompetence we've seen. I'm now inclined to believe that the people who were skeptical of the Russian army's capacities (none of whom said it would "implode in 3 days", by the way) were more right, and I was more wrong.
I now think the Russian army can't occupy and hold an intact Kiev; the most they'll be capable of is reduction bombing it and claiming the smoking ruins.
Disagree about claiming the smoking ruins. If anything, lack of population you need to worry about makes it easier to defend a city. That's the reason Russians aren't keen on letting Mariupol's population leave - defenders know that the attackers have no qualms destroying anything so they can't use civilian buildings as cover.
no, i saw them mainly from what seamed like accounts of people with wonky expertise in russia/eastern europe. i think some may have been checkmarked, but nobody with huge followers or generally popular.
One of the answers appears to be that the army and the people who are recruited into it are stunningly low-status in Russia, and that no one with any actual power is concerned about the casualties and terrible logistics.
That's not a claim that "the Russian army will implode in three days", though it could be and apparently was misunderstood as such by dilettantes who just heard professionals talking about this strange "logistics" thing for the first time. It's basically a claim that the Russian army will have to cease offensive operations and may be vulnerable to a counteroffensive in three days.
To elaborate: Armies do not have an initial stockpile of "supplies" that is depleted at a constant rate until it is gone, and they don't "implode" when the supplies are gone. The rate at which an army consumes supplies depends strongly on what that army is doing, so a claim like "three days of supplies" implies three days in their current posture, which turns into a week or more if they shift from aggressive attacks to holding against light resistance.
Furthermore, armies do tend to be resupplied over time. Now, much has been made about Russia's failures in this area, but it's not the case that they have been delivering *literally zero* supplies to their front-line troops. So if they shift to a holding action, and bring up fresh supplies at even the current limited rate, then that "week or more" might turn into two weeks, or two months or forever.
And, as the supplies run out, armies just get stingier about using them. They park their vehicles in the best firing positions they can find, shoot only when they have a clear target within effective range, and hold tight. If they are *literally* out of food or *literally* out of ammunition, they might surrender, but the amount of food and bullets it takes to forestall that is tiny compared to the fuel and artillery ammunition requirements of a major offensive.
So, professionals say something that in professional-speak means "the Russian offensive will stop in three days unless something drastically changes", and a bunch of random twiteratti say "the Russian army will *Implode!* in three days!". Says nothing we didn't already know about random twiteratti, and nothing much about either the professionals or the Russian army.
So, prediction markets are currently regulated as gambling in the US (is my understanding). It seems from Scott’s posts that it is not regulated as much in other countries. Is there a good way to legally delineate prediction markets from, say, sports betting?
I think Kalshi (which Scott briefly mentioned last month) demonstrates that yes, there is a good way. Its just that that good way is “hire good lawyers and lobbyists and let them spend years convincing the CFTC that what you’re doing isn’t gambling, but futures trading, and that you should be regulated as such.” Not the easiest of ways, but its a start.
Yeah, like paramutual betting but on people dying, not horse races. Prediction markets are an interesting idea, but the optics of wealthy intellectuals sitting around gambling money on how war with mass murder is going to turn out are really terrible. Like, wow that guys a genius, he made lots of money betting that the war/mass murder was going longer than anyone expected! Scott's altruism and general strong rationality of course blunt the edge of that critique, but, still, there are lots of ways to highlight the value of this kind of experiment, without focus on the betting odds on carnage.
I've read early insurance policies faced similar criticism, you can also characterize those as gambling on tragedy.
But you can alternatively characterize insurance as a hedge to help people overcome possible future tragedies, and that characterization ultimately dominated. (Or maybe the characterization that dominated is just the concept of insurance itself, it's no longer analogous to other normal things, it's just a normal thing itself.)
You can characterize prediction markets lots of different ways, some beneficial to humanity, some more jarring. I wonder, what drives society to accept a benign characterization over others?
Maybe a company could accept proposition bets as "insurance" against certain outcomes that might be bad for business. Though you can insure onion crops, and insurance companies can generally find a hedge against their own policies, so I'm not sure why that market didn't evolve into a broader loophole for otherwise banned onion futures.
Insurance isn't people betting on someone else's misfortune. It's buying protection against the buyer's own potential losses. Actually, trying to buy insurance against someone else's misfortune is legally impermissible in general. (The rule is sometimes put, you cannot buy insurance payable to yourself on your neighbors house.) So I don't think it would further the legal case for futures markets to characterize them as insurance because that would likely lead to them being declared to be against public policy in most jurisdictions.
Maybe prediction markets have some benefit to humanity, though I don't think it depends as much on how you characterize them as on whether someone can demonstrate the value in any concrete way. Personally, I've not seen anything to convince me one way or the other. My point was that prediction markets on war seems rather more like paramutual betting on dogfights than on horse races.
I'm glad you raised insurable interest. The history of insurable interest provisions is instructive here.
If I recall correctly, the early insurance industry arose as a way for churches in the UK to provide for widows or victims of fires. But as the industry expanded, it faced a dilemma, because the only similar thing communities were familiar with was gambling. As a religiously rooted service, this analogy to gambling was a major risk for this socially valuable service.
Insurable interest provisions were used to help distinguish insurance from gambling.
Because these provisions were originally added to shape perceptions of the skeptical, the laws on insurable interest vary a ton between jurisdictions. Some places, like the UK, you're not deemed to have any insurable emotional interest in the lives of your children! That's one extreme, probably due to the UK's proximity to the origin of insurance, when society was most skeptical. Most jurisdictions differ.
There's nothing inherently preventing some other jurisdiction from saying that the emotional and economic impacts of war are insurable. This would be in line with the loosening of insurable interest laws as the concept developed.
I struggle with the dogfight gambling analogy because such gamblers specifically encourage harm to animals in a way that prediction markets do not. That seems like a major morally relevant consideration to me.
There are other forms of hedging against tragedy we could consider. Suppose a local community pools its resources to build a trauma center in an underserved area. Building any clinic like that is a hedge against future violence, and the money would be (thankfully) wasted if there is no future violence. I agree with you that dogfighting is repugnant, but spending money to hedge against future harms, in the general case, is often noble.
"WAIT!" you might counter, "the trauma center helps people beyond the person hedging. Just as the dogfight gamblers cause harm, beyond the betting, the trauma center bends our intuitions the other way, because this group is treating the injured."
Ok, fair, what would be a more neutral analogy? The family or greengrocer who stocks up on extra food, forecasting an especially harsh winter or bad crop, is generally viewed as prudent and respectable, even though they are the primary beneficiary of their foresight.
Dogfighting is absolutely horrific. Hedges are more laudable.
> I don't think it depends as much on how you characterize them as on whether someone can demonstrate the value in any concrete way.
I applaud this move. "Impact" seems a much better standard than analogies, which are somewhat arbitrary. Though the bar seems somewhat high. There are a ton of legal things out there I don't think have any particular social benefit. It would be a high bar to say "everything is illegal until it proves it benefits society." How would we find socially beneficial technologies, like insurance, if everything starts out illegal by default?
most kinds of betting are legal in the US. Doesn’t mean that they aren’t extremely heavily regulated. My understanding is that sports betting has a decent amount of regulation on it
Legal *federally*. Not in every state, the northwest in particular has it banned. And because it's state by state, even where it isn't banned, I'd bet there are weird varying restrictions in different regions. So it seems like you'd need an army of lawyers.
But isn't "online" sports betting now legal across the country? Can't everyone in the US legally bet on DraftKings on their phone?
I suppose DraftKings is technically classified as "fantasy sports" which you can bet real money on. We just need DraftKings to add things such as Covid deaths and Zelensky's odds of staying in power as one of their "fantasy sports" on their app. Perhaps they could call the latter category "The Most Dangerous Game".
betting online on fantasy sports a la DraftKings and FanDuel is legal in 40 states, and DraftKings is fighting a legal battle in Texas, where they currently provide and advertise it to customers, even though Texas claims it's illegal.
So my initial assertion was wrong -- and it seems unlikely that prediction markets could be conflated with fantasy sports.
Have the policies of the federal reserve since the 2008 financial crisis caused an asset bubble? If so, please explain in detail the mechanism causing the bubble. If not, then why is the common perception that the Fed has caused an asset bubble? Thank you in advance for taking the time to reply.
To some degree, a bubble is a subjective call, given that it’s effectively a value judgement that market prices are in excess of a hypothetical efficient price. The facts on the ground are that the expansion of the federal reserve’s balance sheet has underwritten significant liquidity in capital markets, while a historically long bull market has played out. It will be a bubble if the fed shrinks it’s balance sheet and destroys all the value created in the last decade (via penalizing future growth, etc.). Alternatively, the fed may successfully exit its positions or it may continue to operate at similar levels of support for markets.
Historically, bubbles have been characterized by big expansions in the total market size, accommodated by new entrants cashing out existing ones. Bubbles pop when outside funding dries up and Suddenly everyone holding these very pricey assets can’t find anyone to buy them at their inflated prices. This one is different because the capacity of the fed to provide additional funds is theoretically unlimited but obviously subject to practical upper limits and just plain diminishing returns. So to some degree the answer is, like all good zen koans “we’ll see”.
Interest rates were incredibly low for one thing. Junk bonds - issued by the riskiest most overleveraged corporate borrowers used to pay 10%+ rates at least, last few years dropped below 4% at one point just incredibly unhealthy and the symptom of too much money chasing yield in all the wrong places. Argentina just a few years after last default was able to issue 100 year bonds (and promptly defaulted on them again) how stupid is that.
Aggressive interventions every time markets had a swoon (remember taper tantrum) was another problem that created expectations of a central bank put that encouraged people to gamble, always buy the dip etc. because they always expected the safety net to catch them.
In terms of actual mechanisms, am no macroecon / central bank expert but i guess it's a mix of interest rates, direct market buying from fed balance sheet, and expectation setting through forward guidance and market-placating behavior. Changing their mission statement to favor more heavily unemployment reduction (+ mixing in other political side goals like racial inequality and climate) vs. inflation control in recent years probably also didn't help sending wrong signals.
I need to pick a BA thesis (philosophy, preferably philosophy of mind) within the next week. I am very bad at this, I tend to vastly exceed scope and cram too much into the page limit, and every student paper so far has gotten the feedback that I could turn this into a thesis easily. But I also start off from a vague area of research and settle on a proper question only in the last stages. I'm not allowed to do that for a BA, I need to register a topic and stick to it.
Anyone interested in making suggestions, asking questions, refining my notes can go to
You should have a thesis advisor. I’d definitely run the final top three past them. You’ll have done the hard work of finding something you care about enough; they’ll have a good sense of what will most like project forward into a good thesis.
If you’re thinking about using it as a sample for grad school they’ll also be able to help you choose a topic that will showcase your strengths best given your career goals.
I have two meetings with professors set up for the next days, but have nobody else to talk about these things, so going from "uuuuh something in the direction of cognitive linguistics" to "well, this group of problems looks promising" is easiest when I try to explain myself to strangers.
I chipped in a few thoughts. You might also find the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a nice place to explore; their articles are focused enough to point out recent work and open puzzles that people consider interesting. Good luck!
I was a philosophy major as an undergrad, and fascinated by philosophy of mind. I'm also several decades deeper into life than you are. I read your page of potential BA topics, & here's what I think. You are obviously smart as fuck. You do not need to worry about not making it as a philosopher or a neuroscientist. Don't buy into the idea that you need to get some faculty advisor's advice on what topic to pick in order to avoid ending up at some intellectual or professional dead end. Your professional success is not hanging the balance. Fuck worrying about that stuff. Pick the topic you think your mind will fasten on with the most passion and focus. Since you tend to bite off more than you can chew, pick something smaller and more specific than you're inclined to, and let you mind go to town on that. The chance is nil that you will run out of things to say before you produce a substantial enough piece. Happy Wittgenstein, buddy.
Thank you so much! That's really nice to hear. I feel like I misrepresented my future, though, chronic illness and a persistent tendency to switch careers every couple of years (I am a qualified media designer as well as software developer, oh, and I sell fallacy card games) mean I have no professional success waiting for me at any point. I'm a high-school dropout finally basking in university life, I study for the sake of studying, and afterwards I'll probably get a part-time home-office programming job because there's no way to reach for the stars on 20 hours a week, career-wise. So, student papers are probably the closest I'll ever get to research, and I want to make the most of it, learning stuff that matters to me.
I'm a bit confused about your situation. You're going to get a BA then do part-time programming 20 hours a week? And do you mean you'll be doing that while going to grad school? Or just doing that and nothing else? There was something in your earlier post about going for a masters in cognitive science or something like that, but couldn't find that just now. Can you clarify what's going to happen after your get your BA, and what you're hoping to be doing in a few years?
I didn't finish high school either, but went to college anyhoo, so don't worry about your odd and messy start. At college I fell in love with Wittgenstein, symbolic logic, Goedel's proof, AJ Ayer and Daniel Dennett. I ended up with a career in another field, but I'd say those college years as a philosophy major were the intellectual high point of my life. I got so excited about that stuff that I actually cried sometimes when I finally understood particularly difficult bits. And all the paradoxes and mental moves and weird, almost mystical, visions of the strangeness and complexity of things just sort of became a part of me, and still inform my thinking. And the *people,* especially Wittgenstein for me.
Anyhow, if your situation is vastly different, maybe what I have to say about the whole thing doesn't apply to your situation, but here it is anyhow: Your fascination with these topics if a valuable and magical thing. It will give you energy to drive your mind deep into all kinds of subjects, & it will remain a source of mental models and mystical feels for the rest of your life. So go with that. It's the best thing you've got going on. Pick your topic based on how fascinated your are by it and by how much it revs up your mind. Forget consulting some professor, who may have lost his mojo and be stuck navigating decisions about what to write next by considering what topics are currently fashionable and what rivals he most wants to one-up. Don't let him influence you with considerations of that kind. Nobody expects an undergrad to have that sort of canniness in picking a topic. In fact, people who are in love with philosophy might see your picking a "trending" kind of topic as bad sign -- a sign that you don't love the field and are learning the production of philosophy articles as you would a trade. So forget all that and just pick the subject that thrills you the most.
Oh, sorry, I probably wasn't clear. I'll get my BA, then go get an MA in cognitive science, and then I'll probably have trouble finding employment because of illness. I expect I'll either go for a PhD (if the opportunity arises) or go back to programming (because there's interesting part-time & home office jobs in that field), or make a living self-employed ... I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, I consider software development my fallback career though, as it's pretty forgiving to sickly goblin types.
I love studying very much and am very happy for the opportunity, but I'm not sure it's leading anywhere (career-wise), for me, so I'm mostly doing it for myself.
The talk with my professor today was incredibly frustrating, because he didn't understand my notes at all, was strongly against any interdisciplinary approach and tried to push a bog standard topic on me, when what I really want is not prove I can write what everyone can, but write what only I can (pardon the hubris). I'll try others, though he's the one who's in the field.
I'm not strategic in my topic selection at all, my problem is mostly to go from "this sort of stuff is fascinating" to a proper(ly scoped) question to tackle. The actual writing is not an issue.
"incredibly frustrating, because he didn't understand my notes at all, was strongly against any interdisciplinary approach and tried to push a bog standard topic on me, when what I really want is not prove I can write what everyone can, but write what only I can "
Yes, exactly. If you are studying for pleasure, you'll get the most pleasure from writing what only you can. If you have try to for grad school or a career in philosophy, writing a thesis that only you can is your best shot at getting respectful attention. Everybody can tell the difference between something that's well-coached and something that's the real deal.
So you're a sick goblin? Want to say what your illness is, or is that too private?
> "I tend to vastly exceed scope and cram too much into the page limit, and every student paper so far has gotten the feedback that I could turn this into a thesis easily."
1. This is sort of delightful to hear. Obligatory "Banach's Thesis would maybe-never had happened if his colleagues hadn't NINJA'd him into defending it without telling him that was what was happening" story link: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/111724/who-wrote-up-banachs-thesis (so thankful for whoever posted it in the ACXD server 2 years ago.)
2. Share what the topics/titles of those papers were? (Unless that's basically what the list in the Google Doc IS made of! Along with a few other things of interest.)
Coming from somebody who is outside academia it seems to me that that is the answer to the question. If you have multiple papers that “could easily be turned into a thesis“ the easiest thing to do would be to pick your favorite and go.
Thank you so much, but "could be turned into a (BA) thesis (with some work)", not "basically a PhD" ... That anecdote is delightful, but not all that relatable.
Previous papers were on:
- Scientific Regression? The Return of Scurvy in early 20th Century (analyzed through the lens of Ludwik Fleck's work)
- Authority and Freedom in Capitalism. Popper and Hayek: Liberal Social Philosophy in the Context of Economic Relations
- Embodied Consciousness
And the sociology papers (my other subject):
- Excess of Men in Rural East Germany Post-Reunion (selective migration, crippled birth rates and the resulting marriage squeeze)
- BDSM: Consensual Domination and Submission as Sexual Practice in Context Societal Power Structures (mostly recapping the lesbian sex wars of the 70s - yes, that's what they're called; also: reading porn, for science)
- Poverty on the Internet: Digital Panhandling (currently writing)
For a thesis, for a smart student, the biggest difficulty is picking a topic you can finish writing something about. For that reason, it can be helpful to pick the topic adjacent to the one that interests you most, rather than the one that actually interests you most - the one that interests you most will turn into a 700 page monster and eat up many years of your life. For someone who’s smart and good at coming up with ideas, the next step comes with showing that you can finish a product. I need to get back to my own grad students in a few minutes so I won’t dive into the details of your topics, but it is helpful to pick something with a well-defined scope - not “here are problems that arise with cognitive pentrability of experience” but something more like “Siegel’s argument regarding the cognitive penetrability of experience rests on the following four assumptions, and I show a novel reason to reject the second”. There will be plenty of material to fill a full thesis involved in giving the background, discussing other relevant arguments, and showing why your particular rejection has some interest of its own.
What would it take to get an effective Iron Dome/anti-artillery or anti-ballistic missile system up and running for Ukraine, to protect at least Kyiv if not some of their other cities? I was wondering about this earlier in the week, and then I saw a Reuters article that Zelensky was asking Israel for Iron Dome technology (it’s a defensive system that shoots down Palestinian or Hezbollah rockets aimed at their cities, if you don’t know what it is).
Could Israel (with obvious Western help) set up & implement such a system in a few weeks? Months? By 2023? Would it be effective against not just Russian artillery, but also actual Russian missiles? Is this doable at all? (This question is specifically directed at John Schilling, who seems to know about these things, but obviously is open for anyone who knows more than me). Would seem to be a game-changer for Ukraine if so
I am by no means an expert, but my guess is that the level of defence required to protect against eh Russian army is orders of magnitude more than is required to stop the very limited armaments available to Hezbollah, and I would be very surprised it it was possible in theory, let alone trying to set it up in cities already under siege. Consider that North Korean artillery still threatens Seoul - if an Iron Dome style system could work at that scale I'd expect South Korea to have one.
You'd be hard pressed to defend against North Korea's artillery. They don't have just one or two pieces, they sport about 6,000 guns aimed at Seoul alone. Iron Dome chokes on 50 missiles fired at once.
Iron Dome would not be useful against artillery and most rockets. Each ID interception costs ~$100k. Even in the Israeli case it's a losing proposition, economically, as the cost of the cheap-ass rockets Hamas uses is way less than $100k, but the Israeli calculation is different anyway.
Is there any existing system capable of protecting against what Russia launches, especially given volume of attacks? I expect that destroying launch systems wold be easier.
You'd need an impossible number of interceptors to make that work. Literally impossible, in that there aren't enough factories with the very specialized tooling needed to build enough interceptors to matter before the issue in Ukraine is settled one way or another.
Iron Dome is scaled to defend against rocket attacks by people using handcrafted rockets made one at a time in hidden workshops, or occasionally bigger ones smuggled in by tunnel. Ukraine is facing a major industrial power that spent half a century stockpiling ammunition for Literally World War Three; they're having trouble trucking it to the front lines as fast as they'd like, but they can still overwhelm any practical active defense.
And unfortunately, this isn't 1941 when the US and Western Europe had strong independent and highly flexible industrial bases that could switch overnight from sewing machines to machine guns, cameras to Norden bombsights, whatever was needed. Now it's all highly optimized, specialized, and Just-In-Time. "Just In Time", meaning, "Way too late if anything at all goes wrong", and somebody starting a war without notifying you a year in advance counts as something going terribly wrong.
Good info, thanks for the response. I just read an FT article about how Ukraine is hoping to get various Eastern European S-300 systems, I guess from the Soviet era- which apparently can intercept missiles as well as aircraft? I wonder if those could be useful if they could successfully transfer them?
They might be useful against Russian cruise and tactical ballistic missiles, but given the limited numbers likely to be provided they are probably best reserved for use against Russian combat aircraft to deny Russia air superiority as long as possible.
Against Russian missile strikes, the best bet is to use camouflage, concealment, and deception to trick the Russians into wasting their missiles on empty warehouses and plywood mock-ups of SAM sites or whatever.
If the Russians want to just shoot their fancy missiles at apartment buildings and kill civilians, there's probably not much to be done but have people spend as much of their time as possible in bomb shelters. And note that nobody has ever killed enough civilians that way to break a nation or win a war.
Is the Beta "Reader" function on substack broken for anyone else? About a week ago or so, it just stopped showing anything at all. This seems like a "me" problem since I can't find any reference to anyone else having this issue, and after a week, if it was more widespread I would expect mention if not a fix.
I've tried different browsers all to no avail. It only shows the first of my subscritptions on the sidebar, and in the main panel, where all the recent publications should be, it's just a bunch of grey boxes.
"The Onion Knight" was amazing. Also the travelogue vignettes last year were hilarious, for example. Extremely worth the subscription cost. (Btw, I often fail to notice that subscribers-only things are subscribers-only until I try to link people to them.)
I think of myself as pretty moderate regarding politics. I can usually see both sides of an issue. I’m an ER physician by trade.
One issue that I cannot find myself at all understanding the “other side” (even after years of intentional pondering) is abortion. It just seems like such a blatant betrayal of the right to life, one of the most valued rights we have. Even hard-core libertarians that I know who believe in almost no laws are pro-life regarding abortion.
I’m all for decreasing unplanned/unwanted pregnancies via easily accessible/free contraceptives and reasonable sex ed.
For those that say the unborn aren’t viable on their own, my question is, does dependency remove personhood? I don’t think it does, as that would pose a huge issue for the disabled (and young kids). Also, for anyone that uses that argument, it would follow that they are strictly against abortion post 24 weeks when the baby is now viable apart from mom, but I find that many of these people aren’t against post 24 week abortions.
For those that want to claim right to abortion in rape cases, I think a debate can be had there, but it should be realized that rape cases are a tiny percentage of abortions (around 1%).
If a physician’s oath is “do no harm”, it seems to me that an abortion violates this. When a pregnant mom comes in with trauma, respiratory distress, or any other disease we work from a mental framework of “two patients, take care of both”.
Around a million abortions are performed each year in the US. This is astounding in and of itself, and when you count years of life lost it’s even more overwhelming. Worldwide, 40-50 million abortions occur per year. These numbers are absolutely wild. COVID has (appropriately) received a ton of press the past two year, but when you compare COVID to abortions in lives lost, and particularly years of life lost, abortion monumentally overshadows COVID numbers.
I’m all for mom to have as much support and as many rights as possible. But just as an adult doesn’t have the right to end the life of another person, so I can’t endorse a mom’s right to terminate a baby in the womb.
Other than medical emergencies that endanger the mother’s life, I do not see an ethical argument for abortion, which violates the basic right to life.
I realize this can be a very charged and emotional subject. I’m not looking to poke the bee hive or be attacked, but to hear rational thoughts on the matter.
"40 million fetuses are being murdered per year, and so what? 40 million cows are murdered each year and they are way more sentient than a fetus."
This is not likely to get people to shift to support your perspective, btw. Emphasis on the superior right to life of an 18 month old bovine over that of a human infant not even born yet is not really a common set of values.
FWIW I share that set of values and I expect many of my friends to do the same.
"Human infant" is doing a lot of work there, comparing to the actual object of an abortion, especially early-stage abortions which even pro-choice people consider better than late-stage.
I suggest actually asking your friends if they think it is morally worse to kill a cow than to abort a human child. Use whatever euphemisms you like to obscure that one is human and the other is not. You might be surprised at how many people don't share your view that animals have more moral worth.
I suggest changing your language from "murder" to "homicide" or "killing" - the very definition of murder implies wrongness and illegality: eg. a killing in self defence is *not* a "murder"
They might, but they might not, and the typical context around the word tends to give it the meaning Thor describes. While you're far from the first person to use the word that way, it's used far too often to mean unjust killings. It's even defined that way in the dictionary, especially in legal contexts, which is specifically what abortion is concerned with here. Consequently, whatever time you try to save in the interest of brevity will end up getting sucked out of you anyway in having to clarify later.
I mean, you're already courting misinterpretation by posting under the name "Lizard Man"...
Note the graphs that cover general attitudes toward abortion from 1975 (Roe was decided in 1973) to the present. The only reasonable conclusion is that attitudes towards abortion are fairly constant, but experience small fluctations over time.
The percentage of those that think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances was 21% in 1975, fell to 15% in the late 90s, and has since risen to 19%. The percentage who thought it should be legal under any circumstances was 22% in 1975, rose to 34% in 1993, fell back to 21% in 2009, and has risen back to 32% today. The percentage that think it should be legal only under certain circumstances was 54% in 1975, rose to 61% in 1997, and has since falled to 48% in 2021.
Similarly, the next graph, showing self-labels "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have hovered around 50% each for nearly 25 years with very little change. They were 47/44 (choice/life) in 1997, 42/51 in 2009, 50/44 in 2015, and 49/47 in 2021.
Most countries have more restrictive abortion laws than the reddest parts of the US. (Under Roe, there were no limits allowed at all in the first 13 weeks, and have "reasonable health regulations" up to the 26th week. Casey is a moving target.)
"If this only made you more against it, not my problem since abortion rights are only getting stronger. All i can do is offer you the choice to change your perspective in the face of a world that's changing in a way you don't like."
Wholly aside from Carl Pham showing pretty convincingly that you're wrong on the facts, I wonder if you would accept this argument in reference to any other issue. "Don't oppose any given immanent circumstance or any process that's already underway, because you'll probably lose! You'll just get mad if you keep insisting that the immoral is, in fact, immoral."
For example, would you tell BLM that all you can really do is offer them the choice to accept the position of blacks since Whitey just has more and more money and cops every year?
Sounds like you understand the general terrain of the issue more than your opening lines suggest. One thing not captured above is the weighing of harms to foetus vs. to mother. If having a baby significantly harms the mother (either for medical reasons or 'socioeconomic' reasons) then this should appear on the ledger as a threat to pro-life values as well, since the mother is a) currently alive and b) potentially capable of rearing multiple future children at another time.
Unrelated to your main question but rape as criteria for abortion legality seems to give rise to some really bad scenarios. I'd suggest at the outset that it's probably reasonable to have *some* criteria for abortion legality, of which rape could/should be considered among the several influencing factors. But if the law explicitly listed rape as a top-level prerequisite for state-allowed abortion, this would have a predictable distorting effect on the reporting of rapes; and given the elasticity of the term with it's proximity to sexual assault and interaction with our ever-changing notion of "consent", I just see it as a legal and social nightmare for all involved.
Killing someone for economic gain or to prevent economic loss is among the most abhorrent, and most clearly condemned, motivations for murder in our society. I am not clear that this needs to be taken into weight at all.
I do completely agree that the issues with assault reporting that you mention are possible and a concern. I suggest that modern genomics will allow for better identification of rapists in these cases, and to serve as somewhat of a deterrent for frivolous accusations. Also- that quandary is not a new one, and abortion has been used to cover up rape as well.
We may even begin to respect the rights of fathers in this regard.
Could it, though? Even if adoption were available (which it is, which invalidates the economic loss argument) does anyone really starve to death in the U.S. nowadays? I'm pretty sure the number of people who starve here is basically 0. Elsewhere the question may be different.
It's very rare for anyone to literally starve to death in the United States. Malnutrition is still quite possible. As is drug overdose when you realize you've got *just* enough money for rice and beans and a TV set and enough fentanyl to make that bearable one week out of every month, but if you take it all at once you'll never have to worry about those unbearable weeks ever again.
And a hundred other ugly, slow endings for a human life. Some of them will drag out long enough that you can maybe call them "natural causes".
Only if she were unwilling to either take social services or give up the child. Claims of socio-economic harm have to keep in mind that young healthy children are readily adopted, so there is no harm beyond the pregnancy and delivery (which isn't, of course, zero) if the mother is willing to give up the child.
The aspect of the 'socioeconomic harm' (inverted commas signifying my lack of personal investment) argument that I'm engaging with is the small but real risk that a having a baby can push a mother into destitution and emotional turmoil, which could do more net harm than terminating an embryo*. There is a pro-life argument for having that abortion so that in a few years' time when her situation has stabilised she can have a family without being plunged into chaos.
*And yes, we are still left with the question of "at what stage...?"
I think I could squint and see places and times when this would be a reasonable argument. Maybe in the 3rd world still.
In the US, this seems very incorrect. Young women receive significantly more support if they have a child, directly from the government. She becomes eligible for multiple new programs for herself and her child, which are generally funded enough that she could survive without a job or any outside support than the government programs. For someone on the edge of destitution, having a baby would be a significant *improvement* on their financial situation.
Even if that were not true, putting the baby up for adoption would be a mostly neutral socioeconomic decision. There are costs involved, but they are generally taken up by the state in those cases. Sometimes the mothers get financial support during and after pregnancy even when giving the child up.
Do you really think that a child is a net economic gain? The programs you refer to are intended to relieve some of the burden of raising a child, not to vault women out of poverty. I really don't see any way that it could be true that "For someone on the edge of destitution, having a baby would be a significant *improvement* on their financial situation."
Certainly not, but neither is a child (in a modern welfare state) a doom that a mother can never get away from. The post I responded to was making an argument that a poor women having a baby was headed for "destitution" and that's really not the case, or at least not because of the baby.
If you know any parents firsthand (your comment makes me suspect that you do not!), I encourage you to ask them for feedback on your opinion that having a child results in a net financial gain. My advice, be ready to duck.
I don't know much about the US welfare system, but the UK (which I tend to think of as being more generous in terms of welfare payments than the US) does not offer benefits which would allow someone to survive without a job, at the marginal decision of having a child vs not.
In the UK the government will pay £151.97 / week for the first 39 weeks you are off work with your pregnancy (I don't know how it works if you are unemployed when you get pregnancy, but I think it might be £102.68 ie 90% of your out-of-work benefits). They then pay a £500 one-off payment at birth for expenses like a crib / pram and an ongoing £21.15 / week for the first child (£14.00 / week for subsequent children).
There are a few other benefits-in-kind - for example tax relief on money spent on childcare and support for prescriptions - but the only one which I think is material is the fact that as a single mother on the poverty line you will be prioritised for council housing. I don't know quite how to price this at the margin - it is a benefit you are entitled to anyway, but that you will be fast-tracked for as you are pregnant so you get it sooner. I guess just saying something like 'the benefit counts for the first year, and then not after that' because it makes the maths easier
In the first year you therefore get something like £5000 + your housing costs taken care of AT THE MARGIN, which is probably about equivalent to a marginal part-time minimum wage job (I'd halve my salary to avoid ever having to work, but I don't know if this is a reasonable trade this close to the poverty line). In all subsequent years you get something like £1000 at the margin. I don't know exactly what you'd consider a 'significant' improvement, but £1000 / year seems very close to me to be approaching the absolute minimum amount a child could cost you at the margin - for example foster carers of children are paid ~£400 / week and housing a Ukrainian refugee is paid ~£350 / week
As someone who is strongly prolife - there is a right to not be obligated to assist or support another person, even if one's assistant would be life saving. I go to bed knowing that there are tragedies going on in my home town and across the globe that I could intervene in, but will/do not.
I give a biblical percentage of charitable tithe, but I live quite comfortably and have excess material goods. I could help more.
To me, the most righteous argument for morally acceptable elective abortion is an overgrowth of that right to not be obligated to assist everyone.
I think that is insufficient, but I know some people disagree. I also think that abortion of the children of rapists is wrong, but the countering arguments for abortion are stronger there.
It's a hard topic. Everyone thinks their own situation is an edge case and that abortion is ok for them. It's not, but again, hard.
Pro-life vs pro-choice is about drawing a line somewhere, the argument is where. So, where do you draw it? Is Plan B fine? Copper IUD used after unprotected intercourse?
From the standpoint of secular moral philosophy, my own opinion is that no one has ever improved on the searching analysis [https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/society/on-abortion-carl-sagan-ann-druyan/] of the abortion question that Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan published in 1990. After painstakingly laying out scientific facts, moral hypotheticals, and commonsense principles, Sagan and Druyan ultimately conclude that the right question to ask is when the fetus develops something that’s *recognizably a human brain, processing thoughts and emotions*. In practice, that probably means drawing a hard line at the end of the second trimester. Coincidentally, that’s almost exactly where Roe v. Wade drew the line, but Sagan and Druyan’s reasoning is completely different: they reject Roe‘s criterion of viability outside the womb, as both morally irrelevant and contingent on medical technology.
This is generally my thinking on it. I hadn't heard of the analysis that Sagan and Druyan did. I am excited to read it as they likely thought much more deeply about it than I have.
My emotional comfort level is that the line is somewhere before 22/24 weeks (the earliest a baby has been able to live outside the womb) but after 8-12 which seems to be before the fetus has developed rudimentary organs and systems. Though above average my understanding of the biology and medical technology available is below that of a first year college student studying the topic. Therefore I am very open to changing my views based on new evidence.
The two scenarios that present challenges are in cases of rape or where the pregnancy threatens the mothers life. For rape, I suspect the number of abortions that occur after 22/24 weeks and are where the pregnancy is due to rape is so close to 0 that I am not sure I need to devote brain power to it.
It's a bit more complicated when a later stage pregnancy threatens the mothers life as you now have to decide between the life that already exists in the world or the one that is just beginning. I don't think there is an easy answer. However, this seems to be a question that can just be answered with advances in medicine either by preventing these emergencies or treating them while saving both lives.
Another complication is if the baby will have severe medical problems once born. I don't think it's moral to have an abortion only because the child will have moderate conditions such as a missing limb or downs syndrome. But if they would be confined to a wheel chair unable to eat, speak, move, etc? I am not sure how I feel about it. I should note on the other side of the coin I do think its more to select fertilized eggs for certain traits (even superficial ones) if its before that 8-12 week period as mentioned above.
I am definitely against the types of laws that Texas has just implemented that seek to allow mob rule to determine who has broken a law and then use civil courts to enforce it.
You're begging the question. If you take as axiomatic that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception onward, then yes, of course it's a violation of right to life. But most people do not believe that, and neither does our legal system. I suspect that you might not truly believe it either, ie, imagine the trolley problem, wherein on one side is a test tube with two fertilized eggs, and on the other, say, a 10 year old child. Would you really kill the child the to save the two fertilized eggs? That would be a pretty unusual stance.
Okay, imagine you have on one side the 10 year old child and on the other, a litter of six really cute puppies.
Would you kill the puppies? Honestly, they are *so cute*. Some people would pick the puppies over the kid - they do this in reality by using contraception and instead calling themselves 'fur moms/dads'.
How about if it's one 10 year old child on this side and three 12 year old triplets on the other?
We can multiply examples for as many variables as you like and end up with "yes kill the 10 year old". That says nothing about "is it right to murder 10 year old children?"
As for "the legal system does not believe" - yes, and how many people on here are quite happy to ignore the legal system when it comes to drugs, or other things the legal system does not believe you should do? Hmmm?
I like how the "misogyny" card gets played, when there is no other convincing argument. Just like "racist" or "homophobe" (or I suppose "transphobe" is the new favourite now, as some gay people have the temerity not to support trans rights 200%, so it's okay to be homophobic towards *them*), it's a meaningless noise.
"Some people would pick the puppies over the kid - they do this in reality by using contraception and instead calling themselves 'fur moms/dads'."
So simply choosing not to have kids is equivalent to letting an existing child die? Come on now.
That aside, I do think you have a point with your counter-argument, in the sense that people's immediate intuitions are messy and not always internally consistent. There are people who might indeed save a box of puppies rather than a 10 year old child simply because, in the heat of the moment, their first instinct is to save the cute doggos. There are even a few people (probably not many, but some) who would make that choice even if they had ample time to decide, and consider it to be the morally correct choice. That doesn't mean the life of the dogs is more valuable than the life of the child in any comprehensive ethical sense. So sure, maybe you can claim that someone choosing a 10 year old over a vial of fertilized eggs doesn't prove anything either.
Still, if someone let a 10 year old die in order to save two 12 year olds, or six dogs, or ten adult humans, I imagine they'd be absolutely devastated about it. They'd probably feel extremely guilty even if they were convinced they made the right choice from an ethical point of view, or at the very least, regretful that such a situation ever occured in the first place. I don't think the same would be true for someone who let the vial of fertilized eggs be destroyed: I can't see many people breaking down and crying and screaming "my God, what have I done?" over it, or being traumatized by what happened, or even viewing it as all that much of a loss. Probably a few people would, but the vast majority of people likely wouldn't see it as anything worse than small-scale property destruction.
If it's six puppies, I kill the puppies with a twinge of regret. If it's three twelve year olds, I kill the single ten year old with serious dismay. If it's two fertilized eggs, I smash that vial and feel absolutely no internal conflict, because from my point of view I saved a human life at zero cost. The point of the thought experiment is to get people to think about how they value different groups, and I think when pressed, most people would not actually value a fertilized egg at the same level as a living, breathing child. Certainly there are a lot fewer people trying to save the "babies" in fertility clinics' trash bins than there are, say, protesting abortion clinics.
I'm not suggesting that we mistake legality for morality, I'm just pointing out that the viewpoint is so commonly accepted (and thus should not be unfathomable to the original poster) that it is enshrined in law. If a doctor's personal morality obliges them not to provide abortions, I think they should follow that. I'm not aware of many conscientiously objecting doctors being forced to provide abortions at gunpoint. Generally there are enough doctors of the opposite position to cover those roles.
I don't think I mentioned misogyny anywhere in my comment, but maybe you were just speaking generally?
I don't think "life", on its own, is very meaningful. If I were in a vegetative state with no quality of life, I'd want my family to pull the plug. Some of the life-saving interventions we perform on the elderly are kind of horrifying - performing rib-breaking CPR on elderly patients with no QoL isn't something most doctors would want for themselves.
So, where do we draw the line? The right to life of a embryo compared to the right to freedom, bodily autonomy, health, financial stability of an adult woman - for me, an embryo just doesn't have any meaningful *personhood* that makes it different from an unfertilised egg. If I'm not obliged to get pregnant so that ovum can live, I don't see how I'm obliged to carry an embryo to term. I think you acknowledge the balance here too - if it were all about the right to life of the fetus, why would the circumstances of conception have anything to do with it?
A viable, near term foetus? The balance there is obviously different, because it's much closer to being independent and self aware. Where do we draw the line? Listen, look up some of the circumstances in which women actually have late term abortions - this isn't something that happens casually, these are overwhelmingly wanted babies where something has gone horribly wrong in the course of pregnancy. No one should be forced to carry an anencephalic fetus to term, or continue a pregnancy where the most likely outcome is their own death. Or have a baby when they're still a child themself.
Is there a middle ground? Sure, probably. But there's no clear line where we can say a developing fetus stops being a lump of potential and starts being a person, so it's a decision best made by the most affected definite person involved - the prospective mother - in consultation with her doctors. What might be strenuous and inconvenient for one woman might be something another woman really would attempt suicide to avoid. She has a right to life too.
For what it's worth, the principle is long established that no one has a right to life that justifies taking another innocent life. For example, if a terrorist were to point a gun at you and order you to shoot and kill another person, on pain of your own immediate death, and you did it, you could and would be prosecuted for murder in all jurisdictions. If you are dying of heart disease, and were to hire a hit man to go kill someone with a tissue match in order to get a heart transplant, you would be condemned, even if that were the only possible way to survive.
That is, you have no right to preserve your life by killing someone else. So that argument by itself seems pretty dubious. You can get around it by arguing you're not killing "someone" else -- but then you're forced back to the need to draw a line between human life and not human life.[1]
The argument of anyone being "forced" to carry a fetus to term is also a bit suspect. Except in the exceedingly rare cases of pregnancy as a result of rape (or lack of meaningful consent), nobody forced the sex that was the direct cause of the pregnancy, and in these days almost nobody lacks the awareness of how pregnancy happens or access to extremely cheap ways of reliably preventing it.
If I choose to put my entire retirement savings on Lucky Eddie to win in the 4th race, and Lucky Eddie breaks his leg in the first furlong, we would not say the betting parlor is "forcing" me to eat cat food in my old age. If I choose to join the all-volunteer Army, we would not say the President is "forcing" me to run the risk of being shot and killed when it's my unit's turn to deploy to Afghanistan. All of that was well known to be part of the fine print in the contract I willingly signed.
Generally, when people make decisions of their own free will, knowing full well that certain consequences may ensue, we don't speak of them being "forced" to endure those consequences if they *do* ensue. We say they are experiencing the result of their own choices. A woman who is pregnant by her own free choice to engage in unprotected sex is not "forced" to be pregnant -- she *chose* to be pregnant. The question before us is whether she should be allowed to unmake her choice, after the consequences have become manifest, and at what cost.
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[1] I'm also not especially impressed with the argument that it's hard to draw this line. Who says? You would probably get overwhelming political agreement if you said "A blastocyst of fewer than 10,000 cells is not a human life." So you can easily draw a line that will get broad agreement. What's *hard* is moving the line as close as possible to an actual visibly human being, something with arms and hands and eyes that can look at you and a brain that thinks thoughts, primitive as they may be.
Additionally, we draw "hard" lines like this all the time. We have to. We have to draw lines that say when a person's organs can/cannot be harvested. When a person is/is not competent to manage their own affairs. When a criminal should/should not pay with his life or freedom for a crime. When a soldier should/should not be ordered to his near certain death. When a person is/is not justified in using deadly force to defend himself. In none of these cases do we throw up our hands and say "Well! This is just too hard to come to any kind of social consensus on dividing lines, so we will have to leave it entirely up to individual judgment." There's certainly an argument for listening to the affected individual, just like a jury will listen to the testimony of a defendant charged with using deadly force inappropriatley, but in general we do not eschew social oversight of individual life-and-death decisions.
Heck, if you wanted to put your dog down for what people consider a frivolous reason (e.g. you're going on vacation), the capability exists for society to second-guess your judgment and hold you accountable for it. It seems inconsistent to assert that what we tolerate and manage with respect to the lives of pets is impossibly complex or intrusive with respect to the lives of human beings.
It's listed as a mitigating factor under California law, e.g.:
"190.05 In determining the penalty, the trier of fact shall take into account any of the following factors if relevant:
...
(7) Whether or not the defendant acted under extreme duress or under the substantial domination of another person."
So basically you can argue after being convicted that you should get a lesser sentence because of being coerced. How well that would work I have no idea. Patty Hearst claimed she was acting under duress -- that she'd been raped and threatened with death by the SLA after they kidnapped her -- when she drove the getaway car for a robbery in which someone else killed a bystander. Didn't stop her from being sentenced to 35 years in pokey, later reduced to 7, and then commuted entirely by Jimmy Carter.
It looks like the proxy bombers either escaped and the bomb was defused, if they were coerced by their family being imprisoned, or were killed themselves in the cases where they were strapped in.
We don't draw hard lines in any of those cases, though. We have judges and juries and ethics committees specifically because drawing a single clear line is impossible - to take one of your examples, deciding when a person has ceased to have capacity to manage their own affairs is really tough, it requires both medical and legal input, we don't just say, for example, that they've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's so they automatically lack capacity.
We agree a blastocyst isn't a person. Ok, uncontroversial. So, the embryo isn't a blastocyst anymore, it has a rudimentary heartbeat, but it definitely doesn't have any meaningful personhood, and the mother is a teenager who thought douching with Mountain Dew would prevent pregnancy (I wish this was made up) and knows her family will call her a whore and kick her out if they find out she's pregnant, and she can't see any future for herself past that. I'm strongly in favour of making sure she has the option to go to a shelter and have free medical care and the ability to continue her education and everything else that would help her make a genuine free choice, but I don't think the embryo weighs very highly against her health and happiness, to be honest. And bear in mind pregnancy always carries risk to the life of the mother - modern medical care minimises that but hasn't eliminated it. Abortions aren't literally zero risk, but they're a lot safer than childbirth.
(And if you think there's no circumstances in which late term abortions should be permitted, look up anencephaly. Do not look at pictures.)
I'd also note: first, you're overestimating the reliability of even the best contraception (bear in mind that a 1/10,000 risk is more likely than you think on a population level). Secondly, talking about "consequences" is kind of...well, yes, the consequences of unprotected heterosexual sex are often either pregnancy or the need to have an abortion. That choice is the consequence. I don't find that a meaningful line of argument.
Sure, judges and juries get involved -- because the law criminalizes inappropriate use of lethal force. But you said you were *against* criminalizing abortion in any sense, and getting judges and juries involved in deciding whether an individual has/has not made the right choice at all, no? Or did I not understand what you meant by leaving it entirely up to individual choice?
Anyway, the existence of judges and juries doesn't mean a line hasn't been drawn. Quite the contrary, judges and juries only get involved when a line *has* been drawn, and pages of legal code (and case law) exist to tell you exactly where it lies. The judges and juries are there to ascertain on which side of that line a particular person in particular circumstance falls.
The risk of second-trimester abortion is between 5-10 per 100,000[1]. The risk of maternal death in childbirth is about 20 per 100,000[2]. So the difference in risk is a factor of 2-4. Whether you consider that "a lot" safer is probably a matter of perspective. Certainly a very early abortion is much safer than actual childbirth, but very early abortion is much less controversial and hardly anybody proposes legislation there; what is normally the subject of attempts at legislation *are* the second-trimester events.
The failure rates of contraception are not relevant, because again nobody (aside from rape et cetera) is being *forced* to have sex. You *choose* to have sex, and you *choose* what method of contraception, if any, to use, and you *choose* to run the known risk. Again, I find the argument that the results are something you can reasonable be said to be shocked and surprised about, and not expected to own, is facially absurd. There is no other situation in which a decision with such weighty consequences is treated with such little assignment of agency.
If a 16-year-old thinks he's perfectly fine to drive after drinking 5 beers, because he's never done it before, and nobody has given him a detailed lecture on BAC/reaction times before, and he goes out and kills two people when he sails through a red light, we do not say it is unfair that he is "forced" to accept the (perhaps lifelong!) consequences of his decision, and we do not make excuses for him because he was just a kid, or had some dumb kid notions of how safe it was to drink and drive. Actions have consequences, and if you're old enough to drive -- or screw -- you're old enough to grasp that, and we can reasonably hold you to them.
That's great that you're concerned with the mother. Personally, I'm on the other side. The mother has *already* proven she's a fool[3]. Clearly she doesn't make good decisions, and prioritizes the selfish pleasures of the moment over even very serious issues that (as you point out) could turn her own life upside down, as well as those of her family, and of course end the life of a child.
On the other hand, her baby is a blank page. Could be anything. Could be just as much a fuckup as the parent, of course, but could also be a new Einstein, Baryshnikov, Mozart. I'd rather take a chance on the unknown new life than on the adult who has already proved herself to be an incredible idiot and moral pygmy. I really don't give a shit about her future choices being painfully constrained, because she's already proven she's incapable of exercising choice responsibly. She *had* the chance to do all the nice things you suggest should lie in her future. All she needed to do was keep her legs closed.
You are perhaps confusing a willingness to criticize the decisions of women for misogyny. I'm sure you understand in turn that I consider female chauvinism no more attractive than the male version.
" Certainly a very early abortion is much safer than actual childbirth, but very early abortion is much less controversial and hardly anybody proposes legislation there; what is normally the subject of attempts at legislation are the second-trimester events."
What do you mean by "hardly anyone"? It seems to me there are a good many people who want *no* abortions, it's just that they're currently settling for restrictions of various sorts.
Exactly this. Four states (Texas, Idaho, Oklahoma, and South Carolina) have passed laws banning abortion by fetal heartbeat, which is at about 6 weeks. And i assume more states will soon follow.
Okay, let's do this. Let's bite the bullet here: pro-abortion people, I'll let you abort anencephalic babies up to and at the point of delivery, or even delivered but the umbilical cord is not cut yet, or even delivered, cord cut, but not expected to live past the first couple of breaths - IF you give in on healthy, viable pregnancies.
Because I am sick and tired of the small minority of 'fatal foetal abnormalties incompatible with life' being pulled out and made to dance a jig to justify the majority of abortions which are carried out for "perfectly fine pregnancy which is viable and healthy but..."
The only, the only goddamn reason, I can figure out for the vehement support of "abort pregnancies for poverty" which means curing the problem not by ending poverty but by ending the pregnancy is for the sake of the wider requirement: convenience. Ooops, I'm pregnant five years before I planned to be when the career trajectory I am working on would be in place. Oops how can I have a baby now, I'd have to stop doing all my fun things. Oops I don't want a baby with this guy, he's just a fucktoy nothing serious. Oops I'm not ready to be an adult even though I'm twenty-seven.
Making and keeping it legal for the "this poor woman has no husband and two kids and lives on food scavenged from dumpsters" also has the happy side-effect of making and keeping it legal for the "my college course fees cost more money than that woman will ever see in her entire life" people.
Or it's support for eugenics, which goes right back to Margaret Sanger herself, I guess: poor and/or foreign people who have had at least one kid already, don't want them spawning more.
Guttmacher Institute infographic on abortion in the USA as of 2014:
- Fifty-nine percent of abortions in 2014 were obtained by patients who had had at least one birth.
- Some 75% of abortion patients in 2014 were poor (having an income below the federal poverty level of $15,730 for a family of two in 2014) or low-income (having an income of 100–199% of the federal poverty level).
- In 2014, 16% of patients who obtained abortions in the United States were born outside the United States, a proportion comparable to their representation in the U.S. population (17% of women aged 15–44).
- In 2014, 51% of abortion patients were using a contraceptive method in the month they became pregnant, most commonly condoms (24%) or a short-acting hormonal method (13%).
Oh, no, to be clear, the end goal here is that I personally am not just allowed but encouraged to devour the beating hearts of as many healthy newborns as possible, entirely for my personal amusement; I can't imagine why you think I'd settle for anything less.
(7) Racism (but of course! and if the ACLU say it, it must be so!) See, I just like owning slaves and banning abortion cuts down on the numbers of slaves available for me to own
"The right to life of a embryo compared to the right to freedom, bodily autonomy, health, financial stability of an adult woman"
And here is where the whole fucking abortion argument greased the slope with butter, poured oil down as well, polished the bottom of the tea-tray to a mirror-gloss shine, then flung themselves down that hill with gay abandon and a merry cry of "wheeee!!!!"
The first argument for abortion was "nobody *wants* to kill babies but the mother is going to die! the child cannot be delivered alive! why take two lives when you can save one, albeit at the expense of another?"
Abortion was going to be legal only for very, very severe and very, very rare cases.
And now it's "financial stability". Which means that, to turn the reproaches I have seen levied against pro-life people back on the pro-abortion lot, you are perfectly happy for the woman to continue living in such a state of financial precariousness that she has to kill her own child to survive, you'll put the money towards funding an abortion clinic but after that, Bessie, you're on your own!
I note that there is a lot of pro-life financial support for adoption, at a minimum, which removes the additional financial hardship that the child represents to the poor, new mother. They also tend to support fairly draconian child support laws, requiring father-support for the mother and child if she keeps it.
The argument that pro-life people don't care about the wellbeing of children/mothers post-birth is mostly a baseless attack as far as I can tell.
Are you familiar with the "violinist argument" from Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"?
tl;dr: it's simply irrelevant how much "personhood" a fetus has; no one has the right to someone else's body. Even dead people can't have their organs harvested if they haven't legally agreed.
I'm going to paste this in from Wikipedia, because I think it's explained pretty clearly there. Here's both the thought experiment and a couple paragraphs of explanation:
.....
"You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you."
Thomson argues that one can now permissibly unplug themself from the violinist even though this will cause his death: this is due to limits on the right to life, which does not include the right to use another person's body, and so by unplugging the violinist, one does not violate his right to life but merely deprives him of something—the use of someone else's body—to which he has no right. "[I]f you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due."
For the same reason, Thomson says, abortion does not violate the fetus's legitimate right to life, but merely deprives the fetus of something—the non-consensual use of the pregnant woman's body and life-supporting functions—to which it has no right. Thus, by choosing to terminate her pregnancy, Thomson concludes that a pregnant woman does not normally violate the fetus's right to life, but merely withdraws its use of her own body, which usually causes the fetus to die.
.....
Thomson has a number of other thought experiments that illustrate various other aspects of this issue, all of which are really interesting and which I encourage you to check out. I find them presented in a logical way that avoids a lot of the emotionally charged debates that abortion can bring up.
If that argument had serious moral force a military draft would be ethically unthinkable. How dare you (the state) conscript my body to go to some strange foreign place, eat what you tell me to eat, labor as you command me to labor, possibly commit terrible crimes that will weigh on my conscience (shooting at people), and run the very real risk of being killed myself? The mere fact that the existence of the nation is at stake should have no bearing on the matter, nobody has the right to another's life and labor.
Interesting! Let's take a smaller-scale case, then: you and two friends are walking across a dam in a terrible rainstorm when you come across two policeman desperately trying to save a mother holding her infant who have fallen into the current. The one policeman has her hand but it is only a matter of seconds before he loses his grip and the woman and child die.
The other policeman orders you and your two friends to form a human chain to save the two. There is some risk you would be swept into the torrent yourself, but let us assume the risk is small (e.g. equal to the risk of a woman dying in childbirth, currently 0.017% in the US), the mother and child will otherwise surely die, and the policement is implying that he will use force to get you to comply.
Is the policeman's order unethical? Is it ethical for you to refuse to comply? Do you need a good reason not to help (you're unusually clumsy so the risk of your own death is unusually high), or is it enough to say nobody has the right to demand your labor for any reason whatsoever?
(As far as I know, it would be legal in all US jurisdictions for a policeman to order you to assist in an emergency, to protect life.)
You've constructed an example where simple deontological reasoning becomes confusing. Simularly to whether is it ethical to shoot to death a tresspasser on your territory.
Military draft is ethically unthinkable, and "the nation" is a useless construct.
Even people who fight to defend their homeland, like the Ukrainians right now, fight against an oppressor who threatens their families and hometowns. Nobody but the worst fools dies for the flag.
Well, fair enough, but I assume you will not be surprised when the nation you decline to defend in turn declines to extend its aegis over you. You will not be surprised when it does not lift a finger to defend you against theft or fraud, does not avenge your death by murder, and does not tax others (by force) to pay for your education, healthcare, or retirement. Rugged individualism all around!
My nation-state is terrible at #1, passable at #2. #3 would count in its favor if not for the fact that I already paid way more into its coffers than I received over my lifetime.
Then again, I live in a postcommunist country so I drank distrust towards the government with my mother's milk. YMMV.
If it was just opposition to oppression then any democracy that invaded a dictatorship would see the opposition fade away, but that doesn’t happen. People do fight for flags. For sovereignty. For all kinds of reasons.
I feel like this thread about the draft is getting a bit carried away.
I'd like to stipulate, for starters, that military drafts were considered okay by remarkable percentages of the population of the US as recently as Vietnam. If there weren't, then the draft would've been abolished as fast as the paperwork could have been written up. Point being, as someone who opposes a draft today, I can easily still recognize there was a case for it that was strong enough to convince millions of people. I can say that even before I go through the trouble of trying to construct a steelman for it.
That said, the steelman I made for this (which I won't bother enumerating here, as it's beside my point) was a bit different from the one you made here. I certainly agree that if you're not willing to defend your country, your country ought not be obligated to defend you. But I still dislike how that bargain is struck without people's consent. We're all sort of born into it, you know? The fact that I happen to really, really like that deal doesn't entitle me to project it onto everyone else.
Some people have legitimate concerns over how defense is implemented. Or illegitimate, maybe, but it's still their call to make for themselves. It'd be better, ideally speaking, if we each got to individually affirm or reject it when we come of age, and if we reject, okay, time to see about packing up and moving to some Coventry where all the misfits congregate.
In the end, I also feel like opposing the draft is easy, because it's moot. In the US, we get enough volunteers. And it's clear from incentives alone that they'll fight much more effectively than draftees anyway, so it's easy to consider the matter settled.
Nations in general strike the libertarian in me as a fraught concept, while also striking the pragmatist in me as still superior to the radical revolution that would surely occur if we went to luxury gay space anarchy.
Bringing it back to the violinist: the whole analogy suffers, because we'll never be hooked up to the violinist the same way he's hooked up to us. A mother will never be a fetus again. She could always renege. She's the prisoner who gets to know that the other one kept silent, so now she can defect and get the best payout. This isn't to say moms are all payout-maximizing scum or anything, but rather to say that we should know this isn't an argument we can make work using basic game theory.
I find the violinist to be a terribile argument. Of course i am responsible of murder if i detach myself from the violinist. Someone else right to life justify a temporary violation of my body autonomy.
And I speak as someone who is 100% in favour of abortion in all scenarios.
On the one hand, your counterexample is far stronger than the violinist thought experiment in which is postulated that is just a temporary interruption of body autonomy, with no permanent consequences.
On the other, refusing to donate a kidney when you are the only compatibile donor seems like a pretty straightforward example of something immoral (that you are nonetheless allowed to do) so plese don't defend abortion comparing it to that because it's a very very very bad defense.
I think you're getting confused by "permanent" and "temporary".
A "temporary" stint of being chained to a violinist by kidney cables for 9 months is a "permanent" reduction in your QOL. It permanently takes 9 months of healthy time you had to live and pursue the good life. You do not get them back. You could in theory be compensated sufficiently to make up the difference - but then this is a matter of trade, not morality. Morally there's no meaningful difference between losing a kidney and losing 9 months kidney time, it's just a matter of different costs. Personally I'd rather lose the kidney.
I give you my personal guarantee that there is a person waiting, right now, for a kidney, with whom you are compatible, and for whom there will likely be no other donor. This person will suffer and, in all likelihood, eventually die. If you send an email to this organization, they will match you with a recipient, and you can then give them your kidney.
Not to be too snarky about it (though perhaps it's a bit late for that) - but I'm not looking to defend abortion via this route so much as point out the absurdity of the principle upon which your counterargument is based. If you truly believe what you're saying, then by all means, call these folks up, and I will gladly concede that you are at least a person of principle.
Do you also think that the nurse/respiratory therapist who unplugs the life support machine on a person whose life depends on it is guilty of murder?
Current norms are for patient wishes to be respected; if they're not interested in life-saving care, we don't give it to them. If they're only interested in X amount, and they now need X+Y, we allow them to request X be removed as well so that they die more quickly. If they're incompetent (coma, etc.), the wishes of the next of kin are typically respected as well.
Does the RT who removes the life-saving care murder them?
Really? So if a mom at 38 weeks gestation want to abort because she wants to travel Europe next year and her baby gets in the way of her travel you're ok with her decision to abort? If you truly believe that, we operate under an extremely different set of morals. And that's fine, it's your opinion, but honestly just a wild statement in my mind.
The fetus has the right to the mother's body because it was, in most cases, consensually given.
If you take the risk of creating a life that's bound to you, even if you took non-perfect precautions to prevent its creation, you're responsible for that life.
This stretches the definition of "consent" quite a lot. By the same logic, people give consent to be a victim of crimes if they go into shady alleys. Or, considering the non-perfect precautions, even if they just exist.
Since we insist on antromorphizing the fetus, would you say the fetus has more responsibility over the situation, then? Because we really like assigning responsibility to people, and there aren't many around to choose from.
If you go into a shady alley then get mugged, we blame the mugger since that creates better incentives for society (but you're still kind of stupid for going there). If you go hiking on a dangerous mountain trail during the winter, fall off and die, pretty much everyone agrees that's on you.
I didn't use the concepts of blame, guilt or victimhood. And neither I require to antropomorphize the fetus.
The only thing I claimed is that you can't coherently stretch the definition of consent this way, otherwise you have to claim that everyone consent to literally everything.
I think the best analogy is sports. Fights in hockey aren't assault, aren't illegal, since by playing you accept the risk. I think it's hard-nosed but clearly true to say that by voluntarily participating in sex, you accept the risk of pregnancy, at least to the point where you don't have a right to kill someone to get out of a pregnancy. If that holds, then the violinist example doesn't apply except in cases of rape.
