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Does anyone know of a study looking at what are the best predictors of whether a public policy will get chosen and implemented ? My guts tell me it's public opinion aka how popular the policy is, but I wad wondering if someone looked at that quantitatively.
How do people find interesting books? I read Scott's review of "Sadly, Porn" and during a question in the back of my mind was how I might find more weird and interesting books like that in the mass of literature being produced.
- Recommendation in Christian Science Monitor for *Index, A History of the* by Duncan, which made me wonder how someone could possibly write an entire book about the history of the index and get a glowing recommendation
- Reddit thread asking for books about the meta topics of language learning led me to *Becoming Fluent* by Roberts and Kreuz. I don't remember what made it stand out as something to actually read compared to the rest of the thread.
- A question I posted in a semi-recent hidden OT asking for what people read recently that they found interesting led me to *For All The Tea in China* by Rose (among several others that I haven't read yet). This was probably the most fruitful source because I ended up adding 10+ books to my list across a range of subjects.
Based on those, I'd recommend either following some book recommendation stream or just asking people. You're likely to get subject-specific answers if you ask in a subject-specific place like a subreddit, but asking here will probably get you varied responses.
Has anyone written a really high quality take down of antinatalism? I find it kind of "obviously" wrong and "edgy" but it would be easier to reject fully if I see a well articulated "case against antinatalism" article, if anyone has seen one. Thanks!
If you let people define their own preferences, I can choose a value system where anything bad is "infinitely bad" and anything good is "meh". (I am only making statements about *my* life and values -- hypothetically -- not anyone's else.) Under such system, inevitably, my life is infinitely bad. -- To contradict this, you would have to say something like: "nope, good things that happen to you are objectively good, and even if you deny enjoying them, an MRI scan clearly shows that you do, therefore I insist that your life is good". This seems like a dangerous direction, if you think about implications for e.g. rape or involuntarily giving drugs to people.
I did not consent to be born, and my parents had an option not to have me. This is a fact.
Now it depends on what rules of moral reasoning you consider okay. (And your opponent will attack you at this point.) For example, if you think that the preferences of many outweigh the preferences of a few, then you just need to prove that most people enjoy having been born, which could technically be achieved by a questionnaire. This way of thinking leads to some collectivist conclusions which you might not like. Also, the results of the questionnaire are not guaranteed; consider the popularity of Buddhism, which kinda says "the worst thing that could happen to you after you die is to be born again; you should spend your life working hard to prevent this".
Or you could be a deontologist and say something like "well, your preferences do not matter, the ethically important thing is doing what God wants, and he commanded humanity (that includes your parents) to multiply, therefore shut up; your ungratefulness only brings you closer to Hell."
Or you could do the usual thing and compartmentalize, i.e. say "well, clearly this is a special case and the usual rules do not apply here". If many people agree with you, it becomes a respected philosophical position.
(For the record, my own approach here is a combination of the collectivist and compartmentalizing solution -- not being able to ask people for consent before they are born only leaves us with two options: violating the preferences of the few, or violating the preferences of the many, and the former seems like a lesser evil.)
BEG: I recently saw a link and comment to a news story or article on AI and the Chinese Social Credit system with the comment on the link stating surprise at Chinas desire to have/not have AI manage the social credit system. Now I cannot find that post, I thought it was ACX, but also looked at ZVI and Marginal Revolution. Does anyone know or recognize this post and where I can find it? Thank you
I was watching Robert Miles last video on the "rational animation" yt channel. At a certain point he mention that we should not be concerned about well-aligned AGI stealing our jobs because it will accelerate progress, eliminate scarcity, extend life etc..
Leaving aside the fact that maybe scarcity of intellectual labour is not the bottleneck in the most sci-fi of those things, i still don't see why i shouldn't be scared of losing my job to a well-aligned AI. I have no problem believing that if you are in the top 1% IQ it is going to be great for you, but what about midwits like myself? As it stands, the "utopian" future sound really like we are going to be completely useless to economy and society and kept at bay by a monthly check (and a vr set on our head).
Yes, material conditions would be improving a lot in this scenario, but as rampant mental ilnesses in people of my age in first world countries are showing, material conditions are necessary but not sufficient. What good it is to have radical abundance and live meaningless boring lifes where all days look like sunday afternoon?
And even if there will be no superintelligent AI (indeed, i am pretty skeptical), the jobs that could be automated by evolutions of today AIs like GPT and DALLE are not menial jobs that make our life worse. Are precisely those creative jobs like artists, writer, that make life meaningful. I do not want to live in a world where all art is produced by a machine.
(And as a phd student, neither i want AI in science)
History argues powerfully against the tech-caused mass unemployment thesis. Imagine if you had told farmer in 1900, when 36% of Americans were employed in agriculture, that only 2% of of the population would be employed in farming in 100 years. What on earth would their children and grandchildren be doing? Technology eliminated over 90% if farming jobs. Yet Americans are far wealthier and almost everyone who wants a job has one. Technology tends to eliminate the most boring and back-breaking jobs. The Luddites were smashing looms in the early 1800s. Here are more examples of historical fear of technology, including the technology of writing: https://lenwilson.us/11-examples-of-fear-and-suspicion-of-new-technology/. Your ability to do science will likely be vastly enhanced by AI rather than made redundant. I can't tell you exactly how, but that's the point. We literally can't imagine what technology will bring any better than the smartest futurists as recently as 1980 imagined pocket computers, the world-wide web, drones, or doing your shopping from your recliner. Fear of technology was rampant in the 19th century, just as the living standards started rocketing. The industrial revolution was technology based. Would you rather live then or now?
The difference is that the technologies of the past were never able to replace humans *completely*. There always remained tasks that an average human could do better than a machine. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
If one day we get machines that are *general* intelligences, and can do everything better than an average human, and can be mass produced... that would be a different case. It will no longer be "the machines will do X, so the humans who previously did X are now available to do more Y and Z", but it will become "the machines will do X, Y, Z, and the humans will be at mercy of whoever owns the machines (either a human elite, or another machine)".
Well, I wouldn't want to live in the 19th century, but I would much rather live in the '80s-'90s, before the invention of the web or of pocket computers. I found that the more time I spend at the smartphone, the worse my mental state. Other people's mileage may vary, of course. But yes, technology also have negative effects.
Fact is, we are not in the 19th century, life in the first world (even in my country italy) is pretty nice today. Perennial technological and economical stagnation doesn’t really sound that bad of a deal.
And yes, in the most realistic scenario superintelligent AGI is not coming and realistic AI is probably not going to push phds out of their jobs (even if I really dislike the idea of having to use a black box)
However I maintain that the (implausible) singularity scenario (the one assumed in the mentioned video) is not going to be an utopia.
Edit: and indeed, since you mention, I have (for now) chosen to not have childrens because I don't want to raise kids in a world in which internet exists.
I think one reason pessimism dominates everywhere and always is that happiness is, for many reasons, elusive. Whatever our condition, we quickly find reasons to be unhappy or at least dissatisfied. Our reflex is to ascribe it to external conditions, but I think it has more to do with the inescapable "human condition". We're on a hedonic treadmill, which is another way of saying things are better--and improving--by any objective measure but we find reasons things could be better still. In particular there's never a shortage of problems in our personal lives. Regarding the internet, Socrates believed that writing would weaken our minds--which just illustrates that it's easy to find reasons why things are bad and getting worse. P.S.: Maybe writing did worsen our lives.
Can someone recommend a "popular art history" book? I read a fair bit of "popular science," and am looking for something similar but applied to (not-exceptionally-modern) art. Some examples of what I'd be interested in reading:
- where [time period / geographic location / school] sourced its materials, and how this is reflected in the visual qualities. E.g. the ways in which painting in tempera is different from painting in oil, or the way in which glass availability influences Byzantine mosaics.
- how [time period / geographic location / school] thought about religion, and how this is reflected in the art. I know some very broad things like "reformation => iconoclasm => fewer Virgin Mary statues" but would like some fine details like "canonical iconography in Eastern Orthodox representations of Virgin Mary".
- how backgrounds evolve. Flemish paintings of Biblical scenes are invariably set in, well, Flanders, which makes sense given that the goal is to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, but presumably traditions about how exactly you represent Palestine or Egypt evolved over time?
The above is pretty Western-European-Christian-painting-centric, largely because that's the tradition I know most about, but I'll take very tangentially related recommendations, too -- although e.g. the evolution of Quranic calligraphy might be tricky given how I don't read Arabic.
I would also like to hear if there are any good ones.
Despite majoring in art education and participating in multiple art education professional groups, I can't think of any examples of this -- everything just seems to be communicated peicmeal through discussion, lecture with slides, workshops, museums, or videos. I started reading "The Judgement of Paris," but didn't get very far in. More the fault of reading while motion sick than with the book itself, though.
The State of Oregon passed Measure 110 almost two years ago, decriminalizing many, if not all street drugs. Is it possible to find an unbiased analysis of it's effects, if any?
The USA should limit presidents to single term only. Clearly the nation can't trust itself to not support wannabe dictators' bids for power. Single term executive branch would not prevent an overall single party rule from happening but that is still strictly better outcome than the governance captured by a single individual where merit becomes equal to the personal loyalty. Any cons?
Each President would probably treat his or her first term like second terms are treated now, and would be more willing to go for broke politically. Could be good or bad, depending on whether you support the policies they really really really want to pursue.
The USA already have a problem of extremely short electoral terms where the president's hands are tied after the midterm elections. A one term limit for president should at least come with a longer term or some change to the mid-term elections.
They would still get first 2 years of potentially workable Congress as they do now. I think single term is an easy patch we could implement now that leaves other things relatively intact.
I assume you are not one of those people who like to complain that "the country is ungovernable" or that "we are unable to achieve our goals like we used to do" ?
We have a discord server for Dutch rationalists and rationalists in NL. Feel free to come join us! We're pretty active! Meetups and other activities are also organized there.
Could depression be a result of high self-confidence? (speculative)
After reading a couple of books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I have started questioning my interpretation of past events that have caused me trauma. This often causes me relief, as I am forced to interpret events in a new light. Prior to this, I used to have a very high confidence that my interpretations of past events were the "correct ones", and that alternate interpretations weren't possible. Hence, I would be stuck in a hell-hole of my own making.
This high confidence in beliefs also shows in other aspects of my life. I can be bad at solving puzzles because I often think that an arbitrary choice that I have made at some stage is the "correct one". My girlfriend, on the other hand, who is generally unsure about her choices, does not have any semblance of depression. I realize that this is an n=1 hypothesis, but every day I find more evidence for this proposition.
Is the general principle behind this idea basically "I can be right about everything but it ultimately doesn't really benefit me or change things much. This sucks."?
I think a better term for what you're noticing might be rigidity -- difficulty with trying on novel points of view. Self-confidence seems like to broad a term for what you're identifying.
I think you’re on to something, but I wouldn’t label it self-confidence. I hypothesize that what you’re describing falls into what cognitive behavioral therapy would call “cognitive distortions.”
Self-confidence negatively correlated with depression, at least as far as surveys are concerned. Maybe look to something like vulnerable narcissism though; thinking too much of yourself can cause pain.
Have been on a Julian Jaynes kick, and he claims we only recently became conscious (a few thousand years ago). As part of that claim he says that we did not have the ability to ruminate until recently. Fear can now become anxiety. This agrees with a description of depression I like from the Purple Mountains, "storyline fever". Relates to your idea that being convinced of one story creates pain. And telling stories to ourselves may be a new skill (that we are too good at).
For some values of "forever" this would be possible, simply because the Russians have made it clear that their objectives are not primarily territorial. After the serious fighting is over, there will still be a "Ukraine", at perhaps two thirds of its current size, with a government of sorts and a limited military capability. It could commit itself politically to recovering the Donbas, refuse to sign a peace treaty and so forth, and in that sense the war would not be "over."
But it would be over in every other sense. I think that a new generation of pundits has come to think of Afghanistan as typical of what wars are like, and that war could indeed have gone on forever (it seemed to, to those of us who remember the beginning). But the war in Ukraine is not a low-intensity counter-insurgency, it's a modern high-intensity attrition war, and such a war is lost by the side whose military capability is destroyed the fastest. The Russians have opted to fight the war largely with missiles, artillery and airpower/drones, and have been targeting, according to their press statements, not just formed units, but more importantly HQs, repair depots, ammunition depots and training facilities. In other words, they are targeting the long-term capability of the Ukrainians to regenerate a serious military force. Most of the ground troops engaged have been locals from the Lugansk and Donetsk militias, and the Russians have kept their more modern, mobile forces in reserve for whatever the next phase is going to be. Western arms deliveries will slow this down slightly, but even western governments admit that its all they can do. the HIMARS system, for example, available in small numbers with limited ammunition, only makes up very partially for the similar Soviet and Russian-designed systems the UA had at the beginning of the war and which have mostly been destroyed.
I suspect that what will be decisive is the attitude of the West. If you read western statements carefully, they are much more downbeat than they were a couple of months ago, and no major western government now seriously believes in "victory" in the sense they described it earlier. Recent arms deliveries for example have been justified as "improving Ukraine's bargaining position." And the West is getting towards the end of what it is willing and able to send. I'm sure there are those, not least in Washington, who dream of embroiling the Russians in some kind of guerrilla war on the frontiers of the Russian-speaking areas, but how much continued appetite western governments have for this conflict isn't clear. So it really does depend on what you mean by "war" and "forever."
I suspect you posted this as a standalone post by mistake and instead you wanted to answer in the thread here? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-234/comment/7955964. In any case, I disagree already with your first sentence about Russian objectives; Putin made them not clear at all. And imho that was a smart move from him.
---the HIMARS system, for example, available in small numbers with limited ammunition, only makes up very partially for the similar Soviet and Russian-designed systems the UA had at the beginning of the war and which have mostly been destroyed.
I think you read Russian propaganda a bit too uncritically.
Soviet Smerch and Uragan are very different from HIMARS, and mostly use unguided rockets. It is an area weapon, very inaccurate.
---Most of the ground troops engaged have been locals from the Lugansk and Donetsk militias, and the Russians have kept their more modern, mobile forces in reserve for whatever the next phase is going to be
This is simply not true. And LNR/DNR where only used in Donbas offensive, not in the South, not in the North, and not in Kharkiv area.
So, the Lugansk and Donetsk militias did the fighting, they've made slow gains. The places the "more modern, mobile forces" were actually committed to battle, the Russians got themselves chased back to the border on two fronts out of three, burned through over a thousand tanks in the process, and seem hard-pressed to hold their gains even in the south.
I do not think this adds up to the story of Russian invincibility and inevitability that you think it does.
On the other hand, in the very beginning, many evacuated their embassies outside of Ukraine, even from Lviv, i.e. they expected Ukraine to lose quickly...
Here's a topic I'd love to explore in more depth - the impacts of pollutants on low birth rates. To be clear, I think scientists in the area have a VERY good grasp on this topic, but based on what I see in lay conversation, I don't think this knowledge has penetrated into society as a whole.
I see a lot of conversations about low birth rates which focus on economic and social factors as well as on access to birth control, which I'm not trying to contradict at all, but it seems odd that such conversations very rarely touch on the direct reductions in biological fertility for both men and women caused by environmental pollutants.
These effects are not small - for *individual* types of pollutants such as fertilizers we see results like:
"women who ate more than two servings of high-pesticide fruits or vegetables each day, compared with women who ate an average of one each day, were 18% less likely to become pregnant and 26% less likely to have a live birth than women with the lowest exposure."
"Women with the highest levels of PCBs have a serious 50% decrease in their ability to get pregnant5 and if become pregnant are much more likely to miscarry.6 In women farmers in Ontario, fertility decreased in proportion to pesticide use.7,8 The worst pesticides and herbicides appear to be dicamba (49% decrease in fertility), glyphosate (39%), 2,4-D (29%), organophosphates (25%), and thiocarbamates (24%). When infertile couples seek IVF, those with the highest levels of PCBs were much more unlikely to achieve pregnancy."
I find these figures somewhat alarming (especially having lived for years next to fields treated with glyphosate and 2,4-D!) but they don't seem to be the prevailing non-scientist opinion as to why birth rates are low. Thoughts?
The demographic transition long predates modern chemical pollutants, with similar patterns playing out in a variety of countries with different agricultural practices
I could see those being a factor on the margins, but the vast majority of low fertility is cause by people actively not wanting kids until they're 30+, if at all; Maybe absent pollutants it'd be easier for 35-year-old women to have kids, and that would help make more 2-children families, but the lack of 4+ children families is almost entirely a cultural shift
I haven't read the study at all, but I don't think this (pollutant exposure) is a significant cause of low birth rates overall. My anecdata is from growing up in a community of farmers, and knowing lots of people in the farm-connected world still.
I know of a tiny number of couples in that world who don't have children. It seems that "regularly having sex and not using contraception" starting in your 20's has an overwhelming chance of larger-than-typical families -- even in a world with rather high pollutant exposure.
MidJourney is an AI for making images from a text prompt that gets tiny fractions of the publicity that Dall-E does, but is available via a beta to the public right now, and in my testing is pretty good, better at some things than Dall-E.
I find the discord-based UI maddening, but the model is still worthwhile. I am in no way affiliated with the project.
Yeah I gave it a shot but bounced when it required I sign up for Discord. I was hoping you meant the UI was based on discord (which would be bizarre and unforgivable) rather than requiring discord.
The site isn't automatically updating the page with new comments as quickly as it used to. I have no idea whether it's a problem at my end or your end.