I have a hard time seeing that as more than a game of semantics. To consent to a potential consequence of your actions sounds like the very same thing as accepting the risk of a potential consequence of your actions to me.
Hockey is great fun, but getting my teeth knocked out does derail my plans to have a steak dinner after the game. In deciding to play hockey anyway, with a full understanding of what might happen if I do, I have accepted the risk, and my acceptance of the risk constitutes consent.
I agree with Fishbreath that this seems like a semantic trick.
Say a gambler bets $10,000 to on a 100-to-1 favorite who ends up losing. If the gambler claims that she didn't consent to losing her $10,000, is that true in a meaningful sense? Does it say anything at all about whether we should hold her responsible for her debt?
If EAs really believe the violinist argument, then they should scrap Peter Singer's drowning child argument and spend all their money on paying rents in the Bay Area rather than buying mosquito nets.
Let that child drown, it's not *your* child and nobody has the right to the use of your body to swim out and pull them out of the water.
Most consequentialists don’t believe in rights. The violinist argument is meant to convince people who do believe in rights that the right to use your own body as you see fit can give you the right to unhook from someone even if they depend on your for their life.
For consequentialists, the questions around abortion are going to end up turning on whether the prospective mother reasonably expects the overall quantity of good in the world will be greater if she terminates this pregnancy or if she goes forward with it. And from the state’s perspective, the question is whether punishing people who make the wrong choice in these scenarios will overall make the world a better or worse place. (I really don’t know how to think about the first question, but on the second question, many people give the harm reduction argument that is also given for legalizing drugs, that even if you ban it, many people will still do it, but in much worse ways)
This argument seems very effective in cases of rape, but it has a gaping hole in it where consensual sex is concerned.
Once the sex involved is consensual, it's not "you have been kidnapped and hooked up to a famous violinist against your will. Is it moral to disconnect him?"
It's "you bought a ticket in a pleasure lottery where there is a 99% chance you will receive a bunch of fun gooey endorphins, and a small % chance (which you can shrink with contraception), that you will end up hooked to an ailing violinist to provide him your kidneys for 9 months. Your number came up and now you are hooked to the violinist. Is it moral to disconnect him?"
The second is, at the very least, a much more complex question than the first. So while this is an effective argument, its really only against the most extreme, "and no exceptions" breeds of pro-life positions.
I’m not pro-life so I can’t really speak to the pro-life position if artificial wombs appeared but I think everybody would concede they’d complicate the abortion debate further.
I have trouble seeing how that system would work though. Who parents a kid born in an artificial womb when both mom and dad don’t want it? Return of state orphanages? And who pays for the womb in question? Government? Do Mom and Dad *both* make child support payments to the state?
I guess you can think up a system but it feels extremely speculative and unlikely.
The precedent has already been set (in some jurisdictions) that it is "the best interest of the child" that the parents pay for its upbringing, with parentage being defined as who's name appears on the birth certificate. And since it's already been established that once the father has been so identified that he should pay (regardless of whether or not they are the biological father of the child) it seems that he at least would be paying for an artificially gestated citizen's upbringing. Whether "the best interests of the child" override the equity interest in the mother not paying has not yet been established.
I think the "who pays" issue complicates the "artificial womb" scenario. In maybe interesting ways, depending on your disposition.
To try to simplify it: suppose artificial wombs exist, and are about as easy and safe and inexpensive to use as, say, a free phone. In that case, choosing an abortion over a womb would be a bit like walking by a wide river with a drowning child in the middle, and choosing to pay a sharpshooter to end the child's life humanely, instead of using the phone to summon a (let's pretend further) free dronecopter to whiz over and rescue the child. No one sensible would support shooting the kid, no matter how honorably the shooter goes about his duty. In fact, if anyone were in the vicinity, they'd probably offer to call the copter themselves. Such wombs would probably be considered a boon to humanity.
Auto-wombs are more likely to be at least somewhat expensive, however. So the hypothetical is more like paying a sharpshooter $750-1500 (brief search gave me this range for an abortion), or buying a dronecopter for, let's say, $10000. We're now asking more of our passerby. Consequently, I think we could understand not wanting to oblige a bystander to a potentially unaffordable cost. It might still be possible to justify a general tax to pay for auto-wombs (and wrangle over moral hazard, etc.).
Going a step further: auto-wombs are probably also likely to be non-trivially invasive. After all, we still have to get the fetus out of the mother, and there could be complications. Even if a state tax paid for all of it, we're still asking someone to take a (hopefully tiny) risk of some nasty damage like paralysis or even bleeding out.
I think that non-zero health risk to the mother is going to be the main pushback to a hypothetical auto-womb, to sketch it broadly.
Paying for adoption afterward is easier health-wise, harder money-wise. OTOH, I suspect it'll be as moot as adoption is today. There seem to be many more people wishing to adopt than there are children available to be adopted. (I was surprised to learn this a few years ago, but it nevertheless appears to be the case, though I found some of the underlying reasons depressing.)
People in the "pro choice" camp vary in their opinion on abortion; on one end "it's no big deal", on the other end "it's a bad thing, but anti-abortion legislation leads to even worse outcomes, therefore...". You might find it easier to understand the latter.
In countries where abortion is illegal, sometimes the law says "unless mother's life is in danger", which seems reasonable in theory... but in practice the doctors protect themselves from legal consequences by waiting even in clearly hopeless cases until the mother is almost dying, with lots of irreversible damage already happening. If you are aware of this, then it seems like the only way to protect women from this is to make abortion legal for *arbitrary* reason, then the doctors do not have to protect themselves legally by putting women's lives in danger.
By the way, many people are probably not aware of this, but many (most? not sure) pregnancies end up with *spontaneous* abortion. Which has some interesting theological consequences... like, if you happen to believe that human soul is created at the moment the egg and the sperm join, then, matematically speaking, the number of human souls in limbo (if that is where unborn children go) will *exceed* the number of human souls in heaven and hell combined. (And if you don't believe in limbo, then, well, God is the one who kills most unborn babies and puts them in hell, halleluyah.)
Anyway, if you see that a human foetus already has like 50% chance to be killed by nature, this makes abortion somewhat less horrible; it just kinda slighly increases the already existing chance.
(For the record, I am not trying to convince you or anything like that, just trying to provide information you seem to be interested in.)
Never have I heard/read a pro-life argument which fully takes into account the frequency of spontaneous miscarriage, and the implications this has for what we might infer about God's plan for humanity.
I would be interested to read such an argument, if anyone has a link.
Because think about the terms there: "spontaneous miscarriage" (as an aside, I have read some shitty 'arguments' which weren't really arguments because they were more trying to be 'checkmate atheists!' type gotchas, e.g. "why don't pro-lifers hold funerals for sanitary pads since periods are the same thing as a dead baby, huh?" because of course an unfertilised ovum is the same thing as a blastocyst we all agree that, yeah? It's the same general tenor as Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred" which is not the view held at all, but it serves the purpose of mockery).
Okay, getting back to it: "spontaneous" is not the same thing as "induced abortion" but it's a way of displacing guilt, because there does seem to be some residual guilt floating around. If many pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage, then one teensy-tiny medically induced miscarriage is just exactly the same thing, right? If Sue has a miscarriage where she didn't even know she was pregnant yet, then Annie going to the doctor to get a prescription for mifepristone/misoprostol for that pregnancy which made her go "oh shit" when the red line showed up on the home test kit, then it's the same thing exactly, right? After all, in both cases the women are just undergoing "Remaining products of conception will be expelled during subsequent vaginal bleeding".
Sue didn't cause it, or if she did, not knowingly. So nobody can legitimately blame her and it would be cruel and heartless to do so. It is also cruel and heartless to blame Annie, who just had her pregnancy stop with nobody intervening (going to the doctor and taking tablets? what has that to do with it?)
The point about miscarriages is to try to get people to notice their own inconsistency with how the value fetuses. The argument is NOT "it happens all the time, what's one more".
The argument is: "I notice that when people talk about miscarriages, they are often pretty sad but not unreasonably so, and usually mostly in terms of the loss of something _they_ wanted. Rarely do they lament the fetuses own suffering. I also notice that when talking about induced miscarriage, many of these same people will treat it as "gut wrenchingly morally abhorrent". These things are inconsistent. If they really believe an induced miscarriage is that bad, why do they seem relatively okay with an accidental one? Why isn't it just as important a policy decision to save all the MANY more spontaneous miscarriage as it is to ban the elective ones? The discrepancy here may indicate they're being irrational about the badness of an elective miscarriage and the comparative worth of a fetus."
"We can't always prevent this bad thing from happening, so we don't feel to bad about it" and "Intentionally causing this bad thing is reprehensible" are not at all contradictory.
Compare your response to hearing your friend fell and broke their leg, and hearing someone pushed them down and broke their leg. Bad things happening naturally and bad things being done intentionally have wildly different valences. (Also compare hearing that your friend fell because of an extremely slippery floor that should have been marked.)
Edit: to more directly address your point, different responses do not imply a different value attached to the negative event, but to the cause thereof
The cause being had can add to something's badness. Bad intentions can make a good act reprehensible. But it gets added to the badness of the actual thing. The badness of the actual thing in neutral circumstances is the badness you place on the thing itself. Punishment for the way it happened is unrelated.
I VERY much do not believe any pro-lifers would say "baby death isn't a big deal, but if you do it intentionally that's when it's a problem".
They definitely purport to believe it's always a big fucking deal. It's a child's life. We don't just go "meh" in other cases when children actually die. Have you seen how we respond to child cancer?
No if they admit that miscarriage is genuinely not worth being too upset over then they've admitted they're wrong.
There's inconsistency all over the place. We're not going to change any minds on here either pro- or anti-, since people have positions, have reasons for those positions, and have been at this rodeo before when it comes to arguing those positions.
I'll just finish with "Hm, I notice when people talk about 90 year old Grand-Aunt Hannah dying, they are pretty sad but not unreasonably so, and usually mostly in terms of their own loss. But you talk about bashing Grand-Aunt Hannah's skull in with a lump hammer, and suddenly it's 'gut wrenchingly morally abhorrent'. If they really believe induced death is that bad, why do they seem relatively okay with a natural one?" is an equally tenable argument.
If you don't find it convicing, well, neither do I find the "spontaneous miscarriages happen all the time, what's the big deal with deliberately inducing one?" convincing.
I mean, when I was a fundamentalist Christian my position was:
A) The Bible is actually quite vague about when exactly independent life begins, so we have to determine that outside of scripture
B) Any time after the child is viable outside the womb is CLEARLY too late by my moral intuitions; if it could be an independent life OUTSIDE the womb, we should consider it one inside too.
C) That gets you to 25 weeks with current tech. Practically all 24 week babies die due to their intestines rotting in their bodies post-delivery. That's probably a solvable problem, we just haven't yet. Maybe discount to 20 weeks, just to account for forseeable medical fixes like that.
That gives me an upper bound when I'm pretty darn confident the baby is an independent life and should be treated like it. But maybe that happens earlier? Is there any point at which I can be SURE the baby is not yet an independent life?
Well... my perfect Creator God seems to not mind wasting 2/3rds of fertilized eggs very early in pregnancy due to implantation issues. If you really believe God is good, as I did then, that's sound evidence that they are NOT independent lives at that point, or he would have set up a system that preserved them. (Sure, a lot of later miscarriages can be the responsibility of the Fall; our bodies work imperfectly now. Those can just be tragedies. But the 'throw shit at the uterus and hope it sticks' phase seems to be by design.)
So I put a minimum age for independent life at 7-10 days. Based on what I believed of God, that age of baby isn't morally valuable.
All told, I was in favor of laws which permitted <10 day abortions of various sorts (IUDs, morning after, etc.), and *strongly* opposed to ones that permitted third or late second trimester abortions. Somewhat opposed to ones that permitted 10day-20 months due to prioritizing moral caution, but I recognized the moral validity of an argument to balance that differently.
Overall, I think that's a pro-life position informed by spontaneous miscarriage. My fellow fundamentalists mostly thought I was flirting with heresy and pro-choice. (But they mostly thought I was flirting with heresy all over the place; rationalist-adjacent fundamentalists don't tend to look *normal*.)
This was really interesting to read. It reminds me of another systematic thinker who took Christianity so seriously that he rejected established doctrine which didn't make sense to him: Isaac Newton. In his case, he rejected the Trinity. (Although he went further by accusing early Christians of corrupting scripture.)
If I might ask an unrelated question, how did you reconcile the New Testament portrayal of mental illness as demonic with the modern medical portrayal of mental illness as (somehow) neurological?
The new testament doesn't really claim that ALL mental illness is demonic; merely that some specific cases were. It's notable that some of the apostle Paul's writings really look like someone introspecting about their own mental health issues without blaming it on the devil. For instance: "But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind."
I never really saw a contradiction here. If I had ever met someone raving about clearly spiritual things, I'd probably have prayed for an exorcism. In the few cases I actually dealt with someone with a psychotic break, it didn't seem likely to be spiritual in nature so I dealt with it the same as I would as an atheist.
"Anyway, if you see that a human foetus already has like 50% chance to be killed by nature, this makes abortion somewhat less horrible; it just kinda slighly increases the already existing chance."
An argument that makes as much sense as "You live in New York City where you already have X chance of being murdered, so me deliberately killing you because I don't like the colour of your socks just kinda slightly increases the already existing chance".
Or "Everyone dies. 100%. So since you're gonna die anyway, me murdering you for the fifty cents in your left trouser pocket is somewhat less horrible".
I have noticed this tendency in pro-abortion arguments where there is both (a) it is not murder! you can only murder a person and a foetus is not a person! and (b) trying to make abortion equivalent to 'it just happened, nobody did anything to bring it about' so the "abortion is EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS a miscarriage" is *very* popular.
If it's not murder or killing, why be so squeamish about "I didn't do it, you didn't do it, it just happened, like leaves falling off trees in autumn and that pregnancy you didn't want just stopping".
Trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe you are not in a country where abortion legal, but I'm guessing that actually you're just being a dick.
I'm the dick that supports this movement, so call me what names you like, I don't feel insulted by having the bad opinion of a baby murderer (if we're going to be exchanging polite forms of address):
> (And if you don't believe in limbo, then, well, God is the one who kills most unborn babies and puts them in hell, halleluyah.)
Worth noting that this isn't the complete Venn diagram of common Christian beliefs. Fundamentalist Baptists mostly believe that children before the "age of accountability" (9-13 years of age; varies based on maturity of child) are "Safe", and go to heaven on death regardless of actions, etc.
I'm not debating "children can go to heaven", I'm debating the idea that "Children are incapable of being sinful until a certain arbitrary age" has Biblical support. If a child killed another child, they would have committed the sin of murder, not to mention that this comes into conflict with Protestant conceptions of Original Sin.
I mean, given the assertion from elsewhere that only those counted righteous go to heaven, and the statement in 2 Sam that a 1 week old infant went to heaven, and you have to figure there's SOME exception implied for kids. That or claim this particular infant was sufficiently precocious to call on the name of the Lord at 1 week of age.
That sort of apparent contradiction is the usual thing that prompts a wrinkle to be added to theology. No particular challenge here either; the idea is that they've inheretied the sin nature and are innately sinful (Original Sin), but are not yet sinful by meaningful CHOICE yet so grace is extended to them.
David says that he can go to the child, but the child cannot be brought back to him. David (elsewhere, through the psalms mostly) clearly believes he's going to heaven on death (and generally has a clearer revelatory understanding of the Plan of Salvation than other OT prophets.) So him saying that he can go to the child implies that he believes the child is in heaven (and while one could certainly disagree, it's widely interpreted as him being a reliable source.)
So goes the reasoning, and it's as sound as any systematic theology tends to be. I don't see a real conflict with Sola Scriptura.
Everyone taking a position on the question has picked out a position on the point at which the potentialities in the developmental process advance to become a "life" with its attendant moral valence. Some people maintain that it happens immediately at the point of conception. I find that position scarcely more sane than saying that it happens a little bit prior to conception - i.e. that the whole world should continuously be in a colossal moral panic about the millions and millions of innocent "lives" mercilessly terminated every time I ejaculate from any location other than inside the reproductive apparatus of a fertile woman (and it still happens anyway even if I do ejaculate in such a location)
Say your close friend Alice shares with you that the pregnancy test she took last Sunday came back positive, as did the next two. Alice is excited, and you quietly celebrate, although as a physician you wonder in the back of your mind if that’s not tempting fate a little.
Two months later, you go meet Alice at your usual spot and she sadly reveals that, like a frightening proportion of all pregnancies, hers came to an abrupt halt. You can tell she is disappointed, but determined to move on. She makes no mention of funeral arrangements.
Is Alice acting appropriately? Which (if any) of the following two choices better captures your response and your view?
A] Alice lost a child, and it is unconscionable to move on without so much as a headstone or public mourning. This is as if she’d discarded her dead baby into a trash can! You are shocked to your core at your friend’s monstrosity.
B] Alice wanted a child, and it didn’t work out. You sympathize, talk it out, and reassure her that those things happen. It’ll work out better next time.
How would your answer change if Alice’s pregnancy was 5 months along? 7? 9? Like most people, I presume you would find positions closer to A increasingly understandable as the fœtus develops. If that’s the case, what causes the transition? What property of the fœtus is gained over time?
In developed countries, this intuition seems correctly reflected by our laws, which formalize moral differences between the start and end of the pregnancy by fuzzily drawing a line somewhere in between. Where to draw the line legally is an understandable question to raise, but the notion that a line would be drawn somewhere between A and B seems perfectly in line with our (tragically undervalued, imo) folk wisdom and moral intuition.
I learn someone I met once a few weeks ago has died. It's a reminder of how death could happen at any time, and it disturbs me, but not deeply; I wasn't all that familiar with them.
Someone I have worked with for 3 months and went to a couple of social events with dies. I'm far more bothered, because of my familiarity with the person; I may even be moved to tears when I hear.
A lifelong friend dies. I take time off of work to attend the funeral, contribute to a fund to support his bereaved spouse, and for a while, I visit his grave once a year. I am deeply impacted.
Clearly, in all of these scenarios, the thing happening is exactly as bad: someone dying. What's changing is my level of familiarity and attachment to that person. Similarly, Alice naturally becomes more familiar and attached to her child as they develop, and the farther along the pregnancy is when the miscarriage occurs, the more distraught she will naturally be. That's totally consistent with the miscarriage being equally bad in all those cases, just like a death as equally bad to another death regardless of how familiar or attached I might be to the decedent.
(edit to add the conclusory point:) So there's nothing monstrous about Alice not being distraught at an early miscarriage (although many people are anyway). The error in logic is thinking that because she's not distraught, the miscarriage must not be a bad thing; even if it's not as bad *for her*, it's just as bad for *the child*.
I understand your point, but I reject the premise that we mourn our children (and our community's children, and oftentimes unrelated ones too) purely as a consequence of a growing affection or familiarity. I would argue that our mourning involves elements which clearly ought apply to a fetus were we to earnestly interpret it as a child. E.g: the pain of an individual's future being taken away; the innate sorrow of losing a young community member...
None of those seem to manifest to a comparable degree in the case of an early-term miscarriage. I find that to be a strong indication that we intuitively understand the notion of developing personhood, and do not grant it to a 5-week old fetus, at least not in the way we unreservedly grant it to a child. I find it striking that this reasoning lands us pretty close to what seems to have been a reasonably prevalent norm across eras and cultures (if this is incorrect, I would welcome a correction).
I agree with much of your first paragraph, with the caveat that grief is different for different people. I have known someone who deeply grieved an early miscarriage. I can understand their reasons for doing so, even without familiarity; just as I can understand someone *not* doing so, and wouldn't try to induce them to.
So let me turn the question back on you. Do you think people who *are* profoundly affected by early miscarriages, as early as 5 weeks, are being irrational? It seems like you've painted yourself into that corner.
I'll pass no judgment of irrationality either way. I think some will grieve and some won't, and I won't blame either. And in either case, the harm to the fetus, i.e. the child, is the same either way.
I really don’t like ‘irrational’, here. How about ‘fairly unusual’, or at least ‘meaningfully towards the edge of a (presumably) normal-ish distribution?’ My point isn’t that people ought act a certain way, rather an observation that they tend to do.
To be extra clear, I am not trying to tell young mothers how they should react to the loss of either child or fetus (or, frankly, how to react in general!). I simply hope I could clarify why I think the issue of ‘personhood’ is a bit more substantial than seems acknowledged when legal restrictions on abortion come up.
Understood! They certainly don't always act that way, it may even be positively unusual to. I just suppose I don't think that's especially strong evidence on the morality (or immorality) of abortion, especially given the variance displayed.
I guess my main thrust is that I think pro-life people can consistently simultaneously maintain that (a) early miscarriages are bad, and (b) the people who go through them aren't under any obligation to feel bereaved. If we're agreed on that, then I think we're generally in accord.
The clue here is the general disparity between religious and secular outlooks.
The simple question of why life might be inherently valuable tends to reveal that it is a religious argument, i.e. the sanctity of life. This doesn't compute for the secular perspective, which sees the value of life more-so as a collective agreement. Valuing is an action. This is why living status and human DNA of a fetus is considered irrelevant. Even before personhood (i.e. birth), nervous system development and general capacity for suffering is the line at which it is no longer acceptable, for most. As I recall if you go far back enough in time, there seemed to be less of a stern view (quoting from memory) perhaps because child mortality was once very high, and suffering was greater.
There's something to be said for being cognizant that abortion is killing a living being, even if it should be up to the mother. I do find it weirdly incompatible when some people denounce animal slaughter (not just farming conditions) but have no problem with abortion.
Regarding the replies to the point of "even if the baby/fetus is human from conception onwards, lots of pregnancies fail so nbd"...this is sideways of the point. Lots of people die every year whilst swimming. It's still morally unacceptable to hold someone underwater until they drown, and we have no problem making that illegal, despite the dangers inherent in trying to save people from floods.
Almost everything is sideways to the point, which is that either the life of an embryo is valued to the extent that its termination is tantamount to murder, or it doesn't.
This doesn't work since nothing close to 50% of swimmers die by drowning.
To carry the analogy a bit closer... societies have no problem not rescuing thrill-seekers who put themselves in dangerous situations, say surfing during a tsunami. If it's not inconvenient or puts rescuers as risk, we will try send the coast guard out, but there's certainly no moral imperative to save a life when the person is at high risk of dying anyway.
The first one is the progressive acquisition of rights.
You are born with the right to own property, but not to manage it. You acquire that second right at ~18.
You are born without the right to move around and acquire it progressively from ~12 on.
Even where abortion is allowed, your right to not be poisoned by alcohol or tobacco starts at conception.
Your right to free speech is severely limited as a young child without too many people worrying about that.
So I consider that rights are not absolute things that you get at birth (or even at conception), but are acquired over time for most of them.
The second lense is that even for adults, the right to life is not absolute.
War is the killing of human beings in order to obtain:
* better economical outcomes (oil, food, water)
* liberties : right to move, free speech, democracy, etc.
In a lot of these cases, non-belligerent people are able to take the side of the agressor and agree that their cause is worth killing some people (i.e. violating their right to life)
In several States, it is acceptable to react with lethal force to a non-lethal aggression : to defend the borders of your home, to over-react to a physical aggression.
With that lense, an abortion would be a lethal self-defence against a physical aggression.
Finally, since you mentioned rape, I should note that an unwanted pregnancy satisfies the definition of rape : the penetration of someone's body by someone else. The fact that the perpetrator is a fetus and has no mens rea changes the way that we see the situation, but it doesn't change the perspective of the victim.
War for "better economic outcomes" is internationally condemned.
'Unwanted pregnancy = rape" is illogical. That's like saying a guest oversleeping is a home invader. Also to say that the woman who is considering killing her child is the real victim is an act of denying agency to women that I expect from the likes of the Taliban.
> "War for "better economic outcomes" is internationally condemned."
I don't expect this to hold true in all cases. Consider a popular revolt against a country because the taxes are too high, or equivalently because the government has made a practice of confiscating property if you get too successful and can spare it.
I'd expect international opinion to largely favor the popular revolt.
"Finally, since you mentioned rape, I should note that an unwanted pregnancy satisfies the definition of rape : the penetration of someone's body by someone else. The fact that the perpetrator is a fetus and has no mens rea changes the way that we see the situation, but it doesn't change the perspective of the victim."
This is absolutely absurd, not least because that's literally not even close to the definition of rape.
Like, seriously, just say that fetuses aren't people and be done with it. Claiming fetuses are raping their mothers is goofy nonsense that makes you sound insane.
One way to argue the dependency problem is to say that the dependency is different, in a way that makes one much more physically possible. After all, we don't insist on right-to-life to justify pouring every last penny of a family's wealth into an elderly member with stage 4 cancer. In the case of the other end of life, a newborn's dependence is much easier to duplicate in another parent than the dependence of an unborn. I don't remember hearing anyone make that argument, but I think it's easily implied, so while I never heard anyone pro-choice bring it up, I've never heard a pro-life mention it either.
Once that's established, the next idea is that personhood isn't sufficient to merit state protection against termination. Someone must also be reasonably independent of others. For example, if you were in a helicopter and there was a cord tying you to someone dangling out the side, such that the only way for you to save yourself from being dragged out was to cut it, that's a terrible situation, but few people would blame you for doing it, even though you're consigned the other person to near certain death.
This is essentially the violinist analogy, of course. There's a pro-life response to both in turn - it's one thing to suddenly find yourself sustaining another human being while going about everyday business (kidnapped and raped), and another to engage in business that makes this relation more likely (having promiscuous sex). There might be responses in turn, but FWIW, this is about as far as I see the conversation go.
A response I also commonly see is that that unborn simply isn't a person. I still have problems running that reasoning down. Best I can tell, it's an appeal to topology, and shouldn't have any more grab than an argument to an atheist about the soul entering the body at conception.
In general, it's usually frustrating for the simple reason that Americans largely have picked a side by now, and no counterargument is to be brooked. All the first-line points are all that are made, no caveats are admissible; if they are, they're a signal that the maker is from the other side, and every effort should now be focused on a shoutdown if it's an online forum or otherwise disengaging oneself from unpleasantry. (I saw this just moments ago in one of the subthreads to this one.)
Or, it's just exhausting to give it due diligence. I can sympathize: I tried my best to read every subthread here before posting this. I have more views on all the little side paths the discussion took here, but I'm not sure I could even fit them in the forum's length limit.
Total aside but on the note about it being frustrating because "Americans largely have picked a side by now"... think about how often side-picking occurs absent any consideration of the issue at all because of coalition politics.
You can very reliably predict someone's stance on environmental policy based on their stance on gay marriage, despite those issues being totally unrelated, because we come into the coalition based on the issues we care about but then end up defaulting to our tribe's stance on everything else.
In the same vein, how many pro-lifers are actually pro-life because they've thought the issue through, rather because they are pro-gun, and the gun policy they like happens to sit with the pro-life coalition? And how many pro-choice people are pro-choice because they've thought that issue through, and how many are pro-choice because they want stronger climate policy?
It's gotta be frustrating for people with strong beliefs on the issue to step back and think about how many people are (a) on the other side, and (b) totally unpersuadable not because of the arguments, but because of their attachment to party.
I'm with you (and Edward Scizorhands) there. Although I do find I can break away from the coalition tendency, if I have the time to put in the extra effort and try to discuss. If all I have is an "A or B" poll, then I pretty much assume I'm in the coalition trap, and I try not to sweat it too much.
But if I'm lucky enough to engage and find someone willing to do likewise, I very often find that nearly everyone has a few edge cases on whichever issue they're being tribal about. To put it another way: as long as we have two package deals on the menu, we can naturally expect results to reflect exactly that. If we unpackage them into a la carte, I think we'll find things get much more varied, and almost no one picks the original packages. There's an implication here about how to implement public policy...
One of the good things about sites like ACX, DSL, LW, etc. is that they encourage this type of dialogue, and the richer details become more apparent.
Basically, the strongest version of a pro-abortion argument is some combination of this:
1) There's no such thing as objective rights. There's nothing in the universe or in physics that is "a right to life". Rights are things that humans invented, and that we mostly agree to, because they make life better.
If someone's primary argument boils down to "actually that right is objective", typically for religious reasons, it's entirely unfalsifiable because they are accepting by axiom something that isn't objectively real.
You might, MIGHT, be able to argue some of them out of it by quibling about exactly what the right to life applies to and going into deep pseudo scientific rabbit holes trying to figure out when a fetus is objectively a person. But it's not all that likely and this tactic accepts as given that some right answer exists at all.
2) Given that rights are inventions we agree to, this brings a lot of things into consistency. As a society we are and should be against killing living organisms, but we make exceptions when the tradeoffs are favorable. We go to war, we allow police to kill criminals and sometimes kill them with courts, we allow people to kill in self defense, we kill enormous numbers of very non-sentient animals to eat them, we kill lots of much-more-sentient animals because we want the land or resources, etc. We accept that there are times it's okay to kill living things. Exactly when those times are is determined by the circumstances of the case. Typically, it's a tradeoff of two things that we consider good. We don't like war, but defending our citizens is more important. We like when everyone can get a chance to survive and learn from their mistakes, but we value the life of the victim and justice more, and so allow self defense. Society would be more just if we didn't kill animals for food, but we get enough value from their consumption, and so little is lost by eating them, that it's worth it, until a better alternative is available.
3) We make rules and rights because humans are pretty bad at accurately and fairly assessing cost benefit analysis in controversial cases. "Thou shalt not kill" should be viewed as an adaptive strategy to shackle your temptation to be very convincing and persuade the tribe to murder your rival just because you don't like him. These deontological strategies often work really well, and we shouldn't do away with them. But they shouldn't be confused with moral certainty - indeed they have their own exceptions often built in (like self defense).
4) Therefore, the position of pro-abortion is the claim that the tradeoff of all the things society and individuals care about involved in abortion makes it better to abort (in at least some cases). If someone's response is "killing for a good tradeoff is morally abhorrent" you've missed the point. You already agree with killing for some reasons. All that's up for debate is whether the reason is good enough to break the rule. There's no objective abhorrence to it. The abhorrence is in your brain not the universe.
5) The claim that abortion is worth it I think is really really strong.
Abortion is good for the mother. Abortion is also good for the maintenance of the mothers autonomy, something we have decided we care about. Abortion is good for society. "Unwantedness" is one of the worst things for children and reliably makes unstable unhappy children who become unstable unhappy adults. Their mothers typically want to abort them for a reason. Statistically, these aborted fetuses would live less happy lives than average. If every aborted child were birthed, you'd dramatically reduce the capacity of an already struggling populace to manage their lives. The crime drop in the 90s was attributed largely due to not just the reduction of lead, but also with abortion rights in the 70s.
6) What's being lost of course is a fetus, and I think it would be bizarre to claim that this is literally value-less. But, I DO claim that is of very small value.
Fetuses are basically entirely fungible. Nothing really is lost when a specific fetus is aborted. Most pro-lifers even tacitly accept this fungibility - see all the references to "blank slates" in just this thread. What's the value of a blank slate? There's always more blank slates. The fetus may be a living organism, but it doesn't have any "personhood" at all. There's no intrinsic worth to it at all, only potential. It isn't alive enough to have its own conception of self, and therefore doesn't have anything internal for it to experience losing.
7) Don't ask "so when is it a person?" You're asking a question that has no answer. Ask "Is the tradeoff ever good, and if so, when does it stop being good?". For me personally, the tradeoff is good (because there's so little worth in the fetus) right up until it's born. I think another reasonable position would be "right up until it can survive on its own" or "20 weeks because it's a good compromise" though I don't agree with them. I think "never" and "never with exceptions for rape and health" are extremely unreasonable and irrational, and a really big mistake. But I understand why people would feel that way - we work based on rules and what feels viscerally right or wrong. But if you're someone where the wrongness of abortion just feels viscerally obvious, I'd challenge you that that is just a strongly felt emotion, and it doesn't make it true.
"There's no such thing as objective rights. There's nothing in the universe or in physics that is "a right to life". Rights are things that humans invented, and that we mostly agree to, because they make life better."
This is kind of an hilarious argument consdiering that "rights aren't real" is something that the overwhelming majority of pro-choice people don't believe in any other context. It's not simply "rights aren't real but we can decide certain things are good", no, something being a "violation" of "human rights" is seen as an inherent evil, not just a people not following an agreed upon convention.
I mean, for goodness' sake, the left are overwhelmingly the ones appealing to "rights". "Healthcare is a fundamental right", "Equality is a right", "All children have the right to an education". This is NOT the langauge of people who view rights as arbitary human constructions.
"Fetuses are basically entirely fungible. Nothing really is lost when a specific fetus is aborted. Most pro-lifers even tacitly accept this fungibility - see all the references to "blank slates" in just this thread. What's the value of a blank slate? There's always more blank slates. The fetus may be a living organism, but it doesn't have any "personhood" at all. There's no intrinsic worth to it at all, only potential. It isn't alive enough to have its own conception of self, and therefore doesn't have anything internal for it to experience losing."
Okay, I really really hope you're against laws against forced termination. If I punch a pregnant lady in the womb, by your standards I'm not doing anything different to punching a non-pregnant lady in the womb. Not, of course, that I want to punch anyone, just that in practice this committment to fetuses possessing no value is frequently discarded the instant it leads to inconvenient stituations.
Im not telling the "average pro-choice argument". I dont care that thats not the language most pro-choicers use, and I agree that a lot of progressives go too far on calling things rights (but thats actually my point, and youre misunderstanding how they understand rights. They dont actually believe that healthcare, which requires a healthcare system, is some god given right, they actually mean "this is the minimum a wealthy society such as ours should be able to provide for its citizens")
Your objection here is a really big misunderstanding of how they view rights and also totally irrelevant to the argument Im making. I dont care whether the average pro-choice person feels this way about rights. Can you contend that rights are objective, and if so, how?
For your second part:
Forced termination is obviously wrong, because its against everyone's interests. All those things that I listed as the reasons abortion is worth it get flipped on their head if the fetus is wanted. Wanted children are good, the mother wantspo it, forced termination is STILL a violation of autonomy, and it preserves the non-zero-but-low value of the fetus.
If, somehow, magically, you could punch a pregnant woman such that the fetus died but was instantly replaced by another, different, fetus, and the mother didnt notice (or feel pain), objectively, no, not much if anything is lost, and thats what I mean by fungible. Contrast this to if I kill your ten year old child and replace it with a different ten year old, like God did in the bible to Job. Not so fungible.
I feel like you really didnt engage honestly with my comment / argument at all. Maybe I miscommunicated.
"1) There's no such thing as objective rights. There's nothing in the universe or in physics that is "a right to life". Rights are things that humans invented, and that we mostly agree to, because they make life better."
And by "we" you mean "those most willing and proficient at using violence to enforce their viewpoints" correct? I mean if you're willing to admit that "rights" are a polite fiction don't turn around and pretend that another one like "consent of the governed" or "social contract" have any reality to them.
I think you're really missing the point of the argument.
I never did pretend that "consent of the governed" or social contract is any more physically real than "rights". They're all the same level and kind of real, that is, exactly as real as our social consensus enforces.
"Consent of the governed" is a sort of deontological rule that we have (attempted) to enshrine in our government as a way to shackle it's temptation to act against the interests of it's constituents. But at the same time we know full well that it WILL sometimes act without consent.
"Consent of the governed" has no objective goodness or reality. It's also a social fiction that we employ because we want good Nash equilibrium (which ARE real).
But if consent of the governed stopped being a good strategy, we should do away with it.
The point of this argument is to say that "I feel very viscerally that abortion is morally abhorrent" is not a reasoned position, and "it violates the right to life" is not a valid argument. There is no right, just agreed convention. The question is, should this convention be allowed or not, and rational arguments only please.
That's just it -- you're presupposing that a social consensus exists. And of course, being an abstract construct it cannot enforce anything on concrete human beings, who are not in fact purely reasoning entities.
Therefore you're making a category error and trying to screen it off by artificially disallowing arguments that your framework can't deal with.
Deontology may be reasoned, but the axioms that it starts from are no less arbitrary than "abortion is abhorrent." Once you start abandoning emotive expressions as irrelevant, then the only thing that is actually left is the physical world. And at that point, ultima ratio regum.
I'm not presupposing the social consensus exists. If it doesn't, there just won't be any "rights" or "consent of the governed" enforced.
And I categorically disagree that these things can't affect individual humans. That's all they do. They change the game theory, what equilibria we end up in. There's no category error at all, in fact the whole point is to hug as close to reality as possible,and reality includes human beings and our politics. An argument like "abortion is inherently morally wrong because it violates the objective right to life" would be a category error.
My claim is "rights are things we agree to and which we already allow exceptions for. Abortion should be an exception because it's very little is lost and much is protected."
You might disagree with me that little is lost or that anything worthwhile is saved. That's fine. We can argue about the tradeoffs.
But if you're response is "no, it's just wrong by axiom" or "it's just wrong by religion", that's just _not_ an argument.
You might be able to win by successfully imposing your will. "I just really feel it's wrong" is an argument but a weak one, and emotional responses are valid and important. We often aren't great reasoner's and emotions make good heuristics. But it's still only a weak argument, and not a good or convincing reason to prevent abortions, especially when they're so prosocial.
I have a metaphysical problem with your use of "we," because "we" do not exist as a coherent entity. Ditto society (and therefore pro-social). At most "we" means "myself and people who agree with me" which is of course just popularity which is just a padded weapon. Likewise "prosocial " has a terrible track record as we understand eugenics or political repression today, though it seemed perfectly clear to the ruling "we" of their day. Heck, even today, we see calls for punishing antivaxxers/antimaskers in order to serve the greater good of Society.
I stopped my subscription after the first year because I figured I had done enough Scott supporting. And I needed to conserve money… Now I learn he wrote a post about onion knights?
I think you're probably still allowed to make your subscription fit your circumstances. You could make a compromise with a partial subscription, still support Scott, salve your conscience, conserve some money and also get to read about onion knights. What's not to like!
Soon, I'll be able to go on Erasmus (six month university exchange program). Should I account for the quality/ranking of the university I'm going to, or just pick the nicest country and not worry about quality at all?
I know the exchange program won't be on my resume, so there's little to no potential signaling value to employers.
Why won't the exchange program be on your resume? Let me put this another way: I would strongly advise anyone to include this kind of thing on their resume / publicize it the same way they would publicize having a degree.
At least I can personally attest that I was offered a position in part due to having mentioned this kind of thing. The most relevant part were the connections I made and the people I worked with, not the mere fact that I did an Erasmus, though.
I guess my advice would be: don't pick a country where you think you'll be depressed (eg, I shouldn't pick somewhere where it's dark all the time). After that, choose the best place for networking purposes. That is not necessarily the best university, but the place where the best people of your area are. You can fuck around and enjoy your youth basically anywhere as long as you aren't sick.
Really? I figured that since it's just six months of the same thing you'd be studying at your own university, putting it on your resume is a waste of space.
Thanks for the advice! I guess I will take that into account, then.
Early in your career, just about everyone has an almost identical resume. Anything you can add to make yourself stand out from the crowd is beneficial. You never know when the person reading your resume will turn out to have also studied abroad in the same country, and extend you an interview solely on the basis of wanting to reminisce with someone about it. Literally anything that turns you from "graduate #3096, degree specialty B-4" into "hey, this guy looks kind of interesting" should be taken advantage of.
Ever since the current hostilities with Ukraine began, I saw people wonder why Russians call (some) Ukrainians "Nazi". Some think this is just another case of calling everybody Hitler, and point out how Ukrainian president is of a Jewish descent, and therefore this is a very stupid propaganda.
I think that, while, this IS propaganda, it's not as stupid as it seems to a Western reader, all due to one major misalignment of definitions.
If we look deep enough, almost nobody in the modern world is "Nazi", because you have to subscribe to a specific set of beliefs to be completely aligned with the "original" Nazi party. Most people called Nazi today would probably be kicked out of the Nazi party, or even sent to a camp. But nobody cares about that, because the word came to mean something different since 40's.
In the West, "Nazi" became a word for "someone (usually white) who hates Jews (and maybe also Black People, but if you only hate Blacks and not Jews, then you're probably not a Nazi, but just a garden-variety racist)". This is very understandable - Nazi hated Jews and did a lot to wipe the race from the face of the Earth. But for the West, the definitions stops there.
For Russians, though, things are a bit different. While Hitler harboured little love for Europeans (if I remember correctly, he did think English were Aryan, to some degree?), he had none at all for Slavs. Specifically, his plan was to cull the population of conquered Eastern lands to almost nothing and settle the emptied land with Germans. While his program for western Europe included rounded up Jews and anyone who criticized his policies, his program for USSR was "outright slaughter whole villages just because". For this reason, in Russia the term "Nazi" means "someone who hates Jews and/OR Russians".
This is why the term does not raise any eyebrows in Russia when applied to Ukrainian nationalists. To the western eye, they might seem like common nationalist group who just wants their country to be independent, but in Russia, their hatred of all things Russian and their veneration of World War-era Nazi collaborators squarely places them into "Nazi" category, even though they might not have a single bad thing to say about Jews.
I don't expect or intend this explanation to change anyone's mind about Russia or Ukraine - just to clear up just one specific thing that puzzled some people.
There are Ukrainian Nazis, and Russian Nazis. I don't think it has much to do with the historical Nazi view of Slavs. I think Nazism has a lot of hooks for the human desire for superiority and hatred and strong graphic design.
Rebels fighting for Ukrainian independence (UPA) openly collaborated with Nazis during WW2, wishing to exploit the sudden power vacuum. The Nazis alternated between being somewhat horrified by their atrocities, and egging them on to continue while quietly preparing to genocide whoever is left standing.
The conclusion is still very strained, of course, and the contemporary publicized far right militias like Azov are not representative of the population's beliefs.
It seems to me that Ukrainian nationalists currently (since early 10s, even before 2014) enjoy the status of "intolerant minority" which, while far from a majority, is able to partially set the agenda just because population in general is willing to tolerate them, and because their goals partially agree with people in power. So while they indeed do not represent the whole of Ukrainian people, they have a say in governing them. I'm not sure, but I think they might have sabotaged Zelensky's initial attempts to resolve Donbas situation peacefully, for example - every time there was a rumour he might "cave in" to Putin's demands, they staged another rally in the center of the capital, threatening him with another overthrow.
Russian militant nationalists, on the other hand, enjoyed a brief flourishing under Putin in early 00's, but were quite brutally put down later and been mostly in opposition government at least since taking part in anti-Putin protests in 2012.
"Rebels fighting for Ukrainian independence (UPA) openly collaborated with Nazis during WW2, wishing to exploit the sudden power vacuum. "
I like how no Russian who say this stuff are willing to mention that the main Nazi collaborator was Stalin himself, who was willing to use the nazis reign of terror in europe to steal control of Polish territory for Russia.
I actually wanted to mention this in my comment! But I figured it's not a fair comparison, as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a tactical alliance forged by politicians, while the UPA was a, let's say, grassroots initiative...
(and I'm Polish, not Russian fwiw, not that you should believe randoms on the internet)
You can twist this story any number of ways. EVERYONE was hoping to use Hitler against everyone else, and everybody miscalculated.
This thread is very biased and not very good at fact-checking. According to all sources I could quickly find on the net, Guderian being a student at Kazan is a myth (at a glance, he's a bit too old to be studying with Soviets in 1932). He did inspect the tank school, though - which fits with his then-current job.
Also, no matter what geopolitical games Hitler and Stalin played before the war, German forces' brutality in conquered regions provided enough memories to form a tight association between Nazi and hatred for Slavs in Eastern Europe.
Geopolitical games is a hell of a euphemism. One could call it a profoundly biased eupemism. At least the Ukrainians were seeking freedom from oppression. Russia just wanted to conquer people it hated for its own gain.
I think it's clear that lots of Ukrainians supported the Nazis against the USSR and some of those who did are still well regarded in the Ukraine. But given that the USSR had killed almost four million Ukrainians by deliberate famine less than a decade before, that isn't surprising. Stalin allied with Hitler to invade Poland, even if it wasn't called an alliance, and that doesn't seem an adequate reason to call him a Nazi.
Ukrainian anti-semitism, on the other hand, has a long history having nothing to do with the Nazis.
Russia were the FIRST nazi collaborators. They were happy to use the nazis as cover to slaughter countless Poles and steal their territory, but the minute Hitler turned on them they played the victim and accused everyone else of collaboration.
And it's BS to suggest this is what is driving the war. There are no nazis, Ukraine was never going to invade Russia. Even Putin isn't delusional enough to think that is true. It's just a justification forRussian imperialism born of a demented irredentism.
I'm thinking of commissioning/sponsoring one or more "Much More Than You Wanted to Know"-style posts on specific topics. One topic that I had in mind is "MMTYWTK about aerobic exercise and longevity". I'd be happy to pay $1000 for an ACX-quality post here or on the subreddit.
Does anyone have any ideas how to organize this? Maybe Scott would like to personally write it? Or maybe it's better to hold a mini-contest? Or maybe there is an existing platform for requests like that?
I remember that Scott has declined offers like this previously. If I were you I would post a request in a classified thread and see if someone takes up the offer. Also I've heard good things about contacting PhD students in relevant fields and offer them work like this as a contract gig.
This looks very useful and close to what I need. I was a bit more interested in sponsoring a public blog post that could be useful not just to me, but requesting private research has its advantages as well.
If you want one on why (contrary to a lot of substack imaginings) human being aren't going to Mars any time soon - not this century, for a start - then I'm available for 75 quid. Surely, a veritable bargain..
10 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (unchanged from March 12).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without loosing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, or b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without loosing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24.
15 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (down from 30 % on March 12).
75 % on unambiguous Russian victory (up from 60 % on March 12).
Russian victory is defined as Russia getting something it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO.
Less quantitative prediction:
Still 100 % that there will be broad consensus among reasonable people that postwar living standards in both countries would be substantially higher had they not fought the war. That it is to say, neither side can win in an utilitarian sense. But both sides made it abundantly clear that utilitarian concerns are very much NOT their priority.
Commentary:
Major theme of last week is my increased confidence that Russia is likely to win the war. I do not think that already low chances of outright Ukrainian victory have further decreased, since that would be possible if there is either major shift in Western, or perhaps Chinese, attitude toward the conflict or some unexpected weakness of Russia, or some form of Russian overreach, and I guess neither of those got less likely from last week.
What got less likely is that under continuation of current trends Ukraine will be able to negotiate a non-loosing compromise.
There were some good things happening for Ukrainians in last week. Refugee flow from Ukraine, which is imho bound to cause major problems in the future, at least slowed. Russian armies did not advance anywhere, but imho week ago they were already in such strong position east of the Dnieper that with current trends continuing, Ukrainian defences east of that great river are on track to collapse. And that is half of Ukraine, and it will be very difficult to evict Russian troops by force from that territory once they consolidate their gains.
Other new developments, as well as new information, has been pretty bad for Ukraine.
One thing I got confirmed from my non-English sources is that not only Ukrainian government, but also Ukrainian population, exhibit great message discipline in trying to minimize their losses and other problems. Which means that those are greater than their appear.
It seems that there are already signs of what I predicted last week, that Western solidarity with Ukraine is going to weaken over time. Zelensky got to speak before US and German lawmakers, two probably most important countries for the future development of the conflict (excluding those directly fighting). As far as I know, his appearance before Bundestag yielded him roughly nothing. Regarding his appearance before Congress, main thing that he got was the promise of new military equipment.
How significant is Western military hardware promised to Ukraine?
According to Biden **, military aid agreed to in connection with the Zelensky speech before Congress is worth 800 million dollars, on top of 350 million already agreed to between the start of the war and the speech ***. Well, according to Google, Russian yearly military budget is estimated to be 60 billion dollars. Large part of it goes to nuclear arsenal and other things that are not useful in current war, but still.
800 million for Ukraine would be game-changing if US would send it every week, but since this is in connection with first Zelensky’s rousing speech to Congress I assume that it is closer to a high watermark of US support than to future weekly cheque.
I realize there are big problems with estimating value of military hardware by its price tag, but I’ve got nothing better. It might be the case that Ukrainians are going to receive equipment that is not that expensive to produce for the US, but it will be extremely difficult to counter for Russians due to their (very real) technological backwardness. Or US equipment might be worth less to Ukrainians because they’ll have problems with learning how to operate it efficiently. I assume this roughly cancels out.
Meanwhile EU plan to send another 500 million euro (roughly 550 million dollars) of military aid to Ukraine has been delayed in bureaucracy (“It has now emerged that Germany needs to get approval from the Bundestag’s budget committee at home, which is unlikely to happen until next week.”**** ). Probably this will be approved eventually, but political will to do substantially more just isn’t here.
On sanctions and economic help for Ukraine, big non-news is that no major proposals for economic help were announced and no new important sanctions on Russia were approved.
EU clearly indicated that it is not going to stop paying for Russian oil and gas, for now. India is considering it will buy Russian oil at a discount and in connection with that is mulling some scheme how to get around US sanctions. Perhaps nothing will come from this, but it fits my prediction from previous week that sanctions will be eroded over time.
Russian currency, which previously traded for over 50 % below its already historically bad prewar exchange rate to dollar, now rebounded somewhat and is now trading within 25 – 50 % lower than prewar. This is imho firmly “not great, not terrible territory” as opposed to “imminent danger of total meltdown”. For comparison, day after the Brexit referendum, pound has fallen by 12 % against the dollar, and it never fully rebounded, yet. Exchange rate is very imperfect proxy for the state of the Russian economy, but I don’t know about anything better. Suggestions are welcome.
Key question is imho the strength of the Russian antiwar movement, but that is difficult to assess. My impression is that the war (which Russians are rather hilariously not allowed to call “a war”, but only “special military operation” under severe criminal penalties) is not popular in Russia. But for now, I assume that the antiwar movement, while dangerous for the government and capable of individual brave acts, as demonstrated e.g. by Marina Ovsyannikova, will not be sufficiently strong to force the end of the war at least for months, absent some unexpected military or economic setback for Putin.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
My first thought was that your percent for a compromise ending was much too low, and your Russia Wins much too high, but I see that you're using a different definition than I would.
I personally see a situation where a much larger aggressor fighting to a stalemate with a much smaller defender and compromising on the end result is not really a Russian victory. If Russia formally annexes Donbass or one of those regions gains a few more miles of territory, that would meet your definition of Russian victory, but my definition of a compromise where both can claim victory - if Russia otherwise agrees to back down and ends hostilities.
Note that difference in population between Russia and Ukraine is not THAT large.
I am using as my definition of Ukrainian victory what Ukrainians themselves would have regarded as a victory.
Admittedly it is more difficult to define Russian victory, since their stated war aims include tons of BS (e.g. denazification) and it is unclear what Putin really wants the most. But imho if Putin would get some important concessions from Ukraine without giving any in return, it would be difficult to conclude anything else than that he won.
If all he gets is a Ukrainian agreement not to join NATO, with everything else as it was before the invasion, I don't think that is a Russian win. That outcome leaves the Ukrainian population much more anti-Russian than before, the European NATO states substantially more willing to arm, and the reputation of the Russian military substantially worse. It's not clear that counts as a Ukrainian win but I think it is a Russian loss.
This is a good point; Ukrainian government agreeing not to join NATO and then e.g. entering a separate alliance with Poland shouldn't be counted as Russian victory. Poor wording on my part.
I sort of automatically assume that Ukrainian agreement not to join NATO would be accompanied by declaration of neutrality in a sense that it would promise not to let Western troops on their territory and not join any military pact with Western countries without Russian approval. And that would imho count as Russian victory.
I've been keeping up with the steady stream of "COVID cause measurable decreases in cognition for a (larger percentage/majority, it varies) of people infected, even if they have mild/no symptoms".
They keep coming out but not getting talked about; and some of theme seem pretty big/legit.
Is this because they aren't big and legit, or is it a climate change style thing where people don't want it to be real so they just don't think about it?
To the contrary, I have seen people signal-boost such studies as justification for masks, vaccination, and restrictions on movement. A Pew(?) poll came out indicating 10-15% of people not want covid restrictions to ever end, no matter how much case counts drop. Perhaps people derive a sort of pleasure from the rituals of covid mitigation, or else, enjoy signalling they care more about public health than nearly everyone else (and I would allow a portion of these may be meaningfully immune compromised with a legitimate personal risk).
The problem with the cognition numbers or the long covid rates is often the denominator used in the calculation is case counts, not infection estimates. With close half of Americans having been infected to date, are we really seeing 25% of people walk around with cognitive deficiencies? (the jokes that can be made at this point are too easy)
How long after infection are the cognitive decreases observed, and are there differences in magnitude over time? That is, is it something that implies short-term damage and gradual recovery, or is there evidence suggesting long-term or permanent damage.
The bits and pieces I've heard details about seem to suggest the former, particularly a claim I've come across that the cognitive impairment is linked to loss of smell (since I've separately heard that the loss of smell generally recovers over a period of weeks or months). But it sounds like you've been following this in a lot more detail than I have.
Has anyone seen studies citing a failure rate of one country invading another country? It seems like this might help forecasters take the outside view of Russia-Ukraine.
I posted this in a previous open thread and have been thinking about it since. The right search terms continue to escape me.
To me those seem like very, very odd things to compare, and I am curious about the reasons you find the analogy useful. Are you thinking narrowly about the goals or execution of some specific M&A deal to be compared with the ongoing war, or is yours a broader claim regarding those two (very diverse) fields?
Years ago, when I first read that the failure rate of M&A was estimated to be so high, I was surprised. Had I been asked to guess beforehand, I would have estimated the failure rate below 50%. I hadn't given any thought to the auction regret and misaligned incentives mentioned in Eric Rall's comment, which might explain what seems to be the pursuit of negative expected value by most of the acquiring companies.
I'm comparing M&As to another sort of complex expansion venture, military invasions, because I'm wondering if they similarly have a negative expected value from the outside perspective ('How often have ventures like this succeeded? Not often.'). As mentioned, I can't find data.
If military invasions also have a negative expected value, then similar cognitive biases might be at work in explaining why decision-makers go ahead with them. Planning fallacy and optimism bias come to mind, but there might be a closer match.
One word which I haven't mentioned is 'pride'. I find pride hard to use in causal explanations, but it's probably relevant to both.
The most straightforward interpretation is that an M&A fails in the deal doesn't go through, but the text out the article seems to imply that they're taking about deals which do go through, which rules that out. Maybe deals that go through but fail to improve the fortunes of the acquiring firm?
I recall one of my professors on business school, who had done a bunch of research into mergers and acquisitions, summarizing her findings thus:
- There are no true mergers, oy acquisitions.
- Typically, slightly over 100% of the value created by the acquisition is captured by the shareholders of the acquired firm. That is, acquisitions tend to create value above the separate value of the two companies, but the price paid to buy out the other company's shareholders typically includes all the added value on top of the separate value of that company and then a little more.
Her interpretation of this was that the fundamental problem was a combination of auction regret and agency costs. Auction Regret is a well-known phenomenon where in competitive bidding situations, the high bidder has often made a mistake in valuing the purchase. Agency costs here means that the deals are made by upper management of the acquiring firm, while the costs are paid by the acquiring firm's shareholders, and the interests of upper management and the shareholders are not 100% congruent: the CEO is interested not just in maximizing share price, but also boosting his power and prestige as well as justifying a richer comp package next time his contract is up for reevaluation. Presiding over a larger company serves all these interests, even if the acquisition is slightly overpaid-for, provided it's not so grossly overvalued as to be immediately obvious the CEO made a bad deal. Conversely, once knowledge of negotiations become public knowledge, for the deal to fall through would risk the CEO losing face, which management of the target firm knows and can use as negotiation leverage.
Caveat: this is my recollections at 16 or 17 years distance of an informal self-summary of one professor's opinion.
There’s not a lot of examples to consider in the post 1945 era. There have been various interstate wars in this era, but very few with a goal of controlling new territory. North Vietnam was quite successful in the end. Israel has been having issues. Russia was going fine with Crimea for several years. But otherwise I’m mostly aware of wars of some sort of principle (such as regime change) or of independence.
It seems to me that people who believe in utilitarian ethics should promote a high birth rate. Do they? Obviously more full lives lived means tons more utility to be had. I have to assume that on average, even in challenging situations life (vs never having existed) is massively net positive. A higher birth rate would have a positive multiplier effect on any other human-focused effective altruist efforts.
From my experience, everyone I’ve met at minimum prefers to be alive, except in typically transient moments of extreme suffering. I would say that a momentary negative only occurs in those moments where the sum of the psychological forces acting on an individual net out in hoping for death. Otherwise, even in challenging circumstances I would argue that the momentary net utility of the moment in life is positive. By this calculation, the time-averaged life-long summation ends up wildly positive for everyone, or at least very close to everyone. Do you disagree? It could be that I rate higher than you the baseline utility of pure being, pure consciousness, pure existence, pure experience, pure agency, whatever you want to call it. In addition, people are usually able to find moments of great joy even during trials.
These are just my thoughts from my life experience and interactions, which include people with Down’s syndrome, people who have experienced deep physical and sexual trauma and live in a South American slum, Congolese refugees who lived in a refugee camp for over a decade and lost close family member to war, murder, and genocide, situations the depths of which I couldn’t possibly imagine. Despite tragedy I see that people are able to find joy in existence.
If you disagree, I would be interested to know your thoughts.
Suicide rates indicate that the vast majority of people concur on their specific case, and I can't think of any case of humane involuntary euthanasia on anti-vitalist grounds.
There are strong social norms against suicide in many countries (e.g. in my country suicides are called "cowards" and "selfish", which makes no sense to me). So I think observed suicide rates only give a lower bound for the number of people who would prefer not to be alive.
They are "cowards" because they choose to opt out rather than solve the problem facing them. They are "selfish" because they transfer the problem they're escaping onto others and depending on the method of suicide, make additional work and inconvenience for others. They are also "insulting" because they are telling those that love them "I'd rather be dead than continue to live with you."
I think it gives an upper bound, actually. Many people who fail to complete suicide state afterwards that as soon as they kicked the chair or jumped over the ledge, they realized that they'd made a massive mistake. Yes, yes, survivorship bias, etc., etc.- I'd like to see if you have any grounds to your assertion there are these large numbers of people who don't want to be alive and only haven't killed themselves because of social pressure.
EDIT: I'll retract my opinion that it gives an "upper bound"- that was me being flippant. My actual point would be, more simply, that I don't believe that there are that many more people who are being held back purely by societal pressure: I think if you've reached the point where you want to end your life, the question of "what will my parents think of me?" isn't high on your mind- in my n=1 experience, you think something along the lines of "They'll be happy I'm not a burden to them anymore, it'll be such a weight off of their shoulders." (I hate the fact I had such a selfish thought, but there it is.)
The point is that you don't get to talk to anyone who has opted out.
The official suicide rate must be an underestimate of the preference, since it doesn't include those who cannot, or who do not kill themselves for cultural reasons (the stigma, or effect on their family or acquaintances), or those who successfully do but manage to pass it off as misadventure.
My thoughts were an article published about forty years ago, which I have given the cite to above. The natural definition of zero utility, more precisely zero expected value of total utility, is the suicide point, the level at which someone with the option of painless suicide would take it.
I think this definition is too optimistic - I'm sure that there are many people who would prefer not to be alive, but who feel compelled to stay alive for the sake of their loved ones/dependents (I have felt like this for a significant fraction of my life). But doesn't that mean that their utility functions weigh "discharge my obligations" above "don't be miserable", so their utility is indeed positive? Not if the people they owe those obligations to would also prefer not to be alive. In that case, net human welfare would be improved if they could all agree to enter the suicide machine at the same time.
On first glance, yes, but you run into the repugnant conclusion that you should keep encouraging birth rates until you end up with the entire global population living lives that are just barely utility-positive, so while more lives are generally better, there's more to it than that.
That isn't quite right. Even if you are maximizing total utility, the utility of one happy life might be greater than of two barely utility-positive lives.
You still have the same problem of a breakpoint though. There is a point where you can no longer exchange any more utility from fewer people to more people, and maximizing utility implies that we should keep increasing population until we reach the point where there is no more slack, and no one has any utility they can still sacrifice to support the lives of more people. It seems absurd that we should try to strive for that.
Extremely specific answer: practically I think than in currently prevailing conditions in many (perhaps not all) wealthy countries, overall net utility could be increased if governments encouraged more kids, by covering larger share of childcare cost.
Overall however I think that coercing people who do not want more kids into more procreation is unlikely to create net utility. It would make parents miserable and also children born under such conditions are imho likely to have, um, below average life satisfaction.
Yeah, but "encourage people to have more kids, just not in a way that makes their lives worse", is very far from so called repugnant conclusion, which is exactly about forcing people into procreation even though it makes them miserable
One version of utilitarianism maximizes total utility, one maximizes average utility. Both seem to lead to counterintuitive conclusions under some circumstances.