Sideways griping at the Powers That Be: it really is quite annoying that Substack sends notification emails for *both* replies and Likes, and those are bundled under the same account control setting. I care very much about the former and not at all about the latter. In fact it's quite alarming to wake up to several dozen unread emails on those rare occasions I write something likeable on a Substack that didn't default-disable that system. Sure makes maintaining Inbox Zero* a lot more annoying! This alone makes me appreciate Scott removing the functionality, and I hope that stays the policy indefinitely.
* (Wise People have told me not to pursue Inbox Zero. It's Sisyphean, they said. Unfortunately I'm just Neurotic enough that Plausibly-Achievable Perfections are not really things I can pass up without feeling really bad about it. Some rocks you just gotta roll, no matter what.)
To achieve the noble ideal of Inbox Zero, these days you have to employ machines to fight against the machines that send you e-mails. Like, set up a rule that automatically deletes all "like" notifications (based on sender, content, whatever), or at least puts them into a separate folder and marks them as read.
It's actually something I usually maintain without issue, having finally reached high enough WIS to realize the Trivial Inconvenience cost of giving out my email for...anything that does not strictly require it. ("No, actually, I do not want to Create A Free Account For Dubious Benefits, I am just fine with Guest Checkout and will never purchase anything here ever again...") And those that do, sometimes I just nope out and refuse that service entirely instead, on principle. Most automated notifications can really just be sent as texts, wish that were a more widely available option...I know companies wanna leave a paper trail, but when 90% of the relevant info is in the header itself, that's inefficient use of format. Skim-delete.
Helps to not have a white collar job, too, there's no "work email" for me to *also* check on top of Default Address. I used to try the maintain-multiple-addresses-for-different-things thing, but eventually had to cut a bunch of those loose cause they'd get used so rarely + somehow get exponentially more spam than my Actual Address. Somewhere out there on a server, there's my old Yahoo! email account from childhood, with probably like six digits worth of unread emails on it...*shudder*
Substacks make up something like 60% of all my "subscriptions" now though, so those are by far the biggest bulk. I'll probably filter all "likes" into a for-posterity Likes folder, just for ghits and shiggles. (h/t Laurence)
Looking at my inbox, I see that notification e-mails for likes come from a different substack e-mail address (reaction@mg1.substack.com) than those for replies (forum@mg1.substack.com). You can just block that e-mail address.
Cause I like being able to read replies through my email when on the go, mostly. If it's something I really wanna engage back with ASAP, then I'll dedicate a sub-thread or two in my brain's processing to compose a potential reply until I can get back to a Real Computer. This is one of the very few things I'll use my phone for in public besides listen to music. (The Substack mobile experience/app is awful + if it wasn't that sure seems like a huge Molochian temptation I'd rather avoid.) But yes, tradeoffs abound, if it annoys me enough eventually I might go that route.
For anyone who missed them buried at extremities of the last two Open Threads, and who'd like to be able to connect with fellow ACX regulars beyond these pages, my partners and I have released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
Oh most certainly Nancy; when the full app launches, every user will have to be ID verified, and if a user were to have a bad experience with another, then they would be able to block them as they would on any other platform.
Our hope is that the ID-verified/real-names-and-faces aspect will minimise the kind of behaviour that would lead one user to want to block another.
From what I've heard, a real ID requirement will do much less to block bad behavior than you hope, and will also drive away people you want. Again second hand, but I gather there is no substitute for competent human moderation (you're up against humans, after all).
The best conversational places I know of online are moderated by humans.
Maybe you could have an anonymous people/ accept interaction with anonymous people option.
You're right that there is testimony/research to suggest this, but our plan is to devise ways and means of productisation - and to build a record of essential trustworthiness as a platform - that will both reduce that unwillingness and make bad behaviour more trouble than it's worth.
Social media platforms - to the extent that Surf is one - are amazingly innovation-shy on fronts like these; the predominating parties we know and use have only explored a fraction of what's possible in terms of a user journey that minimises the kind of bad incentives you're rightly worried about. Bucking that trend is one of the challenges we're most enthused about.
Appreciate your suggestion, too; it may be something we explore.
Thank you Nancy; I only wish every online community I'd piloted this in had the same level of generosity and engagement shown time and again on ACX.
And best of luck figuring out what you're looking for. I know it's all basically hot air at the minute, as the platform is neither built nor tested, but my deepest ambition for Surf is for people, when they think of it, to feel able to use it with a completely justified absence of fear of the kinds of things we've been discussing.
If we can't get that right nothing else we can get it to do will matter much.
I was thinking about your piece on the homicide spike and I have an alternate theory, a variant on the cabin fever theory. Basically my thinking is it's possible that cabin fever made people generally edgier and lowered their threshold for committing violence, and that combined with the ready availability of guns in the US was the powder keg that the BLM protests put a match to (and I say that as someone who thinks "shall not be infringed" should be interpreted literally). As I recall, until around May people were still taking the whole "stay inside" thing fairly seriously; after BLM everyone was going back out, either to protest or because it was clear that if people were protesting, covid must not be such a big deal. Close proximity+guns+cabin fever=homicide.
This theory makes some predictions. First of all, you'd expect to see increased domestic violence relative to baseline from the cabin fever aspect even before the loosening of lockdowns and BLM. Second of all, you'd expect in countries without easily available guns to still see an uptick in violent crime, just not necessarily homicide because it's not as easy to kill someone without a gun, and you'd expect those upticks to coincide with easing of lockdowns. Countries that had multiple lockdowns would be good case studies for this hypothesis. Third, you'd expect to see more of a spike in demographics that have higher levels of gun ownership. Fourth, as the cornerstone of the theory, you'd expect people to be willing to commit violence more easily than pre-lockdown, although I don't know if there's a good way to confirm that; I don't know what sort of data on "violence thresholds" pre and post-lockdown is out there.
I'm not sure yet if the data bears any of this out, but it strikes me as a plausible alternate theory. Maybe I'll write something up on it at some point.
This is not a variant, it's just the cabin fever theory in different words. And it's already been addressed.
It cannot explain the original Ferguson effect, which means its would be some grand coincidence that two widespread instances of BLM rioting and anti-police rhetoric/policy resulted in homicide increases were coaused by two entirely separate things.
And it cannot explain why homoicides have remained elevated for 2 years and counting. If your theory is that TWO MONTHS of generally staying inside caused a semi-permanent change in the psychology of people across the country (and less for the kinds of people who commit homicides), I see no reason to give this explanation the time of day.
>This is not a variant, it's just the cabin fever theory in different words. And it's already been addressed.
It is substantively different than the original cabin fever theory. The criticism that the original theory couldn't account for differences between countries was correct. This theory can account for those differences.
>It cannot explain the original Ferguson effect, which means its would be some grand coincidence that two widespread instances of BLM rioting and anti-police rhetoric/policy resulted in homicide increases were coaused by two entirely separate things.
This I agree with, but I don't see why two things couldn't both be contributing to the homicide spike. I haven't looked at the statistics, but if the current homicide spike is more drastic than the original Ferguson effect, it's possible other factors are contributing.
>And it cannot explain why homoicides have remained elevated for 2 years and counting. If your theory is that TWO MONTHS of generally staying inside caused a semi-permanent change in the psychology of people across the country (and less for the kinds of people who commit homicides), I see no reason to give this explanation the time of day.
This incredulity people have about the lockdowns having persistent effects just baffles me, though. The negative effects of, for example, solitary confinement and social isolation in general on peoples' psyches is extremely well established. If you don't think it's at least plausible that lockdowns could have had persistent negative psychological effects, I don't know what to tell you other than, try spending two months completely alone now and see if you act more aggressive after that.
Here's a small thing-- I was talking with a guy on the street and his dog growled at me.
He said that his dog is less socialized/more protective of him as a result of lockdown-- no contact with people other than him.
Could there be a similar effect on (some) people? It wouldn't take a huge increase of anger/suspicion to increase the violence level and it wouldn't necessarily reverse easily.
Not as directly about aggression, but our cat now gets actively neurotic whenever we leave the house because we spent so many months at home all day every day. Mind you, lockdowns here in Melbourne were far far stricter than those in the USA.
You're claiming that people are STILL angry, 2 years later? What possible advantages does this explanation have over the much more straightforward explanation of less policing -> more crime.
I think we can do a little bit better than anecdotes about dogs.
And the vast majority of the homicide increase has come from black americans. Can we just appeciate how unacceptable this kind of analogy would be if somebody were trying to use animal behavior to implicate rather than exonerate black people for committing crimes?
>If it was cabin fever this would not have continued for two years after
That's a reasonable assumption, but I don't think it has to be true. We don't know what if any persistent psychological effects lockdowns and extended isolation, and the pandemic itself, may have had.
>and it would've happened in many countries
Not if, like I was thinking, it hinges upon the easy availability of guns. You'd expect to see more homicide in the US and more of other kinds of violent crime in many countries, but not necessarily homicide.
I'm not married to this theory though, and if the data doesn't reflect that point I'm happy to abandon it.
Magnesium isn't so much of an NMDA "blocker" as much as it is a core functional component of the receptor. The Mg ion sits in the ion channel itself, and is displaced when the neuron that it sits in depolarizes, allowing the flow of ions through the pore. I don't know how saturated the NMDA receptors tend to be, but my guess is that supplementing with Mag won't appreciably change the dynamics of NMDA receptor functioning in the way that ketamine does.
Look into taking Magnesium L-Threonate. I'm not sure how much of what I've heard about it originates from the people who hold the patent on it, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's said to cross the blood brain barrier more effectively. Also, Threonic acid may play some role in allowing increased extracellular magnesium to translate into increases in intracellular magnesium. Worth a shot, I'd say. I believe there's some evidence that lowering NMDA signalling can increase AMPA signalling (ie ketamine doesn't just increase AMPA due to the action of its metabolites, but also due to its own NMDA antagonism), which is associated with an antidepressant effect, probably due to increased neurotrophic factors such as BDNF and GDNF
A "real" antidepressants? Would that be an SSRI? I tried them all, no thank you. Besides the monoaminergic hypothesis has already been refuted, it cannot explain why ketamine (no monoaminergic drug) works, and why it's mechanism of action is fast. Unfortunately the current generation of psychiatrists have been trained on it and most of them don't want to exit the comfort zone. Only the rich can get it
In the 20 years since 9/11 (and before in Europe) why hasn’t the technology or procedure improved for airport security? It’s a matter of getting people on one side of the airport to the other. There’s ample space on the other side. Yet people wait hours, miss flights and so on. Why haven’t airports tried to get security times down to say 5 minutes per person even at busy times by the radical example of opening more security lanes, hiring more staff, upgrading scanning technology, even moving to a random searches and scans.
Chalk it up to even more examples of modern incompetence.
They should just profile. Scan everyone who might be up to no good and let everyone else skip the theater. I would be ok with being checked every single time (and probably would) if that meant not having to wait hours so families of six traveling together also get scanned.
Precisely. So the supposed "incompetence" is in fact a way to <s>extort</s> convince folks who still fly to pony up extra $$$. Looks like "good" business practice to me, if you happen to be a rapacious MBA without even a hint of a conscience.
Almost all of those solutions would cost lots of money, which nobody wants to pay. The "random searches and scans" one would leave the whole edifice open to charges of "but now the terrorists can get through, if they're willing to take a chance, and they were planning to die anyway". If the scans aren't random, no one will trust the algorithm.
Plus, understand that the purpose isn't really to stop terrorists that's mostly addressed invisibly by e.g. locks on the reinforced cockpit doors, and drone strikes halfway around the world. The purpose to offer a spectacle that convinces the ignorant and untrusting that the terrorists have been stopped, by something they can see. And to deter the idiot wannabes, again by showing them up front that their simple fantasies will not work. So the optimal level of "stop and look and see the *security*!", is not "as minimal as possible".
I don’t see why scanning technology would cost lots of money. Why would any organisation ever invest otherwise. The problem is that there’s no incentive. Airports have captive markets and are local monopolies. And even if they aren’t monopolies (as in very few cities like london) you buy the ticket on price and maybe airline. The airport isn’t really a choice.
In Australia I rarely wait more than a few minutes to get through airport security. It's an absolute slog in the US.
My guess is that the problem is that there's no real desire to make airport security more efficient. The TSA exists now and has a huge budget, the people in charge of it would like to increase their budget and headcount, and any efforts to make things more efficient with the existing number of staff would be counterproductive to that aim.
There are lots of simple ways to make security checkpoints more efficient, they just don't bother. Even the simple modification of having longer tables so that more people can simultaneously unload their pockets into the trays makes a huge difference. (And of course the crazy shoe thing, which as I understand it is still a US-only ritual.)
The worst thing about the shoes is that airports still don't provide seats to sit on while taking shoes on or off, making the process extremely difficult and even dangerous for old people.
The last time I flew (a few weeks ago), I didn't have to take my shoes off, or take my laptop out of its case. It may have had something to do with some of what I assume were bomb-sniffing dogs that you had to walk past before the X-ray machines/metal detectors.
Yeah, TSA has only been 100% effective at preventing another 9/11. That's some good theater! Imagine if the DEA or ICE were as good at fulfilling their mandates: we'd have no illegal drug trade and 0 illegal immigrants in this country.
I was under the impression that changes in airline policy have effectively made a repeat impossible. For example, securing the cockpit and not allowing hijackers to take control of the plane.
And if you try to take over a plane now, the passengers will no longer think "oh, if we comply we'll be all right" but "they want to crash this plane" and will do whatever they can to stop it.
Has anyone else felt some small part of their brain being vindicated re: carbon tax feasibility, with inflation raising food prices and people still continuing to buy lots of groceries? I'm thinking of meat consumption in particular - can't speak for national trends, but shoppers in SF absolutely do still continue the covid-provoked "buy 6 family sized packages of chicken" thing, even 2.5 years later. This hasn't slowed down at all even as prices have gone up prodigiously.
Obviously I don't think this is a Good Thing(tm), we're not getting anything meaningful out of losing Value to inflation, and it's not a perfect natural experiment. But it gives me hope, or at least retroactive hope, that such works-on-paper ideas may indeed work in real life if conditions are different. People adjust to New Normals faster than they expect.
As a base, spherical-cow model, inflation raises the price of everything equally, so it wouldn't be expected to cause much shift in buying preferences; by contrast, a carbon tax ought to make some things more expensive while leaving others virtually unchanged.
It's going to depend on the underlying cause of the inflation. If we're talking about inflation from the increase in the money supply then all prices will rise equally over time.
If we're talking about increases in prices due to something else, like a labor shortage, then prices will increase roughly based on the amount of that input they use.
Chicken thighs are cheap and delicious. A fav cooking method. De-bone and season. Put a Tbsp of oil in your iron skillet at medium high heat. Place chicken thighs skin side down and put a big can of tomatoes (or any can.. even a pot with some water.) on top of the thighs to press them down into the skillet. Let them cook ~10 minutes or so, till the chicken fat is rendered and the skin is nice and crispy. Flip 'em over, cook the other side and serve. Yum!
Thighs are way better than "tenderloins" or "breasts", I agree. Chicken is bland enough to begin with, removing skin/fat/darkmeat just makes it even sadder. This is the method I learned to cook thighs and similar-property meats, it's pretty similar to your recommendation: http://food52.com/recipes/35813-canal-house-s-chicken-thighs-with-lemon
("does it have bones?" is a more-general heuristic for high-value meat cuts...homemade bone broth is great. Every time I tell people that's a thing I do, they see it as some sorta Master Chef Hack. And I'm like ??? no this is just what poor cooks have done for generations. Food gentrification is maddening...)
I think it would be better to focus on eliminating beef and ethanol subsidies than to introduce a carbon tax. Also, this would seem to be part of a long leftist tradition of raising the prices of essentials (like food), in order to raise more money for things highly valued by upper-class leftists who can easily afford the price hikes.
I agree, but see those Obvious Price Control shenanigans as even more sacrosanct than pricing GHG externalities. The latter got close to passing in some form on some occasions; the former...well...that's *literally* a Sacred Cow issue, no way in hell it's ever happening.
A counterfactual where we greatly increased supply instead of crimping demand is probably most fair and ideal; that's something Matt Yglesias dreams of on several issues, like energy (remember "too cheap to meter"?) I'd prefer less regressive policies all around, but also think that's probably not productive as a Fully General Counterargument to implementing anything ever, either...the class version of "racial disparity". Then again, I also notice that's a double-Probably, so my beliefs here are not terribly concrete.
When I wrote "beef subsidies", I meant all subsidies that reduce the price of beef (and, really, of meat in general). That includes things like low-cost grazing on national land, disaster assistance for livestock, and special covid-19-justified payments to livestock owners. But I know nothing about this except what Google tells me. See https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestock-subsidies-near-50-billion-ewg-analysis-finds , which claims livestock subsidies (which includes subsidies for dairy cows and laying hens) is now about $50 billion / year. Good luck figuring out how much of that is for meat, or finding a quotable source for any data on that site, though--they say it's "USDA data", but AFAI can tell, never give a URL or publication providing that data.
Thanks. The subsidies, I think, are actually for farmers. That definitely affects the pricing structure of their production, so to some degree I think you are right. On the other hand, people with ulterior motives (their ideology) often seem to make dishonest claims — not you, just left or right wing ideologues in general.
In my opinion, all the best carbon tax suggestions are revenue neutral and financially progressive, inasmuch as they give 100% of the tax back to the citizens, but in a flat way, so that people who emit the most carbon (generally speaking the richest people) are subsidizing those who use the least. This explicitly incentivizes emitting less carbon while not punishing the poorest Americans.