I have a very old article looking at the problem and offering a very imperfect way of comparing alternative futures with different numbers of people in them:
"What Does Optimum Population Mean?" Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert.
So far as I know, there is no webbed text of it but I did find a webbed abstract at:
Just now had a chance to read the abstract. It almost seems like the authors question the ability of utilitarian ethics to deal with the question of population size. Do we optimize for a high average utility, or for a high total utility, or some function of the two? Said differently, the rational analysis requires a value judgement as an input.
From my experience, your borderline person is a very extreme case, and far from average even among the (small sample size) poverty-stricken peoples that I have come into contact with. On average humans (and even animals for that matter) hold tightly to and value life very highly.
> I have to assume that on average, even in challenging situations life (vs never having existed) is massively net positive.
If you are wrong about this, then you would be creating a massive amount of disutility by promoting a high birth rate. Looking at Our World In Data's page on the topic (https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction), it seems that average life satisfaction is indeed high and positively correlated with income (so would be expected to go up as the world's level of development increased). I'd expect people to overstate their happiness levels on those surveys for cultural reasons; I'd hope the researchers doing the surveys would be aware of that and try to account for it, but that seems very difficult. Anyway, I'd want to be *extremely* confident that living is a net positive before advocating policies that would create quadrillions of possibly-miserable human beings, as some longtermists advocate. This is not a situation where making assumptions will cut it.
Not sure if he does bio companies, but Scott McKenzie (Patio11 on twitter, Stripe employee) has been willing to review YCombinator applications in the past - I think it was a standing offer.
Suppose we end up in the world where you can’t make any credible public prediction without being willing to bet on it (either directly with a counterparty or through prediction markets). If you say something and aren’t willing to bet, this is considered silly.
What happens to people with gambling addictions? Do they get a kind of special social pass where it’s not considered sketchy to refuse to bet?
So far there’s a relatively small subculture of people who seem to make epistemic bets with each other, but has anyone in this subculture had to deal with problem gambling?
Good question. From what I know of problem gambling, it doesn't exhibit itself as compulsively making bets with other people. If you know a problem gambler, they'll probably never have tried to bet you on something. Interpersonal betting just doesn't match the circumstances that tend to elicit a gambling addiction.
I mentally think of a few kinds of gambling addiction: slot machines, casino games, and placing bets with bookmakers (typically on sports but not necessarily).
Slot machines are a totally unique phenomenon which don't ultimately have much to do with the desire to win or lose money. There's probably a lot of factors in problem gambling around casino games, and likely some psychology is the same, but I can imagine it's very different from epistemic bets.
But placing bets with a bookie seems to be the same thing as a prediction market, and gambling addicts can still get in huge trouble there.
As for peer-to-peer bets, I have no idea whether, in a world where this is frequent and normal, problem gambling might not also arise. At the very least, people you know probably wouldn't financially ruin you over a bet, whereas a casino or bookmaker will. Do you know if there is research by people who study gambling addiction on whether bets between friends are often a problem?
It’s not quite the same thing, but this example (https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/01/my-11-bets-at-10-1-odds-on-10m-covid-deaths-by-2022.html) left me with a bad taste for the idea of monetary epistemic bets. The bet proposer was claiming the bet to be resolved in his favor in a sketchy way I personally disagreed with, and then publicly demanded payments up to $10,000. I feel like this concept comes with interpersonal risks that should be acknowledged.
If problem gambling manifests as problematic willingness to make public prediction, then the recommended response will be to stop making so many predictions.
If a gambling addict needs to abstain from gambling, then they'd have to never make any prediction again.
The scenario I'm imagining is something like this: Bob has a decent track record in prediction markets for elections and geopolitics, and he's also been made successful forecasts in support of decision making for the business he owns. However, from time to time he has been known to lose tons of money making degenerate prop bets on sporting events. Placing prediction-market-style bets puts him in a mental state where he is tempted to gamble irresponsibly on sports, so he now avoids betting for money entirely.
It's definitely an edge case but I think if prediction markets were to really take off, there would be enough people like this that it would have to be considered.
Forgive me if this question is in poor taste, but will postwar Ukraine present a good real estate investment opportunity? For instance, could I, a foreigner, buy a nice house in Kiev for cheap and rent it out for a healthy profit?
What about other investment opportunities that will be unusually profitable thanks to the effect of the war?
Non-expert, but I wouldn't buy real estate in Kyiv unless I could check it out personally. Who knows how much damage there is to the property and the utilities for it?
I think it will present a very good opportunity for institutional investors to buy up large parts of destroyed cities. But very difficult for individuals who aren't Ukrainian or have ties on the ground to the country.
I heard an interview with an investor who focuses on international equities and special situations like war or the collapse of the USSR. This was at the start of the conflict. He basically said its impossible to be right on how these situations impact equity markets. He is only successful because he is in an institutional settings and his clients are looking for hedges or homeruns where they are willing to be wrong 90% of the time for the big payoffs. But if I were trying to profit from this situation I would be looking more into russian equities that have been destroyed from sanctions. Eventually those sanctions will be lifted and many of those companies will come back.
My thinking over all is that someone is going to make billions from this conflict but its unlikely to be me so its not an area I am going to invest my time.
Kiev is going to be dealing with housing shortages for the next 5 years. And under martial law, you are likely to be conscripted if you try to make money off of that.
Why are the commenters on Marginal Revolution so bad?
The writing on MR is often nuanced or at least attempts to be. But the commenters are on the level of reactionary right wing Facebook commenters but with better vocabulary. Why?
Thats my best guess, though its been seemingly the same posters for years - I'd think they would get bored. The light moderation that Scott does seems to have been enough to prevent a similar fate (Even with some hiccups). I hope it continues.
Overton Window is positioned such that left-wing awful (Murder the Rich and Sodomize Their Children, Execute People For Saying Naughty Words, Kill Whitey) is in the bounds of "shocking, awful things to say, but not SO bad that they deserve exile from the public square", while Right-Wing Awful (White Sharia Now, Send the N******* Back to Africa, Kill Libs) is out of those bounds. So anyplace that screens for Awful Behavior will kick more right-wingers out than left-wingers, causing them to gravitate towards alternative platforms.
I think probably because of the lack of moderation? You want to say something that goes against the orthodoxy of a particular site but it's tightly moderated (usually for the laundry list of progressive causes) so you'll be bounced for anything that is even slightly out of step. This drives all the witches to the place where there aren't any witch-hunters.
This is perhaps overly-cynical, but maybe accurate even so: the people who enjoy trolling probably tend to also enjoy very one-sided routs. So any place that harbors trolls tends to get more on one side, and once there, stays there.
They're "balanced out" by the subset of trolls who enjoy what Twitter would call getting ratio'ed - posting short comments that get tons of replies. So any troll-ridden forum gets a many-fold majority on one side and a handful on the other who keep the quarrel going.
There's a definition for "troll" I find useful that fits only (part of) that minority. Such trolls post specifically to rile other people up. They're like kids in the 1950s that poked anthills to watch the ants scurry. The majority aren't trolls in the same sense; they might post inflammatory comments, but they're still in it for the feeling of overwhelming consensus, not for the feeling of goading that minority, which wouldn't work anyway since that minority is largely playing the same game.
I've wondered the same thing myself. I mostly agree with Nancy L - lack of moderation is a big part of it. And lack of participation by the blog authors - Scott's frequent responses to the commentariat, I think, keeps commenting quality much higher than it would otherwise be.
I now have a chapter draft on my calculations of land gained and lost through climate change. The conclusion, if correct, is pretty dramatic, a massive increase in the amount of land usable by humans. It's a Fermi calculation, so very approximate, and I'm ignoring the question of how useful the land is — soil quality and the like. I'm just asking how much land changes from too cold for human use to a reasonable temperature for human use, from a reasonable temperature to too high, and from dry to flooded due to SLR.
I'm mostly interested in whether there are any large mistakes in my calculations that I have missed. Obviously my other reason for putting it up is that if I haven't made any mistakes it implies a large positive effect that almost nobody mentions, hence a reason both to revise down estimates of net cost of climate change and to revise down one's confidence in the reliability of the sources of information your estimates are based on if those sources didn't mention it.
Does your model assume a new steady state climate? This seems important, because usability of land depends on the predictability of its climate, often more so than on the particular climate itself. If there is a new steady state, it definitely seems plausible to me that the new steady state ends up being better than the old one, but there will still be a lot of transition costs paid, and it would be interesting to know the time scale for the payback on that. And if there’s not a new steady state, but a continuous gradual change, then that changes things quite a bit.
I'm not doing anything that complicated. As you can see if you look at the chapter, I am just asking about the effect of the changed distribution of temperature, primarily of January temperature in the Northern Hemisphere but also of maximum temperatures everywhere, as of the end of this century.
In principle one wants a sum of total costs and benefits, but although some people write as if they had such a thing, I don't believe they do. There is so much uncertainty that if you want to conclude that climate change is very bad, you can make a bunch of judgement calls that lead to that conclusion, and similarly if you want to conclude that it is not bad at all, even on net good. I have the much more limited objective in the chapter of producing a rough estimate of one part of it. That estimate, if correct, is huge — an increase in usable land of more than twice the area of the U.S.
Note that we are not talking of rapid change, from a human point of view. Warming so far has been about a tenth of a degree C per decade. It may be getting somewhat faster now, but it is still slow compared to the rate at which, say, farmers shift crop varieties or other choices in response to changes in their environment.
It's a much more elaborate analysis. If done right, it should produce better information, since it tries to take account of things such as humidity and soil quality. On the other hand it is much harder for the reader to audit, to tell what the assumptions are, what variables are being taken account of and how — I cannot even tell if it includes the effect of CO2 fertilization on reducing water requirements.
Its conclusion is that the change in arable land, not counting the effect of land occupied by increased population, is between -.8 and +1.2 million km2. I've added a reference to it to my chapter. Again thanks.
That article cites an earlier one by Ramankutty et. al. which explicitly takes account of the reduced water requirement due to CO2 fertilization. It finds an increase of 6.6 million km2. That's consistent with my result given that I am only looking at temperature. Some land that is warm enough to be useful may be disqualified from agriculture on other grounds — the Sahara, for example. I don't know if the difference between the results of the two papers in part reflects the first one not having taken account of CO2 fertilization, have emailed the lead author to ask.
That seems reasonable. I have seen other reports that global warming (GW) will be net good for much of the northern hemisphere. (No I don't have a link.) As an aside, besides temperature and CO2, GW should lead to more water in the air. (If I'm remembering my Earth science correctly, much of the heat in the tropics is moved to the higher latitudes by water vapor.) More water is more rain which is usually good thing for crops. (Too much rain can lead to flooding, which can be bad at the wrong time in the growing season.) And then I start thinking about second order effects. Last year we (here in the Northeast) had a dry spring, but then a relatively wet summer and fall. Wandering around in my woods I was thrilled by all the mushrooms this produced. (Wet is good for mushrooms.) And this made me think, hmm wet is not only more plants, but more mushrooms, which break down the plant material and return it to the ecosystem. So maybe more water and more nutrients for even more tree growth. This is just wild speculation on my part, and really just to say ecosystems are complicated. (It might be interesting to look at tree ring data. Do we see signs of more growth?)
Is there a reason the US (and other NATO countries like Slovakia or Romania who also supposedly have good anti-air weapons systems) are not giving Ukraine better anti-air weapons than stingers? I am no military expert but from what I gather stingers are great against helicopters but terrible against high altitude bombers.
I don't see a reason to conserve these weapons, after all their main use is to deter the Russian army (there are no other realistic threats that could hit European NATO member states with modern military-grade equipment) and if those weapons can actually destroy that threat (the Russian fleet) then that is the one thing better than deterrence. Particularly if the destroying can be outsourced to very motivated and willing Ukrainians.
It also seems the cheaper alternative - if the Ukrainians defeat Russia, the West is realistically going to subsidize Ukraine's reconstruction heavily. The quicker the Ukrainians win, the less damage done and the lower the costs will be (in money and lives). If they lose, the West will have to deal with an even larger refugee crisis and a need to arm themselves even more.
The only reason not to do this seems the fear that Putin might escalate further and declare war on NATO. I am not sure it is likely that Putin would be "OK" (i.e. not convincingly threatening NATO with a war) with us sending Ukraine stingers and javelins but not with us sending them specific anti-bomber weaponry...
I don’t think the Ukrainians are going to win either way. The Russians aren’t dominating the air anyway, maybe they are already scared of the existing weapons.
I guess it depends on how you define winning. If I had to make a bet, I'd say they will probably have to concede Crimean and the separatist regions to Russia and possibly formally give up NATO membership. But in the current situation anything short of Russia occupying the country and setting up a puppet regime is winning - it still gives Ukraine a chance to join the EU and turn itself into a fortress to prevent another invasion. This of course requires massive western subsidies...but it also seems like the best way NATO can protect its border against Russia and ultimately defeat Russia. Russia (under the weight of western sanctions) becomes just a poor third world dictatorship (with nuclear weapons) and the free Ukraine works as a billboard for the West, a clear reminded to the Russians what they could have if they only deal with their government and replace it with something less hostile to the rest of the world. That would be the hope, anyway...
I would define winning as taking more territory from the other country. Which is where Russia is right now. For Ukraine to enter the EU, as a whole entity, the Russians would start losing. Which is losing the territory they have already.
The Soviet Union, but it was close. At the Moment Russians are advancing into Ukraine and not being stopped. That advance might be slower than expected but unless we see reversals, that is the Russians retreating, they are winning. Whether the victory be Pyrrhic or not remains to be seen.
Ok, I'd say Finland won the Winter war but you are right that a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets is probably a better description (they had to cede territory to the Russians and become neutral with what was effectively unofficial pro-Russian censorship after all).
So my guess (but perhaps it is going to be even worse, I hope not) is that Ukraine can pull of at least that kind of an outcome too. Finns had better terrain for defense but less support from abroad. Resolve seems about the same.
I think you can only give weapons to Ukraine which Ukrainian soldier either know anyway, or which they can learn to use within a few hours. This excludes more advances weapons.
That is probably true. But are there no NATO owned (eastern NATO members still have a lot of old Warsaw pact era weapons, at least in reserve, even Germany has those...of course, not all Warsaw pact weapons are Soviet weapons).
I dunno maybe I just don't know how hard it is to learn how to use a new APC or a rocket launcher. It feels like it should not be that hard but perhaps I am underestimating it.
I am pretty sure I already saw a news story about one of the eastern European countries that was offering its, presumably Soviet, air defense weaponry to Ukraine, conditional on someone replacing it with, presumably, western weaponry.
This is also one of the examples where "the same" weapon can be different. The Polish MIG-29 have been adapted to NATO standards. That means that the buttons are not at the same positions, they now use feet instead of meters (sic!), and so on. It's unclear how much of an issue that is, but it's not just "the same".
Another issue is that there are NATO components that the NATO would not allow to fall into Russian hands, especially the IFF system (identification friend or foe). It was pretty clear from the start that NATO would only allow to transfer the airplanes after these component have been built out. (That was the discussion before the final No from the US.)
It's not just the MiGs, I saw an article about the US trying to cut a deal to get Russian SAMs from Slovakia or Turkey. They use the S-300 and S-400, but we need to hash out some sort of deal to give them replacements first.
Also apparently the US has a small stockpile of Soviet missiles that it used for testing, so it's shipping those.
I was referring to the S-300 and S-400s that beleester mentions. I wouldn't describe a Mig-29 as an air defense weapon, although that is one of the things it can be used for.
yes, exactly, those SAMs. I am not sure why a) US is not willing to pay Slovakia for those SAMs, b) Slovakia is not willing to give them to Ukraine for free.
Actually, at the beginning of March Germany promised 2700 "Strela" surface-to-air missile that were leftovers from former GDR. But they were taken out of operation in 2014, and it turned out that it's not good for weapons if they just lie in depots for 8 years. One thing is that the grip stocks have already been disposed (probably Ukraine still has some), the other that the explosive material is not in a good shape, let alone safe. Germany has delivered 500 of them with two weeks delay, and hopes that it can make more of them operable.
My takeaway is that Germany (and probably other countries as well) are trying, and actually trying hard, but that it's not so trivial.
For the other point, I have read quite explicitly that for more complex weapon system (like airplanes) it would not be so easy for Ukrainians to just use them. Even if it is "the same" model as used in the Ukraine, apparently they are still different enough to make that complicated. The nice thing about Stinger is that it's a "fire and forget" weapon that finds its target pretty automatically.
Weapons which are good against high-altitude bombers require a great deal of specialized training, and the Ukrainians are all trained on (updated versions of) old Soviet systems that NATO mostly doesn't have. If we sent them e.g. Patriot batteries, they probably wouldn't be able to use them without US "advisors" looking over their shoulders. And whether that was the case or not, the Russians would probably assume that there were US or other NATO technicians actually shooting the missiles, which would pose obvious problems re escalation.
There are a few NATO powers that still have some old Soviet hardware lying around various sources, and there's been talk of sending them a couple dozen MiG-29 fighters and some S-300 surface-to-air missiles. The MiG deal seems to have fallen through because of the politics of combat aircraft flying from NATO countries into a war zone; the missiles are not being talked about much. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing.
But I think Slovakia should still have some Warsaw pact era anti-air weapon systems if I understood it correctly but for some reason they did not want to just give them to Ukraine, wanted a compensation from the US (which is something I can't understand).
Of course, the question is what state these are in (like those German DDR Panzerfäuste) and whether they are effective against the sort of airplanes the Russians are using.
But why can't you simply load the MiGs onto a train and transport them that way? Too obvious a target? Too difficult logistically?
The wingspan is too wide for typical railroad (or highway) right-of-way, so you'd have to partially disassemble the aircraft and reassemble them in Ukraine. It is probably not a coincidence that Russia used half a dozen or so of their diminishing supply of cruise missiles to wreck Ukraine's main MiG-29 maintenance facility in Lviv last week.
I can imagine other workarounds, e.g. landing the planes on the Polish side of a clear straight highway across the border, towing them into Ukraine, and having Ukrainian pilots take off. But they're all kind of a kludge, and extremely vulnerable to attack if the Russians get word of them. And if the Russians *don't* get word of them, they may misinterpret the results as Poland having launched MiG-29s directly into combat in Ukraine and shoot missiles at the Polish airbase in question.
I'm nothing like an expert, but my extremely understanding is that air defense systems (besides other aircraft) generally come in two flavors:
1) Vehicle or fixed platforms intended to make use of radar and target higher altitude, faster craft at fairly long range.
2) Man-portable platforms intended to target low altitude, slower moving craft which may be too low for (1) to detect and have to engage at fairly short range.
(2) is relatively easy to transport and train. (1) is not and generally Russia has not successfully degraded Ukraine's (1) systems. As a result, they're relying on lower attitude operations, which means more of (2) is needed.
On the subject of DST, or rather time changes. Am I the only person who believes the time changes are a good thing? There are clearly problems with year long DST (very late sunrises), but conversely year long standard time ends the late summer evenings. There are heated discussions online about which is the preferred option, with nobody compromising on the obvious solution which would allow us to have late sunset in summer and reasonable sunrises in winter: that is retaining the change. It’s just assumed that the time change is a relic.
Personally, I don't like the late summer evenings :) I don't even live that far north (central Europe) and in late July civil twilight does not end before 10pm...that kind of annoying when I want to go to bed before 11pm (sometimes).
When I don't want to go to bed early, I wouldn't really mind the dark at 9pm, summer nights are warm and it is kind of nice.
The only problem is that the sun would then rise at something like 3 am which is just disgusting (I hate when I return home from a party and it is already sunny outside :D ) but if you're at home sleeping you can just use window blinds.
What I really hate is waking up in the dark though. I don't understand how the Scandinavians can survive this, December is already pretty bad even here (sunrise 8am, sunset 4pm-ish). One thing I loved about Singapore was 7 am sunrise, 7pm sunset pretty much all year round (15 minutes of variation).
The only reliably good thing about summer in Ireland, where I now live, is the late sunsets. An outdoor cafe or pub overlooking the Atlantic with a fading post sunset as late as 10:30pm in the West is a great thing. I can sleep fine by midnight, it’s dark enough. However DST in winter would mean a 9:40 am sunrise in Dublin and later in the west. This isn’t just Ireland, north Germany is the same, Hamburg is on the same latitude as Dublin , more or less.
I think the best solution would be more flexible working hours. I mean I have those anyway, working in IT and all, but generally you could have some people work 7-3, others 8-4 and yet others 9-5. I know people who prefer either of these options (even 10-6 which I find quite depressing...though I often worked 7-6 this February without even being made to do so so who am I to judge :D).
It is of course not an option for shift workers in factories and the like. But I guess these jobs will mostly be replaced by machines in a decade or two anyway...
That’s not a solution because everything goes by the clock these days. And there’s the psychology of late sunsets, I associate pre 9pm sunsets with early spring and early autumn.
By the way the next round of automation is really expected to hit office workers as much as factory workers.
Yup, in our company, we're developing an automation tool for accounting (reading printed invoices and receipts included). Seems easier than automating factory workers since you only need the software and very little sophisticated hardware (robots).
Anyway, I am not sure what you mean by "everything goes by the clock these days". In my case, I can decide to start working at 10 am one day and 7 am the next day (and I actually do that sometimes, even though I try to keep a regular-ish schedule). Shops and restaurants rarely open for a single shift anyway, so I think this is an option even in the service industry.
Everything goes by the clock = TV schedules, cinema times, pub opening hours, church times, the theatre, small shop opening hours, most office and factory hours, swimming pools, parks, and on and on and on. The main reason though is psychological - late sunsets are nice. Which is why given the option most people preferred the late nights in summer to later sunrises in winter. The gain in summer - an extra hour on the evening vastly outweighs the loss of sunrise from 4am to 5am, or so.
When I was a kid, I remember my mother getting us up in the mornings and me going "but it can't be time to get up yet, it's still night, look it's dark out".
We're probably gone long past the time when we could rise and sleep with the sun as far as setting schedules goes.
It's the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Bed in Summer":
Neither does shifting clocks, really. Fiddling with our clocks has no effect on the relative positions and orientation of the Earth and the Sun. We're just changing how our clocks are aligned relative to true solar time in order to manipulate people into getting up earlier, going to work or school earlier, and going to be earlier.
DST makes the coordination problem easier and exerts some psychological pressure as well, but otherwise it's more or less equivalent to everyone agreeing to shift schedules earlier during the summer.
A softer nudge in that direction would be for government offices and public schools to adopt a schedule with summer and winter hours, with private employers having the option of following suit or not.
Fiddling with clocks in summer time does what it’s expected to - it moves the sunset time by an hour and the sunrise time by an hour. It’s not really a psychological pressure, it’s a clock movement. Prior to DST there were different summer and winter hours for government offices, and others, but it couldn’t work universally.
We fiddle with time by even using a clock, and time zones, there’s no natural time except a solar clock. Even in Greenwich the clock is wrong most of the time, relative to the sun because of the equation of time.
It changes what we call the sunset time in order to induce people to shift their schedules earlier. It doesn't actually change when the sun sets: it changes the map, not the territory. The benefits and drawbacks of DST all come from shifting schedules, for which fiddling with clocks is a means to an end.
It sounds like your core complaint is that you prefer DST to a system without a clock change because you expect that voluntary behavior with inducements short of a clock change won't be effective enough in getting others to shift their schedules, and shifting your schedule when not enough other people do likewise is suboptimal from your perspective. Or am I missing something?
If that is indeed your core complaint, then I agree with you to the extent that I think DST is a more effective inducement to schedule-shifting than voluntary manual schedule-shifting perhaps with the government setting a "good" example. Where I disagree is that I don't want to be induced to shift my schedule. Like Robinson Davies's fictional character Samuel Marchbanks, I like sleeping in past dawn and enjoy moonlit evenings, and I resent the bony blue-fingered hand of Puritanism trying to make me healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of myself.
I am aware that the length of day stays the same regardless of clock time. The sunset time does shift though, because we measure the time of sunset by the clock. As we do sunrise. As we do solar noon.
Clocks are how how we measure time, and all time we measure by the clock is incorrect compared to solar time except at the meridian(s). Even in winter.
Therefore you are always being coerced into to believing a fiction and if you didn’t want to believe that fiction, if you didn’t want to be coerced by “puritans”, if you wanted to stick with solar time, you would turn up to a noon meeting between 11:30 or 12:30 even in winter - if your location were in the time zone it should be, or if not (like in Spain or France) even later - closer to 1pm winter time. 2pm in summer.
So the “bony hand of Puritanism” is clock time. ( Also it’s keeping people outside in beer gardens and garden parties later than otherwise, so it’s a strange form of Puritanism).
And as for sleeping in past dawn: I like that too, but I can do that even with DST in the summer because the sunrise changes from 3:50am to 4:50am, and I can do it for most of the winter provided we revert to standard time. However, and admittedly it’s grim up north, if we were to stay on DST in winter, then, where I live, sunrise would be closer to 10am than 9am.
Conversely if we stay on standard time in summer there’s an early summer sunset compensated for by a sunrise which will be witnessed by no one except amnesiacs and party goers heading home, and mostly they will curse the sun.
Hence the clock change.
We know how this goes already, and probably would without historical evidence, but we have that. The U.K. brought in year round summer time in 1968 and abandoned it a few years later. Public opinion, once supportive, turned strongly against it. I don’t doubt that public opinion will also turn against year round standard time in all northern latitudes as people see sunsets in midsummer that are earlier than spring sunsets now.
We will then revert to a clock change, because how hard is that anyway. Devices do it for you these days. And that’s what really this is about - losing a hour’s sleep every March. It’s a tribute to the lack of hardiness amongst moderns that we are abandoning a clock change when our automatic clocks do it for us, and we have nothing to do Sunday morning, but our ancestors could change 55 manual grandfather clocks and still get to church by 8am, after milking the cows and feeding the dogs, with some bell ringing practice thrown in at 7am.
We're always going to have long days and brighter evenings in summer, and shorter days and darker evenings in winter (unless we're living on the equator or flip that for the southern hemisphere), so no solution to that.
I'm not falling into line with your prescription about solving the problem, I'm simply stating a fact; sunrise and sunset happen at different 'times' in the Northern Hemisphere during the course of the year, and any attempts to bring 'clock time' into line with 'natural daylight' are going to have to take that into account.
Maybe your suggestion is the best way, I don't know and I don't particularly care one way or the other, since I will still have to be at work by 9:00 a.m. clock time winter and summer whatever scheme is adopted by the country or the world.
I was also aware that sunrise and sunset happen at different times during the year. I don't think I denied that. My argument rather depends on it.
And you **should** care because your 9AM start would be night time in winter in Ireland if it were on DST ( which is UTC+1) all year round. I actually think I need a post explaining the basics here, as in why we ever decided to use DST to begin with. It's not because of energy shortages in 1916, as some claim.
relative to my schedule it does. which would you prefer, my plan above, or a plan where we simultaneosly shift the clock but also work schedules in the same direction for a net zero?
I’m not really sure about your argument. If we tried shifting all schedules by an hour - including all opening and closing times, train timetables, Tv shows, etc it would be much harder logistically than a clock change. I think i’ve explained this already.
And sunset times wouldn’t be later by the clock in summer. Neither all year DST nor all year standard time is ideal.
You had stated my plan doesn't make sunset later. My hypothetical was trying to demonstrate, that you actually care more about the relative sunset compared to your schedule (my plan), than you do about the time on the clock when sunset happens.
My plan is more libertarian, allowing individuals to choose which schedule they prefer, and not forcing everyone to one.
If you abide by a clock time at all you aren’t being “libertarian”. The government has decided your time zone. You are abiding by it.
Honestly these debates are infuriating. Your “ libertarian” ideas are clearly not just incorrect on their own but just wouldn’t work. Do you really think that every business are going to change hours without the clock change?
My preference would be we go with sunrise. So maybe in summertime, depending on latitude, you end up getting up anywhere between 4-6 a.m. in the morning, and in winter (again, depending on latitude) you get up around 7-9 a.m., but so what?
Our problem is that we are on an artificial time scale for industrial purposes, so we 'have' to be at work for 8-9 a.m. in the morning. No problem for summer, when we'd have already had a couple of hours daylight by then, but that means getting up and travelling in the dark for winter. And that's why the messing around with time changes: do we want dark mornings or dark evenings to suit the work schedule?
Change My View: Anti-youth ageism is easily in the top 3 most important social problems facing the West. Personally I can't see how anything other than the wars waged by the US gov and demographic change is more important to address than ageism.
Ageism is so bad because it is enforced by the State. 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.
Teenagers face whippings and beatings for disobedience, and if not that arbitrary confinement. It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else, just as slaves have been treated throughout history. Paddling is still practiced in schools in 19 US states. Elsewhere teens are imprisoned without due process by parents and schools when they are “grounded” or assigned “detention.” Hollywood has made light of these labels, but they are serious civil rights violations, and though force is generally not used to coerce cooperation out of victims, those who fight back against said punishments are often sent to juvenile detention, or worse.
Unlucky, revolutionary teens are sent to camps, where they are deprived of an education and put to punitive labor. Starvation is a common punishment for teen victims in these camps. Collectively, this sadistic gulag-archipelago is known as the “Troubled Teen Industry,” or TTI for short. Camps are often located in the wilderness, in polities such as Utah, Jamaica, and Costa Rica. Bounty-hunters are often hired to “transport” victims to these places.
Teens are considered property under US (and, more generally, Western) law. A teenager has no medical rights; if a teen does not want a vaccine, but his parents do want him to have it, he can be restrained and inoculated against his will. If a teen does want a vaccine, but his parents do not want him to have it, he is not allowed to receive it. In medicine, the need for a patient to agree with a procedure is called assent. The legal requirement for a responsible party to sign off on a procedure is called consent. Teens are neither afforded assent (the right to veto a procedure), nor consent (the right to sign off on a procedure).
“Runaway” teens are hunted down and captured like slaves. Imagine if marital vows were still literal and runaway wives could be tracked down and returned to their husbands. Wouldn’t that be awful? This is worse, because teens never entered an agreement for that to happen in the first place.
And let's not mention the high school, which is 97.8% a waste of time, and therefore 97.8% exploitation, according to my research.
All of this despite the fact that the brain is fully mature at the end of puberty (14-16), and the fact that before that, at the age of 12 or 13, many teen demographics are more measurably mature than many "adult" demographics, per both real outcomes and lab tests.
There is an incredibly urgent need to abolish this oppression in the interests of justice. The high school must be abolished and replaced with a traditional system where 20% go on to college-level education after 8th grade and the other 80% begin hands-on internships and apprenticeships. To make way for this, ownership-by-parents must be abolished. Starting by the age of 13, youths must have medical autonomy, the ability to both initiate and veto any procedure. The punishment camps must be abolished and those responsible must be prosecuted. Working and traveling laws must be adjusted to make way for the new education system.
There is already welfare for youths who are abandoned by their families, but teens must live in restrictive group homes which reproduce the oppressive parental-ownership system in order to receive it. These homes should be abolished, and the welfare should be converted to cash. In accordance with the new education system and the science of brain development, the new age of majority should be 15. Those 13 and up who are maturely pursuing their education or who have graduated should be granted minor status, as opposed to the pupil status of children, and should be allowed to proactively divorce bad parents, sign leases, and open bank accounts.
Just as a by the way, the deliberately exaggerated and screed-y language in parts of this make what good points you have seem radical and unreasonable.
If you believe this is such a big deal, for your sake, I strongly recommend better messaging.
A really successful tactic is to try to seem like "I'm just like all of you and I just happened to stumble onto this info holy shit are you guys seeing this? Shouldn't we worry about this?" And then make it very fact based. Less comparisons to slavery, for a start.
Thanks, I guess, for the advice, but it does come off as concern trolling to a degree. Maybe you should watch *your* tone? Lol.
Rational people should be able to not shut down and lose control when someone makes a slavery comparison (which is apt, by the way). It's either true or not true, I'm not really interested in talking with pearl clutchers who want to assert that I'm not allowed to liken X to Y because Y is sanctified and likening X to it is irreverent. I don't share the postmodern Western religion ("Successor ideology") and am not interested in validating it or catering to it.
To be clear Im NOT tone policing, say what you like, just some of your ideas are things I agree with (though mostly not, and the over-all worldview certainly not) and Im hoping you dont make them seem unreasonable to everyone by association.
I think the slavery comparison is laughable, tone deaf, and bad for your own cause, but fire away. I dont think anyones gonna shutdown, theyre just going to (statistically heuristically correctly) move on to higher-truth-yield pastures when they read it.
What exactly is untrue about the slavery comparison? Are you claiming that teens or slaves are not hunted as run aways? Are you claiming that one doesn't receive corporal punishment? Are you claiming that one doesn't have a master that makes all decisions, including the most intimate medical decisions, like whether or not to get vaccinated?
The comparison is ugly, but that's because teens *are* treated like slaves, and it's disgusting. Don't shoot the messenger.
My claim is that the lived experiences are totally disimilar to each other in such as way as that both groups would disagree that theyre the same and no one would mistake one for the other, and putting the groups together would make for nonsensical comparisons and policy recommendations.
You cant prove things with checklists and definitions.
"Slaves are hunted as runaways, teens are hunted as runaways, therefore teens are slaves" isnt even a true syllogism, let alone a true statement.
>My claim is that the lived experiences are totally dissimilar
Can you provide specific examples? Because my claim is the opposite, but at least I've provided some reasons for what I believe (e.g pointing out specific similarities).
>both groups would disagree that theyre the same and no one would mistake one for the other
You can't divorce this from widespread belief in the Successor Ideology. Furthermore, I do need to write on internalized ageism. Back before feminism women were largely treated like slaves, but the vast majority refused to admit it. Only after they were freed did women begin to de-internalized sexism/patriarchy etc.
>You cant prove things with checklists and definitions.
You can't prove an analogy, but you can provide reasons why it's useful and reasons why it's obcsurative.
Someone with the initials "JB" showing up in a corner of the SSC diaspora to tell us all about how horribly oppressed the yoots today are? What would be the odds of that!
Nobody owes you serious engagement and you've made yourself a clown a hundred times over. You aren't even a FUNNY clown.
EDIT: Ah, yes, since you're here, though, I DO have a burning question. You've repeatedly said that, in your view, a 14-year-old is "fully developed in every respect" and should have "full autonomy in every aspect". So, what are your feelings regarding "consensual" relationships between 14-year olds and 40-year olds? Where does your brave crusade for emancipation for the youths fall on that topic? It's a rather salient issue.
It's American English. There's an implied "idea" in there, so i.e. it says "you are rejecting a user's ideas with the help of the idea that that user is a troll."
Well I didnt make the image and I doubt someone will change the way they talk because some Irish lady thinks grammar policing is a good substitute for an argument
"17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West."
Here we go again.
We should start a book (sorry, on here we call such "prediction markets", don't we?) on what age our little friend is.
My estimates range from 12-14 years of age based on how he replies to criticism, but sometimes he might be as old as 16. I'm not going to go higher, seeing as how his solution for the oppression of 17 year olds (he bumped that one up from 15) is to draft 'em all into the army and send them off to fight and die in Ukraine.
Well, it is a solution. Can't be oppressed if you're pushing up daisies!
"It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else, just as slaves have been treated throughout history."
As they say, and there's people pay good money to be treated like that, and you're complaining about getting it for free? 😁
*kindly pats Joey on the head* No, it's not an argumentum ad hominem. It's not even an argumentum. Just an observation. Don't worry, it's extremely common for the young to believe that the old have forgotten what it's like to have been young. Sometimes it might even be true. But not usually.
This comment is just another ad hom. Could you please either add something to the discussion or stop? Nothing is gained from "silly you you must be 14" or "*pats Joey on the head*" etc.
>We should start a book (sorry, on here we call such "prediction markets", don't we?) on what age our little friend is.
ad hom
>My estimates range from 12-14 years of age based on how he replies to criticism, but sometimes he might be as old as 16. I'm not going to go higher, seeing as how his solution for the oppression of 17 year olds (he bumped that one up from 15) is to draft 'em all into the army and send them off to fight and die in Ukraine.
ad hom and straw man
>Well, it is a solution. Can't be oppressed if you're pushing up daisies!
straw man
>As they say, and there's people pay good money to be treated like that, and you're complaining about getting it for free? 😁
justifying beatings of teenagers with BDSM? Interesting take
>> Teenagers face whippings and beatings for disobedience, and if not that arbitrary confinement. It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else, just as slaves have been treated throughout history. Paddling is still practiced in schools in 19 US states.
So, I went looking for evidence on this item, and I was a little surprised. I had originally thought that this claim was easily-falsifiable. But it does look like there is some level of truth here: though the treatment of children in school is still not comparable to slavery, in my mind. [1]
As background: I reside in a State in which adults who have some authority over children in the Foster-care system can lose their status as Foster Parents (or parents can lose legal permission to spend any unsupervised time with their own children in split-custody scenarios) if Child Protective Services suspects that the adult in question might use corporal punishment on any children under their care. I suspect that school officials using corporal punishment would be subject to loss-of-job and prosecution for some form of assault on a minor.
Sometime in the year 2016, a journal article was published in PubMed about this subject. In that article, the authors collected legal rules and statistics governing corporal punishment in a school setting in the United States.
Among the charts that was published was a chart showing 'States with laws permitting corporal punishment in school', and 'Percent of school districts that have officials admitting to using corporal punishment at least once in the last year'. Three States had numbers above 50%, one state had a value above 26% but less than 50%. Two States had numbers in the range between 16% and 25%, while four States has numbers in the range 6% to 15%. The remaining nine States were at rates 5% and below.
Though it seems worrisome that some States score above 50% on the 'officials admit to using corporal punishment at least once in the last year', it also seems like an attempt to make a possibly-small problem seem large. There is no gradation from 'at least once in the last year' to 'more than 10 times in the last year' or 'more than 50 times in the last year'. Those gradations would be really useful in understanding the number of children impacted by this practice.
In a hypothetical scenario in which 50% of school districts in one State had one official perform corporal punishment once per year, the number of children impacted would be small relative to the total number of children in that State.
If you, yourself, received unjust punishment of this type from either a parent or a school official, you have my sympathies. It does mean that you may be a member of the oppressed class of people who have received that type of punishment from a school official or parent. However, that does not mean that all people under the age of 18 are members of that oppressed class.
[1] Slaves were part of an economic system in which the owner reaped great benefit from forcing the slave to perform labor without the slave being compensated for that labor; and without the slave even being free to choose where/when/how/for-whom to perform the labor. People under the age of 18 in school do not generate economic output for either their parents or for those who run the schools.
That is the first of many points in which the lives of children in school are different from the lives of slaves on a plantation.
>[1] Slaves were part of an economic system in which the owner reaped great benefit from forcing the slave to perform labor without the slave being compensated for that labor; and without the slave even being free to choose where/when/how/for-whom to perform the labor.
And 20th-21st century youths were/are part of an economic system in which "education" workers, teacher unions, "educational" corporations, and university PMC members reaped/reap great benefit from forcing the youth to perform labor without the youth being compensated for that labor; and without the youth even being free to choose where/when/how/for-whom to perform the labor.
>However, that does not mean that all people under the age of 18 are members of that oppressed class.
Sure but extrajudicial confinement is just as bad as an equivalent spanking, similar to how abduction is as serious if not more so than assault. Almost all teenage youth face ridiculous levels of extrajudicial confinement. Just because people have kind of moved away from corporal punishment doesn't mean there isn't still subjugation. Relevant text: https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Prison-Michel-Foucault/dp/0679752552
" It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else"
Lemme take some notes here for my next time helping plot out a darkfic, though to be frank, this is pretty tame compared to what we inflicted on the secondary character.
I do like the "property" bit though, gotta remember that for the next story!
Now, it does seem like paddling (which is spanking with a wooden paddle) is legal in American schools, and that did surprise me since this stopped over here in the late 70s.
We don't actually have data on the corporal punishment of black slaves. The single historical record that there is reveals a corporal punishment rate similar to that of most high schools that use a paddle. We don't know how severe it was. Any one-off horror stories or that picture of scars can be matched by the camps and stuff like A Child Called It but with youth.
So I am still unsure what exactly your objection is based on. Let's put it like this: if there is a 17 year old and they want to get a full time job and marry their sweetheart and live on their own, and they are fully capable of this, since they are fully developed and educated enough for 80+% of jobs, but they are instead forced to go to school for 40 hours a week, and if they don't cooperate, they are beaten with paddles, belts, or extrajudicially confined, and if they try to leave the house where this happens or the school where this happens they will be hunted down as a "runaway," then they are essentially living as slaves. How can you say otherwise?
"We don't actually have data on the corporal punishment of black slaves. The single historical record that there is reveals a corporal punishment rate similar to that of most high schools that use a paddle. We don't know how severe it was. Any one-off horror stories or that picture of scars can be matched by the camps and stuff like A Child Called It but with youth."
Mate, you do realise you have just pulled out of your arse "We don't know how bad black slaves in the pre-Civil War United States had it, but I am perfectly sure a white middle-class guy like me had it ten times worse as a teenager because I had to go to school"? You do realise that?
Do you realize that I never said youth slavery = 10 * black slavery? I'm saying youth slavery ~= black slavery at any moment in time for some active victim.
Our little boy who is fully mature and adult and brain developed because he's at least 13 and maybe as old as 15:
"Elsewhere teens are imprisoned without due process by parents and schools when they are “grounded” or assigned “detention.”
Do you realize that I never said youth slavery = 10 * black slavery? I'm saying youth slavery ~= black slavery at any moment in time for some active victim."
Some bozo named Dickens, never heard of him, seemingly went on a visit to the USA when slavery was still around and wrote it up as a sub-plot in one of his serials:
‘And may I ask,’ said Martin, glancing, but not with any displeasure, from Mark to the negro, ‘who this gentleman is? Another friend of yours?’
‘Why sir,’ returned Mark, taking him aside, and speaking confidentially in his ear, ‘he’s a man of colour, sir!’
‘Do you take me for a blind man,’ asked Martin, somewhat impatiently, ‘that you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?’
‘No, no; when I say a man of colour,’ returned Mark, ‘I mean that he’s been one of them as there’s picters of in the shops. A man and a brother, you know, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, favouring his master with a significant indication of the figure so often represented in tracts and cheap prints.
‘A slave!’ cried Martin, in a whisper.
‘Ah!’ said Mark in the same tone. ‘Nothing else. A slave. Why, when that there man was young—don’t look at him while I’m a-telling it—he was shot in the leg; gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like crimped fish; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron collar, and wore iron rings upon his wrists and ankles. The marks are on him to this day. When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off his coat, and took away my appetite.’
‘Is this true?’ asked Martin of his friend, who stood beside them.
‘I have no reason to doubt it,’ he answered, shaking his head ‘It very often is.’
‘Bless you,’ said Mark, ‘I know it is, from hearing his whole story. That master died; so did his second master from having his head cut open with a hatchet by another slave, who, when he’d done it, went and drowned himself; then he got a better one; in years and years he saved up a little money, and bought his freedom, which he got pretty cheap at last, on account of his strength being nearly gone, and he being ill. Then he come here. And now he’s a-saving up to treat himself, afore he dies, to one small purchase—it’s nothing to speak of. Only his own daughter; that’s all!’ cried Mr Tapley, becoming excited. ‘Liberty for ever! Hurrah! Hail, Columbia!’
"Joseph, you have to go to school, I don't care if you're 13, you're not a grown-up yet"
"Mooooom! You and Dad are so unfair! I'm a slave, this is just like slavery!"
"Joseph, you stayed out until 3:00 a.m. and never told us anything, your mother and I were worried sick, you're grounded for the next two weeks young man".
"DAAAD! You're a slave-owner! This is so unfair!"
'Youth slavery equivalent to black slavery at any moment in time'. Having to go to school or being punished for infractions = exact same thing as "whipped, branded, not permitted to have your children with you". Exactly the same thing, exactly!
***MOD*** I understand this is your hobbyhorse, but you've been posting about it in a bunch of open threads now and it's getting tiresome. Please try to limit your discussion of this to times when it's relevant.
I'll obey you but I will say that I'm disappointed. This topic is probably the most important thing posted in these open threads, and on your blog overall, other than war -- and even then the war in Ukraine is already opposed by the West, there's not much that can be changed by talking about it. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people are significantly harmed every decade by exploitative, coercive over-"education", tens of trillions of dollars are wasted every decade on it, it's the most expensive thing the government funds second to the military, and all of this rests on the falsehood(s) that I've exposed.
And now you're telling me I can't post about it here because I'm posting about it too much. Do you realize I haven't posted about it for the last month or so, and you responded to a 3 week old thread, and now I'm responding to an 8 day old comment, and you have a new open thread every week?
Add to that, the extreme amount of flat-out embarrassingly unreasonable flaming & disrespect you're tacitly allowing from your audience towards my occasional post is also disappointing. If you're gonna put the gloves on now maybe moderate the people saying things like "Aw, it's so cute how diddums has learned one phrase off by heart and can now repeat it ad nauseam! Why, you'd almost think he understood what it meant!" (this was after I told her that her comment consisting solely of guessing that I'm 14 is mere ad hom, lol) and "Nobody owes you serious engagement and you've made yourself a clown a hundred times over. You aren't even a FUNNY clown' (literally just pure flaming).
I really have a lot of respect for you & I hope you rethink this embargo on my ideas.
I'm thinking about using Obsidian to keep track of the material in my qi gong classes. Do people have favorite note-taking systems? I like the idea of making it easy to keep notes associated, but I'm concerned about having a way to sort through too many associations.
At work, I use OneNote because it's just the easiest when all your coworkers' documentation is there. For personal use, I use QOwnNotes or one of several physical notebooks divided by subject. I don't think physical notebooks work well with qi gong unless you're a good artist (I'm guessing you'd need images included?).
I think I can get by without pictures-- the movements I'm studying aren't that complicated, and I've got videos. The challenge is finding the video with the information I want.
The hard part is that there's so much detail and it's so entangled.
With Obsidian you don't even have to use links much - the quick finder is pretty amazing, and ctrl+shift+F helps with the rest. Throw in a MOC for something you want an overview of, and you're set.
You can also use the Dataview community plugin to just embed a dynamic list of all pages tagged with #qigong #exercise or whatever.
I've heard a number of people argue that Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if Trump were POTUS because Trump is a loose cannon and Putin would have feared him too much.
What I find interesting about that argument is that Trump supporters tended to argue that Trump was much less likely to get the US involved in foreign wars than a Democrat would.
Is there a reasonable way to square the circle and argue consistently that if Trump were still POTUS instead of Biden:
1) Putin would have been less likely to invade Ukraine
AND
2) The US would have been less likely to have involved itself in a war
>By acting crazy and unpredictable, Trump made it less likely that a hostile foreign leader would test us ("wait, what if he actually _would_ hit Moscow???") which means less wars.
By "unpredictable" here don't you mean "unpredictable with respect to fighting Russia"? If so, doesn't that mean Trump would have been more likely to start WWIII?
ETA: In other words, your argument refutes Point 2.
>The point is, if you think the other guy might do something extreme in response to a provocation, you step more carefully around them.
So if Trump was more likely to do something extreme in response to Russia's provocation, Trump was more likely to fight Russia in a provocation, right?
To be clear, are you saying that Putin would think Trump is crazy but that you would not? Because I don't think it's reasonable to claim you are able to read what Trump would do better than is Putin.
It's hard to call Trump the king of empty threats when a previous President made such public shows of declaring "red lines" with zero consequences for their violation.
To be fair, he did send out unmarked Gestapo agents to disappear peaceful arsonists off of the idyllic streets of Portland or some such thing. But your examples are all domestic politics.
In international politics he did wipe his ass with the Paris Accords and the JCPA (metaphorically, just like the piss hookers) and that may have given him enough "crazy enough to go through with it" cred to get the NATO freeloaders to start paying up.
I'm not interested in playing the game of "MY guy gets credit for all the good things that happened when he was in office (but none of the blame) and YOUR guy gets the blame for all of the bad things that have happened while he was in office (but none of the credit, and also we'll try to blame him for some of the stuff that happened under my guy's watch too)." Sanctions were passed under Trump. They were waived by the Biden Administration because it was deemed an inappropriate measure, given that it was America telling Russia and Germany what they could and couldn't do between each other, which is going beyond being the World's Policeman and into being the World's Dictator. The Biden Administration reached an agreement with Germany that sanctions would be reapplied if Russia used the pipeline as a political weapon or engaged in other hostile behavior. The second the Ukraine conflict got hot again those sanctions reactivated. None of this touches any actual issue. This is the only response you get from me, as every single engagement I have with you puts another impediment between me and enlightenment. I hope you have a good day.
Except, and I can't emphasize this enough, the US didn't (and couldn't barring some ridiculous actions) block Nord Stream 2. What we could do, and did was sanction the parties involved. When it became clear that wasn't going to stop the pipeline, we stopped sanctioning them as it was futile. When the situation changed, the countries actually involved in Nord Stream 2 (which does not include the US) blocked it and far more vigorous sanctions were imposed.
So, one way would be, Putin would be less likely to invade Ukraine NOW because he would hope that he could get some of his broader ambitions realized in other ways. Though the invasion of Ukraine isn't about NATO, if he could get NATO to collapse, or the US to withdraw from it, that would radically change the strategic situation in his favor throughout eastern Europe. So, if he believed there was a reasonable chance Trump might withdraw, then he might have declined to take action which would strengthen NATO's alliance.
But, if he still chose to proceed, it's certainly possible that Trump would have been less likely to support Ukraine. I frankly don't know if that's true, as for all his talk, he didn't actually accomplish much of anything on that front.
That's not a bad argument. Perhaps Trump could have retreated NATO in Eastern Europe. It does seem like Trump was kind of headed in that direction, if NATO countries didn't pay up more.
Maybe Trump was even a Russian asset and Putin could have convinced Trump to abandon a promise to defend Poland and the Baltics. Biden's election may have ended those plans.
I don't see why it's so far-fetched to imagine Trump felt beholden to Russians who bailed his businesses out after American banks wouldn't loan him anymore money.
This line of argument implies Putin would see Trump as a greater threat than a Biden, and also *you* would not see it that way, because if you saw it that way, you would expect that Trump would be more likely to go to war with Russia, which would fail to satisfy Condition 2. Zvi writes:
"In order to speak this language and wield this leverage you need to provide overwhelming evidence that you have the mafioso nature, that you will endlessly escalate until confronted by a superior force that is also willing to endlessly escalate. The only known way to do this involves actually having the mafioso nature. That’s a problem, because then you’ll think in zero-sum terms and also make dumb decisions."
That sounds like a refutation of Condition 2 to me.
So it requires that Trump would appear a Madman to Putin but not a Madman to *you*. I don't think that's a reasonable thing for anyone to claim.
Sure, but sticking with Zvi's theme, someone with a mafioso nature is also more likely to start an optional war. Putin, for instance. I don't find it hard to imagine Trump starting an optional war with Iran.
I've been reading Scott since 2013-2014 and have commented both in the old Slate Star Codex threads, and over on the SCC reddit and The Motte under various names.
If it weren't for Scott's incredible output I wouldn't be anywhere near the writer or thinker I am today, and if it weren't for the incredible communities he's built I almost certainly wouldn't have had the occasion to write nearly as much as I have.
Thank you.
I started a substack recently and the first content up are some effort posts from TheMotte.
a fitting piece to link since it was Scott's humour writing and long takes that inspired me to do a Capstone pseudo-thesis, and write a far FAR too rigorous look at the rhetoric of Homeric Poetry, and how Alex Jones seemingly replicates them.
So once again thankyou Scott and thankyou everyone. The wider SCC community has been an incredible addition to my life. I can't imagine the past decade as anything but immensely poorer without your influence. thankyou.
Do you do Russian-to-English translation, have time for quick-turnaround volunteer work, and wish to support Navalny & his team? Their excellent Youtube channel needs help with its English subtitles (which aren't excellent at all & are sometimes nonexistent, especially on their longer, more analytical videos.) I wish I spoke Russian, I'd contact them and offer, but alas I only do French-to-English.
I keep arguing here that Literature offers the best insights into human psychology, yet the field of psychology mostly ignores it because it has its ow literature.
Of course Jung took literature seriously, perhaps too seriously. Not sure about Freud.
I'm sure there are plenty of individual psychologists who are well read and have learned a lot about psychology from reading literature. That said, it still seems like Western Literature is a gold mine of psychological wisdom yet to be mined by the psychologists.
How would you formulate and test hypotheses on human psychology based on published literature? Doesn't that create a massive selection bias? It would tell you more about the psychology of writers than about humans in general.
A description of the huge and varied fan ecosystem that developed around a small but well-written game called Undertale.
I think we're living in an era of remarkable creativity which doesn't get noticed as much as it should be because a lot of it is created in gaming and in informal channels.
The 'American Song Contest' will premiere later today (Monday 21 March, 2022) with a two-hour primetime extravaganza on NBC in the States. The Grand Final will air on Monday 9 May - one day before the Eurovision Song Contest First Semi-Final.
Atlantic Records has released the first instalment of the original songs featured on NBC’s American Song Contest. Tonight, in the premiere episode the first 11 artists will perform their original songs in front of hosts Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg, a live studio audience and millions of viewers across America. The 11 songs featured on tonight’s episode are available to enjoy now.
Artists featured on the first episode:
Wonderland – AleXa (OK)
Wonder – Alisabeth Von Presley (IA)
LOKO – Christian Pagán (PR)
Held On Too Long – Hueston (RI)
Feel Your Love – Jake’O (WI)
Never Like This – Kelsey Lamb (AR)
Fire – Keyone Starr (MS)
Beautiful World – Michael Bolton (CT)
New Boot Goofin’ – Ryan Charles (WY)
Love In My City – UG skywalkin (IN)
Ready To Go – Yam Haus (MN)
The 56 artists across the series span a wide range of performers, from undiscovered talent, up-and-coming new artists, and rising stars to established and legendary icons.
An incredible solo artist, duo, group or band will represent each location and perform a new original song, celebrating the depth and variety of different styles and genres across America."
Since the national broadcaster in my country failed to pick this up, for some unfathomable reason, I have been denied the opportunity to enrich my life with "New Boot Goofin'" so I am depending on you, dear American ACX readers and contributors, to let me know what I am missing out on 😁
Don't forget to mark it in your calendars - the Grand Final on 9th May!
NPR did a multi-minute segment on this. While all of their personnel thinks this is the greatest thing EVAH, they were concerned that Eurovision is too "queer" to be successful in a nation "founded by Puritans."
[META] Why am I getting flamed and trolled so hard in my thread "Change My View: Anti-youth ageism is easily in the top 3 most important social problems facing the West. "?
The majority of comments at this point are ad homs or strawmans. I've started just responding with "ad hom." A select few users seem very upset about my thesis and have taken to non-stop flaming and trolling.
Examples: one guy accused me of being a troll even though I have written a whole book on anti-youth ageism, the education system, and brain development. Another guy keeps asking me about relationships between 14 year olds and 40 year olds despite me telling him multiple times that I won't be entertaining obvious scissor statement baiting. Most recently after telling him this he said "Your behavior leads me and basically everyone else who knows of your history to believe you're either a troll or a 16-year old with an unfortunate blend of low self-awareness, high narcissism, and a complete inability to NOT double down on every single half-baked idea that falls out of the Collyer Mansion you call a mind palace. " This was in response to me saying "nah I don't even care about your scissor statement bait. It's a non-issue compared to all the stuff I talk about, kind of like covid mask restrictions vs. ageism" and then he claimed he's not mad lol. One person linked me this image as his reply to my top level https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg . Then he said "A comment section is not a suicide pact that requires us to put up with endless bullshit." No explanation as to why my whole book that I've nourished for 4+ years is "bullshit." One person said, in response to me bringing up corporal punishment of youths, "As they say, and there's people pay good money to be treated like that, and you're complaining about getting it for free? 😁" She also insists on pontificating on what my true age is instead of engaging with my ideas. My favorite is probably "*kindly pats Joey on the head* [proceeds to patronize, no substantial objection to thesis]."
Not to be rude but isn't there rules against this kind of crap here? If I could block them I would, it's a few problem users who have decided to bravely defend the status quo against all manner of fact based criticism using only the most potent forms of irrational shaming and discussion killing. They *really* don't want people talking about ageism and it shows.
So, my question is why is this crazy level of flaming and outgroup booing being tolerated? I think this place would be a lot better without it and it really must be driving away people with ideas outside of the Overton window.
I think the reason you're being flamed is that you're advocating positions far outside the Overton window, and doing so in highly inflammatory terms (e.g. accusing those who disagree with you of supporting evils similar in nature and magnitude to Soviet gulags and Antebellum chattel slavery).
You also come across as dismissive when people engage with you to dispute these characterizations, either in terms of style or in terms of substance. The accusations of trolling and the ad hominem attacks came after a couple rounds of this, presumably because they interpreted your responses as indicating bad faith. I would not make such an accusation myself, as nothing I've read from you so far strikes me as necessarily inconsistent with you sincerely believing the arguments you're advocating, but I understand how others could have reached a different conclusion.
Moreover, I suspect you're making a similar mistake that's feeding to your seemingly-dismissing responses to what I read as attempts at constructive engagement with your arguments. As you (I assume) believe your own arguments and conclusions with a very high level of confidence, including the inflammatory comparisons, you're probably overly inclined to see pushback to your arguments and conclusions as being made in bad faith and to respond to them accordingly. Of course, it doesn't help that you're also getting responses that are actively hostile as well as the attempts at constructive argument.
>(e.g. accusing those who disagree with you of supporting evils similar in nature and magnitude to Soviet gulags and Antebellum chattel slavery).
I seriously believe this, and I optimize for truth, so what am I to do? Yes, if you beat your 17 year old with a belt or extrajudicially confine him for skipping school you a treating him as a slave. If you send him to a camp where he is starved and sent on long marches through the wilderness you have just sent your own blood to a gulag. His brain is developed, he is a young adult, and it's no different from me doing that to the parent because I don't like the parent's work performance.
>You also come across as dismissive when people engage with you to dispute these characterizations, either in terms of style or in terms of substance.
Where have people seriously engaged where I have been dismissive?
> I seriously believe this, and I optimize for truth, so what am I to do?
Consider optimizing your persuasion strategy for moving listeners who currently consider the idea absurd towards your beliefs. If they pattern-match you to a troll or a nutjob, they'll tune you out and you'll make no progress towards righting the extreme wrongs you perceive to be occurring.
On the other had, if optimizing for absolute candor is your utmost priority and you choose to be a lonely voice in the wilderness who speaks the truth even if the heavens fall, then own that decision and accept (unfair) dismissal and ridicule as the price of your candor.
> Where have people seriously engaged where I have been dismissive?
The first reply by Sovereigness made a similar suggestion to the one I just made in terms of optimizing for persuasion. You responded by accusing her of concern trolling and telling her "Maybe you should watch *your* tone? Lol." and saying "I'm not really interested in talking with pearl clutchers". While she was talking about tone instead of substance, I read her reply as being mild in tone and offered as a good-faith suggestion for making the discussion more productive. You responded with mockery, dismissal, and name-calling.
Essex's question about your argument seeming to imply that the sexual age of consent should be substantially lowered seems to me to be an attempt to engage with you on substance in good faith: conventional justification of setting the age of consent at 16-18 years old is that younger teenagers lack the emotional maturity to meaningfully consent to sex with adults, which is a line of thinking that you explicitly reject in other contexts. I think it's reasonable to ask you if you extend the same logic to age of consent, or if there's some other limiting principle (perhaps disparity of resources and life experience) on which to continue to forbid sexual relationships between middle-aged adults and younger teenagers. There are any number of reasonable ways you could have replied (biting the bullet and saying yes the age of consent should be lowered, proposing another limiting principle on which to base the age of consent, arguing that such relationships are morally suspect (like the conventional view of a relationship between an 18 year old and a 40 year old) but probably shouldn't be illegal, etc). Replying "This whole reply is an ad hom and a scissor statement bait question." isn't one of them.
You came closer to engaging constructively with serious engagement when people pushed back on the slavery comparison, but even there your arguments rely heavily on trying to shift the burden of proof to your interlocutors when you are the one who is in radical disagreement with prevailing opinion both among the commentariat here and among society at large. I suppose I can understand you doing so (as you framed your first comment as "I believe X, change my mind", and I expect your conclusions seem clearly and obviously true to you), but I also understand why it ruffles the feathers of your audience and interlocutors.
I think your presentation style seemed very self serving and intentionally lacking nuance. It seemed like you wanted to be flamed on, and are happy it happened. It's like when two mid sized twitter accounts pick a fight with each other, because they know it will get both of them attention... but just imo
No I just don't see a need for nuance here. The demand for nuance from my POV is a demand for me to lie about my conclusions so that they're more inside the Overton. Maybe I'm wrong. What nuance would you like?
It's not a demand. I actually started to read you post, since I thought the topic was potentially interesting, but never finished after about a third. The style was like a dark corner conspiracy blog, and I found in unpersuasive, and hard to read and take seriously. It's your choice... you can either be a more persuasive writer, or you can be mad at people for not finding your writing persuasive. Nobody can make a real demand on which you should choose, just as nobody can make a demand to someone to find something convincing. Good luck with whatever you choose, but don't expect more from people.
As a great writer once said (paraphrase) "Criticism is the most valuable thing in the world to receive, and your enemies give it to you for free."
I second what tempo said. I didn't respond to your comment because, frankly, you didn't seem like someone who was looking to have their view changed. You seemed like someone who wants to spread an idea. The unfortunate part is I can agree with some of the things you said. I think physical punishment is bad, the TTI is full of stories of abuse, and I've certaiunly known friends who are no longer on speaking terms with their parents. This becomes unfortunate not because I agree with you, but because I think the way you present your ideas will alienate far more people than it will persuade.
I also think your defense here is a little dishonest. You say: "One person linked me this image as his reply to my top level https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg". That person was responding to you responding to replying with just an image to another person calling you a troll. Sovereigness's initial reply about tone was responded to with you saying it came off as "concern trolling to a degree". Brett S doubted one of your statements, and rather than directly linking to any kind of direct answer, you suggested a rather long post of your own and your book (and the references section of the post says to go read the book). Not ever counterargument to you was great, but your own responses to the good ones aren't ones that I would consider good.
Most importantly to your presentation: your profile picture is a pedobear meme. That is incredibly ironic if your message is about children's independence.
If I try to approach you and your post in the best faith possible, you're a person with some (possibly) smart ideas but who is also incredibly tone deaf. On the other hand, if I hadn't seen the PDF of your book with my own eyes, I'd think you were trolling and were trying to point people search up a link that would end up as a rickroll.
As someone who used to be far more online than I am now: I don't think characterizing Spurdo as "a pedobear meme" is really very fair. It was originally a meme meant to mock people who spammed pedobear memes and thought they were the height of comedy and then just kind of turned into a general-use meme character associated with Scandinavia (specifically Finns and Finnish culture). My personal suspicion is that they're a troll (unconscious) who's overdosed on chan culture and is just using Spurdo because he's a haha funny meme. I do agree there's a certain irony here, though.
>The unfortunate part is I can agree with some of the things you said. I think physical punishment is bad, the TTI is full of stories of abuse, and I've certaiunly known friends who are no longer on speaking terms with their parents.
All of these things are in the Overton. Which things outside of the Overton do you agree with me on?
>This becomes unfortunate not because I agree with you, but because I think the way you present your ideas will alienate far more people than it will persuade.
Where did I commit a fallacy such that reasonable people would be alienated by my presentation of the evidence?
>I also think your defense here is a little dishonest. You say: "One person linked me this image as his reply to my top level https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg". That person was responding to you responding to replying with just an image to another person calling you a troll.
This is kind of like saying "Your defense is a little dishonest. You say: 'One person maced me with bear spray.' But that was only after you maced someone who was pointing a gun at you." For some reason people here seem to think that, among all insults one can levy, calling someone a troll is especially acceptable. The reality is contrary to that. Calling someone a troll is inflammatory, low effort, bad faith, and toxic to quality discussion.
>Sovereigness's initial reply about tone was responded to with you saying it came off as "concern trolling to a degree"
Yes because tone policing is a form of concern trolling.
>Brett S doubted one of your statements, and rather than directly linking to any kind of direct answer, you suggested a rather long post of your own and your book
Sorry I know a lot of people here want quick and easy answers but much like anything worth learning the book is about the best effort/mastery ratio you're gonna get with this topic. I can't teach a flat earther physics in a forum comment, I can't rewrite my book for every newbie who asks. I wrote summaries to try to cater somewhat to people who don't want to read 250 pages but now you're calling those long. It doesn't get shorter, sorry, that's just the level of complexity this topic is on.
>Most importantly to your presentation: your profile picture is a pedobear meme. That is incredibly ironic if your message is about children's independence.
No it was a randomly chosen spurdo sparde meme but I changed it to pepe since there apparently is a connection.
"Why am I getting flamed and trolled so hard in my thread "Change My View: Anti-youth ageism is easily in the top 3 most important social problems facing the West. "?"
(1) You bury what could be a reasonable and even accurate argument about the stage at which the human brain is fully functionally developed under emotionalism and exaggeration about "teen slavery", which makes you sound like a particularly over-wrought and not very good at it drag queen belting out "I Will Survive" off-key and getting the lyrics wrong.
(2) You refuse to accept any constructive criticism and instead declare that if we don't unconditionally accept your proposition 100% as-is, it is "ad hom" (a phrase you repeat until it becomes the squawking of a parrot) along with chanspeak like "lol". This does *not* contribute to an impression of maturity on your part.
(3) Since you won't consider arguments raised against your proposition, this does mean that engagement with you devolves into poking fun at your exaggerated claims. Regrettable, but true.
(4) Your sole claims are that "all (popular) brain science is wrong" and your sole evidence on this is "I wrote a book". What are your credentials to be an expert in this field? None, so far as anyone can make out; you simply use duelling studies - "Expert A said this which I disagree with, so they are wrong, but Expert B said that which I do agree with, so they are right". Unsupported claims of "I'm right because I'm a genius" won't go far and will, again, evoke mockery. I have read your book, I am neither impressed nor convinced by it.
(5) Again, there probably are good points about corporal punishment and the authority of parents over minor children, particularly abuses in the kind of camps you mention, but you shoot yourself in the foot by the rhodomontade about "teenage slavery". Nobody is going to take seriously that the experience of the majority of minors, which is not that of abuse, is on the same plane as chattel slavery. "I have to go to school" pales in comparison with "I have to pick cotton under the blazing sun and will be whipped if I don't pick enough or fast enough or simply because the overseer can do so".
(6) You set your bar for maturity very low; 13 - 15 years of age. You want people in that age range to have full adult freedoms, no oversight, and no authority over them - the government should simply give them money and let them enter into contracts etc. as they will. Can you really not envisage a large horde of criminals licking their lips at the thought of a new cohort of pigeons for them to pluck? Laws about the debts of minors and their ability to enter into contracts came about because of such deception of the young. Once again, this does not sound like mature consideration but rather like a teenager complaining their parents won't give them money for drink and cigarettes. It may well be that you hold the attitude "It is not our responsibility to protect fools from their folly; if 15 year old George gets conned out of his money by a fake landlord or someone with a Ponzi scheme, too bad for George, let him learn by the experience and if he has to end up homeless on the streets, well, them's the breaks". But if so, then state so, rather than demanding rights with no corresponding duties or responsibilities.
(7) Your great blow for the freedom of oppressed youth is that 15 year olds should besent off to die in Ukraine (this is how you started off your first comment on the entire topic here)? That after claiming teens were slaves for being made go to school, now you think they should be sent off to war? That's your idea of liberating them? I think many would prefer, if given such a choice, to be 'property' of their parents rather than Uncle Sam. Do you seriously propose that "15 year olds can't join the army" is one of the "top 3 most important social problems facing the West", more important than crime, homelessness, racism, the various phobias people are accusing each other of in regards to gender/orientation, the global economy and its knock-on effects, the knowledge versus gig economies and their knock-on effects, etc.?
(8) And to conclude, you now go running to Teacher in order to get the mean kids punished. You want the power to block and censor. You make yourself sound more and more like an immature person and certainly not like an adult that can fight their own corner. You haven't persuaded us, and all the toddler foot-stamping in the world won't do that. Make a reasonable, unexaggerated, unmelodramatic case for what you propose and argue it out. That's how to do it.
(9) Oh yes, and you do not impress me when you try to use an expansive vocabulary, get the terms wrong, and then once again come back with "I'm right and you're wrong".
>(4) Your sole claims are that "all (popular) brain science is wrong" and your sole evidence on this is "I wrote a book". What are your credentials to be an expert in this field? None, so far as anyone can make out; you simply use duelling studies - "Expert A said this which I disagree with, so they are wrong, but Expert B said that which I do agree with, so they are right". Unsupported claims of "I'm right because I'm a genius" won't go far and will, again, evoke mockery. I have read your book, I am neither impressed nor convinced by it.
I lost my longer reply by back arrowing but I wanted to address this in case curious on lookers fall for it. Last time you claimed to read my book you had only read half of chapter 1 and was mad that it was mostly summary despite the disclaimer. I doubt you read past that point because you don't accurately describe the structure of my parts on the brain. First I did a broad review of the literature and then I thoroughly went through the actual words and citations of "teen brain researchers" and found a 99%+ lie rate for the stuff they were saying. Literally, basically every source Jay Giedd and others would cite in review papers, essays, in the media, had nothing to do with their claims or debunked their own claims. Often I included other peer reviewed studies that further debunked their claims. Like in one instance Giedd made up something about cerebellum development during the teen years and said that because the cerebullum was still growing teens lack the ability to mentally coordinate activities and are messy. For one the cerebullum only has to do with literal, physical coordination, not mental planning. Two this guy cited one of his own studies which never mentioned the cerebellum once. Three I found multiple studies, not words of people in news articles, but peer reviewed studies, with data showing that the cerebullum stops growing around the age of 12, and that it begins to shrink after that and continues to shrink til death, AND that that shrinking is aging because there was a study showing that larger amounts of shrinkage were associated with mental decline! In my book I show how teen brain media, from review articles, to books, to news media, is almost 100% crap like this. It's almost unbelievable until you read the book, and for you to totally get that wrong tells me you didn't read it.
>(2) You refuse to accept any constructive criticism and instead declare that if we don't unconditionally accept your proposition 100% as-is, it is "ad hom" (a phrase you repeat until it becomes the squawking of a parrot) along with chanspeak like "lol". This does *not* contribute to an impression of maturity on your part.
What constructive criticism? Your comments were 95% wondering what my age is, 5% strawman, saying I want to send youth to Ukraine to die (no, I just don't want 17 year olds to be exempt from drafting based on ageism), and that I think youth is 10x worse than slavery (no, I think it's about the same, $130,000 != $1,300,000.)
>Nobody is going to take seriously that the experience of the majority of minors, which is not that of abuse, is on the same plane as chattel slavery. "I have to go to school" pales in comparison with "I have to pick cotton under the blazing sun and will be whipped if I don't pick enough or fast enough or simply because the overseer can do so".
Okay I think part of the issue here is that you have an unrealistic view of slavery. I think people are both overstating how constantly abusive slavery was and are understating how abusive youth is. Slavery was not 24/7 abuse, much like being a 17 year old, your master was somewhat invested in you. I cited data earlier showing corporal punishment rates were similar to schools that paddle. We don't know how severe it was. As for the work, black slaves were not worked to the bone so besides having the same restrictions on their freedoms as modern 17 year olds, their day was no different than any other wage earning farm hand. ctrl f "hours and difficulty" http://thealternativehypothesis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AltHypeReader.pdf
Meanwhile perhaps I should talk more on how high school is 97.8% exploitation. It is largely pointless labor, not mental enrichment or whatever, for the benefit of education corporations, teacher unions and their workers, and the university PMC. And much like black slaves it is not by choice, you are told where and when to do it, you are not free, you are beaten or extrajudicially confined if you do not comply, etc.
>Can you really not envisage a large horde of criminals licking their lips at the thought of a new cohort of pigeons for them to pluck?
The law should not cater to criminals. Idk what crime you're thinking of but reducing a large number of young adults to the freedom levels of slaves as a minority report crime prevention thing is a moral non-starter, and that's brushing aside the empirical argument for its need. I don't buy the gullibility thing but even if it were true, how about we put freedom, justice, and dignity first, before catering to criminals. This means free the decent people and just start punishing street thugs severely when they misbehave.
> Laws about the debts of minors and their ability to enter into contracts came about because of such deception of the young.
No they came about as an explicit economic enslavement of the young to their parents. It was thought that at the beginning of youth young adults should be property to their parents to reimburse them for the cost of raising them as children. Therefore they were stripped of their rights from 14 to 21, even though the law did recognize that around 14 they had attained full mental capacity, and could do a number of things that were not contradictory to their parents, like bequeath personal property (but not real property) in a will, Witness deeds and contracts, and testify in court, and serve in militias. If their parents were not around to chose for them they could chose are guardian or master to pay their debt to.
> It may well be that you hold the attitude "It is not our responsibility to protect fools from their folly; if 15 year old George gets conned out of his money by a fake landlord or someone with a Ponzi scheme, too bad for George, let him learn by the experience and if he has to end up homeless on the streets, well, them's the breaks".
Or flog the fraudster and make him pay back double what he stole?
>(7) Your great blow for the freedom of oppressed youth is that 15 year olds should besent off to die in Ukraine
If you don't consciously understand that this is a strawman idk where to say.
>(8) And to conclude, you now go running to Teacher in order to get the mean kids punished. You want the power to block and censor.
No I just want to stop getting flamed by angry Overton window fans who would rather this be their personal facebook than a place to share important, controversial ideas.
>(9) Oh yes, and you do not impress me when you try to use an expansive vocabulary, get the terms wrong, and then once again come back with "I'm right and you're wrong".
If you want me to take you seriously, drop stuff like this.
With all respect, folks: just stop feeding the (excruciatingly obvious) troll. This kid literally has Pedobear as his avatar, you have no obligation to take them seriously. @Scott, a ban is warranted, and if you can, ban the IP address because there is a clear history of sockpuppetry on other platforms with this user.
I am curious to hear what other people think of JB's constant screeding. Is it genuine belief, couched in the trappings of trolling just for shock value? Is it genuine belief, but JB is profoundly autistic? Is it just a straight-up troll (this one, given how long the con has gone on for, seems unlikely - wouldn't you tire of the game at *some* point?)? Is it someone who, for personal reasons, harbors immense hatred for rat-adj spaces and is trying to encourage witch-infiltration, or just show "look what kind of discussion happens in these disgusting places"?
as in, "modern schooling needs improvement" is a pretty uncontroversial thesis, a crowded space, and contains lots of people with a high level of expertise. It would be tough to gain traction and cash in with a position like that.
"School"="Slavery" seems more like a topic you could roll the dice on. Focus on marketing toward a 13-17yo subscriber base. Try to get 'internet famous', as everyone seems to want to do.
In my experience, the truly great stuff on the internet are things that have gone like 4-8years as a passion project, and then suddenly break out.
I'd put my personal money on 2 (or as I call it, "unconscious/accidental trolling"): at a certain point someone's social skills are so bad there's no difference between being socially-awkward and un-self-aware and just being a troll. This is probably someone who had 4chan teach them their foundational social mores instead of their parents or anyone else. I would, however, put a side-bet on actual trolling- there've been trolls who commit to the bit for YEARS without stopping. There's probably something psychiatric going on there anyways, but it happens.
I'm not here to socialize, so I'm basically not using "social skills", re: catering to your assumptions and current world view. I just optimize for truth, and I think 17 year olds are essentially experience slavery. This is a perfectly rational thing to say and I'm willing to defend it; it's censorship to tell me that I can't say that because it might trigger some people. It's your responsibility to engage rationally with my proposition or get out. I say 17 year olds are essentially enslaved and provide evidence & reasoning as to why, and so far you & the other trollers just -- idk, shut down? Like, this comment here is pure bulverism. It's pretty obviously the sort of thing that a cultivator of a space for serious discussion should want to avoid.
1. Yes, you've made it very clear you're here to pontificate, not communicate. This is a space for communication, not your soapbox. Your own substack is your soapbox. I should not have to explain this to you.
2. I'm not saying "you can't say that", I'm saying your claim is stupid and wrong. Others are saying your BEHAVIOR (notice that this is different from your viewpoint) is so anti-social that it justifies a ban.
3. A cultivator of any space would want to weed out someone with a history of not respecting even the most basic rules of the space he's in- like, say, a rationalist forum you spammed with your ideas, constantly insulted other users in, and then, upon being banned, started flooding with sockpuppets so heavily that some members of the community petitioned to put a temporary moratorium on new members because how how tiresome dealing with your socks were.
Bluntly: this isn't 4chan with a thesaurus, and neither is it a place where people are expected to enter into a suicide pact and tolerate any ridiculous idea floated out provided a poster's invoked the right shibboleths. Many people here kinder and more generous than I have given you very good advice on how to avoid hostility from me and your other detractors- I'd advise taking it.
>1. Yes, you've made it very clear you're here to pontificate, not communicate. This is a space for communication, not your soapbox. Your own substack is your soapbox. I should not have to explain this to you.
I'm here to communicate truth, not to make small talk, make you comfortable, etc. The question is: is this Essex's facebook where he gets to always be comfortable, bully out anyone he dislikes, and then go back to small talk and safe, in the overton banter, or is this a place to communicate truth? Mod's choice at this point I suppose.
>. I'm not saying "you can't say that", I'm saying your claim is stupid and wrong. Others are saying your BEHAVIOR (notice that this is different from your viewpoint) is so anti-social that it justifies a ban.
My behavior is that I'm optimizing for truth. This is prosocial when the community goal is to optimize for truth. Your behavior is antisocial with respect to such a community. If on the other hand this is a place for you to be comfortable, I am indeed anti-social, and you a pro-social warrior for comfort, small talk, and safe banter, which per such a space, should obviously be free of those who would threaten it with ideas like "17 year olds have fully developed brains and are treated like slaves, and this is because the Cathedral wants to capture their minds for their own material benefit. Here is a whole book on this." Yeah, that's uncomfortable for a lot of people -- teachers, professors, strict parents, people who faced abuse at that age and rationalized it away, etc. And it's definitely not small talk or safe.
>Many people here kinder and more generous than I have given you very good advice on how to avoid hostility from me and your other detractors- I'd advise taking it.
I'm sorry, what advice was that except self-censor?
Right, this is the last response you get: you clearly think that your little spiel about ageism is the One True Opinion and all others should weep before its glory. You are so confident in this that the closest thing to debate you engage in is "read my book and these studies and then you'll understand". When I asked you to cite a few of these studies so I could review them, you completely ignored me. This isn't communication, even "communicating truth", because communication is a two-way street and not a single external idea penetrates the leaden fortress surrounding your brain. You show zero interest in defending your points, persuading other people to listen to you, or even elaborating on your theory beyond couching it in increasingly-comedic and inflammatory comparisons to the point where I'm expecting the comparison to Jews in the Holocaust to be rolled out next week. You just say your piece and, when you receive even the slightest amount of pushback, you just say it again but louder, pounding on the metaphorical table while accusing anyone who doesn't immediately and uncritically kowtow to your theory (i.e. everyone) of engaging in bad-faith activity. When someone raises a question you find uncomfortable or brings up a point you can't simply sweep away by spouting shibboleths, you just stop responding to them entirely. That's what you did when I asked about your AoC views, that's what you did when I asked to see some of these "hundreds of studies" you kept citing, and that's what you've done now that I've invited you to come down and see direct evidence that comparisons between the current treatment of teenagers and chattel slavery in the US is wildly off-base. You seem to think that you can cozen and browbeat people into agreement, and more damningly that nobody else in the room has anything to say worth listening to. If you do this, you will continue to not persuade anyone, because people can tell when you are talking and when you are lecturing, and the only time people will accept a lecture is from their spouse, their parents, or if they're in a college course.
There were 3 or 4 bad times in my life where I was (one of) really confident in something, angry other people couldn't get it, felt like they were just being difficult, and (worst of all) gathering some kind of endorphin rush from engaging in certain conversations that were just fucking stupid.
Put all of those together at the same time, and you'd have an unconscious troll exactly like this one, where it's really bordering on some kind of mental illness.
It wasn't pedobear, it was spurdo sparde, nonetheless I changed it because I wasn't thinking about that. I just chose a random image from my 4chan folder.
As for you demanding that I be banned, this is what I'm talking about. I'm an effort poster with a scholarly book that I've worked on for years, a serious, highly important message about a fundamental flaw in present society, and you're just some guy who seems to be having a not-unemotional reaction to these serious theses, leading to you to desire me to be forcefully shut up. It's not unexpected that, when critiquing society, there will be a litany of people with vested interests in the status quo behaving in non-rational, censorious manner towards said critical ideas, which may or may not threaten their interests, their sentimental narratives, the interests of their loved ones, or their status, etc.
With regards to your behavior (flaming and trolling my threads), there are 2 alternatives. The first is to build a space meant for the exchange of serious, effortful ideas, in a rational manner, where people like me are encouraged to come and share literal years worth of original, unorthodox thought & scholarship, without getting spammed, trolled, flamed, and banned under false pretenses to satisfy the flamers. The second is to build a space where said flamers get their assumptions permanently catered to; effort, originality, truth, and scholarship take a backseat to orthodoxy and comfort.
I obviously think the first is preferable and that it would be fair to say you think the second is preferable. The 1st requires you to stop flaming by choice or ban, and the 2nd requires me to stop sharing my ideas by choice or ban.
I have a puzzle. Covid infection rates per million at present are about 92 in the U.S., 1,300 in the U.K., 2300 in Germany. Covid death rates per million are 3.2 in the U.S., 1.6 in the U.K., 2.3 in Germany. So infection rates are more than ten times lower in the U.S., death rates somewhat higher. What is going on?
The obvious explanations are that the U.S. is badly undercounting infections or overcounting deaths or that the U.K. and Germany (and various other countries) are badly overcounting infections or undercounting deaths, but it is hard to see how that could explain a more than ten-fold difference. It is even harder to explain why mortality rates in the U.S. would be more than ten times as high. Vaccination rates are a little lower in the U.S., but not hugely, and the age distribution in the U.S. has more young people and fewer old, which should reduce mortality rates.
Anyone have an answer? Are there webbed analyses of the question?
My first thought might be that for the case count numbers, you might have accidentally picked up different types of case counts (e.g. daily new cases in the US vs total active cases in other countries). But I double-checked and the NYT tracker (as reported through Google) claims new case counts that look like roughly the numbers you cited.
Second thought is that this could be partially an artifact time lag between new case count trends and death rate trends (roughly 3-4 weeks in US data, based on eyeballing peaks and inflection points for the Winter 2020-2021, Delta, and Epsilon surges). US case rates are trending substantially downwards over this period: current 7-day moving average of new US cases is about 40% of three weeks ago and about 30% of a month ago. UK new case are going the other way: 7-day moving average is 205% of 3 weeks ago and 290% of a month ago. Germany is also trending upwards, although less sharply than the US: 140% of 3 weeks ago and 114% of a month ago.
This time lag effect would explain a 5x-9x apparent difference in crude CFR between the US and UK, or a ~4x difference between the US and Germany. The actual apparent difference you're seeing in crude CFR is more like 30x, which still leaves a 4x-8x difference left unexplained.
I think testing rates might be a big piece of the rest of the puzzle. It looks like the US is currently doing about 260 new tests per 100k population, while Germany is doing 2284 tests per 100k population, about a 8.8x difference (very close to the unexplained residual difference in crude CFR after accounting for time lag). I haven't looked up UK testing rates yet. Data sources:
Lower vaccination in US (so more deaths) and more infection followed by natural immunity that is better than the vaccine... so lower infection rates in the US. But I'm making this up and don't know. You could ask Zvi. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/
Assuming those numbers are accurate, (I haven't checked them), I think it's pretty certain that the US is badly undercounting cases.
What you have there is more than one case of covid in 30 being fatal, which is obviously absurd. The UK and German numbers are closer to one case in 1000, which is more in line with what we know about COVID in a well-vaccinated population with decent medical care. So the error is in the US numbers, not the UK or Germany ones (although the UK is probably also undercounting cases at the moment, I believe).
Deaths are easy to count; cases are hard to count; not overcounting is easy; not undercounting is hard. Ergo, the US death numbers are probably either accurate or a moderate undercount, while the US case numbers are a ludicrous undercount.
Hmm I think it's fine if there is lag between case counts and deaths, that is sorta expected as a peak goes by. (You have to look at case counts X-weeks ago to correlate with deaths.)
I agree with Eric that the time lag and testing rates are important factors.
In addition, it seems to be the case that the fraction of cases that are in vaccinated people goes up during big COVID waves and down during COVID troughs. Since Germany and UK are in the middle of a COVID wave, you'd expect a larger fraction of their cases to be in vaccinated people, and therefore have a lower case fatality rate.
There seems to be a simple solution to the Ukraine invasion, but I haven't been seeing it much discussed.
The EU and USA should offer money, asylum, and a path to citizenship to any Russian soldiers and their families. Many (most?) Russian soldiers don’t want to be fighting, but they don’t have a way out. Rather than spending billions on war, the West could simply drain Putin’s army, while bolstering its workforce with young educated citizens.
There are 150k Russian soldiers deployed in Ukraine, so we are only talking about 500k “political refugees”, which we can easily absorb. This is tiny compared to the current number of Ukrainian refugees that the EU is already having to deal with, and will mostly be young men who will spend the rest of their lives contributing to western economies.
While we’re at it, why not offer asylum to Russians in general? Putin has destroyed the futures of all Russians, and the West is punishing them even more with economic sanctions. Rather than using sanctions as weapons to hurt civilians, we could be using them to brain-drain Russia.
It’s possible that Russia would respond by forbidding emigration, like the USSR, but that would simply return us to the status quo, while sending a really strong message to Russian citizens. Ukraine has already announced cash and asylum to surrendering soldiers, but asylum in the worn-ravaged Ukraine is not carrot enough for most soldiers.
Would love to hear thoughts on how this could go wrong, and ideas on how to signal-boost this approach. I’ve seen a few articles, but they don’t seem to be getting a lot of attention in the zeitgeist.
It's a nice idea, but unlikely to make a difference. Spending your life as a refugee *really sucks*. You are a stranger in a strange land where you don't even speak the language, the people around you see you as a barbarian only fit for mopping floors, you'll be shot as a traitor if you ever return home and your family back home will suffer dearly if they're caught talking to you, and you can maybe dream that if you somehow find a wife as a barbarian outlander then maybe your children will assimilate into their new country, but you'll probably never pull it off(*). Nobody's going to do that just because you promise them a new car, an iPhone, and a year's rent on a nice apartment. For a million dollars or euros, *maybe*, but at that point your 500k refugees is going to coat half a *trillion* dollars, plus overhead, plus graft and corruption.
Nobody's going to believe you when you tell them that they will be respected and admired for their courage and offered nice middle-class jobs. Multilingual Russian *doctors* in the west wind up mopping floors and driving taxis because we won't accept their credentials; here you're talking about young soldiers who only speak Russian and only know shooting, digging, and mopping. Plus, they're Russian and everybody knows the West hates Putin's Russia, and the bit about how we're all so totally enlightened that we'd never confuse the two or judge the individual by his ethnicity, pull the other one.
Also, they're liable to be shot in the back if they take a step towards accepting your offer, or even dwell more than a few seconds on the social media post where you make it.
Also also, how do you plan to get their families out? Once Junior goes AWOL, mom and dad and sis aren't getting passports ever again. Plus, you're being stingy by only allowing 2.3 family members per soldier. OK, *maybe* that stretches to mom and dad and sis, but now mom can't ever talk to *her* parents or siblings ever again? And she's going to go full refugee and pay that cost just to make her traitor son feel better? Extended families are a thing in Russia.
Really, for most people, muddling through and hoping they'll make it through the war without any crippling injuries will seem like the safer bet. And I'm not aware of any nation anywhere that ever successfully defended itself by bribing individual enemy soldiers to defect (as opposed to bribing the commanders of mercenary armies). That's not how people work.
Best that can be said, is that for the small minority of Russian soldiers who *are* willing to defect, we should probably make it as easy for them as possible. But don't count on it being enough to change the balance of power.
* Possible exception if your new country is the US or Canada, and/or has a substantial Russian immigrant community.
Have you read any of Kamil Galeev, (sorry if I sound like a broken record.) But he changed my perspective on the war, and I have no idea what it's like for a Russian soldier. (Well if his picture is near correct... )
Yes; it doesn't change anything. It sucks to be a Dagestani recruit in the Russian army. It also sucks to be a Dagestani refugee in Germany or wherever, once the initial defection-bonus money runs out. But the Dagestani recruit who sucks it up and completes his term, *probably* goes home alive to his family next year. Defecting and becoming a refugee, is forever.
And I didn't see anything in Galeev about how he proposed to extract the families of the hypothetically defecting soldiers.
Thanks for your perspective. As an immigrant from Russia, now very happy in the US, my experience differs.
Still, we can both agree that there is (at least) a small minority of soldiers that would be happy to defect for US/EU citizenship. Does this seem like a cost effective way to remove them from the war?
I have been trying to put up an announcement of the South Bay meetup this Sunday, but either I am doing something wrong or the LessWrong meetup site is broken. I keep getting:
(I'm mostly happy with Biden, so disagree with that part.)
I do keep making this weird analogy between Ukraine and the Canadian convoy.
U underdog against Russia, C underdog against Canada.
U defender, C aggressor.
U supported by media, C unsupported by media
U Financial weight of west in support, C crushed by Canada (some financial, but also raw government power.)
These stories are similar to me in that there's an underdog fighting against a bigger oppressor, (and I've felt myself in full support of the underdog in both cases.) there are then different paths... (I hope Ukraine is not crushed.) And the financial weight of the west is terrifying...
What prefix (if any) can be used to explicitly denote the opposite of 'meta-' as in e.g. meta-analysis, if we're talking about the 1st order, ground level, plain-old analysis? For example if you wanted to say: "John Doe focused their investigation on the meta-analysis without paying due attention to the ___-analysis."
Is anyone at EAGx in Oxford this weekend? If so I would love to meet up, I don’t know anyone there nor any rationalists and/or ACX readers in real life. If so let me know or book a meeting, my name is Gruffydd Gozali on swapcard. Or just reply here.
As a native German, I would only consider the form "Sie wussten nicht, dass der Wasserstand so stark ansteigen wird" correct if the rising water level is in the future of the speaker. (Though "würde" would be possible even then, because it's in the future of "them".) If it's in the speaker's past, then "würde" seems mandatory to me.
In fact, I would make the same distinction in English. I would find both the following sentences valid, but with different meaning:
"They didn't know that the sun would turn into a red giant."
"They didn't know that the sun will turn into a red giant."
The first one is appropriate if the red giant was in the speaker's past (or if it is a fictional event), the second one if the supernova is in the speaker's future (and it's about reality). Is that just a false analogy from German, am I using it wrong?
In German, it's definitely correct to use the same two structures
"Sie wussten nicht, dass die Sonne sich in einen roten Riesen verwandeln würde."
"Sie wussten nicht, dass die Sonne sich in einen roten Riesen verwandeln wird."
with exactly those two meanings.
Agreed, as native English speaker -- "would" is required for that sentence to be proper.
The second sentence would not be allowed in English.
As a native Polish speaker I always found the amount of tenses in English peculiar. What extra information is given by using future-in-the-past?
"The water will rise" -> "Woda się podniesie"
"They didn't know the water would rise" -> "Nie wiedzieli, że woda się podniesie"
Just use the simple future! We already know the context is the past ("they didn't know") so the next verb is phrased relative to that time.
FWIW, our use of the simple future here is also present agnostic. Are there languages that aren't present agnostic when phrasing sentences like this one?
"Would" in OP's example implies that the water rose after the past context but before the speaker's present. Using "will" instead implies that the water rising is still in the future.
For example:
"They didn't know it would rain [yesterday]."
vs
"They didn't know that it will rain [tomorrow]."
Tried to come up with a variation that felt grammatical, without adding verbs and thereby interfering with tenses. Best I got: "that it will/would rain is something they didn't know" (which of course includes the verb "is")
I sometimes find (my native) Czech limiting because there is no past perfect tense in Czech. Likewise, English is limiting because there is no verb aspect in English (although the continuous tense is somewhat similar...in German, which does not even have the continuous tense, this is even more limiting). I find pretty much all foreign languages limiting in that they do not differentiate between the nominative and vocative cases. There is no way in English, German, Romance languages or even all other Slavic languages to differentiate between "Tibor!" (nominative, someone simply exclaiming my name) and "Tibore!" (vocative, someone addressing me). I think the Baltic languages actually have the vocative case and Latin has it too but I don't think any other Indo-European languages do.
In general, the more languages I learn, the more I realize how imprecise language is and how some finer points can only be ascertained from context.
However, I wouldn't expect this to have any big sociological implications. While it might be true that one language might be better at explaining some fine grammatical details, ordinary people rarely make use of that. How often do you hear people use the conditional perfect tense in English (including native speakers)? I think this is pretty rare. Scholars might use this to make their ideas more precise I don't think any language makes maths-level precision particularly easy and this requires a lot of specific conditionals such as "if and only if" which do not appear in any everyday language (in fact I'd say most people don't even understand what "if and only if" means).
Polish has vocative case, though it's rarely used. e.g.
"Andrzej, chodź na piwo" and "Andrzeju, chodź na piwo" both mean "Andrzej! come drink a beer [with me/us]", with the latter one using a vocative form and sounding kind of formal/official. It's still used, historically it's been used a lot more often, in fact skipping it might be a modern development (?). For example, marriage vows use exclusively the vocative form.
Actually now that I think of it, perhaps we imported the idea from the Czech language? No idea how other Slavic languages handle it, I'm pretty sure Russian has no such thing.
EDIT: I checked and actually Russian has _two_ vocative cases, one is obsolete and very similar to the Polish one, the other is a colloquial construct only for close people.
Out of curiosity, why would someone exclaim a name in the nominative case, or care about the difference?
Unless I’m very mistaken, Romanian _does_ differentiate between vocative and nominative, but usually only for common nouns (and in some declinations the forms are identical). For example, you might exclaim “Cal!” or “Calul!” (meaning “Horse!” or “The horse!”), but you would address a horse as “calule”. However, you would say “câine” for “dog” in either nominative or vocative. A very common case is to say “domn" (either “gentleman” or “lord”, in nominative) or “doamne” (“lord” in vocative, the usual way to address God or, in the past, nobles; it also means “ladies” due to phonetic coincidence).
Proper nouns (i.e. names) aren’t don’t usually take the vocative form in modern usage, and until reading your comment it wouldn’t have occurred to me it was possible to _need_ the distinction. But now that I think of it, it is in fact possible to construct vocative forms of names, it’s just uncommon to use them. (Probably the most common example is “Ioane”, the vocative of “Ion”, which is part of the title and refrain of a well-known song.)
I was always fond of "duration from the past as seen in the future" E.g. "will have been [gerund]"
Dans 5 minutes, il aura travaille pendant deux heures.
To me this is the same thing, but is there a subtile distinction that I am missing?
I wanted to insist Romanian has future-in-the-past, but after thinking a bit more I think you’re right.
I might say something like “Ei nu știau că apa va fi crescut așa de mult” and I’d expect people to understand I’m stressing that the future is relative to the past sentence instead of possibly now, but I’m not 100% sure I’m not inventing this idiom under the influence of English. Certainly it’s not a usual phrasing. The usual interpretation of “va fi crescut” is future perfect (“will have risen”), and normally one would subordinate it to a _future_ tense primary sentence.
Could you summarise Yudkowsky's argument?
How do "letting important financial institutions go belly-up" and "printing money" relate? Wasn't the quantitative easing of the late 2000s intended to preserve banks?
> USG did do a number of taxpayer-funded bailouts
MMT:ers would take issue with this argument, since in their view there is no such thing as "taxpayer money". All money is created out of thin air from the central bank. Taxes are only really needed to cool inflation.
Well, there's always a good counterargument in the comments -
Q. Yeah… I've been wondering if maybe my currency is pretty much interchangeable with government bonds, now. Maybe when I buy government bonds from the sort of people who own government bonds in the first place, they just keep my currency around and don't buy anything else with it. Maybe I need to inject the money somewhere else.
A. First, like many other problems having to do with deflation, this hypothetical problem, if it existed, would be one that you could solve with moar money. There is some amount of money creation that overflows into the hands of people who can buy real things, that gets things moving again and causes all the factories to work at capacity and people to be employed and flows through all the trades that people can make."
This problem does seem to be happening: the people who sell government bonds to the government take that money and invest it somewhere else. Selling that bond doesn't really increase their marginal propensity to spend on anything besides asset purchases very much, and thus we see the modern economy where inflation is low while all asset prices are through the roof. Eliezer is of course correct that this could eventually be solved by MOAR MONEY, in that printing enough money will eventually raise inflation and get the economy working at capacity. But there are real negative effects to pouring the vast majority of the money created into bidding asset prices up ever higher, and relying on the fraction the trickles down to the real economy to do the stimulative work.
I see the Central Bankers as having tried the "moar money" route, seen that most of that money is diverted over into asset bubbles, and concluded that printing even more money is not a good route to stimulating the economy. The big hurdle is not an unwillingness to print ungodly amounts of money if necessary, it's an unwillingness to go for the kind of unconventional "send everybody a check" or "fund fiscal stimulus" uses for the newly created money that would direct a much higher proportion of that money into the real economy.
His writing doesn't read like someone who is an expert on either monetary policy or banks. More like some guy who has simply read a lot of blogs.
I'd suggest reading the opinions of trained economists over that of a dilettante on this issue.
"send everyone a check" has been done, a few times. In scenarios where increasing inflation is the goal, why is it not done more often? is it a separation of powers thing where buying bonds back is the central bank but sending out checks needs the government to pass a bill?
can you imagine a world where 1) central bank can just mail out checks to people at random times without any legislative approval and 2) central bank governors are nominated by the president every few years? US would become typical third world country where government gives out free cash just before every election to buy votes.
What do you mean fail? Wipe out the shareholders? That’s a fine idea.
But the company still exists as it would have $100 of billions in assets and $100s of billions debts. That would all have to be unwound.
Some would argue that the (actual) risk of complete ruin would change the behavior of the institutions so they would be unlikely to get very big while also taking undue risk. Many small institutions would surely go completely bell up but their assets and obligations would be much smaller.
Institutions don’t have behavior - individuals do. It’s all about the agency problem. If you’re an executive who already has $20 million - why not swing for the fences. If you win you get a few million. If you lose you get fired.
It’s all the age old agency problem.
True, but the board of directors or large shareholders may be more interested in a long term view which could impact hiring of executives, compensation structure, what budgets get approved, etc.
I'm absolutely fine with it. I don't understand why it's so widely regarded as wrong; "too big to fail" doesn't actually exist. A huge, overleveraged bank drags lots of companies and people down with it? Okay, that's a necessary risk-tolerance adjustment for the future. Now you know what kind of pitch sounds too good to be true. If you don't like the national economy being obliterated, update toward caution.
The only argument I can see as valid is that maybe the people responsible for bankruptcies should be shot, in emulation of prior times of unlimited liability where they had to shoot themselves to clear the family name.
Hard agree.
Have the entire c level do some seppuku; with the death poem and everything.
the thing to understand here is that if you increase the personal cost for bankers of going bankrupt they are going to lend money in a much more conservative manner. Right after a crisis e.g. when the idiocies in mortgage lending circa 2003-06 are fresh on one's mind this may seem like a good idea, but reduced financing availability during regular economic times will also severely curtail economic growth. It used to be that bankers would shoot themselves when their businesses failed, and we moved away from that not just for humanitarian reasons but because it was counterproductive from economic point of view. Similar to why we now have limited liability corps rather than forcing ruin on every shareholder when a company fails. And if you look at 07-09 crisis the main issue wasn't even that bankers weren't held accountable for bad risk underwriting, it was that they were able to securitize (i.e. sell on) that risk quickly to other investors which really removed all incentives to be correct. And you could probably say that that is a step too far, but securitization also has many uses that seem genuinely helpful. Dunno am on the fence on this topic - most of the time i feel like our economy has become overlevered and we've veered to far in direction of excessive financial efficiency which, similar to just in time supply chains, may blow up in our face one day when some big unexpected event happens. Maybe it would be better to have a bit less economic growth, less risk financing etc. in exchange for stronger antifragile features . But don't call for bankers' heads without also understanding the consequences / tradeoffs that would be involved.
"The thing to understand here is that if you increase the personal cost for bankers of going bankrupt they are going to lend money in a much more conservative manner."
That's the whole *point*.
"It used to be that bankers would shoot themselves when their businesses failed, and we moved away from that not just for humanitarian reasons but because it was counterproductive from economic point of view."
No, it wasn't counterproductive, people just got impatient with the natural pace of growth. Abolishing unlimited liability was like the Boomers effectively taking out loans on future generations: a gross indulgence of greed with almost incalculable negative consequences. There's no humanitarian *or* economic reason that a guy shouldn't have to first ruin his whole family, then shoot himself, if he screws up on that scale.
Well I don't necessarily (fully) disagree, have commented elsewhere that I think financialization may have gone too far and made system fragile. But how do you unwind what's already been done? It would involve decades of economic pain at a minimum and current generation taking it on a chin in massive way for sake of future ones/to repent for sins of past ones. If we cant get our act together for say addressing climate change what you are talking about is an order of magnitude harder still.
this has already been done? Post GFC there've been new standards for banks and resolution tools for regulators to allow banks to fail without bail outs. I’m not an expert but banks hold much more capital and their shareholders would be forced to bail-in. Banks will be allowed to fail, and the theory is this time it won’t bring down the rest of the financial system
(Check out the FSB reports and the Fed stress testing https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/stress-tests-capital-planning.htm
An outright collapse of a big bank would have major economic flow on effects (especially if depositors are wiped out, but also through other types of entanglements). But there are options in the government arsenal that prevent that outcome while still being reasonably incentive compatible. You can broker a takeover by another bank (as the US FDIC usually does when small banks fail). You can also nationalize - i.e. become the owner. Governments from certain ideological backgrounds will be very uneasy about that option, as is the case in the US. But they still partially did it in 2008, being careful to avoid owning a controlling share. The US taxpayers became ~40% owners of some of the largest banks. Those shares were then gradually sold back in the open market over the next few years.
The regulatory evolution that has happened since that event has involved a bit of shifting away from the (perhaps quixotic) idea of preventing bank collapses, toward facilitating more smooth transfers of control.
The option of issuing more currency in order to inflate your way out of a bank crisis would probably "work" but have serious side effects
The problem here is that we do not have a lot of information on the counterfactual, i.e., what would happen if we do let these firms go under. The way people think about this issue is probably hugely shaped by the experience of the Great Depression (1929) when 'too big to fail' institutions actually failed (monetary policy was not as expansive as it should have been) and the result was a much worse economic collapse than the Great Recession (2009). Decision makers aware of this history are probably very reticent to let institutions fail again.
That said, there is a compromise between the two positions which is what some Chicago people would support: "punish the people, save the institutions." This strategy is far from perfect, as you'll still be saving (passive) investors who knowingly took a risk and under the rules of capitalism should shoulder the cost when things go south. However, it does force the people that actually make decisions in these TBTF institutions think hard about whether they are taking excessive risks.
So this is basically solved now (well, 'solved' in one way, in that risk has now been largely pushed out of the banking system) via much more restrictive regulation post-crisis and 'bail-in' legislation (I'm more familiar with the European context, but banks are a bigger part of the European financial system anyway so it's more important in any case).
It's a case of where regulators and legislators saw the problem and acted on it pretty effectively. There are also 'bigness' penalties in the form of higher capital requirements (which continue to get higher as the banks get bigger) and stricter rules overall.
Where the critique goes wrong is assuming that the only thing banks do is provide funding, which a central bank could do just as well if you view it from the 20,000 foot level. What banks do is 'allocate' capital (not always perfectly, but better than randomly) where this is expected to more-than-reproduce itself.
There are arguments that banks aren't the perfect vehicle to do this, or that maybe just spraying money into the economy is better than selectively funding businesses based on analysis, but the coordination and capital allocation function requires bigness, and is very labour-intensive (and the many attempts to automate lending have gone rather poorly thus far outside of the micro-level).
I think there's general consensus that letting Lehman fail was a mistake. It started a domino effect leading to much worse problems. There's just too much contagion when large financial institutions fail. I think Yudkowsky's article does not address just how interconnected things are and how much value destruction occurs with a large bank failure.
I think everyone agrees this is not a good state to be in, so people have been trying to come up with solutions to either (a) let institutions fail in an orderly, non-contagious way (b) ensuring institutions don't fail through tighter regulations. The response to GFC included a bit of both, but personally I'd like to see a lot more of (a). An extreme idea I like is to have an "instant bankruptcy" process for large banks, where equity holders are immediately wiped out, and debt holders become equity holders, and the bank continues to do business uninterrupted.
If you want to learn more, some of the GFC memoirs were good--it's been many years since I read them, but I recall Hank Paulson's was a good source what actually happened during GFC. Some of the good financial bloggers (e.g. Matt Levine) have covered a lot of these topics in the past as well, but might be some effort to find all the articles.
---------RUSSIAN/UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY MEMBER SUPPORT COORDINATION SUBTHREAD---------
My friend recently opened an account in Kazakhstan, but it wasn't easy: you need to first get a Kazakh tax id to do that. I also heard that Georgian banks were willing to open an account after signing a statement that you don't support Russian aggression, but it may have changed since.
https://wise.com/ is an option. They are like.. a quasi-bank? Very easy to sign up but you might want to investigate whether their level of bankness is enough for you.
If you're willing to travel somewhere, then at least a year ago the Polish bank "PKO" was letting anyone open an account without having Polish residency (or a work/study visa, etc).
I think it doesn't work with Russia anymore and can refuse to open an account for a Russian citizen.
My friends with Russian passports signed up for Wise on March 11 and received their cards successfully (although they had to ship them through Poland). Or was it disabled later than March 11?
Ah, ok, maybe it's not a problem then. I know that they stopped money transfers to Russia, so I was assuming that they might have stopped opening accounts as well.
Just guessing here, but I would look into Estonia. You can get an e-residency online and start from there.
It seems that it's relatively easy to get working visa in Portugal: you need to prove income of just 700 euro per person. Here's the list of countries with different conditions: https://nomadgirl.co/countries-with-digital-nomad-visas/
I have e-residency and it's great. However, e-residency doesn't help you with opening a bank account — or at least it didn't several years ago.
E-residency lets you easily open a company in Estonia. You still need a personal bank account (in Estonia or elsewhere) because you can't just use the corporate bank account as a personal one. All corporate account expenses need to be business-related.
When I was opening a corporate LHV account (LHV is a big Estonian bank), I had to travel to Tallinn. I didn't need that for my corporate Wise account — but then you can just open a personal Wise account without e-residency.
Our company is cooperating with a UK company with a mostly Russian (and partly Ukrainian) dev team. The company moved all or most of their devs out of Russia two days after the invasion started (they are definitely no Putin supporters...which is also why we are still collaborating with them). Curiously, they moved their team to several countries - Turkey, Georgia, Armenia. The guy we are mostly working with is currently in Georgia after having moved from Armenia where he was relocated to initially (not sure why, visas maybe?).
I assume those guys would know quite a bit about how to deal with your situation (including the bank account etc.) and could help with some tips if you'd like Cr.
I think they moved the team abroad as a precaution but with what's been going on in Russia since I doubt a lot of them will be keen to come back. Also, if you're a software developer they might be hiring.
I think the chances are slim in the EU, some countries (like ours) have banned all Russian citizens from entering, other are less strict but opening a bank account is not likely a realistic option for Russians anywhere in the West.
Let me know if you'd like me to connect you with them.
Can you tell me more about EU countries banning all Russian citizens from entering? I was aware of travel bans for specific individuals, and of golden passport programs getting closed to Russians, but not of travel bans for all citizens.
(On the question of why one might want to move from Armenia to Georgia: both Armenia and Georgia are visa-free for Russians to enter; you can stay in Armenia for 6 months, and in Georgia for a year. If the choice was his, it could be that he knows more people in Georgia, or had better leads on finding housing. Also, as best I can tell, Georgia is making more gestures towards aligning itself with the EU, which might make it a more viable long-term proposition? If the choice was the company's, things like taxes might come into consideration as well.)
Well, the Czech republic stopped giving any new visas to Russians (with the exception of prolonging the visas of Russian students already studying in the country). This was implemented 3 weeks ago I think. I think Poland is doing the same.
Most other EU countries are not so strict though and since we are in Schengen, Russians can still technically come here (if they get a visa in Germany, they can still come and stay in the Czech republic for its duration because the visa is valid everywhere in the Schengen zone.).
Thank you for explaining the Armenia/Georgia situation (I am surprised Georgia is so open to Russians though, given that Russia is supporting the Southern Osetian seperatists). I am not sure whether he could choose which country he would move to at first (when leaving Russia, I think this was also done in a hurry) but perhaps when he then moved to Georgia it was his own decision. I guess I could ask.
All visas for Schengen for Russians are done in Estonia, and the system is overrun trying to process the Ukrainians. A Serbian friend of mine couldn't get a working German visa as the consulate in Belgrade told her they stopped processing all visas until the backlog is done. So unless those Russians have a Schengen visa already (which is unlikely as the old visa policies were quite strict) they are unlikely to get an EU visa now or soon.
Very important point - you can open a bank account in Georgia, even if you are a non-resident (and I've heard there are middle-men who can do it for you, so potentially there is a fully-remote option), and that means you would be able to work (remotely) and get paid right away...
If anyone in the Boston area wants to donate clothes, childcare supplies, etc. for Ukrainian refugees please contact me at: metacelsus at protonmail dot com, and we can coordinate.
My girlfriend and I will ship them to her cousins in Poland. Their village is now hosting 50+ refugees, many of whom had to leave quickly without taking all their belongings. We will ship them on Friday. We can get a pretty good deal on bulk shipping through a Polish agency.
Note that I do *not* recommend buying stuff to donate, it's more effective to donate the cash. But, for example, if you have extra clothes your kids have outgrown, you could donate them.
The most needed items right now are underwear, socks, and diapers.
It may be worth consulting what is needed - many donation points in Poland are flooded with clothes.
BTW, sending money may be far more effective (cheaper to send, prices are likely lower in Poland, faster to arrive). (though if you want to donate clothes it should not stop you!)
Project Kesher (PK) is a grassroots organization that has been serving the needs of women in the Former Soviet Union and Israel for 25 years. PK has a network of staff and volunteers on the ground in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. My wife has been on PK's Board for 15 years. I can vouch for their integrity and their ability to be nimble and efficient. They have already helped many women and families get to safety. Dollars go far in the region. A few hundred dollars can make all the difference.
https://www.projectkesher.org
If anyone wants an introduction to PK's CEO Karyn Gershon, let me know.
Scott, great that you are doing this.
Looks like it's specifically for helping Jewish folks?
They have since branched out, especially in these days of crisis.
Special scholarships are being set up for Ukrainian students who want to do graduate work or postdocs in Canada:
https://science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/98369.html
You would still apply normally to research labs/graduate school, but you'll have an advantage in admissions because you'll effectively be free for the lab you join. At many graduate programs here you apply directly to a professor's lab, and this scholarship is being publicized to professors. If accepted to a lab or graduate program, the school will then help you with a student visa.
If you are curious about graduate school in Canada and want more information about the admissions system, please contact me at:
CanadianScientist1985@gmail.com
I know a few people in Europe and the Middle East who I can ask to host. One of them (in Turkey) has already taken someone in. But no guarantees. I've also fled countries before (though not specifically Ukraine) and could give some basic advice if that'd be helpful.
I can also help with advice on remote work and the legal implications of working in a different country than you were previously. I think it's a better bet than temporary PESEL cards since it's not time limited to eighteen months. Though maybe the Poles will bet that they'll get extended? Anyway, sometimes companies won't hire because of the precarious status.
If you're hosting or trying to host refugees, be aware that a) you might register at some platform/organization and never hear back because they might be forbidden from brokering accommodations (trafficking laws, I think), and b) if you're not asked to register and just get to pick up people, no questions asked, that is very bad and very bad people could exploit that.
My parents are going through that process in Germany right now, the org that I volunteer at can't legally allocate people though they've tried, and a lot of folks are sitting on their empty rooms willing to help and can't find a way to make it happen safely.
Also, don't donate duvet covers and pillow cases. We're running out of space, and they're rarely requested (pretty much only for newly-opened emergency shelters and when people move into their own apartments). Out last donations from the 2015 Syria crisis were only distributed last year, and actually went to Ukraine.
Then what should you donate? Food: shelf-stable, ready to eat, the less equipment it requires to make and eat the better. Hygiene products. Pain medication. New underwear. Handwarmers. Heaters. But the bottleneck is efficient distribution, at the Polish/Ukrainian border there's so many different orgs and folks active helping, but no central distribution of donations, so pick some organization that does the distribution and find out what they, specifically, need.
Don't go there yourself unless you know what you're doing or have contacts there. A friend of mine is in Chełm right now and has to constantly translate and mediate between people who drove there with a vague intention of helping and the people they're trying to help.
Similar situation on Slovak/Ukrainian border. There don't seem to be a problem with brokering accommodation though. I've offered my flat, got people there the next day. (Yes, sounds dangerous, but human-traffickers so far seem to pick people up in person at the border instead of pretending to offer accommodation.) Maybe some kind of cooperation can be arranged? Say, the org in Germany can do the vetting of the people offering accommodation, an org in a country with less red tape the actual distribution? Anyway, if you want to get in contact with the people on the ground in Slovakia, drop me a note. sustrik at 250bpm dot com.
A Ukrainian colleague recommended Nova Ukraine (https://novaukraine.org/) as the most direct way to help refuges and victims of war on the ground in Ukraine.
The situation in the bordering countries, at least in Slovakia, is chaotic. There's a lot of volunteers helping, but the state is not keeping up. Cooperation is kind of ad-hoc, not really centralized, volunteers are getting tired and overwhelmed by the sheer number of refugees. What's really needed now IMO are managers, people able to organize large-scale cooperation, people able get funds where they are needed the most etc.
I guess a lot of effective altruists are hanging out on this forum: I think it would be important to find out what are the most effective causes w.r.t. refugee crisis. It may not be the most effective cause overall, but given that there are funds earmarked for it and people and organizations just donating without having much idea what specifically to donate to, it would be good if those funds are distributed to places where they can do the most good.
I suggest donating to People in Need, which is a Czech humanitarian organization with long track record, that is apparently doing a lot of things both on the borders and inside Ukraine. Their English page for Ukraine is currentyl here: https://www.peopleinneed.net/8-most-frequently-asked-questions-ukraine-8565gp
This seems like it might be a good way to determine the amount of actual management which is required in order to be effective. Everybody wants to avoid overhead in charitable work. I'm not certain anybody has done a good analysis to see what the appropriate range (including minimum) is.
> Everybody wants to avoid overhead in charitable work.
But that overhead is what's needed. We need low-to-middle-managers who can tell 50 untrained volunteers what to do and know what to do with a bunch of random donations.
The Austrian Science funds FWF provides some emergency budget to employ Ukrainian scientists who had to flee the war on existing FWF projects (for a year). See https://m.fwf.ac.at/en/research-funding/ukraine-support
So if you have/had to flee Ukraine and would like to work in Austria, you can see whether an existing project would be suitable for you and contact the PI ( project database here https://m.fwf.ac.at/en/research-in-practice/project-finder/search/template )
Senior Infra Engineer@FAANG looking for Rust/C++ short/mid-term work/contract.
I was visiting my parents when war started -> can't leave the country -> can't return to main job.
EDIT: i can be found at kilotaras (at) gmail.com
On the previous open thread there was https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-215/comment/5530044?s=r, they mentioned that they were open to people working remotely
How do we get in touch with you?
edited the post with email.
Never used substack and assumed there're direct messages.
Why can't you leave? At any rate, I'd suggest applying to remote jobs. There's a real demand, especially if you can speak English, and anything from TopTal to a remote job board should be a gold mine. Happy to help if this is new.
> Why can't you leave?
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/02/25/why-cant-men-leave-ukraine/
Like 100k+ other households in the UK, I have registered my spare room under the UK govt's Homes for Ukraine scheme (https://homesforukraine.campaign.gov.uk/). Under this scheme, refugees placed with a UK host will have full rights to live, work and access healthcare, benefits, employment support, education, and English language tuition in the UK for three years.
In theory, I and other prospective hosts should now be matched by the govt with a refugee. For obvious reasons I have low confidence in the govt's ability to do this speedily. If you or anyone you know is a Ukrainian refugee in need of UK accommodation, we can speed this up by coordinating directly. It's a small room in a small house with small children in it, about an hour outside London by train in the South East of the UK. Further details available on request at 0pedunculate at gmail dot com; if my house isn't to your liking or gets taken soon, almost everyone I know is also offering rooms through the scheme so we can probably find a place.
Same here – three bedroom house in Bath, south west England (lovely heritage city!). ukraine at 150mail dot com
To those fleeing from Ukraine: I heard that Moldova and Hungary are not very friendly towards Ukrainian refugees. The family that we are hosting went through those countries and report troubles with the locals in Moldova and unwillingness of Hungarian officials to help. It's better to flee through Poland and as soon as possible move towards Western Europe, since Poland is already full with refugees.
To those willing to host refugees: eu4ua.org is one of ways to directly offer help.
For those fleeing from Russia, see my comment in the previous thread: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links/comment/5437012?s=r.
The Hungarian government went to almost-fascist levels of hostility to refugees during the Syrian crisis. They are in theory friendly to refugees this time, but 1) all those anti-refugee campaigns six years ago probably left a mark, 2) they intentionally crippled some refugee support systems back then and those haven't fully recovered since, 3) the government is just pretty incompetent in general.
I don't think it's a terrible idea to go to Hungary but if I was free to pick as a refugee I would probably prefer Poland (and then Western Europe).
I don't think their opposition to being flooded with "differently-cultured" migrants has anything to do with fascism. That's like saying "almost democratic levels of degeneracy" — your team will cheer, but it's meaningless: just two "boo" signs stuck together.
How is it "fascist" to not have your country unwillingly filled with foreigners? That's completely absurd. No country has an obligation to accept this and the lesson from other european countries is clear: it makes your country worse off.
It's like saying you have a 'fascist-level" of hostility towards homeless people because you call the police if they try and break into your house.
>I heard that Moldova and Hungary are not very friendly towards Ukrainian refugees.
I can't speak to Hungary but for context, Moldova has taken the highest number of refugees per capita of any country.
An estimated 350,000 Ukrainian refugees in Moldova right now, a country with a total population of 2.6 million. So ~13% of the country is refugees. Additionally Moldova's per-capita household income is like $2,500.
For this reason I don't think it's fair to characterize Moldova as unfriendly and I think a better could be made they are the most friendly, competing with Poland.
It's now a tough life for Russians who are willing to move abroad fleeing from war but are treated as non-refugees at best or declined visas/entry and are harassed at worst.
One would think that a sane strategy is to actively enforce brain drain by sucking in each and every specialist trying to leave Russia, but so far we have yet to see a western country realize that.
A Russian friend of mine has been unsuccessfully trying to migrate to USA for many years now, - having legally stayed for several years there he was further declined all attempts to get new visas.
A few months before, he started the procedure of requesting a Canadian visa instead, but now that the UA/RU conflict broke out the process has been put to a halt.
Any recommendations for how an experienced Russian 3D animator could enter Canada or USA these days?
Unfortunately I don't know much about the situation in Canada and the US. The only thing I heard was that friends of my friends tried to request asylum in the US by entering from Mexico, but did succeed. I don't know all the details, but I think they were stopped already on the Mexican side.
This is just a speculation, but if your friends are already in the US, maybe they could also try to ask for asylum? With the current situation in Russia any Russian citizen opposing the war can plausibly end up in jail. This possibly makes sufficiently strong grounds for getting an asylum. And in any case the process will take at least months during which time they will be able to stay in the US.
That's the problem, they are currently in Russia.
I see. In that case I would maybe start by moving to some visa-free country like Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan or Cyprus and then applying for a digital nomad long-term visa in some European country, say Portugal or Czech Republic. This will obviously depends on whether they are able to prove that they have remote work with which they can support themselves.
The Czech republic won't be an option right now, we are currently not issuing any new visas to Russian citizens (including tourist visas, although Russian students currently studying at Czech universities are allowed to stay). You could theoretically still come with a Schengen visa but the Czechs are probably the most hawkish NATO nation right after the Poles and while in the media people sometimes talk about the need not to equate all Russians with Putin and good examples of civil resistance in Russia are highlighted, I don't think it is the best country to go to for Russians right now. I mean the national theatre is cancelling Tchaikovski's plays from this year's program. Also, we have our hands quite full with Ukrainian refugees already who are likely going to amount to 5% of the total population in a week or two, so I would not expect much effort to process political asylum requests from Russia.
Georgia or Armenia seem like a good bet. Our company is working with a UK-based but mostly Russian company which evacuated pretty much all of their dev team out of Russia two days after the invasion started. They are currently in Georgia, Armenia and Turkey (for some reason, different team members are in different countries).