Yes, a carbon tax without a rebate _is_ regressive. That's _why_ you do the rebate. And I'm honestly confused about what you mean "where does it come from".....from the tax....obviously. That's what "revenue neutral" means. Whatever amount comes in, that much goes back out. It doesn't go to the general fund, it doesn't go anywhere. It goes straight back out the door.
Note the "give 100% of the tax back to the citizens". It seems sort of self explanatory to me.
Be careful with your tone. Your suggestion isn't clear at all.
We tax people as point of sale and then rebate them the same tax, so exactly how does that change behaviour? I'd like to see the actual workings out here, because I am not seeing it. Food is a much larger cost to low income households, if you tax their purchases and then rebate ( via what ever mechanism you are not mentioning here) then there won't be any reason for a behavioural change. Maybe some people with an extra $100 a month to spend won't spend it all on the food they are used to which is now $100 more expensive, but they probably will spend most of it on food.
The middle classes and rich don't spend disproportionally on food, and can afford moderate increases in food taxes. So I am not sure what exactly is expected to change here.
Because the rebate isn't related to how much they spend. It's a flat rebate to every user (and most schemes would send the rebate quarterly/yearly/some not-too-frequent-interval for simplicity sake so that the spending and the rebate are at least partially disconnected). So every user is always incentivized to emit less carbon. If you personally can emit less carbon, then you are (potentially) _making_ money on the backs of those who emit the most. So on the margins, it will shift behavior that is capable of being shifted. A tax and rebate scheme (where the rebate is a flat rebate to every user) will always incentivize less use.
And, as I mentioned elsewhere, a "properly" set carbon tax doesn't actually matter if it shifts behavior or not, because the only problem with emitting carbon is that a portion of the costs are not born by the people transacting. A carbon tax fixes this. Of course, the issue here is that not everyone agrees what the externalized cost is so your tax level will never please everyone. But that's true of everything.
I guess it might be useful to discuss the carbon tax abstractly, sort of, but given how utterly unimaginable it is in the US politically, is there really a point?
It's fun to discuss hypothetical counterfactuals on blogs with pretentions towards intellectualism (i.e. very little actual power/influence on policy, we're mostly not activists here)? What-Ifs make for fun topics. Do concede that it's effectively a dead-letter at this point in history, not sure there'll ever be another shot at it in the future. So it's certainly a distraction in practical terms; I think post-mortems are still useful to learn from though. Carbon tax wasn't the first and won't be the last wonk-approved climate policy.
I was thinking of it along the lines of: right now, "extra" money "lost" to inflation doesn't generate any revenue, or actually any Value period (unless I'm seriously misunderstanding economics). In a counterfactual where extra food money, specifically meat money, specifically-specifically beef money, instead went towards carbon tax revenue - that'd be an improvement on the current factual, even if behaviour remained equally unchanged. Plus it's better to have a legible economic lever; one can always tinker with a carbon tax and affect prices immediately. Inflation is a bit more challenging a beast.
Or, orthogonally: I wonder what actually *would* cause people to significantly change behaviour in this realm, if big price increases don't do it. (Idk if it's applicable outside my specific store, but we have some products like roma tomatoes that have literally tripled in price vs 2019 levels...)
Well, I'm just a grocer - I know the sales data for my store and could give generalities (the generality given here is "selling as much or even more meat products than pre-covid, even with restaurant dining back up to full capacity"), but it'd risk employer sanctions to leak any specifically-quantifiable data like dollar value or whatever. I already skirt that line enough here, sadly. (Sometimes I dream of being fired so I can divulge as much dirt as I want...)
I'm sure there's data out there in the Google wilds somewhere? It's not something I went to look for, cause most of my Open Thread comments are just based on personal anecdata and general observations; I am usually not looking to "prove" a hypothesis or "win" an argument. The only claim I'll stick to is Local Validity, it's entirely possible my picture of the world is deeply flawed or not generalizable elsewhere.
But I do take your point seriously elsewhere in thread, that ideological motives often make for wrong-claims. FWIW, I probably register as center-right and libertarian, but try hard to update my Map whenever I encounter significant update-worthy evidence...the Rationalist credo of "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" is something I try to embody for my own mental models. So if I make any wrong-claims here, it's definitely out of ignorance, not malice or deception. After all, I am just a poor blue-collar grunt; ACX is pretty much the extent of what little "life of the mind" I get. (Scott's great but I am sure I've picked up lots of wrong-beliefs from him over the years, even the Rightful Caliph isn't perfect.)
High single digit inflation is making Joe Biden the second most unpopular postwar president (and most unpopular at this point in his presidency). And your takeaway is that your preferred policy is feasible? Surely it's extreme evidence to the contrary?
And that's without mentioning DangerouslyUnstable's points about why it's different. I'll add: no one claimed people wouldn't buy groceries. They claimed consumption would go down as people prioritized buying food and so didn't consume other things.
I think there's a distinction to be made between "feasible" (i.e. could it be passed if put to a vote - this was historically contendable but very much No now) and "so disruptive it collapses under its own weight" (*also* not happening). It's the level of normalcy and carrying-on that surprises me, hence the OP. People went and marched regarding Roe, there were rallies for Ukraine, lots of covid-related protests...I'm not aware of anyone protesting inflation more generally, not in the sense of Great Recession widespread economic disaffection leading to mobilization.
(Fair counter: people know inflation isn't just a switch that can be turned on and off instantly, it's entirely possible they would be out in the streets rioting if 300% price increases came from something legible like a carbon tax. There's always gotta be a boogeyman.)
Are people indeed not-consuming lots of other things to keep food (and gas) at stable levels, and thus I'm only observing a shift in consumption patterns with no broader implications? (besides still-borked-by-covid things, which are understandable given the continued prominence of Permanent Midnight) I freely admit to not being very well-read on this topic, since my own low income constrains most of my purchases to such basic necessities. (Definitely made me take longer to pay for subscription here than I'd felt comfortable with...)
You march and rally for controversial things. If everyone agrees inflation is bad and should be dealt with there's no reason to apply pressure. You're assuming silence means they're fine with it rather than the truth which is they care about inflation far more than those other things. As they are about to express in November.
And yes, a decline in real income (which has been widely reported on) means a general decline in consumption. Though food has a lower elasticity of demand (everyone needs to eat) and so will be affected less. No one, to my knowledge, denies that you can tax food. But it's unpopular and disproportionately affects the poor.
Hmm, your heuristic for determining Marchableness and Ralliness doesn't quite match mine; there are certainly lots of Loud Minority-type protests where that's one of their only ways to raise the awareness waterline, but when I think back on all the biggest baddest noteworthiest protests I've seen in my lifetime, they were largely non-controversial. Maybe that's a bubble experience; "what good does it do protesting Roe in San Francisco?" and all that. It was sorta refreshing to occasionally see Trump rallies out here, just because it seemed to "have a point" rather than effectively throwing a block party for activists. This is probably just #semantics though.
I vaguely recall reading that real income decline has been negligible or nonexistent for the lower percentiles, due to huge wage increases on that end prior to inflation kicking in, but perhaps that was more of a relative-comparison than an absolute-comparison ("declined less [quickly] than others"), or just bad math from outdated calculations.
>But it's unpopular and disproportionately affects the poor.
Pigovian taxes always trip me up ideologically, especially when proposed by Smart People I'm otherwise inclined to agree with on economic policy...on the one hand, regressive taxes make me very sad, and I vote them down when possible + don't enforce them when given the opportunity. (That "bag tax" at stores in lefty jurisdictions? Yeah, I don't collect it anymore.) On the other hand, the nominal reason for so-called sin taxes is that, no, actually, it'll *help* the poor in the long run...since the worst-off have the most to lose from poor-consumption-decisions and unpriced-negative-externalities. Seems like a tricky tension to resolve. I feel like the default answer of "just alleviate poverty instead, preferably by giving people money" is probably correct. Path dependence is a terrible erosion of freedom, after all...
What are your examples of "largely non-controversial" protests? Because I haven't seen any large protests for anything I can't recognize as highly controversial.
Hmm, I think I spot the confusion. Lemme narrow that claim to "locally largely non-controversial". That is, if it doesn't have significant counter-protestors and/or negative local media coverage, I wouldn't consider it controversial. Even if it'd make a great Fox News chyron "Hysterial Democrazies Riot In Progressive Hotbed SF Again" or whatever. Pick anything on the Big Dartboard 'o Leftist Causes: abortion, LGBT rights*, TDS, anti-fossil fuels/global warming, veganism/factory farming, minimum wage...it's gonna be at least a 90/10 split in favour, with the median bystander happy to honk their car horn or cheer or whatever. Since most of those things are table stakes beliefs here, at least if one doesn't wanna risk alienation from social reality.