EDIT: It seems I was wrong, the Czech republic is still issuing humanitarian visas for Russians. But I guess you'd need to somehow prove you are being persecuted in Russia, I'm not sure what the exact rules are.
No idea about Canada or USA short of marrying into them, but I did recently learn that Brexit forced UK companies to get much better at sponsoring work visas -- maybe that's a more promising path?
Getting into the US/Canada is a relatively hard process and probably impossible with the end of embassy services. It's easier to immigrate to some of the less popular countries (some of which can be quite nice). Plus it'll be easier to immigrate to the US as a non-Russian down the line.
"As a non-Russian" meaning stay somewhere else until you get their citizenship, then move to the US, possibly revoking your Russian citizenship in the process? That's a very long-term plan.
Yes because these are all long term plans. Emigrating to the US takes about three years just for a green card and multiple years after that to get citizenship. Three years is enough to get citizenship in another, easier country. And some will give you a green card right off the plane. Also, you'll be able to use documents from your new country instead of Russia if there's any geopolitical unpleasantness.
My point is if you need something RIGHT NOW and you're not a refugee (as most Russians won't be) then other countries will let you in much faster. And if you still want to get to the US you can still do so later.
The only immediate way to get US residence is to find a spouse. Even work visas with a job offer take 3-6 months.
Agreed that if you need something now, US / Canada is not the easiest way to get it, but emphasis is on "need" in that sentence. I can imagine wanting US/Canada or nothing, in which case I'm dubious that the right way is by first getting yet another citizenship. Whether wanting US/Canada or nothing is reasonable will presumably depend.
Canada is hard. I couldn't get a temporary resident visa for my own wife to visit me here. Edit: I should have mentioned that Canada is willing to give visas to highly skilled workers. (and Ukrainian refugees specifically.)
Here is an official EU information page for Ukrainian refugees (in English, Ukrainian and Russian): https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/stronger-europe-world/eu-solidarity-ukraine/eu-assistance-ukraine/information-people-fleeing-war-ukraine_en
Hi all!
So I'm an American paramedic who lives in Ukraine, currently in the west, my family and I have set up an NGO focusing on getting medical supplies and other nonlethal aid (radios/drones/body armor) to the Territorial Defense in the city of Ternopil, and elsewhere.
I know we're all rationalists here, and you should prioritize giving to thoroughly vetted organizations, which I 100% encourage you all to do.
However, I've found a gap, and I'm doing my best to to fill it, so if anyone from the Astral Codex Community wants to throw caution to the wind help out a rando anyway, our page is:
https://www.facebook.com/TernopilDefenceAid
And we're collecting money via Paypal:
ternopildefence@gmail.com
or
paypal.me/ukrainedefenceaid
We're all volunteer, so all the proceeds go directly to buying supplies. Alternatively if you have medical supplies you think may be useful, in Europe, feel free to get in touch and we'll chat about it. Thanks so much ya'll!
-JD
My friend, senior data scientist, would love to get out of Russia if only she had a job offer from a first world country, which is not an easy thing to get in current situation. I believe there are a lot of people in similar situation, myself somewhat included.
It would be great if there was some kind of program for Russian immigrants, providing them remote jobs in tech with minimal fuss.
My employer Funding Circle in the UK is hiring in a wide variety of roles, including senior data scientist. https://jobs.jobvite.com/funding-circle-uk/jobs
They pay well and have a nice and accommodating company culture. Some people are remote-only.
They've also set up a Ukraine Relocation Initiative, which gives preferential treatment & relocation help for refugees ("For any individuals displaced as a result of conflict - in the Ukraine or any other country"). https://jobs.jobvite.com/funding-circle-uk/job/od2Yifwf
(There's a bonus in it for me if I get engineers hired, so I would appreciate a message if someone does successfully apply, but no big deal.)
On the previous open thread there was https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-215/comment/5530044?s=r, they mentioned that they were open to people working remotely
I can help with this in a general sense. But the visa process is hard and more or less impossible if you're still in Russia right now. Not to mention remote work is too. (Yes, sanctions affect remote work.) Likewise, remote jobs can't get you a greencard unless the company converts it. My suggestion would be to leave for wherever will take them. Once they're out of the country (even on a tourist visa) remote work becomes possible and they can nomad for a while until they find a permanent place to stay. (And they should really look at some second world places. It's a lot easier to get into, eg, Thailand or Argentina than the US. And those are not bad places to live at all.)
Yeah, that's more or less the plan. Find a remote job in a first world country while residing in a non-Russia second world one.
LinkedIn pushed this at me: https://boards.greenhouse.io/equilibriumenergy -- an acquaintance works there. If this is of interest and you or your friend would like a chain of personal introductions, you can reach me at lastname at gmail.
How is your friends English/ business skills? They can hmu at sam@ncd.com
Last 2 weeks we saw a handful of 'Russian army will implode in 3 days' type statements. Have any of these folks explained why they were wrong?
Yes, hence the deafening silence from those who were claiming right up to the 24th of Feb that US claims of an imminent invasion were propaganda and that of course Putin had no intention of invading.
Can you give a particular example of this? Because while I would not say the will of the Russian army has “imploded,” there is evidence that their morale is decreasing dramatically in response to stiffer than expected Ukrainian resistance.
It looks like it’s still declining, at least at the lower levels. Though this is according to what British intelligence is saying, so take it with a grain of salt. https://twitter.com/LucasFoxNews/status/1500551253226573826
That report is from March 6th, 2 weeks ago.
And? This was well after the initial phase of the war, and I think the point was that it continues to decline slowly.
People talk about this encirclement of the main Ukrainian force in the Donbass, but how is it inevitable? It would require a Russian military thrust of hundreds of miles and encirclement could be prevented by the Ukrainians retreating a much shorter distance.
Fixed fortifications are not vitally important in modern war. Equipment is, but (1) it isn't as important as trained people to use it, and (2) Ukraine is being supplied with new equipment.
Ukraine is fighting a protracted war. Trading space for time is in their interest, even if it means abandoning fortifications. Their goal is to live to fight another day in an area they can defend, and to make it difficult for Russia to kill them.
The Ukrainians have retreated from their positions north of Kiev, and around Crimea, and they've retreated substantially from their initial positions facing the DPR and LPR, and they've always retreated in good order. They've never allowed themselves to be encircled that I know of except in Mariupol, which is unusually important and also an unusually good place to make Russians die, and *maybe* in the Chernihiv-Nizhyn salient, where they seem to be holding out quite nicely and from which I think they can break out from if they need to.
The Ukrainians are fighting defense, and the way you do that is not some comic-book "Never Retreat, Never Surrender, You Shall Not Pass!", but trading space for time and dead Russians. Retreating is *hard*, it takes skill and discipline to do it without turning into a rout, but it's how you win on the defense. If you do it right, it's costly enough - for the other side.
At the current exchange rate, costly enough that the Russians will run out of army before they've conquered half the Ukraine. And if the Russians run out of army, the Ukrainians can take back the land.
If the Ukrainians are smart enough to retreat before they are encircled and/or destroyed, that is. But they've done that every time it's mattered so far, so I don't see why they would stop now.
Presumably they were wrong because they were repeating Ukrainian propaganda. I would be shocked if anyone serious has already pirouetted on their position.
Well, I guess the sister comment is right that people who make excessive statements like this are either pushing propaganda (for the right side? but still) or are simply exaggerating a lot. Neither of those will post a post-mortem.
That being said, as someone who (silently) hoped this, for a short time it really looked like the invasion will fail quickly. The operational side was horrible, global reception was really bad for Russia and it looked like there are major economic and morale problems coming in Russias army. There was definitely a hope that Russia stops the invasion given how badly it failed in the beginning. More abstractly, I think a lot of people simply saw a trendline going off the cliff and extrapolated from there.
As of right now, though, it seems that Russia got its shit together or at least secured the funding to keep the invasion going, which (IMO) means that the Ukraine is in a really, really bad position now - the world can't help much more and it's very likely that if this comes down to who can support a war longer, Russia has very good chances. I'm hoping those three days are similar to "Russia will invade Ukraine in 3 days", but I'm not too optimistic.
The GDP of just the US and Eurozone is 22 times larger than that of Russia. Pretty sure the world can outlast Russian economic resources without even working up a sweat. Whether they will sustain an interest in doing so is another story, of course.
Russia can raze ukraine to the ground while we wait for the sanctions to work. Also, we in italy for example still have no way to substitute russian gas in a short time horizon.
In Italy you can at least get by without heating.
Further north gas is critical to keeping buildings habitable in the winter, so I can't say I blame Germans for being on the fence for so long.
Up until last week in some part of italy it was snowing
Danke, though this German winter was mild and a very sunny spring week now. Anyway: gas for private heating is cut last, gas for electricity second, gas for factories/companies first. Even a few hundred-thousands out of work is a hard sell. With Diesel at 9$+ a gallon, already - 2,20€/liter, hope I got the conversion right. AFAIK we do not pay Putin today's market-price for e.g. north-sea Brent, but a longer-term one/different base. - We better keep our economies in good shape to win a war of attrition. I do not expect Putin to suffer from a few billion € less if it is short time only.
Well, first of all, what do you think they're trying to do already? It's not like Russia is just messing around to date and have vast resources yet to commit. Secondly, who says we're just waiting for sanctions to work? There's a good reason the Ukies have been able to wipe out so much Russian armor, and it's not enthusiastic use of Molotov cocktails ha ha. Apparently they're going to get some hot new drones, too, and the open story is this is to use against tanks and stuff, but I think it more likely we hear still more stories of Russian generals mysteriously dying. I'm a little doubty they'll get Harpoons to take out Russian Black Sea fleet ships, because that seems very provocative indeed, but maybe they'll get targeting info and do the job themselves, who knows? Third...come on. If your *lives were at stake* I'm sure you could figure out some way to do without Russian gas. Might be damned unpleasant, but you could do it. So it's more a question, as I said, of what the rest of the world has the interest and will to do.
I disagree. Don't get me wrong, i am pro ukraine but we really have little alternatives. We cannot even import it via ships because we have very little in terms of plants that can process liquid natural gas. We shifted to coal, but we import coal from Russia. All plans to make us independent from Russia are on a time scale longer than ukraine can survive
What can you do in 8 months?
Turn the nuclear power plants back on??
Germany is pretty reliant on Russia for gas, coal and oil.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-much-does-germany-need-russian-gas-2022-01-20/
GDP isn’t the be all and end all of everything. Some products matter more than others. Russian gas and oil give them immense leverage.
I have less hope that the invasion falls apart, and slightly more hope that Putin and Zelinzky come up with a deal that makes it look like Putin won, but doesn't make concessions so bad that Russia will just rinse and repeat in 4 years. Putin needs a win after the embarrassing show, and he might prefer a fast win without further losses, then the potential repeat of Afghanistan.
I’d be far more interested in why all the “Kyiv would fall in 2 days” predictions were wrong.
Actually a discussion of the dictator information problem would be even more interesting.
I think quite a lot was written on the first one. I particularly liked the presentation in https://ig.ft.com/russias-war-in-ukraine-mapped/
On the dictator information problem, see e.g. https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ivan-krastev-on-russia-s-invasion-of-ukraine-putin-lives-in-historic-analogies-and-metaphors-a-1d043090-1111-4829-be90-c20fd5786288
It was Twitter that decided that Kyiv would fall in two days and that Putin was expecting Kyiv to fall in two days.
Oh yeah? What about the victory lap essay that got accidentally posted after 2 days announcing the capture of Ukraine? What about that airdrop into Hostomel airport on the first day?
Who knows if the first essay is true, or when it was supposed to be released. It was the era of the ghost of Kyiv.
Because morale is the most important thing in war, and it is almost impossible to measure in peacetime.
The unit-level cohesion of the Ukrainian army was a big unknown before the shooting started. The experience of 2014-2015 wasn't particularly favorable in that respect, and while the Ukrainians had eight years to improve on the lessons learned, there was anecdotal evidence that they hadn't learned what they needed to. So it was at least plausible that, when faced with a Guards Tank Army bearing down on them, the Ukrainians would cut and run and not stop until they reached the Polish border.
See also Afghanistan last year.
Anybody predicting that this *would surely* happen, was overconfident and full of themselves. But predicting that it *could* happen, maybe even that it was more likely than not, was reasonable until the first day's results were in.
”and it is almost impossible to measure in peacetime.”
Is it? Russian morale has been terrible. That said, I have no doubt if NATO lays siege to Moscow the defense with be absolutely ferocious.
Now that there's a war going on, we can see that Russian morale has been terrible. A month ago, that was still relatively unknown.
And the hypothetical of NATO laying siege to Moscow, could go either way depending on what the path to Moscow looks like.
> Russian army will implode in 3 days' type statements
I don't recall reading any such statement; can you give examples?
Same. I saw a lot of "look at this convoy out of gas," "look at these troops abandoning vehicles," "Why isn't Russia crushing Ukraine utterly like they were expected to" types of coverage, but I haven't seen anything on message boards or in media about how Russia would be *defeated*. Even the most pro-Ukrainian stuff I've seen has taken for granted that Russia will eventually win the conflict (even if only to settle into a protracted counter-insurgency).
https://twitter.com/ALanoszka/status/1500101542233481221
I think Kei and Beleester below really hit the nail on the head with this.
(1) this isn't an example of the predictions you're talking about, it's someone else saying they've seen those predictions. It's the old Trump-style "people are saying..." rhetorical play.
(2) Also, the predictions referenced aren't predicting ""implosion of the Russian army" they're predicting it "becoming a spent force." I (at least) read the first to be a total collapse/defeat, while the second would indicate exhaustion/inability to advance. That seems to be what Michael Koffman, the guy Alexander Lanoszka is quoting, means by "spent force."
"Exhausted in terms of combat effectiveness. What follows next I don’t know. Maybe a ceasefire where both sides reorganize and resupply, maybe a settlement. It depends on the course of the war and the situation in Russia. End."
"That’s not indicative of either side winning, or the war ending. I can’t predict how the next few weeks will go. Just looking at it from my limited perspective, I see this phase of it as bounded, especially given how the war began."
https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1499967950975115269
So maybe we're just all operating on different definitions of "implode"... when you refer to "'Russian army will implode in 3 days' type statements," how do you define the word "implode" as used in that sentence?
Yes, I've read and watched quite a bit of Michael Koffman on this conflict, and if anything he's been consistently making the point that the Russian Army should not be underestimated and never came close to saying they will implode in 3 days.
Koffman's main conclusion is that the way Russia will have to fight in the military campaign to 'win' a military victory ensures that Russia's political goals - the reason for the invasion initially - can not be achieved.
https://twitter.com/ALanoszka/status/1500101542233481221
This is not an example of someone predicting a collapse of three days, just someone saying they had seen other people make that prediction
agreed! unfortunately i did not catalog all these statements when i came across them, and I guess my twitter search skills are not great (i dont have an account, so looking at old posts is difficult)
*however*, I am just some random ACX poster. I figured it would be worth at least a few points of microevidence if someone with that accounts credentials had the same observations. He also does link to one example, but unfortunately it is at the upper end of the prediction times.
Perhaps another question to ask, is why did my media viewing habits expose me to these predictions, when most others did not? i dont know!
I don't know why you think ACX would be able to explain why someone on Twitter thinks what they think.
That aside, they said "becoming a spent force," not "collapse." If they mean that Russian forces are at the point where they can't push their offensives further, that's in-line with the expert opinions I've seen. Here's the ISW assessment from yesterday, for comparison:
"Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated."
("Culminated" is war nerd speak for "too exhausted/disorganized/unsupplied to keep going.")
pundit prediction and accountability is a pretty frequent topic around here. it's also an OT.
My point is that Twitter is the Fountain of Infinite Pundits, and I don't know this guy from Adam. Without other context I don't know why I should care that they heard someone else speculating on collapse in 3 days.
I mostly saw statements of this type from people who were just being overly optimistic and hopeful. I didn't see anyone say the Russians will implode in 3 days and then follow that up with thorough reasons why it would happen. I don't take such statements to be "predictions" in the formal sense. More just wishful thinking clouded by excitement.
I think the primary english language source of these claims is this page:
https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/277993621180390
<i>According to the available information, Russian occupation forces operating on the territory of Ukraine have ammunition and food supplies for no more than three days. </i>
This looks like the official Facebook page of the Ukrainian General Staff. It has since been reprinted by many sources. The claim was made early morning on the 22nd, so we have 2-3 days to see to which extent it was true.
In war, the first casualty is truth.
Tbf, it's one thing to read it and think "yeah sure ok", it's another to witness in real time the combination of fog of war + propaganda + whishful thinking + hysteria that turned any discourse on the Ukraine war into a mess of 99% unconfirmable bullshit.
Exactly to the contrary. In the last discussion on the topic, I thought Kiev would fall in a matter of weeks. I've now updated significantly away from that position after hearing from sources I trust about the level of Russian incompetence we've seen. I'm now inclined to believe that the people who were skeptical of the Russian army's capacities (none of whom said it would "implode in 3 days", by the way) were more right, and I was more wrong.
I now think the Russian army can't occupy and hold an intact Kiev; the most they'll be capable of is reduction bombing it and claiming the smoking ruins.
Disagree about claiming the smoking ruins. If anything, lack of population you need to worry about makes it easier to defend a city. That's the reason Russians aren't keen on letting Mariupol's population leave - defenders know that the attackers have no qualms destroying anything so they can't use civilian buildings as cover.
Has anyone made such claims on ACX? Or is there any person commenting here who made such silly predictions?
no, i saw them mainly from what seamed like accounts of people with wonky expertise in russia/eastern europe. i think some may have been checkmarked, but nobody with huge followers or generally popular.
One of the answers appears to be that the army and the people who are recruited into it are stunningly low-status in Russia, and that no one with any actual power is concerned about the casualties and terrible logistics.
Since everyone is asking where this came from, see this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1506150941367705604?cxt=HHwWiIC95aOT9uYpAAAA
That's not a claim that "the Russian army will implode in three days", though it could be and apparently was misunderstood as such by dilettantes who just heard professionals talking about this strange "logistics" thing for the first time. It's basically a claim that the Russian army will have to cease offensive operations and may be vulnerable to a counteroffensive in three days.
To elaborate: Armies do not have an initial stockpile of "supplies" that is depleted at a constant rate until it is gone, and they don't "implode" when the supplies are gone. The rate at which an army consumes supplies depends strongly on what that army is doing, so a claim like "three days of supplies" implies three days in their current posture, which turns into a week or more if they shift from aggressive attacks to holding against light resistance.
Furthermore, armies do tend to be resupplied over time. Now, much has been made about Russia's failures in this area, but it's not the case that they have been delivering *literally zero* supplies to their front-line troops. So if they shift to a holding action, and bring up fresh supplies at even the current limited rate, then that "week or more" might turn into two weeks, or two months or forever.
And, as the supplies run out, armies just get stingier about using them. They park their vehicles in the best firing positions they can find, shoot only when they have a clear target within effective range, and hold tight. If they are *literally* out of food or *literally* out of ammunition, they might surrender, but the amount of food and bullets it takes to forestall that is tiny compared to the fuel and artillery ammunition requirements of a major offensive.
So, professionals say something that in professional-speak means "the Russian offensive will stop in three days unless something drastically changes", and a bunch of random twiteratti say "the Russian army will *Implode!* in three days!". Says nothing we didn't already know about random twiteratti, and nothing much about either the professionals or the Russian army.
So, prediction markets are currently regulated as gambling in the US (is my understanding). It seems from Scott’s posts that it is not regulated as much in other countries. Is there a good way to legally delineate prediction markets from, say, sports betting?
I think Kalshi (which Scott briefly mentioned last month) demonstrates that yes, there is a good way. Its just that that good way is “hire good lawyers and lobbyists and let them spend years convincing the CFTC that what you’re doing isn’t gambling, but futures trading, and that you should be regulated as such.” Not the easiest of ways, but its a start.
Sports betting is perfectly legal in the USA now. It would be better to conflate prediction markets with sports betting.
Yeah, like paramutual betting but on people dying, not horse races. Prediction markets are an interesting idea, but the optics of wealthy intellectuals sitting around gambling money on how war with mass murder is going to turn out are really terrible. Like, wow that guys a genius, he made lots of money betting that the war/mass murder was going longer than anyone expected! Scott's altruism and general strong rationality of course blunt the edge of that critique, but, still, there are lots of ways to highlight the value of this kind of experiment, without focus on the betting odds on carnage.
I've read early insurance policies faced similar criticism, you can also characterize those as gambling on tragedy.
But you can alternatively characterize insurance as a hedge to help people overcome possible future tragedies, and that characterization ultimately dominated. (Or maybe the characterization that dominated is just the concept of insurance itself, it's no longer analogous to other normal things, it's just a normal thing itself.)
You can characterize prediction markets lots of different ways, some beneficial to humanity, some more jarring. I wonder, what drives society to accept a benign characterization over others?
Maybe a company could accept proposition bets as "insurance" against certain outcomes that might be bad for business. Though you can insure onion crops, and insurance companies can generally find a hedge against their own policies, so I'm not sure why that market didn't evolve into a broader loophole for otherwise banned onion futures.
Insurance isn't people betting on someone else's misfortune. It's buying protection against the buyer's own potential losses. Actually, trying to buy insurance against someone else's misfortune is legally impermissible in general. (The rule is sometimes put, you cannot buy insurance payable to yourself on your neighbors house.) So I don't think it would further the legal case for futures markets to characterize them as insurance because that would likely lead to them being declared to be against public policy in most jurisdictions.
Maybe prediction markets have some benefit to humanity, though I don't think it depends as much on how you characterize them as on whether someone can demonstrate the value in any concrete way. Personally, I've not seen anything to convince me one way or the other. My point was that prediction markets on war seems rather more like paramutual betting on dogfights than on horse races.
I'm glad you raised insurable interest. The history of insurable interest provisions is instructive here.
If I recall correctly, the early insurance industry arose as a way for churches in the UK to provide for widows or victims of fires. But as the industry expanded, it faced a dilemma, because the only similar thing communities were familiar with was gambling. As a religiously rooted service, this analogy to gambling was a major risk for this socially valuable service.
Insurable interest provisions were used to help distinguish insurance from gambling.
Because these provisions were originally added to shape perceptions of the skeptical, the laws on insurable interest vary a ton between jurisdictions. Some places, like the UK, you're not deemed to have any insurable emotional interest in the lives of your children! That's one extreme, probably due to the UK's proximity to the origin of insurance, when society was most skeptical. Most jurisdictions differ.
There's nothing inherently preventing some other jurisdiction from saying that the emotional and economic impacts of war are insurable. This would be in line with the loosening of insurable interest laws as the concept developed.
I struggle with the dogfight gambling analogy because such gamblers specifically encourage harm to animals in a way that prediction markets do not. That seems like a major morally relevant consideration to me.
There are other forms of hedging against tragedy we could consider. Suppose a local community pools its resources to build a trauma center in an underserved area. Building any clinic like that is a hedge against future violence, and the money would be (thankfully) wasted if there is no future violence. I agree with you that dogfighting is repugnant, but spending money to hedge against future harms, in the general case, is often noble.
"WAIT!" you might counter, "the trauma center helps people beyond the person hedging. Just as the dogfight gamblers cause harm, beyond the betting, the trauma center bends our intuitions the other way, because this group is treating the injured."
Ok, fair, what would be a more neutral analogy? The family or greengrocer who stocks up on extra food, forecasting an especially harsh winter or bad crop, is generally viewed as prudent and respectable, even though they are the primary beneficiary of their foresight.
Dogfighting is absolutely horrific. Hedges are more laudable.
> I don't think it depends as much on how you characterize them as on whether someone can demonstrate the value in any concrete way.
I applaud this move. "Impact" seems a much better standard than analogies, which are somewhat arbitrary. Though the bar seems somewhat high. There are a ton of legal things out there I don't think have any particular social benefit. It would be a high bar to say "everything is illegal until it proves it benefits society." How would we find socially beneficial technologies, like insurance, if everything starts out illegal by default?
most kinds of betting are legal in the US. Doesn’t mean that they aren’t extremely heavily regulated. My understanding is that sports betting has a decent amount of regulation on it
Legal *federally*. Not in every state, the northwest in particular has it banned. And because it's state by state, even where it isn't banned, I'd bet there are weird varying restrictions in different regions. So it seems like you'd need an army of lawyers.
But isn't "online" sports betting now legal across the country? Can't everyone in the US legally bet on DraftKings on their phone?
I suppose DraftKings is technically classified as "fantasy sports" which you can bet real money on. We just need DraftKings to add things such as Covid deaths and Zelensky's odds of staying in power as one of their "fantasy sports" on their app. Perhaps they could call the latter category "The Most Dangerous Game".
No, online sports betting is only legal in about 15 states so far.
According to this https://gamboool.com/how-is-draftkings-legal-and-what-states-dont-allow-it#:~:text=First%20off%2C%20yes%2C%20playing%20daily%20fantasy%20sports%20online,word%3A%20%E2%80%9Cfederal%20law.%E2%80%9D%20But%20how%20is%20DraftKings%20legal%3F
betting online on fantasy sports a la DraftKings and FanDuel is legal in 40 states, and DraftKings is fighting a legal battle in Texas, where they currently provide and advertise it to customers, even though Texas claims it's illegal.
So my initial assertion was wrong -- and it seems unlikely that prediction markets could be conflated with fantasy sports.
Have the policies of the federal reserve since the 2008 financial crisis caused an asset bubble? If so, please explain in detail the mechanism causing the bubble. If not, then why is the common perception that the Fed has caused an asset bubble? Thank you in advance for taking the time to reply.
To some degree, a bubble is a subjective call, given that it’s effectively a value judgement that market prices are in excess of a hypothetical efficient price. The facts on the ground are that the expansion of the federal reserve’s balance sheet has underwritten significant liquidity in capital markets, while a historically long bull market has played out. It will be a bubble if the fed shrinks it’s balance sheet and destroys all the value created in the last decade (via penalizing future growth, etc.). Alternatively, the fed may successfully exit its positions or it may continue to operate at similar levels of support for markets.
Historically, bubbles have been characterized by big expansions in the total market size, accommodated by new entrants cashing out existing ones. Bubbles pop when outside funding dries up and Suddenly everyone holding these very pricey assets can’t find anyone to buy them at their inflated prices. This one is different because the capacity of the fed to provide additional funds is theoretically unlimited but obviously subject to practical upper limits and just plain diminishing returns. So to some degree the answer is, like all good zen koans “we’ll see”.
Interest rates were incredibly low for one thing. Junk bonds - issued by the riskiest most overleveraged corporate borrowers used to pay 10%+ rates at least, last few years dropped below 4% at one point just incredibly unhealthy and the symptom of too much money chasing yield in all the wrong places. Argentina just a few years after last default was able to issue 100 year bonds (and promptly defaulted on them again) how stupid is that.
Aggressive interventions every time markets had a swoon (remember taper tantrum) was another problem that created expectations of a central bank put that encouraged people to gamble, always buy the dip etc. because they always expected the safety net to catch them.
In terms of actual mechanisms, am no macroecon / central bank expert but i guess it's a mix of interest rates, direct market buying from fed balance sheet, and expectation setting through forward guidance and market-placating behavior. Changing their mission statement to favor more heavily unemployment reduction (+ mixing in other political side goals like racial inequality and climate) vs. inflation control in recent years probably also didn't help sending wrong signals.
I need to pick a BA thesis (philosophy, preferably philosophy of mind) within the next week. I am very bad at this, I tend to vastly exceed scope and cram too much into the page limit, and every student paper so far has gotten the feedback that I could turn this into a thesis easily. But I also start off from a vague area of research and settle on a proper question only in the last stages. I'm not allowed to do that for a BA, I need to register a topic and stick to it.
Anyone interested in making suggestions, asking questions, refining my notes can go to
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yQgNrcms-liYSlMoaN5tSUoP76DEcXdcW6VgLhjReUw/edit?usp=sharing
You should have a thesis advisor. I’d definitely run the final top three past them. You’ll have done the hard work of finding something you care about enough; they’ll have a good sense of what will most like project forward into a good thesis.
If you’re thinking about using it as a sample for grad school they’ll also be able to help you choose a topic that will showcase your strengths best given your career goals.
I have two meetings with professors set up for the next days, but have nobody else to talk about these things, so going from "uuuuh something in the direction of cognitive linguistics" to "well, this group of problems looks promising" is easiest when I try to explain myself to strangers.
I chipped in a few thoughts. You might also find the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a nice place to explore; their articles are focused enough to point out recent work and open puzzles that people consider interesting. Good luck!
I was a philosophy major as an undergrad, and fascinated by philosophy of mind. I'm also several decades deeper into life than you are. I read your page of potential BA topics, & here's what I think. You are obviously smart as fuck. You do not need to worry about not making it as a philosopher or a neuroscientist. Don't buy into the idea that you need to get some faculty advisor's advice on what topic to pick in order to avoid ending up at some intellectual or professional dead end. Your professional success is not hanging the balance. Fuck worrying about that stuff. Pick the topic you think your mind will fasten on with the most passion and focus. Since you tend to bite off more than you can chew, pick something smaller and more specific than you're inclined to, and let you mind go to town on that. The chance is nil that you will run out of things to say before you produce a substantial enough piece. Happy Wittgenstein, buddy.
Thank you so much! That's really nice to hear. I feel like I misrepresented my future, though, chronic illness and a persistent tendency to switch careers every couple of years (I am a qualified media designer as well as software developer, oh, and I sell fallacy card games) mean I have no professional success waiting for me at any point. I'm a high-school dropout finally basking in university life, I study for the sake of studying, and afterwards I'll probably get a part-time home-office programming job because there's no way to reach for the stars on 20 hours a week, career-wise. So, student papers are probably the closest I'll ever get to research, and I want to make the most of it, learning stuff that matters to me.
I'm a bit confused about your situation. You're going to get a BA then do part-time programming 20 hours a week? And do you mean you'll be doing that while going to grad school? Or just doing that and nothing else? There was something in your earlier post about going for a masters in cognitive science or something like that, but couldn't find that just now. Can you clarify what's going to happen after your get your BA, and what you're hoping to be doing in a few years?
I didn't finish high school either, but went to college anyhoo, so don't worry about your odd and messy start. At college I fell in love with Wittgenstein, symbolic logic, Goedel's proof, AJ Ayer and Daniel Dennett. I ended up with a career in another field, but I'd say those college years as a philosophy major were the intellectual high point of my life. I got so excited about that stuff that I actually cried sometimes when I finally understood particularly difficult bits. And all the paradoxes and mental moves and weird, almost mystical, visions of the strangeness and complexity of things just sort of became a part of me, and still inform my thinking. And the *people,* especially Wittgenstein for me.
Anyhow, if your situation is vastly different, maybe what I have to say about the whole thing doesn't apply to your situation, but here it is anyhow: Your fascination with these topics if a valuable and magical thing. It will give you energy to drive your mind deep into all kinds of subjects, & it will remain a source of mental models and mystical feels for the rest of your life. So go with that. It's the best thing you've got going on. Pick your topic based on how fascinated your are by it and by how much it revs up your mind. Forget consulting some professor, who may have lost his mojo and be stuck navigating decisions about what to write next by considering what topics are currently fashionable and what rivals he most wants to one-up. Don't let him influence you with considerations of that kind. Nobody expects an undergrad to have that sort of canniness in picking a topic. In fact, people who are in love with philosophy might see your picking a "trending" kind of topic as bad sign -- a sign that you don't love the field and are learning the production of philosophy articles as you would a trade. So forget all that and just pick the subject that thrills you the most.
If you want more advice, I'm game.
Oh, sorry, I probably wasn't clear. I'll get my BA, then go get an MA in cognitive science, and then I'll probably have trouble finding employment because of illness. I expect I'll either go for a PhD (if the opportunity arises) or go back to programming (because there's interesting part-time & home office jobs in that field), or make a living self-employed ... I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, I consider software development my fallback career though, as it's pretty forgiving to sickly goblin types.
I love studying very much and am very happy for the opportunity, but I'm not sure it's leading anywhere (career-wise), for me, so I'm mostly doing it for myself.
The talk with my professor today was incredibly frustrating, because he didn't understand my notes at all, was strongly against any interdisciplinary approach and tried to push a bog standard topic on me, when what I really want is not prove I can write what everyone can, but write what only I can (pardon the hubris). I'll try others, though he's the one who's in the field.
I'm not strategic in my topic selection at all, my problem is mostly to go from "this sort of stuff is fascinating" to a proper(ly scoped) question to tackle. The actual writing is not an issue.
"incredibly frustrating, because he didn't understand my notes at all, was strongly against any interdisciplinary approach and tried to push a bog standard topic on me, when what I really want is not prove I can write what everyone can, but write what only I can "
Yes, exactly. If you are studying for pleasure, you'll get the most pleasure from writing what only you can. If you have try to for grad school or a career in philosophy, writing a thesis that only you can is your best shot at getting respectful attention. Everybody can tell the difference between something that's well-coached and something that's the real deal.
So you're a sick goblin? Want to say what your illness is, or is that too private?
Sucks when you don't get a conducive mentor. I know that feeling. It's Joshua who commented on your pages, for you to know.
> "I tend to vastly exceed scope and cram too much into the page limit, and every student paper so far has gotten the feedback that I could turn this into a thesis easily."
1. This is sort of delightful to hear. Obligatory "Banach's Thesis would maybe-never had happened if his colleagues hadn't NINJA'd him into defending it without telling him that was what was happening" story link: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/111724/who-wrote-up-banachs-thesis (so thankful for whoever posted it in the ACXD server 2 years ago.)
2. Share what the topics/titles of those papers were? (Unless that's basically what the list in the Google Doc IS made of! Along with a few other things of interest.)
that is a lovely anecdote, thanks for sharing!
Coming from somebody who is outside academia it seems to me that that is the answer to the question. If you have multiple papers that “could easily be turned into a thesis“ the easiest thing to do would be to pick your favorite and go.
Thank you so much, but "could be turned into a (BA) thesis (with some work)", not "basically a PhD" ... That anecdote is delightful, but not all that relatable.
Previous papers were on:
- Scientific Regression? The Return of Scurvy in early 20th Century (analyzed through the lens of Ludwik Fleck's work)
- Authority and Freedom in Capitalism. Popper and Hayek: Liberal Social Philosophy in the Context of Economic Relations
- Embodied Consciousness
And the sociology papers (my other subject):
- Excess of Men in Rural East Germany Post-Reunion (selective migration, crippled birth rates and the resulting marriage squeeze)
- BDSM: Consensual Domination and Submission as Sexual Practice in Context Societal Power Structures (mostly recapping the lesbian sex wars of the 70s - yes, that's what they're called; also: reading porn, for science)
- Poverty on the Internet: Digital Panhandling (currently writing)
For a thesis, for a smart student, the biggest difficulty is picking a topic you can finish writing something about. For that reason, it can be helpful to pick the topic adjacent to the one that interests you most, rather than the one that actually interests you most - the one that interests you most will turn into a 700 page monster and eat up many years of your life. For someone who’s smart and good at coming up with ideas, the next step comes with showing that you can finish a product. I need to get back to my own grad students in a few minutes so I won’t dive into the details of your topics, but it is helpful to pick something with a well-defined scope - not “here are problems that arise with cognitive pentrability of experience” but something more like “Siegel’s argument regarding the cognitive penetrability of experience rests on the following four assumptions, and I show a novel reason to reject the second”. There will be plenty of material to fill a full thesis involved in giving the background, discussing other relevant arguments, and showing why your particular rejection has some interest of its own.
This is excellent advice.
What would it take to get an effective Iron Dome/anti-artillery or anti-ballistic missile system up and running for Ukraine, to protect at least Kyiv if not some of their other cities? I was wondering about this earlier in the week, and then I saw a Reuters article that Zelensky was asking Israel for Iron Dome technology (it’s a defensive system that shoots down Palestinian or Hezbollah rockets aimed at their cities, if you don’t know what it is).
Could Israel (with obvious Western help) set up & implement such a system in a few weeks? Months? By 2023? Would it be effective against not just Russian artillery, but also actual Russian missiles? Is this doable at all? (This question is specifically directed at John Schilling, who seems to know about these things, but obviously is open for anyone who knows more than me). Would seem to be a game-changer for Ukraine if so
I am by no means an expert, but my guess is that the level of defence required to protect against eh Russian army is orders of magnitude more than is required to stop the very limited armaments available to Hezbollah, and I would be very surprised it it was possible in theory, let alone trying to set it up in cities already under siege. Consider that North Korean artillery still threatens Seoul - if an Iron Dome style system could work at that scale I'd expect South Korea to have one.
You'd be hard pressed to defend against North Korea's artillery. They don't have just one or two pieces, they sport about 6,000 guns aimed at Seoul alone. Iron Dome chokes on 50 missiles fired at once.
Or at least, things that *look* like guns.
And ballistic shells are different than rockets.
Iron Dome would not be useful against artillery and most rockets. Each ID interception costs ~$100k. Even in the Israeli case it's a losing proposition, economically, as the cost of the cheap-ass rockets Hamas uses is way less than $100k, but the Israeli calculation is different anyway.
Is there any existing system capable of protecting against what Russia launches, especially given volume of attacks? I expect that destroying launch systems wold be easier.
You'd need an impossible number of interceptors to make that work. Literally impossible, in that there aren't enough factories with the very specialized tooling needed to build enough interceptors to matter before the issue in Ukraine is settled one way or another.
Iron Dome is scaled to defend against rocket attacks by people using handcrafted rockets made one at a time in hidden workshops, or occasionally bigger ones smuggled in by tunnel. Ukraine is facing a major industrial power that spent half a century stockpiling ammunition for Literally World War Three; they're having trouble trucking it to the front lines as fast as they'd like, but they can still overwhelm any practical active defense.
And unfortunately, this isn't 1941 when the US and Western Europe had strong independent and highly flexible industrial bases that could switch overnight from sewing machines to machine guns, cameras to Norden bombsights, whatever was needed. Now it's all highly optimized, specialized, and Just-In-Time. "Just In Time", meaning, "Way too late if anything at all goes wrong", and somebody starting a war without notifying you a year in advance counts as something going terribly wrong.
I'm just here to nominate this as reply of the day.
Good info, thanks for the response. I just read an FT article about how Ukraine is hoping to get various Eastern European S-300 systems, I guess from the Soviet era- which apparently can intercept missiles as well as aircraft? I wonder if those could be useful if they could successfully transfer them?
https://www.ft.com/content/d7c213ec-15eb-450b-86e3-01f5c3b4130d
https://archive.ph/kPlh2 (archive.is link to bypass the paywall)
They might be useful against Russian cruise and tactical ballistic missiles, but given the limited numbers likely to be provided they are probably best reserved for use against Russian combat aircraft to deny Russia air superiority as long as possible.
Against Russian missile strikes, the best bet is to use camouflage, concealment, and deception to trick the Russians into wasting their missiles on empty warehouses and plywood mock-ups of SAM sites or whatever.
If the Russians want to just shoot their fancy missiles at apartment buildings and kill civilians, there's probably not much to be done but have people spend as much of their time as possible in bomb shelters. And note that nobody has ever killed enough civilians that way to break a nation or win a war.
Is the Beta "Reader" function on substack broken for anyone else? About a week ago or so, it just stopped showing anything at all. This seems like a "me" problem since I can't find any reference to anyone else having this issue, and after a week, if it was more widespread I would expect mention if not a fix.
I've tried different browsers all to no avail. It only shows the first of my subscritptions on the sidebar, and in the main panel, where all the recent publications should be, it's just a bunch of grey boxes.
"The Onion Knight" was amazing. Also the travelogue vignettes last year were hilarious, for example. Extremely worth the subscription cost. (Btw, I often fail to notice that subscribers-only things are subscribers-only until I try to link people to them.)
I think of myself as pretty moderate regarding politics. I can usually see both sides of an issue. I’m an ER physician by trade.
One issue that I cannot find myself at all understanding the “other side” (even after years of intentional pondering) is abortion. It just seems like such a blatant betrayal of the right to life, one of the most valued rights we have. Even hard-core libertarians that I know who believe in almost no laws are pro-life regarding abortion.
I’m all for decreasing unplanned/unwanted pregnancies via easily accessible/free contraceptives and reasonable sex ed.
For those that say the unborn aren’t viable on their own, my question is, does dependency remove personhood? I don’t think it does, as that would pose a huge issue for the disabled (and young kids). Also, for anyone that uses that argument, it would follow that they are strictly against abortion post 24 weeks when the baby is now viable apart from mom, but I find that many of these people aren’t against post 24 week abortions.
For those that want to claim right to abortion in rape cases, I think a debate can be had there, but it should be realized that rape cases are a tiny percentage of abortions (around 1%).
If a physician’s oath is “do no harm”, it seems to me that an abortion violates this. When a pregnant mom comes in with trauma, respiratory distress, or any other disease we work from a mental framework of “two patients, take care of both”.
Around a million abortions are performed each year in the US. This is astounding in and of itself, and when you count years of life lost it’s even more overwhelming. Worldwide, 40-50 million abortions occur per year. These numbers are absolutely wild. COVID has (appropriately) received a ton of press the past two year, but when you compare COVID to abortions in lives lost, and particularly years of life lost, abortion monumentally overshadows COVID numbers.
I’m all for mom to have as much support and as many rights as possible. But just as an adult doesn’t have the right to end the life of another person, so I can’t endorse a mom’s right to terminate a baby in the womb.
Other than medical emergencies that endanger the mother’s life, I do not see an ethical argument for abortion, which violates the basic right to life.
I realize this can be a very charged and emotional subject. I’m not looking to poke the bee hive or be attacked, but to hear rational thoughts on the matter.
"40 million fetuses are being murdered per year, and so what? 40 million cows are murdered each year and they are way more sentient than a fetus."
This is not likely to get people to shift to support your perspective, btw. Emphasis on the superior right to life of an 18 month old bovine over that of a human infant not even born yet is not really a common set of values.
FWIW I share that set of values and I expect many of my friends to do the same.
"Human infant" is doing a lot of work there, comparing to the actual object of an abortion, especially early-stage abortions which even pro-choice people consider better than late-stage.
I suggest actually asking your friends if they think it is morally worse to kill a cow than to abort a human child. Use whatever euphemisms you like to obscure that one is human and the other is not. You might be surprised at how many people don't share your view that animals have more moral worth.
I suggest changing your language from "murder" to "homicide" or "killing" - the very definition of murder implies wrongness and illegality: eg. a killing in self defence is *not* a "murder"
They might, but they might not, and the typical context around the word tends to give it the meaning Thor describes. While you're far from the first person to use the word that way, it's used far too often to mean unjust killings. It's even defined that way in the dictionary, especially in legal contexts, which is specifically what abortion is concerned with here. Consequently, whatever time you try to save in the interest of brevity will end up getting sucked out of you anyway in having to clarify later.
I mean, you're already courting misinterpretation by posting under the name "Lizard Man"...
At least in the United States, the data do not agree with you:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
Note the graphs that cover general attitudes toward abortion from 1975 (Roe was decided in 1973) to the present. The only reasonable conclusion is that attitudes towards abortion are fairly constant, but experience small fluctations over time.
The percentage of those that think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances was 21% in 1975, fell to 15% in the late 90s, and has since risen to 19%. The percentage who thought it should be legal under any circumstances was 22% in 1975, rose to 34% in 1993, fell back to 21% in 2009, and has risen back to 32% today. The percentage that think it should be legal only under certain circumstances was 54% in 1975, rose to 61% in 1997, and has since falled to 48% in 2021.
Similarly, the next graph, showing self-labels "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have hovered around 50% each for nearly 25 years with very little change. They were 47/44 (choice/life) in 1997, 42/51 in 2009, 50/44 in 2015, and 49/47 in 2021.
Most countries have more restrictive abortion laws than the reddest parts of the US. (Under Roe, there were no limits allowed at all in the first 13 weeks, and have "reasonable health regulations" up to the 26th week. Casey is a moving target.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-time-frames-in-europe/
Africa and South America are even more restrictive.
"If this only made you more against it, not my problem since abortion rights are only getting stronger. All i can do is offer you the choice to change your perspective in the face of a world that's changing in a way you don't like."
Wholly aside from Carl Pham showing pretty convincingly that you're wrong on the facts, I wonder if you would accept this argument in reference to any other issue. "Don't oppose any given immanent circumstance or any process that's already underway, because you'll probably lose! You'll just get mad if you keep insisting that the immoral is, in fact, immoral."
For example, would you tell BLM that all you can really do is offer them the choice to accept the position of blacks since Whitey just has more and more money and cops every year?
Sounds like you understand the general terrain of the issue more than your opening lines suggest. One thing not captured above is the weighing of harms to foetus vs. to mother. If having a baby significantly harms the mother (either for medical reasons or 'socioeconomic' reasons) then this should appear on the ledger as a threat to pro-life values as well, since the mother is a) currently alive and b) potentially capable of rearing multiple future children at another time.
Unrelated to your main question but rape as criteria for abortion legality seems to give rise to some really bad scenarios. I'd suggest at the outset that it's probably reasonable to have *some* criteria for abortion legality, of which rape could/should be considered among the several influencing factors. But if the law explicitly listed rape as a top-level prerequisite for state-allowed abortion, this would have a predictable distorting effect on the reporting of rapes; and given the elasticity of the term with it's proximity to sexual assault and interaction with our ever-changing notion of "consent", I just see it as a legal and social nightmare for all involved.
>>>weighing socioeconomic harm to the mother
Killing someone for economic gain or to prevent economic loss is among the most abhorrent, and most clearly condemned, motivations for murder in our society. I am not clear that this needs to be taken into weight at all.
I do completely agree that the issues with assault reporting that you mention are possible and a concern. I suggest that modern genomics will allow for better identification of rapists in these cases, and to serve as somewhat of a deterrent for frivolous accusations. Also- that quandary is not a new one, and abortion has been used to cover up rape as well.
We may even begin to respect the rights of fathers in this regard.
Could it, though? Even if adoption were available (which it is, which invalidates the economic loss argument) does anyone really starve to death in the U.S. nowadays? I'm pretty sure the number of people who starve here is basically 0. Elsewhere the question may be different.
It's very rare for anyone to literally starve to death in the United States. Malnutrition is still quite possible. As is drug overdose when you realize you've got *just* enough money for rice and beans and a TV set and enough fentanyl to make that bearable one week out of every month, but if you take it all at once you'll never have to worry about those unbearable weeks ever again.
And a hundred other ugly, slow endings for a human life. Some of them will drag out long enough that you can maybe call them "natural causes".
Only if she were unwilling to either take social services or give up the child. Claims of socio-economic harm have to keep in mind that young healthy children are readily adopted, so there is no harm beyond the pregnancy and delivery (which isn't, of course, zero) if the mother is willing to give up the child.
The child isn't necessarily healthy.
True enough. But I don't think the "socio-economic harm" argument is restricted to chronically ill children.
There is a huge demand for American babies.
To address the typical misdirection, they do not need to be white babies in perfect health, either.
The aspect of the 'socioeconomic harm' (inverted commas signifying my lack of personal investment) argument that I'm engaging with is the small but real risk that a having a baby can push a mother into destitution and emotional turmoil, which could do more net harm than terminating an embryo*. There is a pro-life argument for having that abortion so that in a few years' time when her situation has stabilised she can have a family without being plunged into chaos.
*And yes, we are still left with the question of "at what stage...?"
I think I could squint and see places and times when this would be a reasonable argument. Maybe in the 3rd world still.
In the US, this seems very incorrect. Young women receive significantly more support if they have a child, directly from the government. She becomes eligible for multiple new programs for herself and her child, which are generally funded enough that she could survive without a job or any outside support than the government programs. For someone on the edge of destitution, having a baby would be a significant *improvement* on their financial situation.
Even if that were not true, putting the baby up for adoption would be a mostly neutral socioeconomic decision. There are costs involved, but they are generally taken up by the state in those cases. Sometimes the mothers get financial support during and after pregnancy even when giving the child up.
Do you really think that a child is a net economic gain? The programs you refer to are intended to relieve some of the burden of raising a child, not to vault women out of poverty. I really don't see any way that it could be true that "For someone on the edge of destitution, having a baby would be a significant *improvement* on their financial situation."
Certainly not, but neither is a child (in a modern welfare state) a doom that a mother can never get away from. The post I responded to was making an argument that a poor women having a baby was headed for "destitution" and that's really not the case, or at least not because of the baby.
If you know any parents firsthand (your comment makes me suspect that you do not!), I encourage you to ask them for feedback on your opinion that having a child results in a net financial gain. My advice, be ready to duck.
I don't know much about the US welfare system, but the UK (which I tend to think of as being more generous in terms of welfare payments than the US) does not offer benefits which would allow someone to survive without a job, at the marginal decision of having a child vs not.
In the UK the government will pay £151.97 / week for the first 39 weeks you are off work with your pregnancy (I don't know how it works if you are unemployed when you get pregnancy, but I think it might be £102.68 ie 90% of your out-of-work benefits). They then pay a £500 one-off payment at birth for expenses like a crib / pram and an ongoing £21.15 / week for the first child (£14.00 / week for subsequent children).
There are a few other benefits-in-kind - for example tax relief on money spent on childcare and support for prescriptions - but the only one which I think is material is the fact that as a single mother on the poverty line you will be prioritised for council housing. I don't know quite how to price this at the margin - it is a benefit you are entitled to anyway, but that you will be fast-tracked for as you are pregnant so you get it sooner. I guess just saying something like 'the benefit counts for the first year, and then not after that' because it makes the maths easier
In the first year you therefore get something like £5000 + your housing costs taken care of AT THE MARGIN, which is probably about equivalent to a marginal part-time minimum wage job (I'd halve my salary to avoid ever having to work, but I don't know if this is a reasonable trade this close to the poverty line). In all subsequent years you get something like £1000 at the margin. I don't know exactly what you'd consider a 'significant' improvement, but £1000 / year seems very close to me to be approaching the absolute minimum amount a child could cost you at the margin - for example foster carers of children are paid ~£400 / week and housing a Ukrainian refugee is paid ~£350 / week
As someone who is strongly prolife - there is a right to not be obligated to assist or support another person, even if one's assistant would be life saving. I go to bed knowing that there are tragedies going on in my home town and across the globe that I could intervene in, but will/do not.
I give a biblical percentage of charitable tithe, but I live quite comfortably and have excess material goods. I could help more.
To me, the most righteous argument for morally acceptable elective abortion is an overgrowth of that right to not be obligated to assist everyone.
I think that is insufficient, but I know some people disagree. I also think that abortion of the children of rapists is wrong, but the countering arguments for abortion are stronger there.
It's a hard topic. Everyone thinks their own situation is an edge case and that abortion is ok for them. It's not, but again, hard.
Pro-life vs pro-choice is about drawing a line somewhere, the argument is where. So, where do you draw it? Is Plan B fine? Copper IUD used after unprotected intercourse?
Quoting Scott Aaronson:
From the standpoint of secular moral philosophy, my own opinion is that no one has ever improved on the searching analysis [https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/society/on-abortion-carl-sagan-ann-druyan/] of the abortion question that Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan published in 1990. After painstakingly laying out scientific facts, moral hypotheticals, and commonsense principles, Sagan and Druyan ultimately conclude that the right question to ask is when the fetus develops something that’s *recognizably a human brain, processing thoughts and emotions*. In practice, that probably means drawing a hard line at the end of the second trimester. Coincidentally, that’s almost exactly where Roe v. Wade drew the line, but Sagan and Druyan’s reasoning is completely different: they reject Roe‘s criterion of viability outside the womb, as both morally irrelevant and contingent on medical technology.
This is generally my thinking on it. I hadn't heard of the analysis that Sagan and Druyan did. I am excited to read it as they likely thought much more deeply about it than I have.
My emotional comfort level is that the line is somewhere before 22/24 weeks (the earliest a baby has been able to live outside the womb) but after 8-12 which seems to be before the fetus has developed rudimentary organs and systems. Though above average my understanding of the biology and medical technology available is below that of a first year college student studying the topic. Therefore I am very open to changing my views based on new evidence.
The two scenarios that present challenges are in cases of rape or where the pregnancy threatens the mothers life. For rape, I suspect the number of abortions that occur after 22/24 weeks and are where the pregnancy is due to rape is so close to 0 that I am not sure I need to devote brain power to it.
It's a bit more complicated when a later stage pregnancy threatens the mothers life as you now have to decide between the life that already exists in the world or the one that is just beginning. I don't think there is an easy answer. However, this seems to be a question that can just be answered with advances in medicine either by preventing these emergencies or treating them while saving both lives.
Another complication is if the baby will have severe medical problems once born. I don't think it's moral to have an abortion only because the child will have moderate conditions such as a missing limb or downs syndrome. But if they would be confined to a wheel chair unable to eat, speak, move, etc? I am not sure how I feel about it. I should note on the other side of the coin I do think its more to select fertilized eggs for certain traits (even superficial ones) if its before that 8-12 week period as mentioned above.
I am definitely against the types of laws that Texas has just implemented that seek to allow mob rule to determine who has broken a law and then use civil courts to enforce it.
You're begging the question. If you take as axiomatic that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception onward, then yes, of course it's a violation of right to life. But most people do not believe that, and neither does our legal system. I suspect that you might not truly believe it either, ie, imagine the trolley problem, wherein on one side is a test tube with two fertilized eggs, and on the other, say, a 10 year old child. Would you really kill the child the to save the two fertilized eggs? That would be a pretty unusual stance.
Okay, imagine you have on one side the 10 year old child and on the other, a litter of six really cute puppies.
Would you kill the puppies? Honestly, they are *so cute*. Some people would pick the puppies over the kid - they do this in reality by using contraception and instead calling themselves 'fur moms/dads'.
How about if it's one 10 year old child on this side and three 12 year old triplets on the other?
We can multiply examples for as many variables as you like and end up with "yes kill the 10 year old". That says nothing about "is it right to murder 10 year old children?"
As for "the legal system does not believe" - yes, and how many people on here are quite happy to ignore the legal system when it comes to drugs, or other things the legal system does not believe you should do? Hmmm?
I like how the "misogyny" card gets played, when there is no other convincing argument. Just like "racist" or "homophobe" (or I suppose "transphobe" is the new favourite now, as some gay people have the temerity not to support trans rights 200%, so it's okay to be homophobic towards *them*), it's a meaningless noise.
"Some people would pick the puppies over the kid - they do this in reality by using contraception and instead calling themselves 'fur moms/dads'."
So simply choosing not to have kids is equivalent to letting an existing child die? Come on now.
That aside, I do think you have a point with your counter-argument, in the sense that people's immediate intuitions are messy and not always internally consistent. There are people who might indeed save a box of puppies rather than a 10 year old child simply because, in the heat of the moment, their first instinct is to save the cute doggos. There are even a few people (probably not many, but some) who would make that choice even if they had ample time to decide, and consider it to be the morally correct choice. That doesn't mean the life of the dogs is more valuable than the life of the child in any comprehensive ethical sense. So sure, maybe you can claim that someone choosing a 10 year old over a vial of fertilized eggs doesn't prove anything either.
Still, if someone let a 10 year old die in order to save two 12 year olds, or six dogs, or ten adult humans, I imagine they'd be absolutely devastated about it. They'd probably feel extremely guilty even if they were convinced they made the right choice from an ethical point of view, or at the very least, regretful that such a situation ever occured in the first place. I don't think the same would be true for someone who let the vial of fertilized eggs be destroyed: I can't see many people breaking down and crying and screaming "my God, what have I done?" over it, or being traumatized by what happened, or even viewing it as all that much of a loss. Probably a few people would, but the vast majority of people likely wouldn't see it as anything worse than small-scale property destruction.
If it's six puppies, I kill the puppies with a twinge of regret. If it's three twelve year olds, I kill the single ten year old with serious dismay. If it's two fertilized eggs, I smash that vial and feel absolutely no internal conflict, because from my point of view I saved a human life at zero cost. The point of the thought experiment is to get people to think about how they value different groups, and I think when pressed, most people would not actually value a fertilized egg at the same level as a living, breathing child. Certainly there are a lot fewer people trying to save the "babies" in fertility clinics' trash bins than there are, say, protesting abortion clinics.
I'm not suggesting that we mistake legality for morality, I'm just pointing out that the viewpoint is so commonly accepted (and thus should not be unfathomable to the original poster) that it is enshrined in law. If a doctor's personal morality obliges them not to provide abortions, I think they should follow that. I'm not aware of many conscientiously objecting doctors being forced to provide abortions at gunpoint. Generally there are enough doctors of the opposite position to cover those roles.
I don't think I mentioned misogyny anywhere in my comment, but maybe you were just speaking generally?
I kill the person attempting to put me in a Kobyashi Maru scenario.
I don't think "life", on its own, is very meaningful. If I were in a vegetative state with no quality of life, I'd want my family to pull the plug. Some of the life-saving interventions we perform on the elderly are kind of horrifying - performing rib-breaking CPR on elderly patients with no QoL isn't something most doctors would want for themselves.
So, where do we draw the line? The right to life of a embryo compared to the right to freedom, bodily autonomy, health, financial stability of an adult woman - for me, an embryo just doesn't have any meaningful *personhood* that makes it different from an unfertilised egg. If I'm not obliged to get pregnant so that ovum can live, I don't see how I'm obliged to carry an embryo to term. I think you acknowledge the balance here too - if it were all about the right to life of the fetus, why would the circumstances of conception have anything to do with it?
A viable, near term foetus? The balance there is obviously different, because it's much closer to being independent and self aware. Where do we draw the line? Listen, look up some of the circumstances in which women actually have late term abortions - this isn't something that happens casually, these are overwhelmingly wanted babies where something has gone horribly wrong in the course of pregnancy. No one should be forced to carry an anencephalic fetus to term, or continue a pregnancy where the most likely outcome is their own death. Or have a baby when they're still a child themself.
Is there a middle ground? Sure, probably. But there's no clear line where we can say a developing fetus stops being a lump of potential and starts being a person, so it's a decision best made by the most affected definite person involved - the prospective mother - in consultation with her doctors. What might be strenuous and inconvenient for one woman might be something another woman really would attempt suicide to avoid. She has a right to life too.
For what it's worth, the principle is long established that no one has a right to life that justifies taking another innocent life. For example, if a terrorist were to point a gun at you and order you to shoot and kill another person, on pain of your own immediate death, and you did it, you could and would be prosecuted for murder in all jurisdictions. If you are dying of heart disease, and were to hire a hit man to go kill someone with a tissue match in order to get a heart transplant, you would be condemned, even if that were the only possible way to survive.
That is, you have no right to preserve your life by killing someone else. So that argument by itself seems pretty dubious. You can get around it by arguing you're not killing "someone" else -- but then you're forced back to the need to draw a line between human life and not human life.[1]
The argument of anyone being "forced" to carry a fetus to term is also a bit suspect. Except in the exceedingly rare cases of pregnancy as a result of rape (or lack of meaningful consent), nobody forced the sex that was the direct cause of the pregnancy, and in these days almost nobody lacks the awareness of how pregnancy happens or access to extremely cheap ways of reliably preventing it.
If I choose to put my entire retirement savings on Lucky Eddie to win in the 4th race, and Lucky Eddie breaks his leg in the first furlong, we would not say the betting parlor is "forcing" me to eat cat food in my old age. If I choose to join the all-volunteer Army, we would not say the President is "forcing" me to run the risk of being shot and killed when it's my unit's turn to deploy to Afghanistan. All of that was well known to be part of the fine print in the contract I willingly signed.
Generally, when people make decisions of their own free will, knowing full well that certain consequences may ensue, we don't speak of them being "forced" to endure those consequences if they *do* ensue. We say they are experiencing the result of their own choices. A woman who is pregnant by her own free choice to engage in unprotected sex is not "forced" to be pregnant -- she *chose* to be pregnant. The question before us is whether she should be allowed to unmake her choice, after the consequences have become manifest, and at what cost.
----------------
[1] I'm also not especially impressed with the argument that it's hard to draw this line. Who says? You would probably get overwhelming political agreement if you said "A blastocyst of fewer than 10,000 cells is not a human life." So you can easily draw a line that will get broad agreement. What's *hard* is moving the line as close as possible to an actual visibly human being, something with arms and hands and eyes that can look at you and a brain that thinks thoughts, primitive as they may be.
Additionally, we draw "hard" lines like this all the time. We have to. We have to draw lines that say when a person's organs can/cannot be harvested. When a person is/is not competent to manage their own affairs. When a criminal should/should not pay with his life or freedom for a crime. When a soldier should/should not be ordered to his near certain death. When a person is/is not justified in using deadly force to defend himself. In none of these cases do we throw up our hands and say "Well! This is just too hard to come to any kind of social consensus on dividing lines, so we will have to leave it entirely up to individual judgment." There's certainly an argument for listening to the affected individual, just like a jury will listen to the testimony of a defendant charged with using deadly force inappropriatley, but in general we do not eschew social oversight of individual life-and-death decisions.