At the company I work for, we used to have animal-welfare activists conduct "die-ins" to block our store entrances, because we were heartless enough to sell non-cage-free eggs. Like basically every other supermarket everywhere. This went on for *years* and no one really cared, the public was rather supportive actually. Eventually the company "caved" anyway and we moved to all-free-range, but I'd bet strongly on it being a convenient alignment of corporate interests and renegotiation with suppliers, rather than giving any shits about the protests. (Funny how they didn't expend the same energy protesting our well-known habit of selling chocolate produced using child labour...coincidence?)
*Exception for picketing the actual Official Pride Parade(tm) every year due to Corporate Pinkwashing and sometimes having the temerity to allow gay cops to march. This is always controversial.
Inflation is a bad analogy for carbon taxes and an even worse analogy for carbon taxes on groceries since, while agriculture obviously emits carbon, I have never heard of an actual plan to incorporate non-petroleam ag carbon emisions.
The primary reason it's a bad analogy though is that under an inflationary regime the average price level is increasing (aka, just about everything is going up). Carbon taxes are explicitely supposed to _only_ make things that are carbon intensive more expensive and only to the extent that they are carbon intensive. On the margin, this means that people will switch to less carbon intensive alternatives wherever possible. This will not be possible everywhere and no one seriously believes (nor is it the point) that carbon taxes will completely eliminate carbon emissions. It is merely meant to internalize the cost. Some (likely many) carbon emitting activities are still worth it even with the internalized cost and so they would continue.
-edit- upon rereading your comment...it seems like you think this is a pro-carbon tax argument? I am very pro-carbon taxes but I really don't think we can learn anything about their feasibility from spending habits during an inflationary regime.
Hmm, I definitely remember reading a lot of lefty takes over the years along the lines of "we need to tax *beef specifically* (and maybe meat more generally) cause of its high climate externalities, just like a carbon tax!" So I guess that's a "methane tax". Either way, it was a case to internalize costs so consumption could either stabilize at a new "honest" set point, or reduce consumption by implicitly not subsidizing the price anymore. Maybe I just read a lot of unserious bubbled media though - that's very plausible!
I believe people have said that. Maybe this is semantics, but I'm not sure I'd call a flat tax on beef/meat livestock a carbon tax. When burning fossil fuels, you know exactly how much carbon is emitted per barrel of oil (or whatever). When it comes to livestock, it's much _much_ more variable (by feed, breed, raising and management practices etc. etc. etc.) and I doubt that anyone has suggested (nor would it be possible) to tax them at a variable rate that actually accounted for carbon/ghg emitted. Best you could do is some kind of "average" rate. Having an average rate like that, would not, to my mind, count as a carbon tax. It's just a beef tax.
But again, I suppose that's a bit of semantic debate. It would have a similar affect of internalizing (to a greater or less, or even excessive degree by the nature of averages) the currently externalized costs of raising livestock, which would, on the margins, probably decrease beef consumption. I'm just not personally convinced it's a very good idea, especially when there is so much more lower hanging fruit.
That being said, I'm a big fan of getting rid of the corn/soy subsidies that make feeding cattle and other livestock lot cheaper than they should be.
Fair enough! Measurement difficulties certainly make it harder to price animal product GHG vs, say, factory emissions, so an inefficient flat tax is possibly the best we could get in that solution-space. Not to mention that measurement is itself a cost which cuts into any potential gains. (The argument for flat income taxes always feels predicated on more "waste and red tape" than actually exists, but it is certainly compelling narratively.)
I have been told by Very Reasonable People that there are sometimes legitimate uses for price controls, but the so-called free market of the USA seems to regularly exceed such legitimate use cases. It would be nice to "Less of this, please".
I'd love a source on the fact that crop subsidies are increasing prices. Everything I've found suggests a moderate decrease in prices (except for sugar cane, where some of the rules are basically banning imports, so the price is higher)
-edit- although I will admit that I found less evidence/support for this than I expected when I was very briefly searching for this response. However, I'd still be for getting rid of subsidies regardless of the impact on prices. The (alleged) impact on reducing livestock feed is, to me, a side benefit. If it goes away or reverses, it wouldn't change my opinion on crop subsidies
Seems like an even more relevant example of continued consumption despite rising prices is the price of gas continuing to skyrocket, but no one I know (anecdotally) decreasing their consumption of gasoline in the short term. several people (including myself) are updating their calculus on long term decisions or plans to reduce their gasoline in the future, however.
That's what's surprised me, yeah. People *not* significantly switching to cheaper alternatives like beans, flour, rice. There was an early-on rush due to the whole Civilizational Collapse vibe, where everyone wanted nonperishables, but that abated fairly quick. Since then people have gone back to buying pre-packaged pre-prepared stuff, meat, pre-cooked frozen rice (that one always makes me #smh), etc. It makes some sense with gasoline, cause the switching costs of recalculating an entire commute on public transit or changing to e.g. a hybrid or EV are pretty immense. But swapping within groceries seems a lot more tractable, even if one is indeed dovish on The Current Troubles not lasting too much longer in the big-picture future.
edit: and anyway gas prices are finally starting to go *down* here, so I suppose they'd have been proven right!
OK, I'm a believer. The stats I learned I understood well, but that was several decades ago and I have not kept up with advances. But I do grasp the concept of the need to adjust for multiple comparisons, and you sound like you have your head screwed on straight about what's the best way to do that.
It looks like you accidentally replied to the main post instead of whatever sub-thread you were using. Not knowing the context, there are many different ways to adjust for multiple comparisons of various levels of complexity. Among the most basic are Bonferroni adjustments or Holmes-Bonferroni adjustments (they are both simple enough that a quick google should demonstrate their use adequately). I'm sure there are likely more complex methods depending on your use case though.
"Character-building" comes close, maybe? Although it literally refers to activities that increase virtue, I've found that the stuff I hated at the time, but made me a better person, I remember fondly.
But I suspect this is just one of the many existing things that English has no word for.
There's a "fun scale" that (to my knowledge) is attributed to an REI post from 2014 about types of fun. It started as a joke, I think, but by now myself and everyone I know in the outdoorsy/adventurey world use this scale as something legitimate to explain a situation that is pretty bad but you know will be fun to think back on (Type II Fun) OR a situation that is just so bad that you'll probably choose to almost never bring it up again (Type III Fun). For clarity, Type I Fun is like...uh...sitting in a jacuzzi at a resort with your arms draped across the edge to keep you from sinking, a cold drink within easy reach. https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
I think of nostalgia as memories we'd rather have than experience; you are wondering about experiences we'd rather remember than have. So it seems like we could rearrange the root of nostalgia; it comes from nostas=return home, algos=pain. Maybe joy of leaving home? Xenochara.
Oh another relevant thing is I heard an interview with someone who was discussing the difference between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self". So you could describe such things as "done for the remembering self".
I think it was either on Rationally Speaking, or Sean Carroll's podcast. I've searched both and can't find the episode though. Kahneman was a guest on at least one of those podcasts, so it was probably him.
I don't know of such a word in English, but I have heard expressed before the view that truly great experiences/happiness mostly come from things that are at least somewhat unpleasant in the moment. Things that are pure hedonism, while more enjoyable in the moment, are nearly always shallow and empty (relatively speaking) in hindsight.
While this resonates with me and seems to have a large amount of truth to it (although I can certainly come up with counter examples), I'm curious how much of it isn't due to things like the sunk cost fallacy or the (similar? adjacent?) fallacy of something being better/more worthwhile because it's the thing you did/chose (can't for the life of me find the name, but I'm sure I've encountered it as an official fallacy, sort of the opposite of sour grapes; my googleing is turning up "sweet lemons" even though I'm quite sure I've never heard that before)
I think the counterexamples are more common than the examples, they're just less remarkable and thus less readily available to your mind. Most unpleasant things are just always unpleasant, and many pleasant things are meaningful, but we spend a lot more time arguing over the unpleasant worthwhile things and the empty hedonism we feel guilty over than all the things that are just obviously good or obviously bad.
Just because something is unpleasant in the moment by no means guarantees it will be viewed favorably in the future. I have never heard someone seriously argue this and nor did I mean to imply it. And the fact that some slightly unpleasant things will be viewed positively is not, nor should it be viewed as, evidence that all unpleasant things will be. Rather just that most of the best experiences in life were some degree of unpleasant in the moment. This is true for me (although certainly I have some extremely cherished memories/experiences that were _also_ an unadulterated pleasure in the moment), and I know it's at least partially true for a lot of people I know personally. To be clear, the things I'm thinking of are not _completely_ unpleasent in the moment, they just have an aspect of unpleasantness.
To give a recent example of my own: I went on a backpacking hike with friends. On the way back out we got unexpectedly rained on and I was unprepared gear-wise. I hiked for 4 hours soaked to the bone, carrying a heavy pack, and chilled by the wind. The trip as a whole was still an amazing experience and I'm glad I did it and would do it again in a heartbeat, even though that portion was not very enjoyable in the moment.
I think this is relatively common, at least in my circles. It’s not quite as broad as the definition asked for though, as I would it say it refers specifically to being unpleasant *physically* in the moment.
Hmmm... is it cheating to nominate a work of philosophy?
Schopenhauer's "The World As Will and Representation" altered my mental chemistry like nothing else I've ever read, but it's tough going - especially if you aren't already well steeped in Kant. (Though someone - Karl Popper, I think - said that the best way to understand Kant is to read Schopenhauer.)
I intend to read Blood Meridian someday, but I fear it. McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" left me both aesthetically awed and horrified. I was skeptical of claims that McCarthy stood in the line of Melville and Faulkner, but, having read those three books, I'm now a believer. That said, the sheer level of brutality therein can be overwhelming - there were nights that it deprived me of sleep - and I understand that those books are on the "gentler" side of McCarthy's overall work.
House of Leaves. Makes a great Bragging Right, adds a new literary lens one is unlikely to pick up elsewhere. Dreadful to actually suffer through. Same conceits have been done better since then (e.g. Zero HP Lovecraft's "God-Shaped Hole"), but none matched the "brand recognition" of the original.
TV is a little harder...I think a great deal of what's been Mass Popular over the last decade or so was actually insufferable triple, but it sure does lock one out of a lot of small-talk to not have even in passing watched said dreck. I used to read TV critics' reviews for exactly this reason, save myself the trouble and bluff a bit. An actual book is a lot harder to effectively socialize off just the Cliff Notes(tm).
I love House of Leaves! It was a gateway to experimental literature, for me. Danielewski guides you gently through the process of learning how to read a novel from the novel itself, like training wheels, where most experimental authors just toss you in.
I feel like I'd have gotten more out of it if I'd read it earlier in life, back before experiencing other Experimental Literature...I used to play a lot of Japanese visual novels, so the whole "unreliable narrator + aggressively nonstandard formatting" schtick wasn't new to me. But yes, despite extravagantly doubling down on the central conceit over and over, it's remarkably "gentle" compared to successors. There's a lot to be said for accessibility in niche genres.
I'll express solidarity with your lack of enjoyment of the Sopranos, though I haven't gotten the benefit of remembering it with fondness. As with "Mad Men", it was a show I watched in order to HAVE watched it, a kind of cultural literacy.
"Bloodlands" is like that for me. Increasingly difficult to stick with while reading it, but it deepened my perspectives on some big topics, including but not limited to its specific subject matter.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
I recently heard about the Khan World School through an interview with it's found on the People I Mostly Admire podcast. It's being run by Sal Khan of Khan Academy of in coordination with the University of Chicago (to help design curriculum) and Arizona State University (to run and help finance it, I believe)
As a community that is generally interested in schooling and (in some cases) quite skeptical of traditional schooling, I'm wondering about people's thoughts on it.
Obviously it's too new to be able to say anything concrete, but to me it seems rather exciting and seems like a much bigger experiment/change than even most charter schools. Sal Khan had previously run a small lab school in CA that (despite a whole host of confounders) seemed rather promising.
I think there are some very good ideas here, and it's a good podcast with some smart questions asked. It's probably going to work very well for a certain subset of learners--people who are very smart, but also self-motivated enough to plow through a lot of independent study. I like the idea of a daily seminar and I like the focus on bringing data into classes other than math/science.
But I don't think it's going to magically solve the problem Levitt talks about where his students aren't curious and only care about getting an A. That's part of a much broader societal issue. Universities aren't serving the role of educating people, they're serving the role of credentialing people and saying that this degree-holder is some combination of a) smart and b) conscientious enough to jump through four years of hoops. Not all degrees are useless; I'm a teacher and I have a BA and MA that are both directly related to the subject area I work in, and I learned a lot of things that are relevant to what I do on a daily basis. But there are obviously millions of people out there in some middle-management job somewhere who are required to have a college degree, even if that degree has absolutely nothing to do with their work. (I could also go on a rant about the effects of Griggs v. Duke Power, but that would be going a bit too far astray of the topic at hand.)
I also think online learning in general is not going to work well for a large portion of students. For one thing, it's not ideal for the younger grades where you need physical supervision of students. Certainly there can still be online activities, but it can't work in the same way that it could for a high school student. Then I think you have a large number of students who are reasonably capable, but not necessarily mature enough to manage their time effectively and get work done on their own.
Oh no! Deiseach got banned again? And I can't even see the comment that triggered it since it's in the subscriber only thread. Ah well, at least it's only for a month. I'm sure we'll all muddle through till then.
I'm assuming copy-pasting from subscribers-only to non-subscribers is bad form, but I *think* it's reasonable to meta-comment on banning decisions for the purposes of letting people know what is and isn't over the line from Scott's apparent decisions:
Deisearch got banned for a post that was a long, uniquely written poem that was adapting the format of "Modern Major General." It was neither kind (because it roasting the poster she was replying to) nor necessary (because it was at best tangentially related to the topic at hand), and its truth can be debated, so it was justified for a ban.
It was funny and stylish and high-effort trolling, but still basically pure trolling and those behavior that Scott wants to discourage, I think.
I'm very glad she's not permanently banned, because she's an important part of the community.
Hmm, now I feel bad for possibly encouraging or inciting that post. There wasn't any *necessary* reason for me to pick on the same dude bearing the same cross, based on previous reactions from the last Open Thread; it was a true criticism and I tried to word it kindly, but, eh. Best let sleeping dogs lie, and all that. Pile-ons are a pretty predictable consequence from bringing attention to threads which seem destined to end in obscurity, and I certainly didn't wanna goad anyone into getting banned when obviously-controversial topics are discussed.
It *was* a very funny satire though, so I suppose that's some value created anyway.
I think it hypothetically would have be an acceptable top-level post (even if it was implicitly sub-tweeting someone) because it was high-effort & funny & stylish, but as a reply it was pretty clearly Out Of Bounds enough that it would have been bad to make an exception for it.
Along the lines of the BLM/Homicide spike there was a pretty similar debate occurring fifteen years ago that started with an Atlantic article titled American Murder Mystery that discussed an academic theory whereby knocking down traditional concentrated high rise housing projects and providing section 8 vouchers through the Federal Hope VI program just spread all the problems of concentrated ghetto housing onto working class neighborhoods. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
Many were not happy with this characterization and many efforts were made to discredit the entire theory:
I would love to see Scott apply his talent to this as well. On the one hand the theory passed the anecdotal/personal account explanation. Many civilians and police officers in various cities that were affected by this gave a similar account of the Hope VI program spreading the ghetto to low crime but poorish and vulnerable inner ring suburbs that, after ten or so years, just looked much more like the ghetto. I believe academic researchers later showed that while there were big spikes in violent crime in these communities that received the new residents, it couldn't be proven that the section 8 tenants were actually the criminal offenders.
One thing I would say is that this is my field, and the research in this field is highly suspect. I have participated in large cost benefit research analysis projects about programs similar to Hope VI, where the literal instructions were "only look at the benefits, do not look at or try to calculate any costs". Then when the report is done everyone can make a big press release patting themselves on the back about how beneficial it all was, and look all those nasty nay-sayers were wrong! And unless you actually read through the 400 page monstrosity, and were smarter than a journalist, you wouldn't notice that it no way addressed a single criticism of the approach.
No one was ever disputing that the move from the projects would be better for the people who previously lived in the projects, but that is what we spent hundreds of pages proving. People were interested in the impact on their new neighborhoods, which we were instructed to avoid looking into in any way.
That is insane and exactly what I'm talking about. It just seems like it helps the careers of "experts" who simply move on from these communities with resume line items while actual lives are ruined. Maybe that's too cynical and not the whole picture but it would an easy picture to paint. The more I learn the more I feel like Thomas Sowell's criticism of intellectuals is more accurate than most. Zero accountability.
I mean if the government offers your employer a big contract to study X, aren't you going to do what they ask? You might ask some questions, make a few suggestions. But if they essentially say "stop asking about that we aren't interested in that part of the problem", what are you going to do? Its not like whistleblowing when someone is actually dying. They just want you to conduct some short sighted/stupid analysis.
This happens all the time in the public policy world. Take Economic Development. The University of X's "public impact center" (or whatever) will put together a report indicating the Zoo's request for $25 million to the legislature for a better Dolphin habitat absolutely makes sense and for sure is going to pay for itself.
You read the report and it assumes every single visitor to the Zoo is coming from outside of town, and every single one of them ONLY came to town to see the Zoo. It also makes some likely wildly exaggerated projections about what the upgrade will do to attendance, but we will ignore that for now.
Are the people who wrote signed/off on this report (some of whom are actual economists) actually this stupid? No probably not. But that was the question the Zoo/Legislature asked them to solve and the assumptions they wanted smuggled in.
That way you don't need to actually justify the expense, you have a piece of paper you can point to that indicates this particular piece of legislation is in some vague way going to economically "pay for itself".