Heck, if you wanted to put your dog down for what people consider a frivolous reason (e.g. you're going on vacation), the capability exists for society to second-guess your judgment and hold you accountable for it. It seems inconsistent to assert that what we tolerate and manage with respect to the lives of pets is impossibly complex or intrusive with respect to the lives of human beings.
It's listed as a mitigating factor under California law, e.g.:
"190.05 In determining the penalty, the trier of fact shall take into account any of the following factors if relevant:
...
(7) Whether or not the defendant acted under extreme duress or under the substantial domination of another person."
So basically you can argue after being convicted that you should get a lesser sentence because of being coerced. How well that would work I have no idea. Patty Hearst claimed she was acting under duress -- that she'd been raped and threatened with death by the SLA after they kidnapped her -- when she drove the getaway car for a robbery in which someone else killed a bystander. Didn't stop her from being sentenced to 35 years in pokey, later reduced to 7, and then commuted entirely by Jimmy Carter.
It looks like the proxy bombers either escaped and the bomb was defused, if they were coerced by their family being imprisoned, or were killed themselves in the cases where they were strapped in.
We don't draw hard lines in any of those cases, though. We have judges and juries and ethics committees specifically because drawing a single clear line is impossible - to take one of your examples, deciding when a person has ceased to have capacity to manage their own affairs is really tough, it requires both medical and legal input, we don't just say, for example, that they've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's so they automatically lack capacity.
We agree a blastocyst isn't a person. Ok, uncontroversial. So, the embryo isn't a blastocyst anymore, it has a rudimentary heartbeat, but it definitely doesn't have any meaningful personhood, and the mother is a teenager who thought douching with Mountain Dew would prevent pregnancy (I wish this was made up) and knows her family will call her a whore and kick her out if they find out she's pregnant, and she can't see any future for herself past that. I'm strongly in favour of making sure she has the option to go to a shelter and have free medical care and the ability to continue her education and everything else that would help her make a genuine free choice, but I don't think the embryo weighs very highly against her health and happiness, to be honest. And bear in mind pregnancy always carries risk to the life of the mother - modern medical care minimises that but hasn't eliminated it. Abortions aren't literally zero risk, but they're a lot safer than childbirth.
(And if you think there's no circumstances in which late term abortions should be permitted, look up anencephaly. Do not look at pictures.)
I'd also note: first, you're overestimating the reliability of even the best contraception (bear in mind that a 1/10,000 risk is more likely than you think on a population level). Secondly, talking about "consequences" is kind of...well, yes, the consequences of unprotected heterosexual sex are often either pregnancy or the need to have an abortion. That choice is the consequence. I don't find that a meaningful line of argument.
Sure, judges and juries get involved -- because the law criminalizes inappropriate use of lethal force. But you said you were *against* criminalizing abortion in any sense, and getting judges and juries involved in deciding whether an individual has/has not made the right choice at all, no? Or did I not understand what you meant by leaving it entirely up to individual choice?
Anyway, the existence of judges and juries doesn't mean a line hasn't been drawn. Quite the contrary, judges and juries only get involved when a line *has* been drawn, and pages of legal code (and case law) exist to tell you exactly where it lies. The judges and juries are there to ascertain on which side of that line a particular person in particular circumstance falls.
The risk of second-trimester abortion is between 5-10 per 100,000[1]. The risk of maternal death in childbirth is about 20 per 100,000[2]. So the difference in risk is a factor of 2-4. Whether you consider that "a lot" safer is probably a matter of perspective. Certainly a very early abortion is much safer than actual childbirth, but very early abortion is much less controversial and hardly anybody proposes legislation there; what is normally the subject of attempts at legislation *are* the second-trimester events.
The failure rates of contraception are not relevant, because again nobody (aside from rape et cetera) is being *forced* to have sex. You *choose* to have sex, and you *choose* what method of contraception, if any, to use, and you *choose* to run the known risk. Again, I find the argument that the results are something you can reasonable be said to be shocked and surprised about, and not expected to own, is facially absurd. There is no other situation in which a decision with such weighty consequences is treated with such little assignment of agency.
If a 16-year-old thinks he's perfectly fine to drive after drinking 5 beers, because he's never done it before, and nobody has given him a detailed lecture on BAC/reaction times before, and he goes out and kills two people when he sails through a red light, we do not say it is unfair that he is "forced" to accept the (perhaps lifelong!) consequences of his decision, and we do not make excuses for him because he was just a kid, or had some dumb kid notions of how safe it was to drink and drive. Actions have consequences, and if you're old enough to drive -- or screw -- you're old enough to grasp that, and we can reasonably hold you to them.
That's great that you're concerned with the mother. Personally, I'm on the other side. The mother has *already* proven she's a fool[3]. Clearly she doesn't make good decisions, and prioritizes the selfish pleasures of the moment over even very serious issues that (as you point out) could turn her own life upside down, as well as those of her family, and of course end the life of a child.
On the other hand, her baby is a blank page. Could be anything. Could be just as much a fuckup as the parent, of course, but could also be a new Einstein, Baryshnikov, Mozart. I'd rather take a chance on the unknown new life than on the adult who has already proved herself to be an incredible idiot and moral pygmy. I really don't give a shit about her future choices being painfully constrained, because she's already proven she's incapable of exercising choice responsibly. She *had* the chance to do all the nice things you suggest should lie in her future. All she needed to do was keep her legs closed.
--------------
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3897528/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2020/maternal-mortality-rates-2020.htm
[3] The father, too, of course, and I'm perfectly happy to see *him* held as much to the consequences as the mother.
Ah, and now the misogyny comes out. I won't respond further as I no longer believe you're arguing in good faith.
You are perhaps confusing a willingness to criticize the decisions of women for misogyny. I'm sure you understand in turn that I consider female chauvinism no more attractive than the male version.
" Certainly a very early abortion is much safer than actual childbirth, but very early abortion is much less controversial and hardly anybody proposes legislation there; what is normally the subject of attempts at legislation are the second-trimester events."
What do you mean by "hardly anyone"? It seems to me there are a good many people who want *no* abortions, it's just that they're currently settling for restrictions of various sorts.
Exactly this. Four states (Texas, Idaho, Oklahoma, and South Carolina) have passed laws banning abortion by fetal heartbeat, which is at about 6 weeks. And i assume more states will soon follow.
Okay, let's do this. Let's bite the bullet here: pro-abortion people, I'll let you abort anencephalic babies up to and at the point of delivery, or even delivered but the umbilical cord is not cut yet, or even delivered, cord cut, but not expected to live past the first couple of breaths - IF you give in on healthy, viable pregnancies.
Because I am sick and tired of the small minority of 'fatal foetal abnormalties incompatible with life' being pulled out and made to dance a jig to justify the majority of abortions which are carried out for "perfectly fine pregnancy which is viable and healthy but..."
The only, the only goddamn reason, I can figure out for the vehement support of "abort pregnancies for poverty" which means curing the problem not by ending poverty but by ending the pregnancy is for the sake of the wider requirement: convenience. Ooops, I'm pregnant five years before I planned to be when the career trajectory I am working on would be in place. Oops how can I have a baby now, I'd have to stop doing all my fun things. Oops I don't want a baby with this guy, he's just a fucktoy nothing serious. Oops I'm not ready to be an adult even though I'm twenty-seven.
Making and keeping it legal for the "this poor woman has no husband and two kids and lives on food scavenged from dumpsters" also has the happy side-effect of making and keeping it legal for the "my college course fees cost more money than that woman will ever see in her entire life" people.
Or it's support for eugenics, which goes right back to Margaret Sanger herself, I guess: poor and/or foreign people who have had at least one kid already, don't want them spawning more.
Guttmacher Institute infographic on abortion in the USA as of 2014:
https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2016/us-abortion-patients
Abortion rates are coming down, that's one good thing I guess:
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states
- Fifty-nine percent of abortions in 2014 were obtained by patients who had had at least one birth.
- Some 75% of abortion patients in 2014 were poor (having an income below the federal poverty level of $15,730 for a family of two in 2014) or low-income (having an income of 100–199% of the federal poverty level).
- In 2014, 16% of patients who obtained abortions in the United States were born outside the United States, a proportion comparable to their representation in the U.S. population (17% of women aged 15–44).
- In 2014, 51% of abortion patients were using a contraceptive method in the month they became pregnant, most commonly condoms (24%) or a short-acting hormonal method (13%).
Oh, no, to be clear, the end goal here is that I personally am not just allowed but encouraged to devour the beating hearts of as many healthy newborns as possible, entirely for my personal amusement; I can't imagine why you think I'd settle for anything less.
Why, my dear, it is just the same way that I am all about:
(1) Misogyny and hating women
https://letsbreakthrough.org/anti-abortion-misogyny-its-never-about-the-children/
(2) Promulgating falsehoods and pernicious myths (with a side of the ever-popular "it's Anti-Science!")
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2015/aug/12/five-main-anti-abortion-arguments-examined
(3) Against Mom, Freedom, and Apple Pie
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12340405/
(4) Controlling women (that perhaps would be a sub-head of point no. 1 above)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/22/a-new-poll-shows-what-really-interests-pro-lifers-controlling-women
(5) Was it lust for power? gold? or was I just born to be a Bible-thumper?
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/what-drives-a-person-to-become-a-prolife-antiabortion-activist-a7601546.html
(6) More Science! denialism
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-study-that-debunks-most-anti-abortion-arguments
(7) Racism (but of course! and if the ACLU say it, it must be so!) See, I just like owning slaves and banning abortion cuts down on the numbers of slaves available for me to own
https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/the-racist-history-of-abortion-and-midwifery-bans/
(8) Sinister secret motives that need to be exposed
https://reproductiverights.org/new-website-exposes-motives-of-anti-abortion-policymakers/
(9) The tried and trusted - money! Clearly I am being paid the big bucks to hold these abhorrent views
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/follow-money-behind-anti-abortion-laws
(10) Racism Part Deux
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/opinion/abortion-evangelicals-conservatives.html
Compared with all that horribleness, what's a little foetal tissue in skin creams?
https://www.law.uh.edu/healthlaw/perspectives/2010/(CM)%20Cosmetic.pdf
"The right to life of a embryo compared to the right to freedom, bodily autonomy, health, financial stability of an adult woman"
And here is where the whole fucking abortion argument greased the slope with butter, poured oil down as well, polished the bottom of the tea-tray to a mirror-gloss shine, then flung themselves down that hill with gay abandon and a merry cry of "wheeee!!!!"
The first argument for abortion was "nobody *wants* to kill babies but the mother is going to die! the child cannot be delivered alive! why take two lives when you can save one, albeit at the expense of another?"
Abortion was going to be legal only for very, very severe and very, very rare cases.
And now it's "financial stability". Which means that, to turn the reproaches I have seen levied against pro-life people back on the pro-abortion lot, you are perfectly happy for the woman to continue living in such a state of financial precariousness that she has to kill her own child to survive, you'll put the money towards funding an abortion clinic but after that, Bessie, you're on your own!
I haven't heard that the "pro-life" are particularly interested in the financial wellbeing of poor, new mothers, either.
I note that there is a lot of pro-life financial support for adoption, at a minimum, which removes the additional financial hardship that the child represents to the poor, new mother. They also tend to support fairly draconian child support laws, requiring father-support for the mother and child if she keeps it.
The argument that pro-life people don't care about the wellbeing of children/mothers post-birth is mostly a baseless attack as far as I can tell.
Are you familiar with the "violinist argument" from Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"?
tl;dr: it's simply irrelevant how much "personhood" a fetus has; no one has the right to someone else's body. Even dead people can't have their organs harvested if they haven't legally agreed.
I'm going to paste this in from Wikipedia, because I think it's explained pretty clearly there. Here's both the thought experiment and a couple paragraphs of explanation:
.....
"You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you."
Thomson argues that one can now permissibly unplug themself from the violinist even though this will cause his death: this is due to limits on the right to life, which does not include the right to use another person's body, and so by unplugging the violinist, one does not violate his right to life but merely deprives him of something—the use of someone else's body—to which he has no right. "[I]f you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due."
For the same reason, Thomson says, abortion does not violate the fetus's legitimate right to life, but merely deprives the fetus of something—the non-consensual use of the pregnant woman's body and life-supporting functions—to which it has no right. Thus, by choosing to terminate her pregnancy, Thomson concludes that a pregnant woman does not normally violate the fetus's right to life, but merely withdraws its use of her own body, which usually causes the fetus to die.
.....
Thomson has a number of other thought experiments that illustrate various other aspects of this issue, all of which are really interesting and which I encourage you to check out. I find them presented in a logical way that avoids a lot of the emotionally charged debates that abortion can bring up.
You can read the full thing here: https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
If that argument had serious moral force a military draft would be ethically unthinkable. How dare you (the state) conscript my body to go to some strange foreign place, eat what you tell me to eat, labor as you command me to labor, possibly commit terrible crimes that will weigh on my conscience (shooting at people), and run the very real risk of being killed myself? The mere fact that the existence of the nation is at stake should have no bearing on the matter, nobody has the right to another's life and labor.
I mean, I agree with that--I think a military draft is unethical.
Interesting! Let's take a smaller-scale case, then: you and two friends are walking across a dam in a terrible rainstorm when you come across two policeman desperately trying to save a mother holding her infant who have fallen into the current. The one policeman has her hand but it is only a matter of seconds before he loses his grip and the woman and child die.
The other policeman orders you and your two friends to form a human chain to save the two. There is some risk you would be swept into the torrent yourself, but let us assume the risk is small (e.g. equal to the risk of a woman dying in childbirth, currently 0.017% in the US), the mother and child will otherwise surely die, and the policement is implying that he will use force to get you to comply.
Is the policeman's order unethical? Is it ethical for you to refuse to comply? Do you need a good reason not to help (you're unusually clumsy so the risk of your own death is unusually high), or is it enough to say nobody has the right to demand your labor for any reason whatsoever?
(As far as I know, it would be legal in all US jurisdictions for a policeman to order you to assist in an emergency, to protect life.)
You've constructed an example where simple deontological reasoning becomes confusing. Simularly to whether is it ethical to shoot to death a tresspasser on your territory.
Military draft is ethically unthinkable, and "the nation" is a useless construct.
Even people who fight to defend their homeland, like the Ukrainians right now, fight against an oppressor who threatens their families and hometowns. Nobody but the worst fools dies for the flag.
Well, fair enough, but I assume you will not be surprised when the nation you decline to defend in turn declines to extend its aegis over you. You will not be surprised when it does not lift a finger to defend you against theft or fraud, does not avenge your death by murder, and does not tax others (by force) to pay for your education, healthcare, or retirement. Rugged individualism all around!
My nation-state is terrible at #1, passable at #2. #3 would count in its favor if not for the fact that I already paid way more into its coffers than I received over my lifetime.
Then again, I live in a postcommunist country so I drank distrust towards the government with my mother's milk. YMMV.
If it was just opposition to oppression then any democracy that invaded a dictatorship would see the opposition fade away, but that doesn’t happen. People do fight for flags. For sovereignty. For all kinds of reasons.
I feel like this thread about the draft is getting a bit carried away.
I'd like to stipulate, for starters, that military drafts were considered okay by remarkable percentages of the population of the US as recently as Vietnam. If there weren't, then the draft would've been abolished as fast as the paperwork could have been written up. Point being, as someone who opposes a draft today, I can easily still recognize there was a case for it that was strong enough to convince millions of people. I can say that even before I go through the trouble of trying to construct a steelman for it.
That said, the steelman I made for this (which I won't bother enumerating here, as it's beside my point) was a bit different from the one you made here. I certainly agree that if you're not willing to defend your country, your country ought not be obligated to defend you. But I still dislike how that bargain is struck without people's consent. We're all sort of born into it, you know? The fact that I happen to really, really like that deal doesn't entitle me to project it onto everyone else.
Some people have legitimate concerns over how defense is implemented. Or illegitimate, maybe, but it's still their call to make for themselves. It'd be better, ideally speaking, if we each got to individually affirm or reject it when we come of age, and if we reject, okay, time to see about packing up and moving to some Coventry where all the misfits congregate.
In the end, I also feel like opposing the draft is easy, because it's moot. In the US, we get enough volunteers. And it's clear from incentives alone that they'll fight much more effectively than draftees anyway, so it's easy to consider the matter settled.
Nations in general strike the libertarian in me as a fraught concept, while also striking the pragmatist in me as still superior to the radical revolution that would surely occur if we went to luxury gay space anarchy.
Bringing it back to the violinist: the whole analogy suffers, because we'll never be hooked up to the violinist the same way he's hooked up to us. A mother will never be a fetus again. She could always renege. She's the prisoner who gets to know that the other one kept silent, so now she can defect and get the best payout. This isn't to say moms are all payout-maximizing scum or anything, but rather to say that we should know this isn't an argument we can make work using basic game theory.
I find the violinist to be a terribile argument. Of course i am responsible of murder if i detach myself from the violinist. Someone else right to life justify a temporary violation of my body autonomy.
And I speak as someone who is 100% in favour of abortion in all scenarios.
Until I hear from you that you've donated one of your kidneys to a stranger, I cannot possibly take this counterargument seriously.
On the one hand, your counterexample is far stronger than the violinist thought experiment in which is postulated that is just a temporary interruption of body autonomy, with no permanent consequences.
On the other, refusing to donate a kidney when you are the only compatibile donor seems like a pretty straightforward example of something immoral (that you are nonetheless allowed to do) so plese don't defend abortion comparing it to that because it's a very very very bad defense.
I think you're getting confused by "permanent" and "temporary".
A "temporary" stint of being chained to a violinist by kidney cables for 9 months is a "permanent" reduction in your QOL. It permanently takes 9 months of healthy time you had to live and pursue the good life. You do not get them back. You could in theory be compensated sufficiently to make up the difference - but then this is a matter of trade, not morality. Morally there's no meaningful difference between losing a kidney and losing 9 months kidney time, it's just a matter of different costs. Personally I'd rather lose the kidney.
nkfcares@kidney.org
I give you my personal guarantee that there is a person waiting, right now, for a kidney, with whom you are compatible, and for whom there will likely be no other donor. This person will suffer and, in all likelihood, eventually die. If you send an email to this organization, they will match you with a recipient, and you can then give them your kidney.
Not to be too snarky about it (though perhaps it's a bit late for that) - but I'm not looking to defend abortion via this route so much as point out the absurdity of the principle upon which your counterargument is based. If you truly believe what you're saying, then by all means, call these folks up, and I will gladly concede that you are at least a person of principle.
Do you also think that the nurse/respiratory therapist who unplugs the life support machine on a person whose life depends on it is guilty of murder?
Current norms are for patient wishes to be respected; if they're not interested in life-saving care, we don't give it to them. If they're only interested in X amount, and they now need X+Y, we allow them to request X be removed as well so that they die more quickly. If they're incompetent (coma, etc.), the wishes of the next of kin are typically respected as well.
Does the RT who removes the life-saving care murder them?
"100% in favour of abortion in all scenarios"
Really? So if a mom at 38 weeks gestation want to abort because she wants to travel Europe next year and her baby gets in the way of her travel you're ok with her decision to abort? If you truly believe that, we operate under an extremely different set of morals. And that's fine, it's your opinion, but honestly just a wild statement in my mind.
The fetus has the right to the mother's body because it was, in most cases, consensually given.
If you take the risk of creating a life that's bound to you, even if you took non-perfect precautions to prevent its creation, you're responsible for that life.
This stretches the definition of "consent" quite a lot. By the same logic, people give consent to be a victim of crimes if they go into shady alleys. Or, considering the non-perfect precautions, even if they just exist.
Since we insist on antromorphizing the fetus, would you say the fetus has more responsibility over the situation, then? Because we really like assigning responsibility to people, and there aren't many around to choose from.
If you go into a shady alley then get mugged, we blame the mugger since that creates better incentives for society (but you're still kind of stupid for going there). If you go hiking on a dangerous mountain trail during the winter, fall off and die, pretty much everyone agrees that's on you.
It's not the mountain's fault.
You seem to be missing my point.
I didn't use the concepts of blame, guilt or victimhood. And neither I require to antropomorphize the fetus.
The only thing I claimed is that you can't coherently stretch the definition of consent this way, otherwise you have to claim that everyone consent to literally everything.
I think the best analogy is sports. Fights in hockey aren't assault, aren't illegal, since by playing you accept the risk. I think it's hard-nosed but clearly true to say that by voluntarily participating in sex, you accept the risk of pregnancy, at least to the point where you don't have a right to kill someone to get out of a pregnancy. If that holds, then the violinist example doesn't apply except in cases of rape.
Notice the enormous difference between consenting to something and accepting a risk of something.
I have a hard time seeing that as more than a game of semantics. To consent to a potential consequence of your actions sounds like the very same thing as accepting the risk of a potential consequence of your actions to me.
Hockey is great fun, but getting my teeth knocked out does derail my plans to have a steak dinner after the game. In deciding to play hockey anyway, with a full understanding of what might happen if I do, I have accepted the risk, and my acceptance of the risk constitutes consent.
What distinction do you see?
I agree with Fishbreath that this seems like a semantic trick.
Say a gambler bets $10,000 to on a 100-to-1 favorite who ends up losing. If the gambler claims that she didn't consent to losing her $10,000, is that true in a meaningful sense? Does it say anything at all about whether we should hold her responsible for her debt?
If EAs really believe the violinist argument, then they should scrap Peter Singer's drowning child argument and spend all their money on paying rents in the Bay Area rather than buying mosquito nets.
Let that child drown, it's not *your* child and nobody has the right to the use of your body to swim out and pull them out of the water.
Most consequentialists don’t believe in rights. The violinist argument is meant to convince people who do believe in rights that the right to use your own body as you see fit can give you the right to unhook from someone even if they depend on your for their life.
For consequentialists, the questions around abortion are going to end up turning on whether the prospective mother reasonably expects the overall quantity of good in the world will be greater if she terminates this pregnancy or if she goes forward with it. And from the state’s perspective, the question is whether punishing people who make the wrong choice in these scenarios will overall make the world a better or worse place. (I really don’t know how to think about the first question, but on the second question, many people give the harm reduction argument that is also given for legalizing drugs, that even if you ban it, many people will still do it, but in much worse ways)
This argument seems very effective in cases of rape, but it has a gaping hole in it where consensual sex is concerned.
Once the sex involved is consensual, it's not "you have been kidnapped and hooked up to a famous violinist against your will. Is it moral to disconnect him?"
It's "you bought a ticket in a pleasure lottery where there is a 99% chance you will receive a bunch of fun gooey endorphins, and a small % chance (which you can shrink with contraception), that you will end up hooked to an ailing violinist to provide him your kidneys for 9 months. Your number came up and now you are hooked to the violinist. Is it moral to disconnect him?"
The second is, at the very least, a much more complex question than the first. So while this is an effective argument, its really only against the most extreme, "and no exceptions" breeds of pro-life positions.
So once artificial wombs exist, abortion is prohibited?
I’m not pro-life so I can’t really speak to the pro-life position if artificial wombs appeared but I think everybody would concede they’d complicate the abortion debate further.
I have trouble seeing how that system would work though. Who parents a kid born in an artificial womb when both mom and dad don’t want it? Return of state orphanages? And who pays for the womb in question? Government? Do Mom and Dad *both* make child support payments to the state?
I guess you can think up a system but it feels extremely speculative and unlikely.
The precedent has already been set (in some jurisdictions) that it is "the best interest of the child" that the parents pay for its upbringing, with parentage being defined as who's name appears on the birth certificate. And since it's already been established that once the father has been so identified that he should pay (regardless of whether or not they are the biological father of the child) it seems that he at least would be paying for an artificially gestated citizen's upbringing. Whether "the best interests of the child" override the equity interest in the mother not paying has not yet been established.
I think the "who pays" issue complicates the "artificial womb" scenario. In maybe interesting ways, depending on your disposition.
To try to simplify it: suppose artificial wombs exist, and are about as easy and safe and inexpensive to use as, say, a free phone. In that case, choosing an abortion over a womb would be a bit like walking by a wide river with a drowning child in the middle, and choosing to pay a sharpshooter to end the child's life humanely, instead of using the phone to summon a (let's pretend further) free dronecopter to whiz over and rescue the child. No one sensible would support shooting the kid, no matter how honorably the shooter goes about his duty. In fact, if anyone were in the vicinity, they'd probably offer to call the copter themselves. Such wombs would probably be considered a boon to humanity.
Auto-wombs are more likely to be at least somewhat expensive, however. So the hypothetical is more like paying a sharpshooter $750-1500 (brief search gave me this range for an abortion), or buying a dronecopter for, let's say, $10000. We're now asking more of our passerby. Consequently, I think we could understand not wanting to oblige a bystander to a potentially unaffordable cost. It might still be possible to justify a general tax to pay for auto-wombs (and wrangle over moral hazard, etc.).
Going a step further: auto-wombs are probably also likely to be non-trivially invasive. After all, we still have to get the fetus out of the mother, and there could be complications. Even if a state tax paid for all of it, we're still asking someone to take a (hopefully tiny) risk of some nasty damage like paralysis or even bleeding out.
I think that non-zero health risk to the mother is going to be the main pushback to a hypothetical auto-womb, to sketch it broadly.
Paying for adoption afterward is easier health-wise, harder money-wise. OTOH, I suspect it'll be as moot as adoption is today. There seem to be many more people wishing to adopt than there are children available to be adopted. (I was surprised to learn this a few years ago, but it nevertheless appears to be the case, though I found some of the underlying reasons depressing.)
> Who parents a kid born in an artificial womb when both mom and dad don’t want it?
Might be a problem some day, but right now there is a tremendous demand for babies. And not just white perfect-health babies, either.
According to current SCOTUS precedent, yes.
People in the "pro choice" camp vary in their opinion on abortion; on one end "it's no big deal", on the other end "it's a bad thing, but anti-abortion legislation leads to even worse outcomes, therefore...". You might find it easier to understand the latter.
In countries where abortion is illegal, sometimes the law says "unless mother's life is in danger", which seems reasonable in theory... but in practice the doctors protect themselves from legal consequences by waiting even in clearly hopeless cases until the mother is almost dying, with lots of irreversible damage already happening. If you are aware of this, then it seems like the only way to protect women from this is to make abortion legal for *arbitrary* reason, then the doctors do not have to protect themselves legally by putting women's lives in danger.
By the way, many people are probably not aware of this, but many (most? not sure) pregnancies end up with *spontaneous* abortion. Which has some interesting theological consequences... like, if you happen to believe that human soul is created at the moment the egg and the sperm join, then, matematically speaking, the number of human souls in limbo (if that is where unborn children go) will *exceed* the number of human souls in heaven and hell combined. (And if you don't believe in limbo, then, well, God is the one who kills most unborn babies and puts them in hell, halleluyah.)
Anyway, if you see that a human foetus already has like 50% chance to be killed by nature, this makes abortion somewhat less horrible; it just kinda slighly increases the already existing chance.
(For the record, I am not trying to convince you or anything like that, just trying to provide information you seem to be interested in.)
Never have I heard/read a pro-life argument which fully takes into account the frequency of spontaneous miscarriage, and the implications this has for what we might infer about God's plan for humanity.
I would be interested to read such an argument, if anyone has a link.
Because think about the terms there: "spontaneous miscarriage" (as an aside, I have read some shitty 'arguments' which weren't really arguments because they were more trying to be 'checkmate atheists!' type gotchas, e.g. "why don't pro-lifers hold funerals for sanitary pads since periods are the same thing as a dead baby, huh?" because of course an unfertilised ovum is the same thing as a blastocyst we all agree that, yeah? It's the same general tenor as Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred" which is not the view held at all, but it serves the purpose of mockery).
Okay, getting back to it: "spontaneous" is not the same thing as "induced abortion" but it's a way of displacing guilt, because there does seem to be some residual guilt floating around. If many pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage, then one teensy-tiny medically induced miscarriage is just exactly the same thing, right? If Sue has a miscarriage where she didn't even know she was pregnant yet, then Annie going to the doctor to get a prescription for mifepristone/misoprostol for that pregnancy which made her go "oh shit" when the red line showed up on the home test kit, then it's the same thing exactly, right? After all, in both cases the women are just undergoing "Remaining products of conception will be expelled during subsequent vaginal bleeding".
Sue didn't cause it, or if she did, not knowingly. So nobody can legitimately blame her and it would be cruel and heartless to do so. It is also cruel and heartless to blame Annie, who just had her pregnancy stop with nobody intervening (going to the doctor and taking tablets? what has that to do with it?)
No, it's all just sadly, miscarriages all round.
The point about miscarriages is to try to get people to notice their own inconsistency with how the value fetuses. The argument is NOT "it happens all the time, what's one more".
The argument is: "I notice that when people talk about miscarriages, they are often pretty sad but not unreasonably so, and usually mostly in terms of the loss of something _they_ wanted. Rarely do they lament the fetuses own suffering. I also notice that when talking about induced miscarriage, many of these same people will treat it as "gut wrenchingly morally abhorrent". These things are inconsistent. If they really believe an induced miscarriage is that bad, why do they seem relatively okay with an accidental one? Why isn't it just as important a policy decision to save all the MANY more spontaneous miscarriage as it is to ban the elective ones? The discrepancy here may indicate they're being irrational about the badness of an elective miscarriage and the comparative worth of a fetus."
"We can't always prevent this bad thing from happening, so we don't feel to bad about it" and "Intentionally causing this bad thing is reprehensible" are not at all contradictory.
Compare your response to hearing your friend fell and broke their leg, and hearing someone pushed them down and broke their leg. Bad things happening naturally and bad things being done intentionally have wildly different valences. (Also compare hearing that your friend fell because of an extremely slippery floor that should have been marked.)
Edit: to more directly address your point, different responses do not imply a different value attached to the negative event, but to the cause thereof
Sort of correct sort of incorrect.
The cause being had can add to something's badness. Bad intentions can make a good act reprehensible. But it gets added to the badness of the actual thing. The badness of the actual thing in neutral circumstances is the badness you place on the thing itself. Punishment for the way it happened is unrelated.
I VERY much do not believe any pro-lifers would say "baby death isn't a big deal, but if you do it intentionally that's when it's a problem".
They definitely purport to believe it's always a big fucking deal. It's a child's life. We don't just go "meh" in other cases when children actually die. Have you seen how we respond to child cancer?
No if they admit that miscarriage is genuinely not worth being too upset over then they've admitted they're wrong.
There's inconsistency all over the place. We're not going to change any minds on here either pro- or anti-, since people have positions, have reasons for those positions, and have been at this rodeo before when it comes to arguing those positions.
I'll just finish with "Hm, I notice when people talk about 90 year old Grand-Aunt Hannah dying, they are pretty sad but not unreasonably so, and usually mostly in terms of their own loss. But you talk about bashing Grand-Aunt Hannah's skull in with a lump hammer, and suddenly it's 'gut wrenchingly morally abhorrent'. If they really believe induced death is that bad, why do they seem relatively okay with a natural one?" is an equally tenable argument.
If you don't find it convicing, well, neither do I find the "spontaneous miscarriages happen all the time, what's the big deal with deliberately inducing one?" convincing.
I mean, when I was a fundamentalist Christian my position was:
A) The Bible is actually quite vague about when exactly independent life begins, so we have to determine that outside of scripture
B) Any time after the child is viable outside the womb is CLEARLY too late by my moral intuitions; if it could be an independent life OUTSIDE the womb, we should consider it one inside too.
C) That gets you to 25 weeks with current tech. Practically all 24 week babies die due to their intestines rotting in their bodies post-delivery. That's probably a solvable problem, we just haven't yet. Maybe discount to 20 weeks, just to account for forseeable medical fixes like that.
That gives me an upper bound when I'm pretty darn confident the baby is an independent life and should be treated like it. But maybe that happens earlier? Is there any point at which I can be SURE the baby is not yet an independent life?
Well... my perfect Creator God seems to not mind wasting 2/3rds of fertilized eggs very early in pregnancy due to implantation issues. If you really believe God is good, as I did then, that's sound evidence that they are NOT independent lives at that point, or he would have set up a system that preserved them. (Sure, a lot of later miscarriages can be the responsibility of the Fall; our bodies work imperfectly now. Those can just be tragedies. But the 'throw shit at the uterus and hope it sticks' phase seems to be by design.)
So I put a minimum age for independent life at 7-10 days. Based on what I believed of God, that age of baby isn't morally valuable.
All told, I was in favor of laws which permitted <10 day abortions of various sorts (IUDs, morning after, etc.), and *strongly* opposed to ones that permitted third or late second trimester abortions. Somewhat opposed to ones that permitted 10day-20 months due to prioritizing moral caution, but I recognized the moral validity of an argument to balance that differently.
Overall, I think that's a pro-life position informed by spontaneous miscarriage. My fellow fundamentalists mostly thought I was flirting with heresy and pro-choice. (But they mostly thought I was flirting with heresy all over the place; rationalist-adjacent fundamentalists don't tend to look *normal*.)
This was really interesting to read. It reminds me of another systematic thinker who took Christianity so seriously that he rejected established doctrine which didn't make sense to him: Isaac Newton. In his case, he rejected the Trinity. (Although he went further by accusing early Christians of corrupting scripture.)
If I might ask an unrelated question, how did you reconcile the New Testament portrayal of mental illness as demonic with the modern medical portrayal of mental illness as (somehow) neurological?
The new testament doesn't really claim that ALL mental illness is demonic; merely that some specific cases were. It's notable that some of the apostle Paul's writings really look like someone introspecting about their own mental health issues without blaming it on the devil. For instance: "But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind."
I never really saw a contradiction here. If I had ever met someone raving about clearly spiritual things, I'd probably have prayed for an exorcism. In the few cases I actually dealt with someone with a psychotic break, it didn't seem likely to be spiritual in nature so I dealt with it the same as I would as an atheist.
"Anyway, if you see that a human foetus already has like 50% chance to be killed by nature, this makes abortion somewhat less horrible; it just kinda slighly increases the already existing chance."
An argument that makes as much sense as "You live in New York City where you already have X chance of being murdered, so me deliberately killing you because I don't like the colour of your socks just kinda slightly increases the already existing chance".
Or "Everyone dies. 100%. So since you're gonna die anyway, me murdering you for the fifty cents in your left trouser pocket is somewhat less horrible".
I have noticed this tendency in pro-abortion arguments where there is both (a) it is not murder! you can only murder a person and a foetus is not a person! and (b) trying to make abortion equivalent to 'it just happened, nobody did anything to bring it about' so the "abortion is EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS a miscarriage" is *very* popular.
If it's not murder or killing, why be so squeamish about "I didn't do it, you didn't do it, it just happened, like leaves falling off trees in autumn and that pregnancy you didn't want just stopping".
> If it's not murder or killing, why be so squeamish about
Probably because "pro-lifers" treating women like murders make them a bit defensive.
You're correct that nobody likes being told their crime is a crime.
Trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe you are not in a country where abortion legal, but I'm guessing that actually you're just being a dick.
I'm the dick that supports this movement, so call me what names you like, I don't feel insulted by having the bad opinion of a baby murderer (if we're going to be exchanging polite forms of address):
https://marchforlife.ie/
> (And if you don't believe in limbo, then, well, God is the one who kills most unborn babies and puts them in hell, halleluyah.)
Worth noting that this isn't the complete Venn diagram of common Christian beliefs. Fundamentalist Baptists mostly believe that children before the "age of accountability" (9-13 years of age; varies based on maturity of child) are "Safe", and go to heaven on death regardless of actions, etc.
A very interesting belief that I'm familiar with, although I have to wonder how many Baptists notice that this conflicts with Sola Scriptura...
Eh? There's scripture that can support it. See 2 Sam 12:23 and Matt 19:14 for claims that children go to heaven.
Unless you mean the specific age isn't listed in scripture, which is fair enough but I never heard a Baptist claim to know the exact age anyhow.
I'm not debating "children can go to heaven", I'm debating the idea that "Children are incapable of being sinful until a certain arbitrary age" has Biblical support. If a child killed another child, they would have committed the sin of murder, not to mention that this comes into conflict with Protestant conceptions of Original Sin.
I mean, given the assertion from elsewhere that only those counted righteous go to heaven, and the statement in 2 Sam that a 1 week old infant went to heaven, and you have to figure there's SOME exception implied for kids. That or claim this particular infant was sufficiently precocious to call on the name of the Lord at 1 week of age.
That sort of apparent contradiction is the usual thing that prompts a wrinkle to be added to theology. No particular challenge here either; the idea is that they've inheretied the sin nature and are innately sinful (Original Sin), but are not yet sinful by meaningful CHOICE yet so grace is extended to them.
> 2 Sam 12:23
Says the child is dead, doesn't mention heaven.
David says that he can go to the child, but the child cannot be brought back to him. David (elsewhere, through the psalms mostly) clearly believes he's going to heaven on death (and generally has a clearer revelatory understanding of the Plan of Salvation than other OT prophets.) So him saying that he can go to the child implies that he believes the child is in heaven (and while one could certainly disagree, it's widely interpreted as him being a reliable source.)
So goes the reasoning, and it's as sound as any systematic theology tends to be. I don't see a real conflict with Sola Scriptura.
Everyone taking a position on the question has picked out a position on the point at which the potentialities in the developmental process advance to become a "life" with its attendant moral valence. Some people maintain that it happens immediately at the point of conception. I find that position scarcely more sane than saying that it happens a little bit prior to conception - i.e. that the whole world should continuously be in a colossal moral panic about the millions and millions of innocent "lives" mercilessly terminated every time I ejaculate from any location other than inside the reproductive apparatus of a fertile woman (and it still happens anyway even if I do ejaculate in such a location)
Say your close friend Alice shares with you that the pregnancy test she took last Sunday came back positive, as did the next two. Alice is excited, and you quietly celebrate, although as a physician you wonder in the back of your mind if that’s not tempting fate a little.
Two months later, you go meet Alice at your usual spot and she sadly reveals that, like a frightening proportion of all pregnancies, hers came to an abrupt halt. You can tell she is disappointed, but determined to move on. She makes no mention of funeral arrangements.
Is Alice acting appropriately? Which (if any) of the following two choices better captures your response and your view?
A] Alice lost a child, and it is unconscionable to move on without so much as a headstone or public mourning. This is as if she’d discarded her dead baby into a trash can! You are shocked to your core at your friend’s monstrosity.
B] Alice wanted a child, and it didn’t work out. You sympathize, talk it out, and reassure her that those things happen. It’ll work out better next time.
How would your answer change if Alice’s pregnancy was 5 months along? 7? 9? Like most people, I presume you would find positions closer to A increasingly understandable as the fœtus develops. If that’s the case, what causes the transition? What property of the fœtus is gained over time?
In developed countries, this intuition seems correctly reflected by our laws, which formalize moral differences between the start and end of the pregnancy by fuzzily drawing a line somewhere in between. Where to draw the line legally is an understandable question to raise, but the notion that a line would be drawn somewhere between A and B seems perfectly in line with our (tragically undervalued, imo) folk wisdom and moral intuition.
I learn someone I met once a few weeks ago has died. It's a reminder of how death could happen at any time, and it disturbs me, but not deeply; I wasn't all that familiar with them.
Someone I have worked with for 3 months and went to a couple of social events with dies. I'm far more bothered, because of my familiarity with the person; I may even be moved to tears when I hear.
A lifelong friend dies. I take time off of work to attend the funeral, contribute to a fund to support his bereaved spouse, and for a while, I visit his grave once a year. I am deeply impacted.
Clearly, in all of these scenarios, the thing happening is exactly as bad: someone dying. What's changing is my level of familiarity and attachment to that person. Similarly, Alice naturally becomes more familiar and attached to her child as they develop, and the farther along the pregnancy is when the miscarriage occurs, the more distraught she will naturally be. That's totally consistent with the miscarriage being equally bad in all those cases, just like a death as equally bad to another death regardless of how familiar or attached I might be to the decedent.
(edit to add the conclusory point:) So there's nothing monstrous about Alice not being distraught at an early miscarriage (although many people are anyway). The error in logic is thinking that because she's not distraught, the miscarriage must not be a bad thing; even if it's not as bad *for her*, it's just as bad for *the child*.
I understand your point, but I reject the premise that we mourn our children (and our community's children, and oftentimes unrelated ones too) purely as a consequence of a growing affection or familiarity. I would argue that our mourning involves elements which clearly ought apply to a fetus were we to earnestly interpret it as a child. E.g: the pain of an individual's future being taken away; the innate sorrow of losing a young community member...
None of those seem to manifest to a comparable degree in the case of an early-term miscarriage. I find that to be a strong indication that we intuitively understand the notion of developing personhood, and do not grant it to a 5-week old fetus, at least not in the way we unreservedly grant it to a child. I find it striking that this reasoning lands us pretty close to what seems to have been a reasonably prevalent norm across eras and cultures (if this is incorrect, I would welcome a correction).
I agree with much of your first paragraph, with the caveat that grief is different for different people. I have known someone who deeply grieved an early miscarriage. I can understand their reasons for doing so, even without familiarity; just as I can understand someone *not* doing so, and wouldn't try to induce them to.
So let me turn the question back on you. Do you think people who *are* profoundly affected by early miscarriages, as early as 5 weeks, are being irrational? It seems like you've painted yourself into that corner.
I'll pass no judgment of irrationality either way. I think some will grieve and some won't, and I won't blame either. And in either case, the harm to the fetus, i.e. the child, is the same either way.
I really don’t like ‘irrational’, here. How about ‘fairly unusual’, or at least ‘meaningfully towards the edge of a (presumably) normal-ish distribution?’ My point isn’t that people ought act a certain way, rather an observation that they tend to do.
To be extra clear, I am not trying to tell young mothers how they should react to the loss of either child or fetus (or, frankly, how to react in general!). I simply hope I could clarify why I think the issue of ‘personhood’ is a bit more substantial than seems acknowledged when legal restrictions on abortion come up.
Understood! They certainly don't always act that way, it may even be positively unusual to. I just suppose I don't think that's especially strong evidence on the morality (or immorality) of abortion, especially given the variance displayed.
I guess my main thrust is that I think pro-life people can consistently simultaneously maintain that (a) early miscarriages are bad, and (b) the people who go through them aren't under any obligation to feel bereaved. If we're agreed on that, then I think we're generally in accord.
The clue here is the general disparity between religious and secular outlooks.
The simple question of why life might be inherently valuable tends to reveal that it is a religious argument, i.e. the sanctity of life. This doesn't compute for the secular perspective, which sees the value of life more-so as a collective agreement. Valuing is an action. This is why living status and human DNA of a fetus is considered irrelevant. Even before personhood (i.e. birth), nervous system development and general capacity for suffering is the line at which it is no longer acceptable, for most. As I recall if you go far back enough in time, there seemed to be less of a stern view (quoting from memory) perhaps because child mortality was once very high, and suffering was greater.
There's something to be said for being cognizant that abortion is killing a living being, even if it should be up to the mother. I do find it weirdly incompatible when some people denounce animal slaughter (not just farming conditions) but have no problem with abortion.
Regarding the replies to the point of "even if the baby/fetus is human from conception onwards, lots of pregnancies fail so nbd"...this is sideways of the point. Lots of people die every year whilst swimming. It's still morally unacceptable to hold someone underwater until they drown, and we have no problem making that illegal, despite the dangers inherent in trying to save people from floods.
Almost everything is sideways to the point, which is that either the life of an embryo is valued to the extent that its termination is tantamount to murder, or it doesn't.
This doesn't work since nothing close to 50% of swimmers die by drowning.
To carry the analogy a bit closer... societies have no problem not rescuing thrill-seekers who put themselves in dangerous situations, say surfing during a tsunami. If it's not inconvenient or puts rescuers as risk, we will try send the coast guard out, but there's certainly no moral imperative to save a life when the person is at high risk of dying anyway.
I've got two lenses to look at this.
The first one is the progressive acquisition of rights.
You are born with the right to own property, but not to manage it. You acquire that second right at ~18.
You are born without the right to move around and acquire it progressively from ~12 on.
Even where abortion is allowed, your right to not be poisoned by alcohol or tobacco starts at conception.
Your right to free speech is severely limited as a young child without too many people worrying about that.
So I consider that rights are not absolute things that you get at birth (or even at conception), but are acquired over time for most of them.
The second lense is that even for adults, the right to life is not absolute.
War is the killing of human beings in order to obtain:
* better economical outcomes (oil, food, water)
* liberties : right to move, free speech, democracy, etc.
In a lot of these cases, non-belligerent people are able to take the side of the agressor and agree that their cause is worth killing some people (i.e. violating their right to life)
In several States, it is acceptable to react with lethal force to a non-lethal aggression : to defend the borders of your home, to over-react to a physical aggression.
With that lense, an abortion would be a lethal self-defence against a physical aggression.
Finally, since you mentioned rape, I should note that an unwanted pregnancy satisfies the definition of rape : the penetration of someone's body by someone else. The fact that the perpetrator is a fetus and has no mens rea changes the way that we see the situation, but it doesn't change the perspective of the victim.
War for "better economic outcomes" is internationally condemned.
'Unwanted pregnancy = rape" is illogical. That's like saying a guest oversleeping is a home invader. Also to say that the woman who is considering killing her child is the real victim is an act of denying agency to women that I expect from the likes of the Taliban.
> "War for "better economic outcomes" is internationally condemned."
I don't expect this to hold true in all cases. Consider a popular revolt against a country because the taxes are too high, or equivalently because the government has made a practice of confiscating property if you get too successful and can spare it.
I'd expect international opinion to largely favor the popular revolt.
"Finally, since you mentioned rape, I should note that an unwanted pregnancy satisfies the definition of rape : the penetration of someone's body by someone else. The fact that the perpetrator is a fetus and has no mens rea changes the way that we see the situation, but it doesn't change the perspective of the victim."
This is absolutely absurd, not least because that's literally not even close to the definition of rape.
Like, seriously, just say that fetuses aren't people and be done with it. Claiming fetuses are raping their mothers is goofy nonsense that makes you sound insane.
One way to argue the dependency problem is to say that the dependency is different, in a way that makes one much more physically possible. After all, we don't insist on right-to-life to justify pouring every last penny of a family's wealth into an elderly member with stage 4 cancer. In the case of the other end of life, a newborn's dependence is much easier to duplicate in another parent than the dependence of an unborn. I don't remember hearing anyone make that argument, but I think it's easily implied, so while I never heard anyone pro-choice bring it up, I've never heard a pro-life mention it either.
Once that's established, the next idea is that personhood isn't sufficient to merit state protection against termination. Someone must also be reasonably independent of others. For example, if you were in a helicopter and there was a cord tying you to someone dangling out the side, such that the only way for you to save yourself from being dragged out was to cut it, that's a terrible situation, but few people would blame you for doing it, even though you're consigned the other person to near certain death.
This is essentially the violinist analogy, of course. There's a pro-life response to both in turn - it's one thing to suddenly find yourself sustaining another human being while going about everyday business (kidnapped and raped), and another to engage in business that makes this relation more likely (having promiscuous sex). There might be responses in turn, but FWIW, this is about as far as I see the conversation go.
A response I also commonly see is that that unborn simply isn't a person. I still have problems running that reasoning down. Best I can tell, it's an appeal to topology, and shouldn't have any more grab than an argument to an atheist about the soul entering the body at conception.
In general, it's usually frustrating for the simple reason that Americans largely have picked a side by now, and no counterargument is to be brooked. All the first-line points are all that are made, no caveats are admissible; if they are, they're a signal that the maker is from the other side, and every effort should now be focused on a shoutdown if it's an online forum or otherwise disengaging oneself from unpleasantry. (I saw this just moments ago in one of the subthreads to this one.)
Or, it's just exhausting to give it due diligence. I can sympathize: I tried my best to read every subthread here before posting this. I have more views on all the little side paths the discussion took here, but I'm not sure I could even fit them in the forum's length limit.
Total aside but on the note about it being frustrating because "Americans largely have picked a side by now"... think about how often side-picking occurs absent any consideration of the issue at all because of coalition politics.
You can very reliably predict someone's stance on environmental policy based on their stance on gay marriage, despite those issues being totally unrelated, because we come into the coalition based on the issues we care about but then end up defaulting to our tribe's stance on everything else.
In the same vein, how many pro-lifers are actually pro-life because they've thought the issue through, rather because they are pro-gun, and the gun policy they like happens to sit with the pro-life coalition? And how many pro-choice people are pro-choice because they've thought that issue through, and how many are pro-choice because they want stronger climate policy?
It's gotta be frustrating for people with strong beliefs on the issue to step back and think about how many people are (a) on the other side, and (b) totally unpersuadable not because of the arguments, but because of their attachment to party.
We used to tolerate more pluralistic beliefs among our own tribe but the constant culture war is making everyone into a one-dimensional cartoon.
I'm with you (and Edward Scizorhands) there. Although I do find I can break away from the coalition tendency, if I have the time to put in the extra effort and try to discuss. If all I have is an "A or B" poll, then I pretty much assume I'm in the coalition trap, and I try not to sweat it too much.
But if I'm lucky enough to engage and find someone willing to do likewise, I very often find that nearly everyone has a few edge cases on whichever issue they're being tribal about. To put it another way: as long as we have two package deals on the menu, we can naturally expect results to reflect exactly that. If we unpackage them into a la carte, I think we'll find things get much more varied, and almost no one picks the original packages. There's an implication here about how to implement public policy...
One of the good things about sites like ACX, DSL, LW, etc. is that they encourage this type of dialogue, and the richer details become more apparent.
Basically, the strongest version of a pro-abortion argument is some combination of this:
1) There's no such thing as objective rights. There's nothing in the universe or in physics that is "a right to life". Rights are things that humans invented, and that we mostly agree to, because they make life better.
If someone's primary argument boils down to "actually that right is objective", typically for religious reasons, it's entirely unfalsifiable because they are accepting by axiom something that isn't objectively real.
You might, MIGHT, be able to argue some of them out of it by quibling about exactly what the right to life applies to and going into deep pseudo scientific rabbit holes trying to figure out when a fetus is objectively a person. But it's not all that likely and this tactic accepts as given that some right answer exists at all.
2) Given that rights are inventions we agree to, this brings a lot of things into consistency. As a society we are and should be against killing living organisms, but we make exceptions when the tradeoffs are favorable. We go to war, we allow police to kill criminals and sometimes kill them with courts, we allow people to kill in self defense, we kill enormous numbers of very non-sentient animals to eat them, we kill lots of much-more-sentient animals because we want the land or resources, etc. We accept that there are times it's okay to kill living things. Exactly when those times are is determined by the circumstances of the case. Typically, it's a tradeoff of two things that we consider good. We don't like war, but defending our citizens is more important. We like when everyone can get a chance to survive and learn from their mistakes, but we value the life of the victim and justice more, and so allow self defense. Society would be more just if we didn't kill animals for food, but we get enough value from their consumption, and so little is lost by eating them, that it's worth it, until a better alternative is available.
3) We make rules and rights because humans are pretty bad at accurately and fairly assessing cost benefit analysis in controversial cases. "Thou shalt not kill" should be viewed as an adaptive strategy to shackle your temptation to be very convincing and persuade the tribe to murder your rival just because you don't like him. These deontological strategies often work really well, and we shouldn't do away with them. But they shouldn't be confused with moral certainty - indeed they have their own exceptions often built in (like self defense).
4) Therefore, the position of pro-abortion is the claim that the tradeoff of all the things society and individuals care about involved in abortion makes it better to abort (in at least some cases). If someone's response is "killing for a good tradeoff is morally abhorrent" you've missed the point. You already agree with killing for some reasons. All that's up for debate is whether the reason is good enough to break the rule. There's no objective abhorrence to it. The abhorrence is in your brain not the universe.
5) The claim that abortion is worth it I think is really really strong.
Abortion is good for the mother. Abortion is also good for the maintenance of the mothers autonomy, something we have decided we care about. Abortion is good for society. "Unwantedness" is one of the worst things for children and reliably makes unstable unhappy children who become unstable unhappy adults. Their mothers typically want to abort them for a reason. Statistically, these aborted fetuses would live less happy lives than average. If every aborted child were birthed, you'd dramatically reduce the capacity of an already struggling populace to manage their lives. The crime drop in the 90s was attributed largely due to not just the reduction of lead, but also with abortion rights in the 70s.
6) What's being lost of course is a fetus, and I think it would be bizarre to claim that this is literally value-less. But, I DO claim that is of very small value.
Fetuses are basically entirely fungible. Nothing really is lost when a specific fetus is aborted. Most pro-lifers even tacitly accept this fungibility - see all the references to "blank slates" in just this thread. What's the value of a blank slate? There's always more blank slates. The fetus may be a living organism, but it doesn't have any "personhood" at all. There's no intrinsic worth to it at all, only potential. It isn't alive enough to have its own conception of self, and therefore doesn't have anything internal for it to experience losing.
7) Don't ask "so when is it a person?" You're asking a question that has no answer. Ask "Is the tradeoff ever good, and if so, when does it stop being good?". For me personally, the tradeoff is good (because there's so little worth in the fetus) right up until it's born. I think another reasonable position would be "right up until it can survive on its own" or "20 weeks because it's a good compromise" though I don't agree with them. I think "never" and "never with exceptions for rape and health" are extremely unreasonable and irrational, and a really big mistake. But I understand why people would feel that way - we work based on rules and what feels viscerally right or wrong. But if you're someone where the wrongness of abortion just feels viscerally obvious, I'd challenge you that that is just a strongly felt emotion, and it doesn't make it true.
"There's no such thing as objective rights. There's nothing in the universe or in physics that is "a right to life". Rights are things that humans invented, and that we mostly agree to, because they make life better."
This is kind of an hilarious argument consdiering that "rights aren't real" is something that the overwhelming majority of pro-choice people don't believe in any other context. It's not simply "rights aren't real but we can decide certain things are good", no, something being a "violation" of "human rights" is seen as an inherent evil, not just a people not following an agreed upon convention.
I mean, for goodness' sake, the left are overwhelmingly the ones appealing to "rights". "Healthcare is a fundamental right", "Equality is a right", "All children have the right to an education". This is NOT the langauge of people who view rights as arbitary human constructions.
"Fetuses are basically entirely fungible. Nothing really is lost when a specific fetus is aborted. Most pro-lifers even tacitly accept this fungibility - see all the references to "blank slates" in just this thread. What's the value of a blank slate? There's always more blank slates. The fetus may be a living organism, but it doesn't have any "personhood" at all. There's no intrinsic worth to it at all, only potential. It isn't alive enough to have its own conception of self, and therefore doesn't have anything internal for it to experience losing."
Okay, I really really hope you're against laws against forced termination. If I punch a pregnant lady in the womb, by your standards I'm not doing anything different to punching a non-pregnant lady in the womb. Not, of course, that I want to punch anyone, just that in practice this committment to fetuses possessing no value is frequently discarded the instant it leads to inconvenient stituations.
To respond to your first part:
Im not telling the "average pro-choice argument". I dont care that thats not the language most pro-choicers use, and I agree that a lot of progressives go too far on calling things rights (but thats actually my point, and youre misunderstanding how they understand rights. They dont actually believe that healthcare, which requires a healthcare system, is some god given right, they actually mean "this is the minimum a wealthy society such as ours should be able to provide for its citizens")
Your objection here is a really big misunderstanding of how they view rights and also totally irrelevant to the argument Im making. I dont care whether the average pro-choice person feels this way about rights. Can you contend that rights are objective, and if so, how?
For your second part:
Forced termination is obviously wrong, because its against everyone's interests. All those things that I listed as the reasons abortion is worth it get flipped on their head if the fetus is wanted. Wanted children are good, the mother wantspo it, forced termination is STILL a violation of autonomy, and it preserves the non-zero-but-low value of the fetus.
If, somehow, magically, you could punch a pregnant woman such that the fetus died but was instantly replaced by another, different, fetus, and the mother didnt notice (or feel pain), objectively, no, not much if anything is lost, and thats what I mean by fungible. Contrast this to if I kill your ten year old child and replace it with a different ten year old, like God did in the bible to Job. Not so fungible.
I feel like you really didnt engage honestly with my comment / argument at all. Maybe I miscommunicated.
"1) There's no such thing as objective rights. There's nothing in the universe or in physics that is "a right to life". Rights are things that humans invented, and that we mostly agree to, because they make life better."
And by "we" you mean "those most willing and proficient at using violence to enforce their viewpoints" correct? I mean if you're willing to admit that "rights" are a polite fiction don't turn around and pretend that another one like "consent of the governed" or "social contract" have any reality to them.
I think you're really missing the point of the argument.
I never did pretend that "consent of the governed" or social contract is any more physically real than "rights". They're all the same level and kind of real, that is, exactly as real as our social consensus enforces.
"Consent of the governed" is a sort of deontological rule that we have (attempted) to enshrine in our government as a way to shackle it's temptation to act against the interests of it's constituents. But at the same time we know full well that it WILL sometimes act without consent.
"Consent of the governed" has no objective goodness or reality. It's also a social fiction that we employ because we want good Nash equilibrium (which ARE real).
But if consent of the governed stopped being a good strategy, we should do away with it.
The point of this argument is to say that "I feel very viscerally that abortion is morally abhorrent" is not a reasoned position, and "it violates the right to life" is not a valid argument. There is no right, just agreed convention. The question is, should this convention be allowed or not, and rational arguments only please.
That's just it -- you're presupposing that a social consensus exists. And of course, being an abstract construct it cannot enforce anything on concrete human beings, who are not in fact purely reasoning entities.
Therefore you're making a category error and trying to screen it off by artificially disallowing arguments that your framework can't deal with.
Deontology may be reasoned, but the axioms that it starts from are no less arbitrary than "abortion is abhorrent." Once you start abandoning emotive expressions as irrelevant, then the only thing that is actually left is the physical world. And at that point, ultima ratio regum.
I'm not presupposing the social consensus exists. If it doesn't, there just won't be any "rights" or "consent of the governed" enforced.
And I categorically disagree that these things can't affect individual humans. That's all they do. They change the game theory, what equilibria we end up in. There's no category error at all, in fact the whole point is to hug as close to reality as possible,and reality includes human beings and our politics. An argument like "abortion is inherently morally wrong because it violates the objective right to life" would be a category error.
My claim is "rights are things we agree to and which we already allow exceptions for. Abortion should be an exception because it's very little is lost and much is protected."
You might disagree with me that little is lost or that anything worthwhile is saved. That's fine. We can argue about the tradeoffs.
But if you're response is "no, it's just wrong by axiom" or "it's just wrong by religion", that's just _not_ an argument.
You might be able to win by successfully imposing your will. "I just really feel it's wrong" is an argument but a weak one, and emotional responses are valid and important. We often aren't great reasoner's and emotions make good heuristics. But it's still only a weak argument, and not a good or convincing reason to prevent abortions, especially when they're so prosocial.
I have a metaphysical problem with your use of "we," because "we" do not exist as a coherent entity. Ditto society (and therefore pro-social). At most "we" means "myself and people who agree with me" which is of course just popularity which is just a padded weapon. Likewise "prosocial " has a terrible track record as we understand eugenics or political repression today, though it seemed perfectly clear to the ruling "we" of their day. Heck, even today, we see calls for punishing antivaxxers/antimaskers in order to serve the greater good of Society.
I stopped my subscription after the first year because I figured I had done enough Scott supporting. And I needed to conserve money… Now I learn he wrote a post about onion knights?
Hmm!
I think you're probably still allowed to make your subscription fit your circumstances. You could make a compromise with a partial subscription, still support Scott, salve your conscience, conserve some money and also get to read about onion knights. What's not to like!
I would think Onion Knights would be somewhat lacking in a digital presentation.
Soon, I'll be able to go on Erasmus (six month university exchange program). Should I account for the quality/ranking of the university I'm going to, or just pick the nicest country and not worry about quality at all?
I know the exchange program won't be on my resume, so there's little to no potential signaling value to employers.
High-ranked university for networking, nicest country to fuck around and enjoy your youth.
If you don't have a real chance of getting to know the faculty and possibly setting up some future opportunities, nicest country wins.
Why won't the exchange program be on your resume? Let me put this another way: I would strongly advise anyone to include this kind of thing on their resume / publicize it the same way they would publicize having a degree.
At least I can personally attest that I was offered a position in part due to having mentioned this kind of thing. The most relevant part were the connections I made and the people I worked with, not the mere fact that I did an Erasmus, though.
I guess my advice would be: don't pick a country where you think you'll be depressed (eg, I shouldn't pick somewhere where it's dark all the time). After that, choose the best place for networking purposes. That is not necessarily the best university, but the place where the best people of your area are. You can fuck around and enjoy your youth basically anywhere as long as you aren't sick.
Really? I figured that since it's just six months of the same thing you'd be studying at your own university, putting it on your resume is a waste of space.
Thanks for the advice! I guess I will take that into account, then.
Early in your career, just about everyone has an almost identical resume. Anything you can add to make yourself stand out from the crowd is beneficial. You never know when the person reading your resume will turn out to have also studied abroad in the same country, and extend you an interview solely on the basis of wanting to reminisce with someone about it. Literally anything that turns you from "graduate #3096, degree specialty B-4" into "hey, this guy looks kind of interesting" should be taken advantage of.
Ever since the current hostilities with Ukraine began, I saw people wonder why Russians call (some) Ukrainians "Nazi". Some think this is just another case of calling everybody Hitler, and point out how Ukrainian president is of a Jewish descent, and therefore this is a very stupid propaganda.
I think that, while, this IS propaganda, it's not as stupid as it seems to a Western reader, all due to one major misalignment of definitions.
If we look deep enough, almost nobody in the modern world is "Nazi", because you have to subscribe to a specific set of beliefs to be completely aligned with the "original" Nazi party. Most people called Nazi today would probably be kicked out of the Nazi party, or even sent to a camp. But nobody cares about that, because the word came to mean something different since 40's.
In the West, "Nazi" became a word for "someone (usually white) who hates Jews (and maybe also Black People, but if you only hate Blacks and not Jews, then you're probably not a Nazi, but just a garden-variety racist)". This is very understandable - Nazi hated Jews and did a lot to wipe the race from the face of the Earth. But for the West, the definitions stops there.
For Russians, though, things are a bit different. While Hitler harboured little love for Europeans (if I remember correctly, he did think English were Aryan, to some degree?), he had none at all for Slavs. Specifically, his plan was to cull the population of conquered Eastern lands to almost nothing and settle the emptied land with Germans. While his program for western Europe included rounded up Jews and anyone who criticized his policies, his program for USSR was "outright slaughter whole villages just because". For this reason, in Russia the term "Nazi" means "someone who hates Jews and/OR Russians".
This is why the term does not raise any eyebrows in Russia when applied to Ukrainian nationalists. To the western eye, they might seem like common nationalist group who just wants their country to be independent, but in Russia, their hatred of all things Russian and their veneration of World War-era Nazi collaborators squarely places them into "Nazi" category, even though they might not have a single bad thing to say about Jews.
I don't expect or intend this explanation to change anyone's mind about Russia or Ukraine - just to clear up just one specific thing that puzzled some people.
Very interesting, I was really wondering why Poutine used nazi so much.
There are Ukrainian Nazis, and Russian Nazis. I don't think it has much to do with the historical Nazi view of Slavs. I think Nazism has a lot of hooks for the human desire for superiority and hatred and strong graphic design.
Rebels fighting for Ukrainian independence (UPA) openly collaborated with Nazis during WW2, wishing to exploit the sudden power vacuum. The Nazis alternated between being somewhat horrified by their atrocities, and egging them on to continue while quietly preparing to genocide whoever is left standing.
The conclusion is still very strained, of course, and the contemporary publicized far right militias like Azov are not representative of the population's beliefs.
It seems to me that Ukrainian nationalists currently (since early 10s, even before 2014) enjoy the status of "intolerant minority" which, while far from a majority, is able to partially set the agenda just because population in general is willing to tolerate them, and because their goals partially agree with people in power. So while they indeed do not represent the whole of Ukrainian people, they have a say in governing them. I'm not sure, but I think they might have sabotaged Zelensky's initial attempts to resolve Donbas situation peacefully, for example - every time there was a rumour he might "cave in" to Putin's demands, they staged another rally in the center of the capital, threatening him with another overthrow.
Russian militant nationalists, on the other hand, enjoyed a brief flourishing under Putin in early 00's, but were quite brutally put down later and been mostly in opposition government at least since taking part in anti-Putin protests in 2012.
Putin's government is acting far more like nazis than Ukranian nationalists do.
"Rebels fighting for Ukrainian independence (UPA) openly collaborated with Nazis during WW2, wishing to exploit the sudden power vacuum. "
I like how no Russian who say this stuff are willing to mention that the main Nazi collaborator was Stalin himself, who was willing to use the nazis reign of terror in europe to steal control of Polish territory for Russia.
I actually wanted to mention this in my comment! But I figured it's not a fair comparison, as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a tactical alliance forged by politicians, while the UPA was a, let's say, grassroots initiative...
(and I'm Polish, not Russian fwiw, not that you should believe randoms on the internet)
That's beautifully put, thank you.
Here's an interesting thread about this: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1497318085652533252
You can twist this story any number of ways. EVERYONE was hoping to use Hitler against everyone else, and everybody miscalculated.
This thread is very biased and not very good at fact-checking. According to all sources I could quickly find on the net, Guderian being a student at Kazan is a myth (at a glance, he's a bit too old to be studying with Soviets in 1932). He did inspect the tank school, though - which fits with his then-current job.
Also, no matter what geopolitical games Hitler and Stalin played before the war, German forces' brutality in conquered regions provided enough memories to form a tight association between Nazi and hatred for Slavs in Eastern Europe.
Geopolitical games is a hell of a euphemism. One could call it a profoundly biased eupemism. At least the Ukrainians were seeking freedom from oppression. Russia just wanted to conquer people it hated for its own gain.
I think it's clear that lots of Ukrainians supported the Nazis against the USSR and some of those who did are still well regarded in the Ukraine. But given that the USSR had killed almost four million Ukrainians by deliberate famine less than a decade before, that isn't surprising. Stalin allied with Hitler to invade Poland, even if it wasn't called an alliance, and that doesn't seem an adequate reason to call him a Nazi.
Ukrainian anti-semitism, on the other hand, has a long history having nothing to do with the Nazis.
Russia were the FIRST nazi collaborators. They were happy to use the nazis as cover to slaughter countless Poles and steal their territory, but the minute Hitler turned on them they played the victim and accused everyone else of collaboration.
And it's BS to suggest this is what is driving the war. There are no nazis, Ukraine was never going to invade Russia. Even Putin isn't delusional enough to think that is true. It's just a justification forRussian imperialism born of a demented irredentism.
I'm thinking of commissioning/sponsoring one or more "Much More Than You Wanted to Know"-style posts on specific topics. One topic that I had in mind is "MMTYWTK about aerobic exercise and longevity". I'd be happy to pay $1000 for an ACX-quality post here or on the subreddit.
Does anyone have any ideas how to organize this? Maybe Scott would like to personally write it? Or maybe it's better to hold a mini-contest? Or maybe there is an existing platform for requests like that?
I remember that Scott has declined offers like this previously. If I were you I would post a request in a classified thread and see if someone takes up the offer. Also I've heard good things about contacting PhD students in relevant fields and offer them work like this as a contract gig.
putanumonit is willing to take commissions, you might try there (https://putanumonit.com/donate/)
Acesounderglass (https://acesounderglass.com/hire-me/) has done this sort of thing before at a high level of quality (IMO).
This looks very useful and close to what I need. I was a bit more interested in sponsoring a public blog post that could be useful not just to me, but requesting private research has its advantages as well.
I'm pretty sure that the writer has made many of the posts public at the request of the funder, so that should be an option. It's a great blog, too!
If you want one on why (contrary to a lot of substack imaginings) human being aren't going to Mars any time soon - not this century, for a start - then I'm available for 75 quid. Surely, a veritable bargain..
Sorry, but confidently predicting something further than 20 years from now makes you ineligible. :)
So this is an update from my last week prediction of an outcome of the latest Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous prediction is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hidden-open-thread-2145/comment/5509257?s=r.
New estimates:
10 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (unchanged from March 12).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without loosing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, or b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without loosing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24.
15 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (down from 30 % on March 12).
75 % on unambiguous Russian victory (up from 60 % on March 12).
Russian victory is defined as Russia getting something it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO.
Less quantitative prediction:
Still 100 % that there will be broad consensus among reasonable people that postwar living standards in both countries would be substantially higher had they not fought the war. That it is to say, neither side can win in an utilitarian sense. But both sides made it abundantly clear that utilitarian concerns are very much NOT their priority.
Commentary:
Major theme of last week is my increased confidence that Russia is likely to win the war. I do not think that already low chances of outright Ukrainian victory have further decreased, since that would be possible if there is either major shift in Western, or perhaps Chinese, attitude toward the conflict or some unexpected weakness of Russia, or some form of Russian overreach, and I guess neither of those got less likely from last week.
What got less likely is that under continuation of current trends Ukraine will be able to negotiate a non-loosing compromise.
There were some good things happening for Ukrainians in last week. Refugee flow from Ukraine, which is imho bound to cause major problems in the future, at least slowed. Russian armies did not advance anywhere, but imho week ago they were already in such strong position east of the Dnieper that with current trends continuing, Ukrainian defences east of that great river are on track to collapse. And that is half of Ukraine, and it will be very difficult to evict Russian troops by force from that territory once they consolidate their gains.
Other new developments, as well as new information, has been pretty bad for Ukraine.
One thing I got confirmed from my non-English sources is that not only Ukrainian government, but also Ukrainian population, exhibit great message discipline in trying to minimize their losses and other problems. Which means that those are greater than their appear.
It seems that there are already signs of what I predicted last week, that Western solidarity with Ukraine is going to weaken over time. Zelensky got to speak before US and German lawmakers, two probably most important countries for the future development of the conflict (excluding those directly fighting). As far as I know, his appearance before Bundestag yielded him roughly nothing. Regarding his appearance before Congress, main thing that he got was the promise of new military equipment.
How significant is Western military hardware promised to Ukraine?
According to Biden **, military aid agreed to in connection with the Zelensky speech before Congress is worth 800 million dollars, on top of 350 million already agreed to between the start of the war and the speech ***. Well, according to Google, Russian yearly military budget is estimated to be 60 billion dollars. Large part of it goes to nuclear arsenal and other things that are not useful in current war, but still.
800 million for Ukraine would be game-changing if US would send it every week, but since this is in connection with first Zelensky’s rousing speech to Congress I assume that it is closer to a high watermark of US support than to future weekly cheque.
I realize there are big problems with estimating value of military hardware by its price tag, but I’ve got nothing better. It might be the case that Ukrainians are going to receive equipment that is not that expensive to produce for the US, but it will be extremely difficult to counter for Russians due to their (very real) technological backwardness. Or US equipment might be worth less to Ukrainians because they’ll have problems with learning how to operate it efficiently. I assume this roughly cancels out.
Meanwhile EU plan to send another 500 million euro (roughly 550 million dollars) of military aid to Ukraine has been delayed in bureaucracy (“It has now emerged that Germany needs to get approval from the Bundestag’s budget committee at home, which is unlikely to happen until next week.”**** ). Probably this will be approved eventually, but political will to do substantially more just isn’t here.
On sanctions and economic help for Ukraine, big non-news is that no major proposals for economic help were announced and no new important sanctions on Russia were approved.
EU clearly indicated that it is not going to stop paying for Russian oil and gas, for now. India is considering it will buy Russian oil at a discount and in connection with that is mulling some scheme how to get around US sanctions. Perhaps nothing will come from this, but it fits my prediction from previous week that sanctions will be eroded over time.
Russian currency, which previously traded for over 50 % below its already historically bad prewar exchange rate to dollar, now rebounded somewhat and is now trading within 25 – 50 % lower than prewar. This is imho firmly “not great, not terrible territory” as opposed to “imminent danger of total meltdown”. For comparison, day after the Brexit referendum, pound has fallen by 12 % against the dollar, and it never fully rebounded, yet. Exchange rate is very imperfect proxy for the state of the Russian economy, but I don’t know about anything better. Suggestions are welcome.
Key question is imho the strength of the Russian antiwar movement, but that is difficult to assess. My impression is that the war (which Russians are rather hilariously not allowed to call “a war”, but only “special military operation” under severe criminal penalties) is not popular in Russia. But for now, I assume that the antiwar movement, while dangerous for the government and capable of individual brave acts, as demonstrated e.g. by Marina Ovsyannikova, will not be sufficiently strong to force the end of the war at least for months, absent some unexpected military or economic setback for Putin.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
** https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/16/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-assistance-the-united-states-is-providing-to-ukraine/
*** Also btw. on top of 650 milion of aid sent to Ukraine in 2021.
**** https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/eu-mulls-further-action-draghi-plays-host-in-rome-agriculture-row-brewing/
My first thought was that your percent for a compromise ending was much too low, and your Russia Wins much too high, but I see that you're using a different definition than I would.
I personally see a situation where a much larger aggressor fighting to a stalemate with a much smaller defender and compromising on the end result is not really a Russian victory. If Russia formally annexes Donbass or one of those regions gains a few more miles of territory, that would meet your definition of Russian victory, but my definition of a compromise where both can claim victory - if Russia otherwise agrees to back down and ends hostilities.
Note that difference in population between Russia and Ukraine is not THAT large.
I am using as my definition of Ukrainian victory what Ukrainians themselves would have regarded as a victory.
Admittedly it is more difficult to define Russian victory, since their stated war aims include tons of BS (e.g. denazification) and it is unclear what Putin really wants the most. But imho if Putin would get some important concessions from Ukraine without giving any in return, it would be difficult to conclude anything else than that he won.
If all he gets is a Ukrainian agreement not to join NATO, with everything else as it was before the invasion, I don't think that is a Russian win. That outcome leaves the Ukrainian population much more anti-Russian than before, the European NATO states substantially more willing to arm, and the reputation of the Russian military substantially worse. It's not clear that counts as a Ukrainian win but I think it is a Russian loss.
This sounds like what the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” is for.
This is a good point; Ukrainian government agreeing not to join NATO and then e.g. entering a separate alliance with Poland shouldn't be counted as Russian victory. Poor wording on my part.
I sort of automatically assume that Ukrainian agreement not to join NATO would be accompanied by declaration of neutrality in a sense that it would promise not to let Western troops on their territory and not join any military pact with Western countries without Russian approval. And that would imho count as Russian victory.
Are there predictions about effects on the world food supply?
Not by me; that is way outside my wheelhouse.
I've been keeping up with the steady stream of "COVID cause measurable decreases in cognition for a (larger percentage/majority, it varies) of people infected, even if they have mild/no symptoms".
They keep coming out but not getting talked about; and some of theme seem pretty big/legit.
Is this because they aren't big and legit, or is it a climate change style thing where people don't want it to be real so they just don't think about it?
To the contrary, I have seen people signal-boost such studies as justification for masks, vaccination, and restrictions on movement. A Pew(?) poll came out indicating 10-15% of people not want covid restrictions to ever end, no matter how much case counts drop. Perhaps people derive a sort of pleasure from the rituals of covid mitigation, or else, enjoy signalling they care more about public health than nearly everyone else (and I would allow a portion of these may be meaningfully immune compromised with a legitimate personal risk).
The problem with the cognition numbers or the long covid rates is often the denominator used in the calculation is case counts, not infection estimates. With close half of Americans having been infected to date, are we really seeing 25% of people walk around with cognitive deficiencies? (the jokes that can be made at this point are too easy)
How long after infection are the cognitive decreases observed, and are there differences in magnitude over time? That is, is it something that implies short-term damage and gradual recovery, or is there evidence suggesting long-term or permanent damage.
The bits and pieces I've heard details about seem to suggest the former, particularly a claim I've come across that the cognitive impairment is linked to loss of smell (since I've separately heard that the loss of smell generally recovers over a period of weeks or months). But it sounds like you've been following this in a lot more detail than I have.
A Harvard Business Review reports that 'study after study puts the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions somewhere between 70% and 90%' (https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-big-idea-the-new-ma-playbook).
Has anyone seen studies citing a failure rate of one country invading another country? It seems like this might help forecasters take the outside view of Russia-Ukraine.
I posted this in a previous open thread and have been thinking about it since. The right search terms continue to escape me.
To me those seem like very, very odd things to compare, and I am curious about the reasons you find the analogy useful. Are you thinking narrowly about the goals or execution of some specific M&A deal to be compared with the ongoing war, or is yours a broader claim regarding those two (very diverse) fields?
Years ago, when I first read that the failure rate of M&A was estimated to be so high, I was surprised. Had I been asked to guess beforehand, I would have estimated the failure rate below 50%. I hadn't given any thought to the auction regret and misaligned incentives mentioned in Eric Rall's comment, which might explain what seems to be the pursuit of negative expected value by most of the acquiring companies.
I'm comparing M&As to another sort of complex expansion venture, military invasions, because I'm wondering if they similarly have a negative expected value from the outside perspective ('How often have ventures like this succeeded? Not often.'). As mentioned, I can't find data.
If military invasions also have a negative expected value, then similar cognitive biases might be at work in explaining why decision-makers go ahead with them. Planning fallacy and optimism bias come to mind, but there might be a closer match.
One word which I haven't mentioned is 'pride'. I find pride hard to use in causal explanations, but it's probably relevant to both.
What do they mean by "failure rate"?
The most straightforward interpretation is that an M&A fails in the deal doesn't go through, but the text out the article seems to imply that they're taking about deals which do go through, which rules that out. Maybe deals that go through but fail to improve the fortunes of the acquiring firm?
I recall one of my professors on business school, who had done a bunch of research into mergers and acquisitions, summarizing her findings thus:
- There are no true mergers, oy acquisitions.
- Typically, slightly over 100% of the value created by the acquisition is captured by the shareholders of the acquired firm. That is, acquisitions tend to create value above the separate value of the two companies, but the price paid to buy out the other company's shareholders typically includes all the added value on top of the separate value of that company and then a little more.
Her interpretation of this was that the fundamental problem was a combination of auction regret and agency costs. Auction Regret is a well-known phenomenon where in competitive bidding situations, the high bidder has often made a mistake in valuing the purchase. Agency costs here means that the deals are made by upper management of the acquiring firm, while the costs are paid by the acquiring firm's shareholders, and the interests of upper management and the shareholders are not 100% congruent: the CEO is interested not just in maximizing share price, but also boosting his power and prestige as well as justifying a richer comp package next time his contract is up for reevaluation. Presiding over a larger company serves all these interests, even if the acquisition is slightly overpaid-for, provided it's not so grossly overvalued as to be immediately obvious the CEO made a bad deal. Conversely, once knowledge of negotiations become public knowledge, for the deal to fall through would risk the CEO losing face, which management of the target firm knows and can use as negotiation leverage.
Caveat: this is my recollections at 16 or 17 years distance of an informal self-summary of one professor's opinion.
There’s not a lot of examples to consider in the post 1945 era. There have been various interstate wars in this era, but very few with a goal of controlling new territory. North Vietnam was quite successful in the end. Israel has been having issues. Russia was going fine with Crimea for several years. But otherwise I’m mostly aware of wars of some sort of principle (such as regime change) or of independence.
It seems to me that people who believe in utilitarian ethics should promote a high birth rate. Do they? Obviously more full lives lived means tons more utility to be had. I have to assume that on average, even in challenging situations life (vs never having existed) is massively net positive. A higher birth rate would have a positive multiplier effect on any other human-focused effective altruist efforts.
> I have to assume that on average, even in challenging situations life (vs never having existed) is massively net positive.
Why do you think this?
From my experience, everyone I’ve met at minimum prefers to be alive, except in typically transient moments of extreme suffering. I would say that a momentary negative only occurs in those moments where the sum of the psychological forces acting on an individual net out in hoping for death. Otherwise, even in challenging circumstances I would argue that the momentary net utility of the moment in life is positive. By this calculation, the time-averaged life-long summation ends up wildly positive for everyone, or at least very close to everyone. Do you disagree? It could be that I rate higher than you the baseline utility of pure being, pure consciousness, pure existence, pure experience, pure agency, whatever you want to call it. In addition, people are usually able to find moments of great joy even during trials.
These are just my thoughts from my life experience and interactions, which include people with Down’s syndrome, people who have experienced deep physical and sexual trauma and live in a South American slum, Congolese refugees who lived in a refugee camp for over a decade and lost close family member to war, murder, and genocide, situations the depths of which I couldn’t possibly imagine. Despite tragedy I see that people are able to find joy in existence.
If you disagree, I would be interested to know your thoughts.
"...everyone I’ve met at minimum prefers to be alive..."
Have you not considered that this is a biased sample?
Suicide rates indicate that the vast majority of people concur on their specific case, and I can't think of any case of humane involuntary euthanasia on anti-vitalist grounds.
There are strong social norms against suicide in many countries (e.g. in my country suicides are called "cowards" and "selfish", which makes no sense to me). So I think observed suicide rates only give a lower bound for the number of people who would prefer not to be alive.
They are "cowards" because they choose to opt out rather than solve the problem facing them. They are "selfish" because they transfer the problem they're escaping onto others and depending on the method of suicide, make additional work and inconvenience for others. They are also "insulting" because they are telling those that love them "I'd rather be dead than continue to live with you."
I think it gives an upper bound, actually. Many people who fail to complete suicide state afterwards that as soon as they kicked the chair or jumped over the ledge, they realized that they'd made a massive mistake. Yes, yes, survivorship bias, etc., etc.- I'd like to see if you have any grounds to your assertion there are these large numbers of people who don't want to be alive and only haven't killed themselves because of social pressure.
EDIT: I'll retract my opinion that it gives an "upper bound"- that was me being flippant. My actual point would be, more simply, that I don't believe that there are that many more people who are being held back purely by societal pressure: I think if you've reached the point where you want to end your life, the question of "what will my parents think of me?" isn't high on your mind- in my n=1 experience, you think something along the lines of "They'll be happy I'm not a burden to them anymore, it'll be such a weight off of their shoulders." (I hate the fact I had such a selfish thought, but there it is.)
I will admit that my set of knowledge and experiences constitute a biased, small sample size.
The point is that you don't get to talk to anyone who has opted out.
The official suicide rate must be an underestimate of the preference, since it doesn't include those who cannot, or who do not kill themselves for cultural reasons (the stigma, or effect on their family or acquaintances), or those who successfully do but manage to pass it off as misadventure.
Also, I'd expect that a sample consisting of *survivors* of terrible events would over-sample those who started with very strong drives for life.
My thoughts were an article published about forty years ago, which I have given the cite to above. The natural definition of zero utility, more precisely zero expected value of total utility, is the suicide point, the level at which someone with the option of painless suicide would take it.
Thanks. That makes sense.
I think this definition is too optimistic - I'm sure that there are many people who would prefer not to be alive, but who feel compelled to stay alive for the sake of their loved ones/dependents (I have felt like this for a significant fraction of my life). But doesn't that mean that their utility functions weigh "discharge my obligations" above "don't be miserable", so their utility is indeed positive? Not if the people they owe those obligations to would also prefer not to be alive. In that case, net human welfare would be improved if they could all agree to enter the suicide machine at the same time.
"Better never to have been born. But who could be so lucky — not one in a thousand."
(From _The Joys of Yiddish_, by memory so possibly not verbatim).
On first glance, yes, but you run into the repugnant conclusion that you should keep encouraging birth rates until you end up with the entire global population living lives that are just barely utility-positive, so while more lives are generally better, there's more to it than that.
A world where everyone's life can only ever be good enough to be preferable to death, but no better, is not a world I want to live in.
That isn't quite right. Even if you are maximizing total utility, the utility of one happy life might be greater than of two barely utility-positive lives.
You still have the same problem of a breakpoint though. There is a point where you can no longer exchange any more utility from fewer people to more people, and maximizing utility implies that we should keep increasing population until we reach the point where there is no more slack, and no one has any utility they can still sacrifice to support the lives of more people. It seems absurd that we should try to strive for that.
It is far from obvious that more lives mean more net utility.
Possibly not exponentially, forever, in a limited geography. But what about now, at the margins?
Extremely specific answer: practically I think than in currently prevailing conditions in many (perhaps not all) wealthy countries, overall net utility could be increased if governments encouraged more kids, by covering larger share of childcare cost.
Overall however I think that coercing people who do not want more kids into more procreation is unlikely to create net utility. It would make parents miserable and also children born under such conditions are imho likely to have, um, below average life satisfaction.
I agree with you 100% about coercion. I would prefer bottom-up cultural adaptation (if that’s possible) rather than government action of any kind.
Yeah, but "encourage people to have more kids, just not in a way that makes their lives worse", is very far from so called repugnant conclusion, which is exactly about forcing people into procreation even though it makes them miserable
I see what you are saying. Good point that purely utilitarian ethics applied uncritically is problematic.
One version of utilitarianism maximizes total utility, one maximizes average utility. Both seem to lead to counterintuitive conclusions under some circumstances.
I have a very old article looking at the problem and offering a very imperfect way of comparing alternative futures with different numbers of people in them:
"What Does Optimum Population Mean?" Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert.
So far as I know, there is no webbed text of it but I did find a webbed abstract at:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12265065/
Very nice. Thanks.
Just now had a chance to read the abstract. It almost seems like the authors question the ability of utilitarian ethics to deal with the question of population size. Do we optimize for a high average utility, or for a high total utility, or some function of the two? Said differently, the rational analysis requires a value judgement as an input.
In the article I offer a Pareto-like approach that lets you compare among some, but not all, pairs of futures of different sizes.
i dont agree with the theory, but some do not think it is so obvious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
It's wrong to assume that two people who are on teh borderline of preferring death to life have greater utility than one happy person.
From my experience, your borderline person is a very extreme case, and far from average even among the (small sample size) poverty-stricken peoples that I have come into contact with. On average humans (and even animals for that matter) hold tightly to and value life very highly.
> I have to assume that on average, even in challenging situations life (vs never having existed) is massively net positive.
If you are wrong about this, then you would be creating a massive amount of disutility by promoting a high birth rate. Looking at Our World In Data's page on the topic (https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction), it seems that average life satisfaction is indeed high and positively correlated with income (so would be expected to go up as the world's level of development increased). I'd expect people to overstate their happiness levels on those surveys for cultural reasons; I'd hope the researchers doing the surveys would be aware of that and try to account for it, but that seems very difficult. Anyway, I'd want to be *extremely* confident that living is a net positive before advocating policies that would create quadrillions of possibly-miserable human beings, as some longtermists advocate. This is not a situation where making assumptions will cut it.
Anyone else here applying to YCombinator, especially as a bio company? If so, wanna compare/mutually criticize applications?
Not sure if he does bio companies, but Scott McKenzie (Patio11 on twitter, Stripe employee) has been willing to review YCombinator applications in the past - I think it was a standing offer.
*Patrick McKenzie - probably best to get his name right when asking for a favour :-)
Suppose we end up in the world where you can’t make any credible public prediction without being willing to bet on it (either directly with a counterparty or through prediction markets). If you say something and aren’t willing to bet, this is considered silly.
What happens to people with gambling addictions? Do they get a kind of special social pass where it’s not considered sketchy to refuse to bet?
So far there’s a relatively small subculture of people who seem to make epistemic bets with each other, but has anyone in this subculture had to deal with problem gambling?
Good question. From what I know of problem gambling, it doesn't exhibit itself as compulsively making bets with other people. If you know a problem gambler, they'll probably never have tried to bet you on something. Interpersonal betting just doesn't match the circumstances that tend to elicit a gambling addiction.
Do you have a theory of why that is?
I mentally think of a few kinds of gambling addiction: slot machines, casino games, and placing bets with bookmakers (typically on sports but not necessarily).
Slot machines are a totally unique phenomenon which don't ultimately have much to do with the desire to win or lose money. There's probably a lot of factors in problem gambling around casino games, and likely some psychology is the same, but I can imagine it's very different from epistemic bets.
But placing bets with a bookie seems to be the same thing as a prediction market, and gambling addicts can still get in huge trouble there.
As for peer-to-peer bets, I have no idea whether, in a world where this is frequent and normal, problem gambling might not also arise. At the very least, people you know probably wouldn't financially ruin you over a bet, whereas a casino or bookmaker will. Do you know if there is research by people who study gambling addiction on whether bets between friends are often a problem?
It’s not quite the same thing, but this example (https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/01/my-11-bets-at-10-1-odds-on-10m-covid-deaths-by-2022.html) left me with a bad taste for the idea of monetary epistemic bets. The bet proposer was claiming the bet to be resolved in his favor in a sketchy way I personally disagreed with, and then publicly demanded payments up to $10,000. I feel like this concept comes with interpersonal risks that should be acknowledged.
If problem gambling manifests as problematic willingness to make public prediction, then the recommended response will be to stop making so many predictions.
If a gambling addict needs to abstain from gambling, then they'd have to never make any prediction again.
The scenario I'm imagining is something like this: Bob has a decent track record in prediction markets for elections and geopolitics, and he's also been made successful forecasts in support of decision making for the business he owns. However, from time to time he has been known to lose tons of money making degenerate prop bets on sporting events. Placing prediction-market-style bets puts him in a mental state where he is tempted to gamble irresponsibly on sports, so he now avoids betting for money entirely.
It's definitely an edge case but I think if prediction markets were to really take off, there would be enough people like this that it would have to be considered.
Forgive me if this question is in poor taste, but will postwar Ukraine present a good real estate investment opportunity? For instance, could I, a foreigner, buy a nice house in Kiev for cheap and rent it out for a healthy profit?
What about other investment opportunities that will be unusually profitable thanks to the effect of the war?
Non-expert, but I wouldn't buy real estate in Kyiv unless I could check it out personally. Who knows how much damage there is to the property and the utilities for it?
You might want to invest in food production.
I think it will present a very good opportunity for institutional investors to buy up large parts of destroyed cities. But very difficult for individuals who aren't Ukrainian or have ties on the ground to the country.
I heard an interview with an investor who focuses on international equities and special situations like war or the collapse of the USSR. This was at the start of the conflict. He basically said its impossible to be right on how these situations impact equity markets. He is only successful because he is in an institutional settings and his clients are looking for hedges or homeruns where they are willing to be wrong 90% of the time for the big payoffs. But if I were trying to profit from this situation I would be looking more into russian equities that have been destroyed from sanctions. Eventually those sanctions will be lifted and many of those companies will come back.
My thinking over all is that someone is going to make billions from this conflict but its unlikely to be me so its not an area I am going to invest my time.
Kiev is going to be dealing with housing shortages for the next 5 years. And under martial law, you are likely to be conscripted if you try to make money off of that.
You could probably buy the ruins of what was once a nice house.
I paid for a subscription so I could read “The Onion Knight”. I was not disappointed.
Scott, your brilliance is most apparent and best expressed in creative fiction.
Why are the commenters on Marginal Revolution so bad?
The writing on MR is often nuanced or at least attempts to be. But the commenters are on the level of reactionary right wing Facebook commenters but with better vocabulary. Why?
In general, unmoderated venues are awful. I don't know why they tend to be dominated by right-wing awful rather than left-wing or mixed awful.
Thats my best guess, though its been seemingly the same posters for years - I'd think they would get bored. The light moderation that Scott does seems to have been enough to prevent a similar fate (Even with some hiccups). I hope it continues.
Overton Window is positioned such that left-wing awful (Murder the Rich and Sodomize Their Children, Execute People For Saying Naughty Words, Kill Whitey) is in the bounds of "shocking, awful things to say, but not SO bad that they deserve exile from the public square", while Right-Wing Awful (White Sharia Now, Send the N******* Back to Africa, Kill Libs) is out of those bounds. So anyplace that screens for Awful Behavior will kick more right-wingers out than left-wingers, causing them to gravitate towards alternative platforms.
I think probably because of the lack of moderation? You want to say something that goes against the orthodoxy of a particular site but it's tightly moderated (usually for the laundry list of progressive causes) so you'll be bounced for anything that is even slightly out of step. This drives all the witches to the place where there aren't any witch-hunters.
Why aren't left and right trolls using those spaces to quarrel with each other?
The left don't know or care about these blogs unless they say something particularly "outrageous" and it goes viral on twitter or reddit.
This is perhaps overly-cynical, but maybe accurate even so: the people who enjoy trolling probably tend to also enjoy very one-sided routs. So any place that harbors trolls tends to get more on one side, and once there, stays there.
They're "balanced out" by the subset of trolls who enjoy what Twitter would call getting ratio'ed - posting short comments that get tons of replies. So any troll-ridden forum gets a many-fold majority on one side and a handful on the other who keep the quarrel going.
There's a definition for "troll" I find useful that fits only (part of) that minority. Such trolls post specifically to rile other people up. They're like kids in the 1950s that poked anthills to watch the ants scurry. The majority aren't trolls in the same sense; they might post inflammatory comments, but they're still in it for the feeling of overwhelming consensus, not for the feeling of goading that minority, which wouldn't work anyway since that minority is largely playing the same game.
People have noted the bad comments at MR before.
And it wouldn't be hard, they have access to income that could hire a GMU student!
If you want to see horrible left-wing commenters, go to any major US newspaper that still permits comments.
I've wondered the same thing myself. I mostly agree with Nancy L - lack of moderation is a big part of it. And lack of participation by the blog authors - Scott's frequent responses to the commentariat, I think, keeps commenting quality much higher than it would otherwise be.
The average MR commeneter is vastly better than the average commentor on the 'advice for unwoke academic' post here.
I now have a chapter draft on my calculations of land gained and lost through climate change. The conclusion, if correct, is pretty dramatic, a massive increase in the amount of land usable by humans. It's a Fermi calculation, so very approximate, and I'm ignoring the question of how useful the land is — soil quality and the like. I'm just asking how much land changes from too cold for human use to a reasonable temperature for human use, from a reasonable temperature to too high, and from dry to flooded due to SLR.
I'm mostly interested in whether there are any large mistakes in my calculations that I have missed. Obviously my other reason for putting it up is that if I haven't made any mistakes it implies a large positive effect that almost nobody mentions, hence a reason both to revise down estimates of net cost of climate change and to revise down one's confidence in the reliability of the sources of information your estimates are based on if those sources didn't mention it.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Climate/Land%20Gained%20and%20Lost.pdf
Does your model assume a new steady state climate? This seems important, because usability of land depends on the predictability of its climate, often more so than on the particular climate itself. If there is a new steady state, it definitely seems plausible to me that the new steady state ends up being better than the old one, but there will still be a lot of transition costs paid, and it would be interesting to know the time scale for the payback on that. And if there’s not a new steady state, but a continuous gradual change, then that changes things quite a bit.
I'm not doing anything that complicated. As you can see if you look at the chapter, I am just asking about the effect of the changed distribution of temperature, primarily of January temperature in the Northern Hemisphere but also of maximum temperatures everywhere, as of the end of this century.
In principle one wants a sum of total costs and benefits, but although some people write as if they had such a thing, I don't believe they do. There is so much uncertainty that if you want to conclude that climate change is very bad, you can make a bunch of judgement calls that lead to that conclusion, and similarly if you want to conclude that it is not bad at all, even on net good. I have the much more limited objective in the chapter of producing a rough estimate of one part of it. That estimate, if correct, is huge — an increase in usable land of more than twice the area of the U.S.
Note that we are not talking of rapid change, from a human point of view. Warming so far has been about a tenth of a degree C per decade. It may be getting somewhat faster now, but it is still slow compared to the rate at which, say, farmers shift crop varieties or other choices in response to changes in their environment.
There's already research on this though, why are you trying to do your own without explaining why other projections are wrong?
Can you point me at such research? I haven't come across it. The IPCC reports go very light on positive consequences.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014014/meta
Thanks. I'll look at it.
It's a much more elaborate analysis. If done right, it should produce better information, since it tries to take account of things such as humidity and soil quality. On the other hand it is much harder for the reader to audit, to tell what the assumptions are, what variables are being taken account of and how — I cannot even tell if it includes the effect of CO2 fertilization on reducing water requirements.
Its conclusion is that the change in arable land, not counting the effect of land occupied by increased population, is between -.8 and +1.2 million km2. I've added a reference to it to my chapter. Again thanks.
That article cites an earlier one by Ramankutty et. al. which explicitly takes account of the reduced water requirement due to CO2 fertilization. It finds an increase of 6.6 million km2. That's consistent with my result given that I am only looking at temperature. Some land that is warm enough to be useful may be disqualified from agriculture on other grounds — the Sahara, for example. I don't know if the difference between the results of the two papers in part reflects the first one not having taken account of CO2 fertilization, have emailed the lead author to ask.
That seems reasonable. I have seen other reports that global warming (GW) will be net good for much of the northern hemisphere. (No I don't have a link.) As an aside, besides temperature and CO2, GW should lead to more water in the air. (If I'm remembering my Earth science correctly, much of the heat in the tropics is moved to the higher latitudes by water vapor.) More water is more rain which is usually good thing for crops. (Too much rain can lead to flooding, which can be bad at the wrong time in the growing season.) And then I start thinking about second order effects. Last year we (here in the Northeast) had a dry spring, but then a relatively wet summer and fall. Wandering around in my woods I was thrilled by all the mushrooms this produced. (Wet is good for mushrooms.) And this made me think, hmm wet is not only more plants, but more mushrooms, which break down the plant material and return it to the ecosystem. So maybe more water and more nutrients for even more tree growth. This is just wild speculation on my part, and really just to say ecosystems are complicated. (It might be interesting to look at tree ring data. Do we see signs of more growth?)
Is there a reason the US (and other NATO countries like Slovakia or Romania who also supposedly have good anti-air weapons systems) are not giving Ukraine better anti-air weapons than stingers? I am no military expert but from what I gather stingers are great against helicopters but terrible against high altitude bombers.
I don't see a reason to conserve these weapons, after all their main use is to deter the Russian army (there are no other realistic threats that could hit European NATO member states with modern military-grade equipment) and if those weapons can actually destroy that threat (the Russian fleet) then that is the one thing better than deterrence. Particularly if the destroying can be outsourced to very motivated and willing Ukrainians.
It also seems the cheaper alternative - if the Ukrainians defeat Russia, the West is realistically going to subsidize Ukraine's reconstruction heavily. The quicker the Ukrainians win, the less damage done and the lower the costs will be (in money and lives). If they lose, the West will have to deal with an even larger refugee crisis and a need to arm themselves even more.
The only reason not to do this seems the fear that Putin might escalate further and declare war on NATO. I am not sure it is likely that Putin would be "OK" (i.e. not convincingly threatening NATO with a war) with us sending Ukraine stingers and javelins but not with us sending them specific anti-bomber weaponry...
I don’t think the Ukrainians are going to win either way. The Russians aren’t dominating the air anyway, maybe they are already scared of the existing weapons.
I guess it depends on how you define winning. If I had to make a bet, I'd say they will probably have to concede Crimean and the separatist regions to Russia and possibly formally give up NATO membership. But in the current situation anything short of Russia occupying the country and setting up a puppet regime is winning - it still gives Ukraine a chance to join the EU and turn itself into a fortress to prevent another invasion. This of course requires massive western subsidies...but it also seems like the best way NATO can protect its border against Russia and ultimately defeat Russia. Russia (under the weight of western sanctions) becomes just a poor third world dictatorship (with nuclear weapons) and the free Ukraine works as a billboard for the West, a clear reminded to the Russians what they could have if they only deal with their government and replace it with something less hostile to the rest of the world. That would be the hope, anyway...
I would define winning as taking more territory from the other country. Which is where Russia is right now. For Ukraine to enter the EU, as a whole entity, the Russians would start losing. Which is losing the territory they have already.
Who would you say won the Winter war?
The Soviet Union, but it was close. At the Moment Russians are advancing into Ukraine and not being stopped. That advance might be slower than expected but unless we see reversals, that is the Russians retreating, they are winning. Whether the victory be Pyrrhic or not remains to be seen.
Ok, I'd say Finland won the Winter war but you are right that a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets is probably a better description (they had to cede territory to the Russians and become neutral with what was effectively unofficial pro-Russian censorship after all).
So my guess (but perhaps it is going to be even worse, I hope not) is that Ukraine can pull of at least that kind of an outcome too. Finns had better terrain for defense but less support from abroad. Resolve seems about the same.
I think you can only give weapons to Ukraine which Ukrainian soldier either know anyway, or which they can learn to use within a few hours. This excludes more advances weapons.
That is probably true. But are there no NATO owned (eastern NATO members still have a lot of old Warsaw pact era weapons, at least in reserve, even Germany has those...of course, not all Warsaw pact weapons are Soviet weapons).
I dunno maybe I just don't know how hard it is to learn how to use a new APC or a rocket launcher. It feels like it should not be that hard but perhaps I am underestimating it.
I am pretty sure I already saw a news story about one of the eastern European countries that was offering its, presumably Soviet, air defense weaponry to Ukraine, conditional on someone replacing it with, presumably, western weaponry.
Yes, that were MIG-29 from Poland.
But a condition was that the weapon would come from a NATO base, not from Poland country. They wanted to be backed up by NATO, but the US said No.
This is also one of the examples where "the same" weapon can be different. The Polish MIG-29 have been adapted to NATO standards. That means that the buttons are not at the same positions, they now use feet instead of meters (sic!), and so on. It's unclear how much of an issue that is, but it's not just "the same".
Another issue is that there are NATO components that the NATO would not allow to fall into Russian hands, especially the IFF system (identification friend or foe). It was pretty clear from the start that NATO would only allow to transfer the airplanes after these component have been built out. (That was the discussion before the final No from the US.)
It's not just the MiGs, I saw an article about the US trying to cut a deal to get Russian SAMs from Slovakia or Turkey. They use the S-300 and S-400, but we need to hash out some sort of deal to give them replacements first.
Also apparently the US has a small stockpile of Soviet missiles that it used for testing, so it's shipping those.
I was referring to the S-300 and S-400s that beleester mentions. I wouldn't describe a Mig-29 as an air defense weapon, although that is one of the things it can be used for.
yes, exactly, those SAMs. I am not sure why a) US is not willing to pay Slovakia for those SAMs, b) Slovakia is not willing to give them to Ukraine for free.
Actually, at the beginning of March Germany promised 2700 "Strela" surface-to-air missile that were leftovers from former GDR. But they were taken out of operation in 2014, and it turned out that it's not good for weapons if they just lie in depots for 8 years. One thing is that the grip stocks have already been disposed (probably Ukraine still has some), the other that the explosive material is not in a good shape, let alone safe. Germany has delivered 500 of them with two weeks delay, and hopes that it can make more of them operable.
My takeaway is that Germany (and probably other countries as well) are trying, and actually trying hard, but that it's not so trivial.
For the other point, I have read quite explicitly that for more complex weapon system (like airplanes) it would not be so easy for Ukrainians to just use them. Even if it is "the same" model as used in the Ukraine, apparently they are still different enough to make that complicated. The nice thing about Stinger is that it's a "fire and forget" weapon that finds its target pretty automatically.
Weapons which are good against high-altitude bombers require a great deal of specialized training, and the Ukrainians are all trained on (updated versions of) old Soviet systems that NATO mostly doesn't have. If we sent them e.g. Patriot batteries, they probably wouldn't be able to use them without US "advisors" looking over their shoulders. And whether that was the case or not, the Russians would probably assume that there were US or other NATO technicians actually shooting the missiles, which would pose obvious problems re escalation.
There are a few NATO powers that still have some old Soviet hardware lying around various sources, and there's been talk of sending them a couple dozen MiG-29 fighters and some S-300 surface-to-air missiles. The MiG deal seems to have fallen through because of the politics of combat aircraft flying from NATO countries into a war zone; the missiles are not being talked about much. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing.
Thanks, thanks makes sense (unfortunately).
But I think Slovakia should still have some Warsaw pact era anti-air weapon systems if I understood it correctly but for some reason they did not want to just give them to Ukraine, wanted a compensation from the US (which is something I can't understand).
Of course, the question is what state these are in (like those German DDR Panzerfäuste) and whether they are effective against the sort of airplanes the Russians are using.
But why can't you simply load the MiGs onto a train and transport them that way? Too obvious a target? Too difficult logistically?
The wingspan is too wide for typical railroad (or highway) right-of-way, so you'd have to partially disassemble the aircraft and reassemble them in Ukraine. It is probably not a coincidence that Russia used half a dozen or so of their diminishing supply of cruise missiles to wreck Ukraine's main MiG-29 maintenance facility in Lviv last week.
I can imagine other workarounds, e.g. landing the planes on the Polish side of a clear straight highway across the border, towing them into Ukraine, and having Ukrainian pilots take off. But they're all kind of a kludge, and extremely vulnerable to attack if the Russians get word of them. And if the Russians *don't* get word of them, they may misinterpret the results as Poland having launched MiG-29s directly into combat in Ukraine and shoot missiles at the Polish airbase in question.
I'm nothing like an expert, but my extremely understanding is that air defense systems (besides other aircraft) generally come in two flavors:
1) Vehicle or fixed platforms intended to make use of radar and target higher altitude, faster craft at fairly long range.
2) Man-portable platforms intended to target low altitude, slower moving craft which may be too low for (1) to detect and have to engage at fairly short range.
(2) is relatively easy to transport and train. (1) is not and generally Russia has not successfully degraded Ukraine's (1) systems. As a result, they're relying on lower attitude operations, which means more of (2) is needed.
On the subject of DST, or rather time changes. Am I the only person who believes the time changes are a good thing? There are clearly problems with year long DST (very late sunrises), but conversely year long standard time ends the late summer evenings. There are heated discussions online about which is the preferred option, with nobody compromising on the obvious solution which would allow us to have late sunset in summer and reasonable sunrises in winter: that is retaining the change. It’s just assumed that the time change is a relic.
(My preference is a 3 month winter time).
Personally, I don't like the late summer evenings :) I don't even live that far north (central Europe) and in late July civil twilight does not end before 10pm...that kind of annoying when I want to go to bed before 11pm (sometimes).
When I don't want to go to bed early, I wouldn't really mind the dark at 9pm, summer nights are warm and it is kind of nice.
The only problem is that the sun would then rise at something like 3 am which is just disgusting (I hate when I return home from a party and it is already sunny outside :D ) but if you're at home sleeping you can just use window blinds.
What I really hate is waking up in the dark though. I don't understand how the Scandinavians can survive this, December is already pretty bad even here (sunrise 8am, sunset 4pm-ish). One thing I loved about Singapore was 7 am sunrise, 7pm sunset pretty much all year round (15 minutes of variation).
The only reliably good thing about summer in Ireland, where I now live, is the late sunsets. An outdoor cafe or pub overlooking the Atlantic with a fading post sunset as late as 10:30pm in the West is a great thing. I can sleep fine by midnight, it’s dark enough. However DST in winter would mean a 9:40 am sunrise in Dublin and later in the west. This isn’t just Ireland, north Germany is the same, Hamburg is on the same latitude as Dublin , more or less.
I think the best solution would be more flexible working hours. I mean I have those anyway, working in IT and all, but generally you could have some people work 7-3, others 8-4 and yet others 9-5. I know people who prefer either of these options (even 10-6 which I find quite depressing...though I often worked 7-6 this February without even being made to do so so who am I to judge :D).
It is of course not an option for shift workers in factories and the like. But I guess these jobs will mostly be replaced by machines in a decade or two anyway...
That’s not a solution because everything goes by the clock these days. And there’s the psychology of late sunsets, I associate pre 9pm sunsets with early spring and early autumn.
By the way the next round of automation is really expected to hit office workers as much as factory workers.
Yup, in our company, we're developing an automation tool for accounting (reading printed invoices and receipts included). Seems easier than automating factory workers since you only need the software and very little sophisticated hardware (robots).
Anyway, I am not sure what you mean by "everything goes by the clock these days". In my case, I can decide to start working at 10 am one day and 7 am the next day (and I actually do that sometimes, even though I try to keep a regular-ish schedule). Shops and restaurants rarely open for a single shift anyway, so I think this is an option even in the service industry.
Everything goes by the clock = TV schedules, cinema times, pub opening hours, church times, the theatre, small shop opening hours, most office and factory hours, swimming pools, parks, and on and on and on. The main reason though is psychological - late sunsets are nice. Which is why given the option most people preferred the late nights in summer to later sunrises in winter. The gain in summer - an extra hour on the evening vastly outweighs the loss of sunrise from 4am to 5am, or so.
When I was a kid, I remember my mother getting us up in the mornings and me going "but it can't be time to get up yet, it's still night, look it's dark out".
We're probably gone long past the time when we could rise and sleep with the sun as far as setting schedules goes.
It's the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Bed in Summer":
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
To be fair he did write that pre DST so the kids would be going to bed pretty early. Before 8 mid summer. Maybe that was the way back then.
we should stay on standard time, but all employers should give employees an option to shift their schedule an hour twice a year.
That doesn’t make the sunset later.
Neither does shifting clocks, really. Fiddling with our clocks has no effect on the relative positions and orientation of the Earth and the Sun. We're just changing how our clocks are aligned relative to true solar time in order to manipulate people into getting up earlier, going to work or school earlier, and going to be earlier.
DST makes the coordination problem easier and exerts some psychological pressure as well, but otherwise it's more or less equivalent to everyone agreeing to shift schedules earlier during the summer.
A softer nudge in that direction would be for government offices and public schools to adopt a schedule with summer and winter hours, with private employers having the option of following suit or not.
Fiddling with clocks in summer time does what it’s expected to - it moves the sunset time by an hour and the sunrise time by an hour. It’s not really a psychological pressure, it’s a clock movement. Prior to DST there were different summer and winter hours for government offices, and others, but it couldn’t work universally.
We fiddle with time by even using a clock, and time zones, there’s no natural time except a solar clock. Even in Greenwich the clock is wrong most of the time, relative to the sun because of the equation of time.
It changes what we call the sunset time in order to induce people to shift their schedules earlier. It doesn't actually change when the sun sets: it changes the map, not the territory. The benefits and drawbacks of DST all come from shifting schedules, for which fiddling with clocks is a means to an end.
It sounds like your core complaint is that you prefer DST to a system without a clock change because you expect that voluntary behavior with inducements short of a clock change won't be effective enough in getting others to shift their schedules, and shifting your schedule when not enough other people do likewise is suboptimal from your perspective. Or am I missing something?
If that is indeed your core complaint, then I agree with you to the extent that I think DST is a more effective inducement to schedule-shifting than voluntary manual schedule-shifting perhaps with the government setting a "good" example. Where I disagree is that I don't want to be induced to shift my schedule. Like Robinson Davies's fictional character Samuel Marchbanks, I like sleeping in past dawn and enjoy moonlit evenings, and I resent the bony blue-fingered hand of Puritanism trying to make me healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of myself.
I am aware that the length of day stays the same regardless of clock time. The sunset time does shift though, because we measure the time of sunset by the clock. As we do sunrise. As we do solar noon.
Clocks are how how we measure time, and all time we measure by the clock is incorrect compared to solar time except at the meridian(s). Even in winter.
Therefore you are always being coerced into to believing a fiction and if you didn’t want to believe that fiction, if you didn’t want to be coerced by “puritans”, if you wanted to stick with solar time, you would turn up to a noon meeting between 11:30 or 12:30 even in winter - if your location were in the time zone it should be, or if not (like in Spain or France) even later - closer to 1pm winter time. 2pm in summer.
So the “bony hand of Puritanism” is clock time. ( Also it’s keeping people outside in beer gardens and garden parties later than otherwise, so it’s a strange form of Puritanism).
And as for sleeping in past dawn: I like that too, but I can do that even with DST in the summer because the sunrise changes from 3:50am to 4:50am, and I can do it for most of the winter provided we revert to standard time. However, and admittedly it’s grim up north, if we were to stay on DST in winter, then, where I live, sunrise would be closer to 10am than 9am.
Conversely if we stay on standard time in summer there’s an early summer sunset compensated for by a sunrise which will be witnessed by no one except amnesiacs and party goers heading home, and mostly they will curse the sun.
Hence the clock change.
We know how this goes already, and probably would without historical evidence, but we have that. The U.K. brought in year round summer time in 1968 and abandoned it a few years later. Public opinion, once supportive, turned strongly against it. I don’t doubt that public opinion will also turn against year round standard time in all northern latitudes as people see sunsets in midsummer that are earlier than spring sunsets now.
We will then revert to a clock change, because how hard is that anyway. Devices do it for you these days. And that’s what really this is about - losing a hour’s sleep every March. It’s a tribute to the lack of hardiness amongst moderns that we are abandoning a clock change when our automatic clocks do it for us, and we have nothing to do Sunday morning, but our ancestors could change 55 manual grandfather clocks and still get to church by 8am, after milking the cows and feeding the dogs, with some bell ringing practice thrown in at 7am.
We're always going to have long days and brighter evenings in summer, and shorter days and darker evenings in winter (unless we're living on the equator or flip that for the southern hemisphere), so no solution to that.
So we mess around with the clocks instead.
Honestly, there’s no responding to that. It’s not a good faith argument.
I'm not falling into line with your prescription about solving the problem, I'm simply stating a fact; sunrise and sunset happen at different 'times' in the Northern Hemisphere during the course of the year, and any attempts to bring 'clock time' into line with 'natural daylight' are going to have to take that into account.
Maybe your suggestion is the best way, I don't know and I don't particularly care one way or the other, since I will still have to be at work by 9:00 a.m. clock time winter and summer whatever scheme is adopted by the country or the world.
I was also aware that sunrise and sunset happen at different times during the year. I don't think I denied that. My argument rather depends on it.
And you **should** care because your 9AM start would be night time in winter in Ireland if it were on DST ( which is UTC+1) all year round. I actually think I need a post explaining the basics here, as in why we ever decided to use DST to begin with. It's not because of energy shortages in 1916, as some claim.
relative to my schedule it does. which would you prefer, my plan above, or a plan where we simultaneosly shift the clock but also work schedules in the same direction for a net zero?
I’m not really sure about your argument. If we tried shifting all schedules by an hour - including all opening and closing times, train timetables, Tv shows, etc it would be much harder logistically than a clock change. I think i’ve explained this already.
And sunset times wouldn’t be later by the clock in summer. Neither all year DST nor all year standard time is ideal.
You had stated my plan doesn't make sunset later. My hypothetical was trying to demonstrate, that you actually care more about the relative sunset compared to your schedule (my plan), than you do about the time on the clock when sunset happens.
My plan is more libertarian, allowing individuals to choose which schedule they prefer, and not forcing everyone to one.
If you abide by a clock time at all you aren’t being “libertarian”. The government has decided your time zone. You are abiding by it.
Honestly these debates are infuriating. Your “ libertarian” ideas are clearly not just incorrect on their own but just wouldn’t work. Do you really think that every business are going to change hours without the clock change?
My preference would be we go with sunrise. So maybe in summertime, depending on latitude, you end up getting up anywhere between 4-6 a.m. in the morning, and in winter (again, depending on latitude) you get up around 7-9 a.m., but so what?
Our problem is that we are on an artificial time scale for industrial purposes, so we 'have' to be at work for 8-9 a.m. in the morning. No problem for summer, when we'd have already had a couple of hours daylight by then, but that means getting up and travelling in the dark for winter. And that's why the messing around with time changes: do we want dark mornings or dark evenings to suit the work schedule?
Subtle ACX callout in the latest Galeev twitter thread on the Russo-Ukraine crisis: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1505922954718113798
Good catch, I've really been enjoying Galeev's analysis but I missed that one.
Change My View: Anti-youth ageism is easily in the top 3 most important social problems facing the West. Personally I can't see how anything other than the wars waged by the US gov and demographic change is more important to address than ageism.
Ageism is so bad because it is enforced by the State. 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.
Teenagers face whippings and beatings for disobedience, and if not that arbitrary confinement. It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else, just as slaves have been treated throughout history. Paddling is still practiced in schools in 19 US states. Elsewhere teens are imprisoned without due process by parents and schools when they are “grounded” or assigned “detention.” Hollywood has made light of these labels, but they are serious civil rights violations, and though force is generally not used to coerce cooperation out of victims, those who fight back against said punishments are often sent to juvenile detention, or worse.
Unlucky, revolutionary teens are sent to camps, where they are deprived of an education and put to punitive labor. Starvation is a common punishment for teen victims in these camps. Collectively, this sadistic gulag-archipelago is known as the “Troubled Teen Industry,” or TTI for short. Camps are often located in the wilderness, in polities such as Utah, Jamaica, and Costa Rica. Bounty-hunters are often hired to “transport” victims to these places.
Teens are considered property under US (and, more generally, Western) law. A teenager has no medical rights; if a teen does not want a vaccine, but his parents do want him to have it, he can be restrained and inoculated against his will. If a teen does want a vaccine, but his parents do not want him to have it, he is not allowed to receive it. In medicine, the need for a patient to agree with a procedure is called assent. The legal requirement for a responsible party to sign off on a procedure is called consent. Teens are neither afforded assent (the right to veto a procedure), nor consent (the right to sign off on a procedure).
“Runaway” teens are hunted down and captured like slaves. Imagine if marital vows were still literal and runaway wives could be tracked down and returned to their husbands. Wouldn’t that be awful? This is worse, because teens never entered an agreement for that to happen in the first place.
And let's not mention the high school, which is 97.8% a waste of time, and therefore 97.8% exploitation, according to my research.
All of this despite the fact that the brain is fully mature at the end of puberty (14-16), and the fact that before that, at the age of 12 or 13, many teen demographics are more measurably mature than many "adult" demographics, per both real outcomes and lab tests.
There is an incredibly urgent need to abolish this oppression in the interests of justice. The high school must be abolished and replaced with a traditional system where 20% go on to college-level education after 8th grade and the other 80% begin hands-on internships and apprenticeships. To make way for this, ownership-by-parents must be abolished. Starting by the age of 13, youths must have medical autonomy, the ability to both initiate and veto any procedure. The punishment camps must be abolished and those responsible must be prosecuted. Working and traveling laws must be adjusted to make way for the new education system.
There is already welfare for youths who are abandoned by their families, but teens must live in restrictive group homes which reproduce the oppressive parental-ownership system in order to receive it. These homes should be abolished, and the welfare should be converted to cash. In accordance with the new education system and the science of brain development, the new age of majority should be 15. Those 13 and up who are maturely pursuing their education or who have graduated should be granted minor status, as opposed to the pupil status of children, and should be allowed to proactively divorce bad parents, sign leases, and open bank accounts.
Just as a by the way, the deliberately exaggerated and screed-y language in parts of this make what good points you have seem radical and unreasonable.
If you believe this is such a big deal, for your sake, I strongly recommend better messaging.
A really successful tactic is to try to seem like "I'm just like all of you and I just happened to stumble onto this info holy shit are you guys seeing this? Shouldn't we worry about this?" And then make it very fact based. Less comparisons to slavery, for a start.
Thanks, I guess, for the advice, but it does come off as concern trolling to a degree. Maybe you should watch *your* tone? Lol.
Rational people should be able to not shut down and lose control when someone makes a slavery comparison (which is apt, by the way). It's either true or not true, I'm not really interested in talking with pearl clutchers who want to assert that I'm not allowed to liken X to Y because Y is sanctified and likening X to it is irreverent. I don't share the postmodern Western religion ("Successor ideology") and am not interested in validating it or catering to it.
To be clear Im NOT tone policing, say what you like, just some of your ideas are things I agree with (though mostly not, and the over-all worldview certainly not) and Im hoping you dont make them seem unreasonable to everyone by association.
I think the slavery comparison is laughable, tone deaf, and bad for your own cause, but fire away. I dont think anyones gonna shutdown, theyre just going to (statistically heuristically correctly) move on to higher-truth-yield pastures when they read it.
What exactly is untrue about the slavery comparison? Are you claiming that teens or slaves are not hunted as run aways? Are you claiming that one doesn't receive corporal punishment? Are you claiming that one doesn't have a master that makes all decisions, including the most intimate medical decisions, like whether or not to get vaccinated?
The comparison is ugly, but that's because teens *are* treated like slaves, and it's disgusting. Don't shoot the messenger.
My claim is that the lived experiences are totally disimilar to each other in such as way as that both groups would disagree that theyre the same and no one would mistake one for the other, and putting the groups together would make for nonsensical comparisons and policy recommendations.
You cant prove things with checklists and definitions.
"Slaves are hunted as runaways, teens are hunted as runaways, therefore teens are slaves" isnt even a true syllogism, let alone a true statement.
>My claim is that the lived experiences are totally dissimilar
Can you provide specific examples? Because my claim is the opposite, but at least I've provided some reasons for what I believe (e.g pointing out specific similarities).
>both groups would disagree that theyre the same and no one would mistake one for the other
You can't divorce this from widespread belief in the Successor Ideology. Furthermore, I do need to write on internalized ageism. Back before feminism women were largely treated like slaves, but the vast majority refused to admit it. Only after they were freed did women begin to de-internalized sexism/patriarchy etc.
>You cant prove things with checklists and definitions.
You can't prove an analogy, but you can provide reasons why it's useful and reasons why it's obcsurative.
Reasonable proposition: "Popular science around the age of brain maturity is wrong"
Unreasonable proposition: "Teenagers are being WHIPPED AND BRANDED LIKE SLAVES at this very hour in the United States of America! I AM SO OPPRESSED!"
>Unreasonable proposition: "Teenagers are being WHIPPED AND BRANDED LIKE SLAVES at this very hour in the United States of America! I AM SO OPPRESSED!"
Less caps locks, please. No need to e-yell. Try to not get that heated.
That said, how is this an unreasonable proposition? You haven't given a reason, you just asserted that it's unreasonable with caps locks.
"All of this despite the fact that the brain is fully mature at the end of puberty (14-16)"
This is not true.
I believe you are uninformed, check out my summaries and my book: https://criticalagetheory.substack.com/p/striking-gold-when-does-the-brain?s=w
Someone with the initials "JB" showing up in a corner of the SSC diaspora to tell us all about how horribly oppressed the yoots today are? What would be the odds of that!
Please don't feed the troll.
https://i.imgur.com/Oeraj91.png
Nobody owes you serious engagement and you've made yourself a clown a hundred times over. You aren't even a FUNNY clown.
EDIT: Ah, yes, since you're here, though, I DO have a burning question. You've repeatedly said that, in your view, a 14-year-old is "fully developed in every respect" and should have "full autonomy in every aspect". So, what are your feelings regarding "consensual" relationships between 14-year olds and 40-year olds? Where does your brave crusade for emancipation for the youths fall on that topic? It's a rather salient issue.
This whole reply is an ad hom and a scissor statement bait question.
You of all people accusing others of ad hom and baiting is hilarious. How about you answer my very simple question instead of spouting jargon?
Because your question is scissor statement bait.
You misused "under the auspices". That means "with the help and support of"; "under the aegis" would be "under the protection of".
I think you meant "under the guise of".
It's American English. There's an implied "idea" in there, so i.e. it says "you are rejecting a user's ideas with the help of the idea that that user is a troll."
It may be American, it's still incorrect.
Well I didnt make the image and I doubt someone will change the way they talk because some Irish lady thinks grammar policing is a good substitute for an argument
https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg
this whole image is just an ad hom.
Also, no u
A comment section is not a suicide pact that requires us to put up with endless bullshit.
This whole comment is just an ad hom. Image relevant? -- https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg
"17 year olds are the most oppressed group in the West."
Here we go again.
We should start a book (sorry, on here we call such "prediction markets", don't we?) on what age our little friend is.
My estimates range from 12-14 years of age based on how he replies to criticism, but sometimes he might be as old as 16. I'm not going to go higher, seeing as how his solution for the oppression of 17 year olds (he bumped that one up from 15) is to draft 'em all into the army and send them off to fight and die in Ukraine.
Well, it is a solution. Can't be oppressed if you're pushing up daisies!
"It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else, just as slaves have been treated throughout history."
As they say, and there's people pay good money to be treated like that, and you're complaining about getting it for free? 😁
Isn't amazing that people who have learned everything by 14 can't believe that people who have lived longer have learned even more?
This comment is just an ad hom
*kindly pats Joey on the head* No, it's not an argumentum ad hominem. It's not even an argumentum. Just an observation. Don't worry, it's extremely common for the young to believe that the old have forgotten what it's like to have been young. Sometimes it might even be true. But not usually.
This comment is just another ad hom. Could you please either add something to the discussion or stop? Nothing is gained from "silly you you must be 14" or "*pats Joey on the head*" etc.
"When I left home at 18, my father was the stupidest man alive. When I returned home at 25, it was shocked by how much he had learned."
>Here we go again.
Less whining and more rebuttal, please.
>We should start a book (sorry, on here we call such "prediction markets", don't we?) on what age our little friend is.
ad hom
>My estimates range from 12-14 years of age based on how he replies to criticism, but sometimes he might be as old as 16. I'm not going to go higher, seeing as how his solution for the oppression of 17 year olds (he bumped that one up from 15) is to draft 'em all into the army and send them off to fight and die in Ukraine.
ad hom and straw man
>Well, it is a solution. Can't be oppressed if you're pushing up daisies!
straw man
>As they say, and there's people pay good money to be treated like that, and you're complaining about getting it for free? 😁
justifying beatings of teenagers with BDSM? Interesting take
>> Teenagers face whippings and beatings for disobedience, and if not that arbitrary confinement. It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else, just as slaves have been treated throughout history. Paddling is still practiced in schools in 19 US states.
So, I went looking for evidence on this item, and I was a little surprised. I had originally thought that this claim was easily-falsifiable. But it does look like there is some level of truth here: though the treatment of children in school is still not comparable to slavery, in my mind. [1]
As background: I reside in a State in which adults who have some authority over children in the Foster-care system can lose their status as Foster Parents (or parents can lose legal permission to spend any unsupervised time with their own children in split-custody scenarios) if Child Protective Services suspects that the adult in question might use corporal punishment on any children under their care. I suspect that school officials using corporal punishment would be subject to loss-of-job and prosecution for some form of assault on a minor.
Sometime in the year 2016, a journal article was published in PubMed about this subject. In that article, the authors collected legal rules and statistics governing corporal punishment in a school setting in the United States.
Among the charts that was published was a chart showing 'States with laws permitting corporal punishment in school', and 'Percent of school districts that have officials admitting to using corporal punishment at least once in the last year'. Three States had numbers above 50%, one state had a value above 26% but less than 50%. Two States had numbers in the range between 16% and 25%, while four States has numbers in the range 6% to 15%. The remaining nine States were at rates 5% and below.
Though it seems worrisome that some States score above 50% on the 'officials admit to using corporal punishment at least once in the last year', it also seems like an attempt to make a possibly-small problem seem large. There is no gradation from 'at least once in the last year' to 'more than 10 times in the last year' or 'more than 50 times in the last year'. Those gradations would be really useful in understanding the number of children impacted by this practice.
In a hypothetical scenario in which 50% of school districts in one State had one official perform corporal punishment once per year, the number of children impacted would be small relative to the total number of children in that State.
If you, yourself, received unjust punishment of this type from either a parent or a school official, you have my sympathies. It does mean that you may be a member of the oppressed class of people who have received that type of punishment from a school official or parent. However, that does not mean that all people under the age of 18 are members of that oppressed class.
[1] Slaves were part of an economic system in which the owner reaped great benefit from forcing the slave to perform labor without the slave being compensated for that labor; and without the slave even being free to choose where/when/how/for-whom to perform the labor. People under the age of 18 in school do not generate economic output for either their parents or for those who run the schools.
That is the first of many points in which the lives of children in school are different from the lives of slaves on a plantation.
>[1] Slaves were part of an economic system in which the owner reaped great benefit from forcing the slave to perform labor without the slave being compensated for that labor; and without the slave even being free to choose where/when/how/for-whom to perform the labor.
And 20th-21st century youths were/are part of an economic system in which "education" workers, teacher unions, "educational" corporations, and university PMC members reaped/reap great benefit from forcing the youth to perform labor without the youth being compensated for that labor; and without the youth even being free to choose where/when/how/for-whom to perform the labor.
>However, that does not mean that all people under the age of 18 are members of that oppressed class.
Sure but extrajudicial confinement is just as bad as an equivalent spanking, similar to how abduction is as serious if not more so than assault. Almost all teenage youth face ridiculous levels of extrajudicial confinement. Just because people have kind of moved away from corporal punishment doesn't mean there isn't still subjugation. Relevant text: https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Prison-Michel-Foucault/dp/0679752552
" It is perfectly legal across the US for a parent to “spank” their teenage property, with belts, paddles, straps, or whatever else"
Lemme take some notes here for my next time helping plot out a darkfic, though to be frank, this is pretty tame compared to what we inflicted on the secondary character.
I do like the "property" bit though, gotta remember that for the next story!
Now, it does seem like paddling (which is spanking with a wooden paddle) is legal in American schools, and that did surprise me since this stopped over here in the late 70s.
https://theconversation.com/video-shows-students-still-get-paddled-in-us-schools-160592
However, I still doubt even the most recalcitrant school beats students the same way and same degree that a slave was beaten.
Ctrl f "corproral" here -- http://thealternativehypothesis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AltHypeReader.pdf
We don't actually have data on the corporal punishment of black slaves. The single historical record that there is reveals a corporal punishment rate similar to that of most high schools that use a paddle. We don't know how severe it was. Any one-off horror stories or that picture of scars can be matched by the camps and stuff like A Child Called It but with youth.
So I am still unsure what exactly your objection is based on. Let's put it like this: if there is a 17 year old and they want to get a full time job and marry their sweetheart and live on their own, and they are fully capable of this, since they are fully developed and educated enough for 80+% of jobs, but they are instead forced to go to school for 40 hours a week, and if they don't cooperate, they are beaten with paddles, belts, or extrajudicially confined, and if they try to leave the house where this happens or the school where this happens they will be hunted down as a "runaway," then they are essentially living as slaves. How can you say otherwise?
"We don't actually have data on the corporal punishment of black slaves. The single historical record that there is reveals a corporal punishment rate similar to that of most high schools that use a paddle. We don't know how severe it was. Any one-off horror stories or that picture of scars can be matched by the camps and stuff like A Child Called It but with youth."
Mate, you do realise you have just pulled out of your arse "We don't know how bad black slaves in the pre-Civil War United States had it, but I am perfectly sure a white middle-class guy like me had it ten times worse as a teenager because I had to go to school"? You do realise that?
Do you realize that I never said youth slavery = 10 * black slavery? I'm saying youth slavery ~= black slavery at any moment in time for some active victim.
And people accuse ME of "blinkered literalism".
Any way you cut it you're just baiting at this point.
Our little boy who is fully mature and adult and brain developed because he's at least 13 and maybe as old as 15:
"Elsewhere teens are imprisoned without due process by parents and schools when they are “grounded” or assigned “detention.”
Do you realize that I never said youth slavery = 10 * black slavery? I'm saying youth slavery ~= black slavery at any moment in time for some active victim."
Some bozo named Dickens, never heard of him, seemingly went on a visit to the USA when slavery was still around and wrote it up as a sub-plot in one of his serials:
‘And may I ask,’ said Martin, glancing, but not with any displeasure, from Mark to the negro, ‘who this gentleman is? Another friend of yours?’
‘Why sir,’ returned Mark, taking him aside, and speaking confidentially in his ear, ‘he’s a man of colour, sir!’
‘Do you take me for a blind man,’ asked Martin, somewhat impatiently, ‘that you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?’
‘No, no; when I say a man of colour,’ returned Mark, ‘I mean that he’s been one of them as there’s picters of in the shops. A man and a brother, you know, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, favouring his master with a significant indication of the figure so often represented in tracts and cheap prints.
‘A slave!’ cried Martin, in a whisper.
‘Ah!’ said Mark in the same tone. ‘Nothing else. A slave. Why, when that there man was young—don’t look at him while I’m a-telling it—he was shot in the leg; gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like crimped fish; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron collar, and wore iron rings upon his wrists and ankles. The marks are on him to this day. When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off his coat, and took away my appetite.’
‘Is this true?’ asked Martin of his friend, who stood beside them.
‘I have no reason to doubt it,’ he answered, shaking his head ‘It very often is.’
‘Bless you,’ said Mark, ‘I know it is, from hearing his whole story. That master died; so did his second master from having his head cut open with a hatchet by another slave, who, when he’d done it, went and drowned himself; then he got a better one; in years and years he saved up a little money, and bought his freedom, which he got pretty cheap at last, on account of his strength being nearly gone, and he being ill. Then he come here. And now he’s a-saving up to treat himself, afore he dies, to one small purchase—it’s nothing to speak of. Only his own daughter; that’s all!’ cried Mr Tapley, becoming excited. ‘Liberty for ever! Hurrah! Hail, Columbia!’
"Joseph, you have to go to school, I don't care if you're 13, you're not a grown-up yet"
"Mooooom! You and Dad are so unfair! I'm a slave, this is just like slavery!"
"Joseph, you stayed out until 3:00 a.m. and never told us anything, your mother and I were worried sick, you're grounded for the next two weeks young man".
"DAAAD! You're a slave-owner! This is so unfair!"
'Youth slavery equivalent to black slavery at any moment in time'. Having to go to school or being punished for infractions = exact same thing as "whipped, branded, not permitted to have your children with you". Exactly the same thing, exactly!
***MOD*** I understand this is your hobbyhorse, but you've been posting about it in a bunch of open threads now and it's getting tiresome. Please try to limit your discussion of this to times when it's relevant.
I'll obey you but I will say that I'm disappointed. This topic is probably the most important thing posted in these open threads, and on your blog overall, other than war -- and even then the war in Ukraine is already opposed by the West, there's not much that can be changed by talking about it. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people are significantly harmed every decade by exploitative, coercive over-"education", tens of trillions of dollars are wasted every decade on it, it's the most expensive thing the government funds second to the military, and all of this rests on the falsehood(s) that I've exposed.
And now you're telling me I can't post about it here because I'm posting about it too much. Do you realize I haven't posted about it for the last month or so, and you responded to a 3 week old thread, and now I'm responding to an 8 day old comment, and you have a new open thread every week?
Add to that, the extreme amount of flat-out embarrassingly unreasonable flaming & disrespect you're tacitly allowing from your audience towards my occasional post is also disappointing. If you're gonna put the gloves on now maybe moderate the people saying things like "Aw, it's so cute how diddums has learned one phrase off by heart and can now repeat it ad nauseam! Why, you'd almost think he understood what it meant!" (this was after I told her that her comment consisting solely of guessing that I'm 14 is mere ad hom, lol) and "Nobody owes you serious engagement and you've made yourself a clown a hundred times over. You aren't even a FUNNY clown' (literally just pure flaming).
I really have a lot of respect for you & I hope you rethink this embargo on my ideas.
I'm thinking about using Obsidian to keep track of the material in my qi gong classes. Do people have favorite note-taking systems? I like the idea of making it easy to keep notes associated, but I'm concerned about having a way to sort through too many associations.
At work, I use OneNote because it's just the easiest when all your coworkers' documentation is there. For personal use, I use QOwnNotes or one of several physical notebooks divided by subject. I don't think physical notebooks work well with qi gong unless you're a good artist (I'm guessing you'd need images included?).
I think I can get by without pictures-- the movements I'm studying aren't that complicated, and I've got videos. The challenge is finding the video with the information I want.
The hard part is that there's so much detail and it's so entangled.
With Obsidian you don't even have to use links much - the quick finder is pretty amazing, and ctrl+shift+F helps with the rest. Throw in a MOC for something you want an overview of, and you're set.
You can also use the Dataview community plugin to just embed a dynamic list of all pages tagged with #qigong #exercise or whatever.
https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview
And now for something political...
I've heard a number of people argue that Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if Trump were POTUS because Trump is a loose cannon and Putin would have feared him too much.
What I find interesting about that argument is that Trump supporters tended to argue that Trump was much less likely to get the US involved in foreign wars than a Democrat would.
Is there a reasonable way to square the circle and argue consistently that if Trump were still POTUS instead of Biden:
1) Putin would have been less likely to invade Ukraine
AND
2) The US would have been less likely to have involved itself in a war
?
>By acting crazy and unpredictable, Trump made it less likely that a hostile foreign leader would test us ("wait, what if he actually _would_ hit Moscow???") which means less wars.
By "unpredictable" here don't you mean "unpredictable with respect to fighting Russia"? If so, doesn't that mean Trump would have been more likely to start WWIII?
ETA: In other words, your argument refutes Point 2.
>The point is, if you think the other guy might do something extreme in response to a provocation, you step more carefully around them.
So if Trump was more likely to do something extreme in response to Russia's provocation, Trump was more likely to fight Russia in a provocation, right?
To be clear, are you saying that Putin would think Trump is crazy but that you would not? Because I don't think it's reasonable to claim you are able to read what Trump would do better than is Putin.
Remember Kruschev pounding his shoe on the podium? Same thing.
It's hard to call Trump the king of empty threats when a previous President made such public shows of declaring "red lines" with zero consequences for their violation.
To be fair, he did send out unmarked Gestapo agents to disappear peaceful arsonists off of the idyllic streets of Portland or some such thing. But your examples are all domestic politics.
In international politics he did wipe his ass with the Paris Accords and the JCPA (metaphorically, just like the piss hookers) and that may have given him enough "crazy enough to go through with it" cred to get the NATO freeloaders to start paying up.
Yes, but not one that satisfies the unspoken third conditional of "and makes Trump not look like a member of Putin's fan-club."
I'm not interested in playing the game of "MY guy gets credit for all the good things that happened when he was in office (but none of the blame) and YOUR guy gets the blame for all of the bad things that have happened while he was in office (but none of the credit, and also we'll try to blame him for some of the stuff that happened under my guy's watch too)." Sanctions were passed under Trump. They were waived by the Biden Administration because it was deemed an inappropriate measure, given that it was America telling Russia and Germany what they could and couldn't do between each other, which is going beyond being the World's Policeman and into being the World's Dictator. The Biden Administration reached an agreement with Germany that sanctions would be reapplied if Russia used the pipeline as a political weapon or engaged in other hostile behavior. The second the Ukraine conflict got hot again those sanctions reactivated. None of this touches any actual issue. This is the only response you get from me, as every single engagement I have with you puts another impediment between me and enlightenment. I hope you have a good day.
Except, and I can't emphasize this enough, the US didn't (and couldn't barring some ridiculous actions) block Nord Stream 2. What we could do, and did was sanction the parties involved. When it became clear that wasn't going to stop the pipeline, we stopped sanctioning them as it was futile. When the situation changed, the countries actually involved in Nord Stream 2 (which does not include the US) blocked it and far more vigorous sanctions were imposed.
So, one way would be, Putin would be less likely to invade Ukraine NOW because he would hope that he could get some of his broader ambitions realized in other ways. Though the invasion of Ukraine isn't about NATO, if he could get NATO to collapse, or the US to withdraw from it, that would radically change the strategic situation in his favor throughout eastern Europe. So, if he believed there was a reasonable chance Trump might withdraw, then he might have declined to take action which would strengthen NATO's alliance.
But, if he still chose to proceed, it's certainly possible that Trump would have been less likely to support Ukraine. I frankly don't know if that's true, as for all his talk, he didn't actually accomplish much of anything on that front.
That's not a bad argument. Perhaps Trump could have retreated NATO in Eastern Europe. It does seem like Trump was kind of headed in that direction, if NATO countries didn't pay up more.
Maybe Trump was even a Russian asset and Putin could have convinced Trump to abandon a promise to defend Poland and the Baltics. Biden's election may have ended those plans.
I don't see why it's so far-fetched to imagine Trump felt beholden to Russians who bailed his businesses out after American banks wouldn't loan him anymore money.
Haha. OK. I give you the win on this side argument :)
Better argument imho is that maybe with Trump in the White House, Ukrainian government would be more accomodating to pre-invasion Russian demands
Well, they wouldn't expect as much assistance from Trump since they had been spending most of their bribe money assisting the other party.
I don't like Trump but those seem perfectly consistent. Trump projected a mafioso character https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ukraine-3-decision-theory-madman and this simply means that Putin was unlikely to test him.
This line of argument implies Putin would see Trump as a greater threat than a Biden, and also *you* would not see it that way, because if you saw it that way, you would expect that Trump would be more likely to go to war with Russia, which would fail to satisfy Condition 2. Zvi writes:
"In order to speak this language and wield this leverage you need to provide overwhelming evidence that you have the mafioso nature, that you will endlessly escalate until confronted by a superior force that is also willing to endlessly escalate. The only known way to do this involves actually having the mafioso nature. That’s a problem, because then you’ll think in zero-sum terms and also make dumb decisions."
That sounds like a refutation of Condition 2 to me.
So it requires that Trump would appear a Madman to Putin but not a Madman to *you*. I don't think that's a reasonable thing for anyone to claim.
I think there is a big distinction between going out and starting an optional war (Iraq, Syria, Libya) and responding to a clear attack.
I don't even like Trump, but this is pretty easy to see.
Sure, but sticking with Zvi's theme, someone with a mafioso nature is also more likely to start an optional war. Putin, for instance. I don't find it hard to imagine Trump starting an optional war with Iran.
I'd like to thank Scott for his influence on me.
I've been reading Scott since 2013-2014 and have commented both in the old Slate Star Codex threads, and over on the SCC reddit and The Motte under various names.
If it weren't for Scott's incredible output I wouldn't be anywhere near the writer or thinker I am today, and if it weren't for the incredible communities he's built I almost certainly wouldn't have had the occasion to write nearly as much as I have.
Thank you.
I started a substack recently and the first content up are some effort posts from TheMotte.
This is the Piece that won post of the year 2019:
https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/alex-jones-wordsmith?r=1b6v2r&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
a fitting piece to link since it was Scott's humour writing and long takes that inspired me to do a Capstone pseudo-thesis, and write a far FAR too rigorous look at the rhetoric of Homeric Poetry, and how Alex Jones seemingly replicates them.
So once again thankyou Scott and thankyou everyone. The wider SCC community has been an incredible addition to my life. I can't imagine the past decade as anything but immensely poorer without your influence. thankyou.
Do you do Russian-to-English translation, have time for quick-turnaround volunteer work, and wish to support Navalny & his team? Their excellent Youtube channel needs help with its English subtitles (which aren't excellent at all & are sometimes nonexistent, especially on their longer, more analytical videos.) I wish I spoke Russian, I'd contact them and offer, but alas I only do French-to-English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7Elc-kLydl-NAV4g204pDQ
I keep arguing here that Literature offers the best insights into human psychology, yet the field of psychology mostly ignores it because it has its ow literature.
Of course Jung took literature seriously, perhaps too seriously. Not sure about Freud.
I'm sure there are plenty of individual psychologists who are well read and have learned a lot about psychology from reading literature. That said, it still seems like Western Literature is a gold mine of psychological wisdom yet to be mined by the psychologists.
Am I wrong? Have they mined it?
How would you formulate and test hypotheses on human psychology based on published literature? Doesn't that create a massive selection bias? It would tell you more about the psychology of writers than about humans in general.
If you have a whole lot of writers, it might not tell you about the whole human race, but it could still tell you quite a bit.
Hey Scott, do you any interest in taking a look at the Pfizer COVID vaccine trial data that has been released?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFIs6LsV0a4&ab_channel=SuperEyepatchWolf
A description of the huge and varied fan ecosystem that developed around a small but well-written game called Undertale.
I think we're living in an era of remarkable creativity which doesn't get noticed as much as it should be because a lot of it is created in gaming and in informal channels.
They said it would never happen. They said it could never happen. They said it should never happen.
But it happened!
The American Song Contest!
https://eurovision.tv/story/the-american-song-contest-is-about-to-begin
"YESTERDAY, 16:15 CET
The 'American Song Contest' will premiere later today (Monday 21 March, 2022) with a two-hour primetime extravaganza on NBC in the States. The Grand Final will air on Monday 9 May - one day before the Eurovision Song Contest First Semi-Final.
Atlantic Records has released the first instalment of the original songs featured on NBC’s American Song Contest. Tonight, in the premiere episode the first 11 artists will perform their original songs in front of hosts Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg, a live studio audience and millions of viewers across America. The 11 songs featured on tonight’s episode are available to enjoy now.
Artists featured on the first episode:
Wonderland – AleXa (OK)
Wonder – Alisabeth Von Presley (IA)
LOKO – Christian Pagán (PR)
Held On Too Long – Hueston (RI)
Feel Your Love – Jake’O (WI)
Never Like This – Kelsey Lamb (AR)
Fire – Keyone Starr (MS)
Beautiful World – Michael Bolton (CT)
New Boot Goofin’ – Ryan Charles (WY)
Love In My City – UG skywalkin (IN)
Ready To Go – Yam Haus (MN)
The 56 artists across the series span a wide range of performers, from undiscovered talent, up-and-coming new artists, and rising stars to established and legendary icons.
An incredible solo artist, duo, group or band will represent each location and perform a new original song, celebrating the depth and variety of different styles and genres across America."
Since the national broadcaster in my country failed to pick this up, for some unfathomable reason, I have been denied the opportunity to enrich my life with "New Boot Goofin'" so I am depending on you, dear American ACX readers and contributors, to let me know what I am missing out on 😁
Don't forget to mark it in your calendars - the Grand Final on 9th May!
NPR did a multi-minute segment on this. While all of their personnel thinks this is the greatest thing EVAH, they were concerned that Eurovision is too "queer" to be successful in a nation "founded by Puritans."
[META] Why am I getting flamed and trolled so hard in my thread "Change My View: Anti-youth ageism is easily in the top 3 most important social problems facing the West. "?
The majority of comments at this point are ad homs or strawmans. I've started just responding with "ad hom." A select few users seem very upset about my thesis and have taken to non-stop flaming and trolling.
Examples: one guy accused me of being a troll even though I have written a whole book on anti-youth ageism, the education system, and brain development. Another guy keeps asking me about relationships between 14 year olds and 40 year olds despite me telling him multiple times that I won't be entertaining obvious scissor statement baiting. Most recently after telling him this he said "Your behavior leads me and basically everyone else who knows of your history to believe you're either a troll or a 16-year old with an unfortunate blend of low self-awareness, high narcissism, and a complete inability to NOT double down on every single half-baked idea that falls out of the Collyer Mansion you call a mind palace. " This was in response to me saying "nah I don't even care about your scissor statement bait. It's a non-issue compared to all the stuff I talk about, kind of like covid mask restrictions vs. ageism" and then he claimed he's not mad lol. One person linked me this image as his reply to my top level https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg . Then he said "A comment section is not a suicide pact that requires us to put up with endless bullshit." No explanation as to why my whole book that I've nourished for 4+ years is "bullshit." One person said, in response to me bringing up corporal punishment of youths, "As they say, and there's people pay good money to be treated like that, and you're complaining about getting it for free? 😁" She also insists on pontificating on what my true age is instead of engaging with my ideas. My favorite is probably "*kindly pats Joey on the head* [proceeds to patronize, no substantial objection to thesis]."
Not to be rude but isn't there rules against this kind of crap here? If I could block them I would, it's a few problem users who have decided to bravely defend the status quo against all manner of fact based criticism using only the most potent forms of irrational shaming and discussion killing. They *really* don't want people talking about ageism and it shows.
So, my question is why is this crazy level of flaming and outgroup booing being tolerated? I think this place would be a lot better without it and it really must be driving away people with ideas outside of the Overton window.
I think the reason you're being flamed is that you're advocating positions far outside the Overton window, and doing so in highly inflammatory terms (e.g. accusing those who disagree with you of supporting evils similar in nature and magnitude to Soviet gulags and Antebellum chattel slavery).
You also come across as dismissive when people engage with you to dispute these characterizations, either in terms of style or in terms of substance. The accusations of trolling and the ad hominem attacks came after a couple rounds of this, presumably because they interpreted your responses as indicating bad faith. I would not make such an accusation myself, as nothing I've read from you so far strikes me as necessarily inconsistent with you sincerely believing the arguments you're advocating, but I understand how others could have reached a different conclusion.
Moreover, I suspect you're making a similar mistake that's feeding to your seemingly-dismissing responses to what I read as attempts at constructive engagement with your arguments. As you (I assume) believe your own arguments and conclusions with a very high level of confidence, including the inflammatory comparisons, you're probably overly inclined to see pushback to your arguments and conclusions as being made in bad faith and to respond to them accordingly. Of course, it doesn't help that you're also getting responses that are actively hostile as well as the attempts at constructive argument.
>(e.g. accusing those who disagree with you of supporting evils similar in nature and magnitude to Soviet gulags and Antebellum chattel slavery).
I seriously believe this, and I optimize for truth, so what am I to do? Yes, if you beat your 17 year old with a belt or extrajudicially confine him for skipping school you a treating him as a slave. If you send him to a camp where he is starved and sent on long marches through the wilderness you have just sent your own blood to a gulag. His brain is developed, he is a young adult, and it's no different from me doing that to the parent because I don't like the parent's work performance.
>You also come across as dismissive when people engage with you to dispute these characterizations, either in terms of style or in terms of substance.
Where have people seriously engaged where I have been dismissive?
> I seriously believe this, and I optimize for truth, so what am I to do?
Consider optimizing your persuasion strategy for moving listeners who currently consider the idea absurd towards your beliefs. If they pattern-match you to a troll or a nutjob, they'll tune you out and you'll make no progress towards righting the extreme wrongs you perceive to be occurring.
On the other had, if optimizing for absolute candor is your utmost priority and you choose to be a lonely voice in the wilderness who speaks the truth even if the heavens fall, then own that decision and accept (unfair) dismissal and ridicule as the price of your candor.
> Where have people seriously engaged where I have been dismissive?
The first reply by Sovereigness made a similar suggestion to the one I just made in terms of optimizing for persuasion. You responded by accusing her of concern trolling and telling her "Maybe you should watch *your* tone? Lol." and saying "I'm not really interested in talking with pearl clutchers". While she was talking about tone instead of substance, I read her reply as being mild in tone and offered as a good-faith suggestion for making the discussion more productive. You responded with mockery, dismissal, and name-calling.
Essex's question about your argument seeming to imply that the sexual age of consent should be substantially lowered seems to me to be an attempt to engage with you on substance in good faith: conventional justification of setting the age of consent at 16-18 years old is that younger teenagers lack the emotional maturity to meaningfully consent to sex with adults, which is a line of thinking that you explicitly reject in other contexts. I think it's reasonable to ask you if you extend the same logic to age of consent, or if there's some other limiting principle (perhaps disparity of resources and life experience) on which to continue to forbid sexual relationships between middle-aged adults and younger teenagers. There are any number of reasonable ways you could have replied (biting the bullet and saying yes the age of consent should be lowered, proposing another limiting principle on which to base the age of consent, arguing that such relationships are morally suspect (like the conventional view of a relationship between an 18 year old and a 40 year old) but probably shouldn't be illegal, etc). Replying "This whole reply is an ad hom and a scissor statement bait question." isn't one of them.
You came closer to engaging constructively with serious engagement when people pushed back on the slavery comparison, but even there your arguments rely heavily on trying to shift the burden of proof to your interlocutors when you are the one who is in radical disagreement with prevailing opinion both among the commentariat here and among society at large. I suppose I can understand you doing so (as you framed your first comment as "I believe X, change my mind", and I expect your conclusions seem clearly and obviously true to you), but I also understand why it ruffles the feathers of your audience and interlocutors.
I think your presentation style seemed very self serving and intentionally lacking nuance. It seemed like you wanted to be flamed on, and are happy it happened. It's like when two mid sized twitter accounts pick a fight with each other, because they know it will get both of them attention... but just imo
>and intentionally lacking nuance
No I just don't see a need for nuance here. The demand for nuance from my POV is a demand for me to lie about my conclusions so that they're more inside the Overton. Maybe I'm wrong. What nuance would you like?
It's not a demand. I actually started to read you post, since I thought the topic was potentially interesting, but never finished after about a third. The style was like a dark corner conspiracy blog, and I found in unpersuasive, and hard to read and take seriously. It's your choice... you can either be a more persuasive writer, or you can be mad at people for not finding your writing persuasive. Nobody can make a real demand on which you should choose, just as nobody can make a demand to someone to find something convincing. Good luck with whatever you choose, but don't expect more from people.
As a great writer once said (paraphrase) "Criticism is the most valuable thing in the world to receive, and your enemies give it to you for free."
I second what tempo said. I didn't respond to your comment because, frankly, you didn't seem like someone who was looking to have their view changed. You seemed like someone who wants to spread an idea. The unfortunate part is I can agree with some of the things you said. I think physical punishment is bad, the TTI is full of stories of abuse, and I've certaiunly known friends who are no longer on speaking terms with their parents. This becomes unfortunate not because I agree with you, but because I think the way you present your ideas will alienate far more people than it will persuade.
I also think your defense here is a little dishonest. You say: "One person linked me this image as his reply to my top level https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg". That person was responding to you responding to replying with just an image to another person calling you a troll. Sovereigness's initial reply about tone was responded to with you saying it came off as "concern trolling to a degree". Brett S doubted one of your statements, and rather than directly linking to any kind of direct answer, you suggested a rather long post of your own and your book (and the references section of the post says to go read the book). Not ever counterargument to you was great, but your own responses to the good ones aren't ones that I would consider good.
Most importantly to your presentation: your profile picture is a pedobear meme. That is incredibly ironic if your message is about children's independence.
If I try to approach you and your post in the best faith possible, you're a person with some (possibly) smart ideas but who is also incredibly tone deaf. On the other hand, if I hadn't seen the PDF of your book with my own eyes, I'd think you were trolling and were trying to point people search up a link that would end up as a rickroll.
As someone who used to be far more online than I am now: I don't think characterizing Spurdo as "a pedobear meme" is really very fair. It was originally a meme meant to mock people who spammed pedobear memes and thought they were the height of comedy and then just kind of turned into a general-use meme character associated with Scandinavia (specifically Finns and Finnish culture). My personal suspicion is that they're a troll (unconscious) who's overdosed on chan culture and is just using Spurdo because he's a haha funny meme. I do agree there's a certain irony here, though.
>The unfortunate part is I can agree with some of the things you said. I think physical punishment is bad, the TTI is full of stories of abuse, and I've certaiunly known friends who are no longer on speaking terms with their parents.
All of these things are in the Overton. Which things outside of the Overton do you agree with me on?
>This becomes unfortunate not because I agree with you, but because I think the way you present your ideas will alienate far more people than it will persuade.
Where did I commit a fallacy such that reasonable people would be alienated by my presentation of the evidence?
>I also think your defense here is a little dishonest. You say: "One person linked me this image as his reply to my top level https://i.imgur.com/mRjjcE6.jpg". That person was responding to you responding to replying with just an image to another person calling you a troll.
This is kind of like saying "Your defense is a little dishonest. You say: 'One person maced me with bear spray.' But that was only after you maced someone who was pointing a gun at you." For some reason people here seem to think that, among all insults one can levy, calling someone a troll is especially acceptable. The reality is contrary to that. Calling someone a troll is inflammatory, low effort, bad faith, and toxic to quality discussion.
>Sovereigness's initial reply about tone was responded to with you saying it came off as "concern trolling to a degree"
Yes because tone policing is a form of concern trolling.
>Brett S doubted one of your statements, and rather than directly linking to any kind of direct answer, you suggested a rather long post of your own and your book
Sorry I know a lot of people here want quick and easy answers but much like anything worth learning the book is about the best effort/mastery ratio you're gonna get with this topic. I can't teach a flat earther physics in a forum comment, I can't rewrite my book for every newbie who asks. I wrote summaries to try to cater somewhat to people who don't want to read 250 pages but now you're calling those long. It doesn't get shorter, sorry, that's just the level of complexity this topic is on.
>Most importantly to your presentation: your profile picture is a pedobear meme. That is incredibly ironic if your message is about children's independence.
No it was a randomly chosen spurdo sparde meme but I changed it to pepe since there apparently is a connection.
"Why am I getting flamed and trolled so hard in my thread "Change My View: Anti-youth ageism is easily in the top 3 most important social problems facing the West. "?"
(1) You bury what could be a reasonable and even accurate argument about the stage at which the human brain is fully functionally developed under emotionalism and exaggeration about "teen slavery", which makes you sound like a particularly over-wrought and not very good at it drag queen belting out "I Will Survive" off-key and getting the lyrics wrong.
(2) You refuse to accept any constructive criticism and instead declare that if we don't unconditionally accept your proposition 100% as-is, it is "ad hom" (a phrase you repeat until it becomes the squawking of a parrot) along with chanspeak like "lol". This does *not* contribute to an impression of maturity on your part.
(3) Since you won't consider arguments raised against your proposition, this does mean that engagement with you devolves into poking fun at your exaggerated claims. Regrettable, but true.
(4) Your sole claims are that "all (popular) brain science is wrong" and your sole evidence on this is "I wrote a book". What are your credentials to be an expert in this field? None, so far as anyone can make out; you simply use duelling studies - "Expert A said this which I disagree with, so they are wrong, but Expert B said that which I do agree with, so they are right". Unsupported claims of "I'm right because I'm a genius" won't go far and will, again, evoke mockery. I have read your book, I am neither impressed nor convinced by it.
(5) Again, there probably are good points about corporal punishment and the authority of parents over minor children, particularly abuses in the kind of camps you mention, but you shoot yourself in the foot by the rhodomontade about "teenage slavery". Nobody is going to take seriously that the experience of the majority of minors, which is not that of abuse, is on the same plane as chattel slavery. "I have to go to school" pales in comparison with "I have to pick cotton under the blazing sun and will be whipped if I don't pick enough or fast enough or simply because the overseer can do so".
(6) You set your bar for maturity very low; 13 - 15 years of age. You want people in that age range to have full adult freedoms, no oversight, and no authority over them - the government should simply give them money and let them enter into contracts etc. as they will. Can you really not envisage a large horde of criminals licking their lips at the thought of a new cohort of pigeons for them to pluck? Laws about the debts of minors and their ability to enter into contracts came about because of such deception of the young. Once again, this does not sound like mature consideration but rather like a teenager complaining their parents won't give them money for drink and cigarettes. It may well be that you hold the attitude "It is not our responsibility to protect fools from their folly; if 15 year old George gets conned out of his money by a fake landlord or someone with a Ponzi scheme, too bad for George, let him learn by the experience and if he has to end up homeless on the streets, well, them's the breaks". But if so, then state so, rather than demanding rights with no corresponding duties or responsibilities.
(7) Your great blow for the freedom of oppressed youth is that 15 year olds should besent off to die in Ukraine (this is how you started off your first comment on the entire topic here)? That after claiming teens were slaves for being made go to school, now you think they should be sent off to war? That's your idea of liberating them? I think many would prefer, if given such a choice, to be 'property' of their parents rather than Uncle Sam. Do you seriously propose that "15 year olds can't join the army" is one of the "top 3 most important social problems facing the West", more important than crime, homelessness, racism, the various phobias people are accusing each other of in regards to gender/orientation, the global economy and its knock-on effects, the knowledge versus gig economies and their knock-on effects, etc.?
(8) And to conclude, you now go running to Teacher in order to get the mean kids punished. You want the power to block and censor. You make yourself sound more and more like an immature person and certainly not like an adult that can fight their own corner. You haven't persuaded us, and all the toddler foot-stamping in the world won't do that. Make a reasonable, unexaggerated, unmelodramatic case for what you propose and argue it out. That's how to do it.
(9) Oh yes, and you do not impress me when you try to use an expansive vocabulary, get the terms wrong, and then once again come back with "I'm right and you're wrong".
>(4) Your sole claims are that "all (popular) brain science is wrong" and your sole evidence on this is "I wrote a book". What are your credentials to be an expert in this field? None, so far as anyone can make out; you simply use duelling studies - "Expert A said this which I disagree with, so they are wrong, but Expert B said that which I do agree with, so they are right". Unsupported claims of "I'm right because I'm a genius" won't go far and will, again, evoke mockery. I have read your book, I am neither impressed nor convinced by it.
I lost my longer reply by back arrowing but I wanted to address this in case curious on lookers fall for it. Last time you claimed to read my book you had only read half of chapter 1 and was mad that it was mostly summary despite the disclaimer. I doubt you read past that point because you don't accurately describe the structure of my parts on the brain. First I did a broad review of the literature and then I thoroughly went through the actual words and citations of "teen brain researchers" and found a 99%+ lie rate for the stuff they were saying. Literally, basically every source Jay Giedd and others would cite in review papers, essays, in the media, had nothing to do with their claims or debunked their own claims. Often I included other peer reviewed studies that further debunked their claims. Like in one instance Giedd made up something about cerebellum development during the teen years and said that because the cerebullum was still growing teens lack the ability to mentally coordinate activities and are messy. For one the cerebullum only has to do with literal, physical coordination, not mental planning. Two this guy cited one of his own studies which never mentioned the cerebellum once. Three I found multiple studies, not words of people in news articles, but peer reviewed studies, with data showing that the cerebullum stops growing around the age of 12, and that it begins to shrink after that and continues to shrink til death, AND that that shrinking is aging because there was a study showing that larger amounts of shrinkage were associated with mental decline! In my book I show how teen brain media, from review articles, to books, to news media, is almost 100% crap like this. It's almost unbelievable until you read the book, and for you to totally get that wrong tells me you didn't read it.
>(2) You refuse to accept any constructive criticism and instead declare that if we don't unconditionally accept your proposition 100% as-is, it is "ad hom" (a phrase you repeat until it becomes the squawking of a parrot) along with chanspeak like "lol". This does *not* contribute to an impression of maturity on your part.
What constructive criticism? Your comments were 95% wondering what my age is, 5% strawman, saying I want to send youth to Ukraine to die (no, I just don't want 17 year olds to be exempt from drafting based on ageism), and that I think youth is 10x worse than slavery (no, I think it's about the same, $130,000 != $1,300,000.)
>Nobody is going to take seriously that the experience of the majority of minors, which is not that of abuse, is on the same plane as chattel slavery. "I have to go to school" pales in comparison with "I have to pick cotton under the blazing sun and will be whipped if I don't pick enough or fast enough or simply because the overseer can do so".
Okay I think part of the issue here is that you have an unrealistic view of slavery. I think people are both overstating how constantly abusive slavery was and are understating how abusive youth is. Slavery was not 24/7 abuse, much like being a 17 year old, your master was somewhat invested in you. I cited data earlier showing corporal punishment rates were similar to schools that paddle. We don't know how severe it was. As for the work, black slaves were not worked to the bone so besides having the same restrictions on their freedoms as modern 17 year olds, their day was no different than any other wage earning farm hand. ctrl f "hours and difficulty" http://thealternativehypothesis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AltHypeReader.pdf
Meanwhile perhaps I should talk more on how high school is 97.8% exploitation. It is largely pointless labor, not mental enrichment or whatever, for the benefit of education corporations, teacher unions and their workers, and the university PMC. And much like black slaves it is not by choice, you are told where and when to do it, you are not free, you are beaten or extrajudicially confined if you do not comply, etc.
>Can you really not envisage a large horde of criminals licking their lips at the thought of a new cohort of pigeons for them to pluck?
The law should not cater to criminals. Idk what crime you're thinking of but reducing a large number of young adults to the freedom levels of slaves as a minority report crime prevention thing is a moral non-starter, and that's brushing aside the empirical argument for its need. I don't buy the gullibility thing but even if it were true, how about we put freedom, justice, and dignity first, before catering to criminals. This means free the decent people and just start punishing street thugs severely when they misbehave.
> Laws about the debts of minors and their ability to enter into contracts came about because of such deception of the young.
No they came about as an explicit economic enslavement of the young to their parents. It was thought that at the beginning of youth young adults should be property to their parents to reimburse them for the cost of raising them as children. Therefore they were stripped of their rights from 14 to 21, even though the law did recognize that around 14 they had attained full mental capacity, and could do a number of things that were not contradictory to their parents, like bequeath personal property (but not real property) in a will, Witness deeds and contracts, and testify in court, and serve in militias. If their parents were not around to chose for them they could chose are guardian or master to pay their debt to.
> It may well be that you hold the attitude "It is not our responsibility to protect fools from their folly; if 15 year old George gets conned out of his money by a fake landlord or someone with a Ponzi scheme, too bad for George, let him learn by the experience and if he has to end up homeless on the streets, well, them's the breaks".
Or flog the fraudster and make him pay back double what he stole?
>(7) Your great blow for the freedom of oppressed youth is that 15 year olds should besent off to die in Ukraine
If you don't consciously understand that this is a strawman idk where to say.
>(8) And to conclude, you now go running to Teacher in order to get the mean kids punished. You want the power to block and censor.
No I just want to stop getting flamed by angry Overton window fans who would rather this be their personal facebook than a place to share important, controversial ideas.
>(9) Oh yes, and you do not impress me when you try to use an expansive vocabulary, get the terms wrong, and then once again come back with "I'm right and you're wrong".
If you want me to take you seriously, drop stuff like this.
With all respect, folks: just stop feeding the (excruciatingly obvious) troll. This kid literally has Pedobear as his avatar, you have no obligation to take them seriously. @Scott, a ban is warranted, and if you can, ban the IP address because there is a clear history of sockpuppetry on other platforms with this user.
I am curious to hear what other people think of JB's constant screeding. Is it genuine belief, couched in the trappings of trolling just for shock value? Is it genuine belief, but JB is profoundly autistic? Is it just a straight-up troll (this one, given how long the con has gone on for, seems unlikely - wouldn't you tire of the game at *some* point?)? Is it someone who, for personal reasons, harbors immense hatred for rat-adj spaces and is trying to encourage witch-infiltration, or just show "look what kind of discussion happens in these disgusting places"?
is it just proliferation of attention economy?
As in, semi-ironic, semi-genuine belief held solely for the purpose of clicks?
as in, "modern schooling needs improvement" is a pretty uncontroversial thesis, a crowded space, and contains lots of people with a high level of expertise. It would be tough to gain traction and cash in with a position like that.
"School"="Slavery" seems more like a topic you could roll the dice on. Focus on marketing toward a 13-17yo subscriber base. Try to get 'internet famous', as everyone seems to want to do.
In my experience, the truly great stuff on the internet are things that have gone like 4-8years as a passion project, and then suddenly break out.
I'd put my personal money on 2 (or as I call it, "unconscious/accidental trolling"): at a certain point someone's social skills are so bad there's no difference between being socially-awkward and un-self-aware and just being a troll. This is probably someone who had 4chan teach them their foundational social mores instead of their parents or anyone else. I would, however, put a side-bet on actual trolling- there've been trolls who commit to the bit for YEARS without stopping. There's probably something psychiatric going on there anyways, but it happens.
I'm not here to socialize, so I'm basically not using "social skills", re: catering to your assumptions and current world view. I just optimize for truth, and I think 17 year olds are essentially experience slavery. This is a perfectly rational thing to say and I'm willing to defend it; it's censorship to tell me that I can't say that because it might trigger some people. It's your responsibility to engage rationally with my proposition or get out. I say 17 year olds are essentially enslaved and provide evidence & reasoning as to why, and so far you & the other trollers just -- idk, shut down? Like, this comment here is pure bulverism. It's pretty obviously the sort of thing that a cultivator of a space for serious discussion should want to avoid.
1. Yes, you've made it very clear you're here to pontificate, not communicate. This is a space for communication, not your soapbox. Your own substack is your soapbox. I should not have to explain this to you.
2. I'm not saying "you can't say that", I'm saying your claim is stupid and wrong. Others are saying your BEHAVIOR (notice that this is different from your viewpoint) is so anti-social that it justifies a ban.
3. A cultivator of any space would want to weed out someone with a history of not respecting even the most basic rules of the space he's in- like, say, a rationalist forum you spammed with your ideas, constantly insulted other users in, and then, upon being banned, started flooding with sockpuppets so heavily that some members of the community petitioned to put a temporary moratorium on new members because how how tiresome dealing with your socks were.
Bluntly: this isn't 4chan with a thesaurus, and neither is it a place where people are expected to enter into a suicide pact and tolerate any ridiculous idea floated out provided a poster's invoked the right shibboleths. Many people here kinder and more generous than I have given you very good advice on how to avoid hostility from me and your other detractors- I'd advise taking it.
Please refer back to line one of my original comment ;)
>1. Yes, you've made it very clear you're here to pontificate, not communicate. This is a space for communication, not your soapbox. Your own substack is your soapbox. I should not have to explain this to you.
I'm here to communicate truth, not to make small talk, make you comfortable, etc. The question is: is this Essex's facebook where he gets to always be comfortable, bully out anyone he dislikes, and then go back to small talk and safe, in the overton banter, or is this a place to communicate truth? Mod's choice at this point I suppose.
>. I'm not saying "you can't say that", I'm saying your claim is stupid and wrong. Others are saying your BEHAVIOR (notice that this is different from your viewpoint) is so anti-social that it justifies a ban.
My behavior is that I'm optimizing for truth. This is prosocial when the community goal is to optimize for truth. Your behavior is antisocial with respect to such a community. If on the other hand this is a place for you to be comfortable, I am indeed anti-social, and you a pro-social warrior for comfort, small talk, and safe banter, which per such a space, should obviously be free of those who would threaten it with ideas like "17 year olds have fully developed brains and are treated like slaves, and this is because the Cathedral wants to capture their minds for their own material benefit. Here is a whole book on this." Yeah, that's uncomfortable for a lot of people -- teachers, professors, strict parents, people who faced abuse at that age and rationalized it away, etc. And it's definitely not small talk or safe.
>Many people here kinder and more generous than I have given you very good advice on how to avoid hostility from me and your other detractors- I'd advise taking it.
I'm sorry, what advice was that except self-censor?
Right, this is the last response you get: you clearly think that your little spiel about ageism is the One True Opinion and all others should weep before its glory. You are so confident in this that the closest thing to debate you engage in is "read my book and these studies and then you'll understand". When I asked you to cite a few of these studies so I could review them, you completely ignored me. This isn't communication, even "communicating truth", because communication is a two-way street and not a single external idea penetrates the leaden fortress surrounding your brain. You show zero interest in defending your points, persuading other people to listen to you, or even elaborating on your theory beyond couching it in increasingly-comedic and inflammatory comparisons to the point where I'm expecting the comparison to Jews in the Holocaust to be rolled out next week. You just say your piece and, when you receive even the slightest amount of pushback, you just say it again but louder, pounding on the metaphorical table while accusing anyone who doesn't immediately and uncritically kowtow to your theory (i.e. everyone) of engaging in bad-faith activity. When someone raises a question you find uncomfortable or brings up a point you can't simply sweep away by spouting shibboleths, you just stop responding to them entirely. That's what you did when I asked about your AoC views, that's what you did when I asked to see some of these "hundreds of studies" you kept citing, and that's what you've done now that I've invited you to come down and see direct evidence that comparisons between the current treatment of teenagers and chattel slavery in the US is wildly off-base. You seem to think that you can cozen and browbeat people into agreement, and more damningly that nobody else in the room has anything to say worth listening to. If you do this, you will continue to not persuade anyone, because people can tell when you are talking and when you are lecturing, and the only time people will accept a lecture is from their spouse, their parents, or if they're in a college course.
I'm done enabling your trolling.
There were 3 or 4 bad times in my life where I was (one of) really confident in something, angry other people couldn't get it, felt like they were just being difficult, and (worst of all) gathering some kind of endorphin rush from engaging in certain conversations that were just fucking stupid.
Put all of those together at the same time, and you'd have an unconscious troll exactly like this one, where it's really bordering on some kind of mental illness.
It wasn't pedobear, it was spurdo sparde, nonetheless I changed it because I wasn't thinking about that. I just chose a random image from my 4chan folder.
As for you demanding that I be banned, this is what I'm talking about. I'm an effort poster with a scholarly book that I've worked on for years, a serious, highly important message about a fundamental flaw in present society, and you're just some guy who seems to be having a not-unemotional reaction to these serious theses, leading to you to desire me to be forcefully shut up. It's not unexpected that, when critiquing society, there will be a litany of people with vested interests in the status quo behaving in non-rational, censorious manner towards said critical ideas, which may or may not threaten their interests, their sentimental narratives, the interests of their loved ones, or their status, etc.
With regards to your behavior (flaming and trolling my threads), there are 2 alternatives. The first is to build a space meant for the exchange of serious, effortful ideas, in a rational manner, where people like me are encouraged to come and share literal years worth of original, unorthodox thought & scholarship, without getting spammed, trolled, flamed, and banned under false pretenses to satisfy the flamers. The second is to build a space where said flamers get their assumptions permanently catered to; effort, originality, truth, and scholarship take a backseat to orthodoxy and comfort.
I obviously think the first is preferable and that it would be fair to say you think the second is preferable. The 1st requires you to stop flaming by choice or ban, and the 2nd requires me to stop sharing my ideas by choice or ban.
I have a puzzle. Covid infection rates per million at present are about 92 in the U.S., 1,300 in the U.K., 2300 in Germany. Covid death rates per million are 3.2 in the U.S., 1.6 in the U.K., 2.3 in Germany. So infection rates are more than ten times lower in the U.S., death rates somewhat higher. What is going on?
The obvious explanations are that the U.S. is badly undercounting infections or overcounting deaths or that the U.K. and Germany (and various other countries) are badly overcounting infections or undercounting deaths, but it is hard to see how that could explain a more than ten-fold difference. It is even harder to explain why mortality rates in the U.S. would be more than ten times as high. Vaccination rates are a little lower in the U.S., but not hugely, and the age distribution in the U.S. has more young people and fewer old, which should reduce mortality rates.
Anyone have an answer? Are there webbed analyses of the question?
All figures from the same source: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
My first thought might be that for the case count numbers, you might have accidentally picked up different types of case counts (e.g. daily new cases in the US vs total active cases in other countries). But I double-checked and the NYT tracker (as reported through Google) claims new case counts that look like roughly the numbers you cited.
Second thought is that this could be partially an artifact time lag between new case count trends and death rate trends (roughly 3-4 weeks in US data, based on eyeballing peaks and inflection points for the Winter 2020-2021, Delta, and Epsilon surges). US case rates are trending substantially downwards over this period: current 7-day moving average of new US cases is about 40% of three weeks ago and about 30% of a month ago. UK new case are going the other way: 7-day moving average is 205% of 3 weeks ago and 290% of a month ago. Germany is also trending upwards, although less sharply than the US: 140% of 3 weeks ago and 114% of a month ago.
This time lag effect would explain a 5x-9x apparent difference in crude CFR between the US and UK, or a ~4x difference between the US and Germany. The actual apparent difference you're seeing in crude CFR is more like 30x, which still leaves a 4x-8x difference left unexplained.
I think testing rates might be a big piece of the rest of the puzzle. It looks like the US is currently doing about 260 new tests per 100k population, while Germany is doing 2284 tests per 100k population, about a 8.8x difference (very close to the unexplained residual difference in crude CFR after accounting for time lag). I haven't looked up UK testing rates yet. Data sources:
US: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states
Germany: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/covid-19-testing
Lower vaccination in US (so more deaths) and more infection followed by natural immunity that is better than the vaccine... so lower infection rates in the US. But I'm making this up and don't know. You could ask Zvi. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/
Assuming those numbers are accurate, (I haven't checked them), I think it's pretty certain that the US is badly undercounting cases.
What you have there is more than one case of covid in 30 being fatal, which is obviously absurd. The UK and German numbers are closer to one case in 1000, which is more in line with what we know about COVID in a well-vaccinated population with decent medical care. So the error is in the US numbers, not the UK or Germany ones (although the UK is probably also undercounting cases at the moment, I believe).
Deaths are easy to count; cases are hard to count; not overcounting is easy; not undercounting is hard. Ergo, the US death numbers are probably either accurate or a moderate undercount, while the US case numbers are a ludicrous undercount.
Hmm I think it's fine if there is lag between case counts and deaths, that is sorta expected as a peak goes by. (You have to look at case counts X-weeks ago to correlate with deaths.)
I agree with Eric that the time lag and testing rates are important factors.
In addition, it seems to be the case that the fraction of cases that are in vaccinated people goes up during big COVID waves and down during COVID troughs. Since Germany and UK are in the middle of a COVID wave, you'd expect a larger fraction of their cases to be in vaccinated people, and therefore have a lower case fatality rate.
There seems to be a simple solution to the Ukraine invasion, but I haven't been seeing it much discussed.
The EU and USA should offer money, asylum, and a path to citizenship to any Russian soldiers and their families. Many (most?) Russian soldiers don’t want to be fighting, but they don’t have a way out. Rather than spending billions on war, the West could simply drain Putin’s army, while bolstering its workforce with young educated citizens.
There are 150k Russian soldiers deployed in Ukraine, so we are only talking about 500k “political refugees”, which we can easily absorb. This is tiny compared to the current number of Ukrainian refugees that the EU is already having to deal with, and will mostly be young men who will spend the rest of their lives contributing to western economies.
While we’re at it, why not offer asylum to Russians in general? Putin has destroyed the futures of all Russians, and the West is punishing them even more with economic sanctions. Rather than using sanctions as weapons to hurt civilians, we could be using them to brain-drain Russia.
It’s possible that Russia would respond by forbidding emigration, like the USSR, but that would simply return us to the status quo, while sending a really strong message to Russian citizens. Ukraine has already announced cash and asylum to surrendering soldiers, but asylum in the worn-ravaged Ukraine is not carrot enough for most soldiers.
Would love to hear thoughts on how this could go wrong, and ideas on how to signal-boost this approach. I’ve seen a few articles, but they don’t seem to be getting a lot of attention in the zeitgeist.
Kamil Galeev has been talking about this. (on twitter, I'm not sure which thread.)
It's a nice idea, but unlikely to make a difference. Spending your life as a refugee *really sucks*. You are a stranger in a strange land where you don't even speak the language, the people around you see you as a barbarian only fit for mopping floors, you'll be shot as a traitor if you ever return home and your family back home will suffer dearly if they're caught talking to you, and you can maybe dream that if you somehow find a wife as a barbarian outlander then maybe your children will assimilate into their new country, but you'll probably never pull it off(*). Nobody's going to do that just because you promise them a new car, an iPhone, and a year's rent on a nice apartment. For a million dollars or euros, *maybe*, but at that point your 500k refugees is going to coat half a *trillion* dollars, plus overhead, plus graft and corruption.
Nobody's going to believe you when you tell them that they will be respected and admired for their courage and offered nice middle-class jobs. Multilingual Russian *doctors* in the west wind up mopping floors and driving taxis because we won't accept their credentials; here you're talking about young soldiers who only speak Russian and only know shooting, digging, and mopping. Plus, they're Russian and everybody knows the West hates Putin's Russia, and the bit about how we're all so totally enlightened that we'd never confuse the two or judge the individual by his ethnicity, pull the other one.
Also, they're liable to be shot in the back if they take a step towards accepting your offer, or even dwell more than a few seconds on the social media post where you make it.
Also also, how do you plan to get their families out? Once Junior goes AWOL, mom and dad and sis aren't getting passports ever again. Plus, you're being stingy by only allowing 2.3 family members per soldier. OK, *maybe* that stretches to mom and dad and sis, but now mom can't ever talk to *her* parents or siblings ever again? And she's going to go full refugee and pay that cost just to make her traitor son feel better? Extended families are a thing in Russia.
Really, for most people, muddling through and hoping they'll make it through the war without any crippling injuries will seem like the safer bet. And I'm not aware of any nation anywhere that ever successfully defended itself by bribing individual enemy soldiers to defect (as opposed to bribing the commanders of mercenary armies). That's not how people work.
Best that can be said, is that for the small minority of Russian soldiers who *are* willing to defect, we should probably make it as easy for them as possible. But don't count on it being enough to change the balance of power.
* Possible exception if your new country is the US or Canada, and/or has a substantial Russian immigrant community.
Have you read any of Kamil Galeev, (sorry if I sound like a broken record.) But he changed my perspective on the war, and I have no idea what it's like for a Russian soldier. (Well if his picture is near correct... )
Yes; it doesn't change anything. It sucks to be a Dagestani recruit in the Russian army. It also sucks to be a Dagestani refugee in Germany or wherever, once the initial defection-bonus money runs out. But the Dagestani recruit who sucks it up and completes his term, *probably* goes home alive to his family next year. Defecting and becoming a refugee, is forever.
And I didn't see anything in Galeev about how he proposed to extract the families of the hypothetically defecting soldiers.
Thanks for your perspective. As an immigrant from Russia, now very happy in the US, my experience differs.
Still, we can both agree that there is (at least) a small minority of soldiers that would be happy to defect for US/EU citizenship. Does this seem like a cost effective way to remove them from the war?
I have been trying to put up an announcement of the South Bay meetup this Sunday, but either I am doing something wrong or the LessWrong meetup site is broken. I keep getting:
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I liked this Bari Weiss piece on Ukraine, US, world. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/things-worth-fighting-for?s=r
(I'm mostly happy with Biden, so disagree with that part.)
I do keep making this weird analogy between Ukraine and the Canadian convoy.
U underdog against Russia, C underdog against Canada.
U defender, C aggressor.
U supported by media, C unsupported by media
U Financial weight of west in support, C crushed by Canada (some financial, but also raw government power.)
These stories are similar to me in that there's an underdog fighting against a bigger oppressor, (and I've felt myself in full support of the underdog in both cases.) there are then different paths... (I hope Ukraine is not crushed.) And the financial weight of the west is terrifying...
What prefix (if any) can be used to explicitly denote the opposite of 'meta-' as in e.g. meta-analysis, if we're talking about the 1st order, ground level, plain-old analysis? For example if you wanted to say: "John Doe focused their investigation on the meta-analysis without paying due attention to the ___-analysis."
Not a prefix exactly, but "object-level".
Is anyone at EAGx in Oxford this weekend? If so I would love to meet up, I don’t know anyone there nor any rationalists and/or ACX readers in real life. If so let me know or book a meeting, my name is Gruffydd Gozali on swapcard. Or just reply here.
This would be in Austria, so easier with work permits: https://jobs.redbull.com/de-de/elsbethen-data-excellence-specialist-140946-057130?lang=en