I totally understand why it happens and don't necessarily blame the individuals involved for protecting their own careers and interests. I just don't think we appropriately acknowledge this happens or discuss the aggregate effect of this across our entire society. We seem to only encourage more of it, and when someone asks a question or disputes a finding, they are attacked for not bowing down to the "experts".
Oh I completely agree in a perfect world people should be taken to task for things like this. I could almost imagine a world in which this sort of thing was criminal if it involved legislation/lobbying. But so few people are even show interest in such documents, and many of them cannot understand them.
If there is a market out there for giving people pieces of paper saying construction projects are going to pay for themselves, there absolutely will develop an industry to service that market (and there has).
I'd like to see Scott look at it too, but it's kind of gamy for him. Some VERY LARGE PERCENTAGE of this is shakedowns and shakedown enforcement. Bribe me or I move a hundred violent career criminals to your neighborhood. Look what I did to their neighborhood. I will do it to yours or you will pay up.
And in my town, like most places, it was moving a housing project of blacks into a black working class community, so the violent crimes were mostly black on black and mostly unreported and ignored.
That's the more nefarious "isn't this all just political horse-trading/power broking bull shit?" aspect to these stories that he wouldn't be expected to touch...although someone should. Scott should simply audit whether there was sufficient evidence to enact such broad social engineering, the results, and perhaps the academic/media portrayal of the results which is usually wholly lacking in transparency and accountability.
I think the ghetto revitalization and gentrification is an important aspect of the story. Someone continues to "hold the bag" for all the crimes and unfortunately in many cases its the black middle class communities getting destroyed. The pushed out communities go somewhere that isn't great but also isn't dangerous...then it becomes dangerous. Although the inner city former ghettos are now filled with 27 year old knowledge workers playing urbanite until they move to the burbs to have kids.
"to program is vastly under specified here" but the quick answer is yes. The cutoff is probably about anyone who decently understood Algebra II and can follow and write a recipe. Someone who can at least do that (quick googling suggests 75% of students pass Algebra II so we're a bit past average) can learn at least some types of useful programming.
They are already plenty of answer, I'll be short. Intelligence is not relevant to programming IMO. It's just how much time you are willing to learn this and that trick.
When you say intelligence is not relevant to programming, do you mean e.g. there are as many successful IQ<70 programmers as IQ>130 ones? Because that really does not seem compatible with my experience.
Also, are we talking about an extreme case like this? I'm assuming we are talking about average, maybe even above average but not extraordinary, IQ.
From my experience, a lot of a programmer job boils down to communication with other programmers and with the rest of the team. When doing code reviews, the most important point I'm looking for is readability/debuggability.
Yes a very smart person will be able to do great engineering feat but IMO this is a small part of the job.
I was just asking you to clarify your claim. I've met several programmers with an IQ>130, but I don't think I've met any with an IQ<70, or even IQ<85, so to me it seems clear that intelligence is relevant to programming.
yeah there isn't any research I know of that looks at programming per se, but there are a few papers (and I think Scott mentioned one in a previous post) that intelligence becomes more relevant as the complexity of the job increases.
So I guess it depends on whether you think programming is a complex job or not.
As for getting going, the question wasn't about me (by no means a genius but I use Python a lot in my work, and tutor it to other students), it was more about my students. Have a lot of students from non-STEM backgrounds that come in really wanting to learn to program, but it seems like most of them really struggle going past the basics. It's especially odd because if you show them a few lines of code and ask them to explain what they output and why, they can normally do that pretty well. But if you ask them to create something from scratch with what they've learned it is borderline impossible for most of them. This led me to speculate that it was perhaps a lot more g-loaded than most people realise.
My first advice to you is to stop looking at things from the intelligence angle, programming is already rife with imposter syndrome and if you're going through things constantly looking at your intelligence to justify your competence or lack thereof you're just going to hurt yourself needlessly.
Programming is just teaching a bunch of electrons how to do things. It varies as enormously as teaching, you can teach kindergarteners or teenagers or college grads or industrial workers or soldiers or elderly people or animals, every one of those jobs is radically different, but they are all teaching, and they share some small number of similarities, like patience and the ability to empathize with who you're teaching.
I hate invoking 'intelligence' in generality because, aside from the aesthetic gut-level reasons of disliking any immutable metric aiming to rank people on a ladder, it's just not useful. Suppose you tell a guy he's bad at programming because he's unintelligent, now what ? what have he learned or not learned ? how can he improve his "unintelligence" ? it's just needlessly cruel feedback that achieves nothing. But suppose you tell him he's bad at programming because he can't imagine the state of the machine (the values of different variables) at every point in a computation ? now we're talking, he can get better at this, even if he can't he can better accept he's not good at this specific ability instead of the very general and value-judgemental "unintelligent".
Like I said above, programming is varied, anything essential or fundamental about it is going to be a small part of it, the rest is going to vary according to the sort of programming you're doing. I would say that this small fundamental part is about imagining how another entity executes instruction that you gave it, and how those instructions might be confusing and incomplete, and how you might fix that. Early women programmers likened it to cooking, cleaning and cloth-making, instruction-oriented activities familiar to women. Others liken it to commanding a servant\maid, commanding an army, managing a factory or a bussiness, ... etc. As flawed as all those analogies are, they hint at a fundamental truth : programming is about giving instructions to an entity that can reason and remember in a very pecuilar way, and watching it execute them EXACTLY, so exactly and literally that it's painful. It's the art of breaking down high-level goals into low-level steps, like a commanding general who wants to cripple the enemy's production ability, but he can't exactly tell each soldier to "go cripple the enemy's production ability", he must break it down into more primitive action, like "go bomb a weapons factory" or "go harrass a supply convoy", those actions might themselves be high-level goals that need further breaking down (which weapons factory and when and how to bomb it).
All of this might sound like nonsense to you, and it is, because words are a bad tool to describe activities and habits of mind. I will just answer your question
>is it something quite hard for most people to grasp
No, I don't think so. Not the fundamentals at any rate, the raw notion of telling computers what to do. This is something school kids master. Programming is not a priestly activity, again not at certain levels, and it can be quite rewarding if you're a certain type of person.
Come up with a reason you want to learn programming for, say it to me here or any place for that type of question, and I will give you a programming language to learn and a learning resource to learn from.
You have to be tenacious, it gets frustrating sometimes, I don't say this to intimidate you (your first learning experience need not be frustrating) or show off how we programmers are a tough bunch who are exceptionally good at handling frustration (we're not, we scream and cuss and rage and cry), but just to prepare and reassure you. You will have days and nights where you question if it's just you or if this <programming activity> is really that frustrating, the answer, now and ever, is that it isn't you. Some of that is failure and inferiority of the tools and infrastructure, but some of that is fundamental about programming as command and control and communication, it's frustrating for the same reason dealing with people or kids or animals can be frustrating and hard.
There is working for a company that provides gym management software and you get a development request to add a reportable field for health insurer and policy number because one of your big customers inked a deal with Blue Cross.
And then there is developing the software that allows Falcon 9 rockets to land themselves on a floating platform.
In my experience a lot of the gym management software guys fancy themselves Falcon 9 developers. And they, you know, aren’t.
you severely misunderstand the difficulty I have with this kind of thing. I had an elementary school with like 20 students in the class and didn't have people's name memorized even after a few years. I was meeting a guy named Ted almost weekly for a while, and it took about a year to get his name consistently right. I had an internship at a particle physics place and understood the physics, but it didn't work out because I couldn't be trained on the computer console. Something that most people have is missing in my brain, and your advice is like telling someone with total face blindness that they just need practice
I think the point everyone here is making is that you don’t even have to memorize anything, all of these commands are online.
Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you *already* knew. I’ve been on the other end of this in the past, and I have never, ever let a developer or coder go because I thought they weren’t learning fast enough; it has always been because they weren’t able to code what I needed *right now*. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today, and when I know that you can just take all that experience somewhere else. Getting fired doesn’t mean “You’re learning slowly,” it means “You have to learn more before working here.”
Unless you’ve been in this industry for a decade, this is perfectly normal. The average person will be fired several times during their life, and most of these will come early on while you’re less productive than a highly-experienced worker. I understand why that can feel frustrating; it is. But unfortunately, there’s no magic trick here, just a shitton of Googling and checking the documentation.
I can't even remember having to memorize anything. Maybe I've gotten good enough that I've just already done it, but for most things there's almost no "commands" to memorize. I know "here is what this library *should* do" and read the documentation to find whatever "find string by start of it" is called.
Some beginner languages, like BASIC, have a pile of commands that you might want to memorize but they fit on one piece of paper.
By commands do you mean language keywords or tools like compilers? If it's the latter why not try an interpreted language like Python, which really has one command, `python`. Even for the former I would recommend it, because it goes easy on the symbols and uses words in places where C-like languages have you conjure a soup of characters.
The trick is to use Google. It will be *very* painful for the first few months looking up every single command, but eventually like 80% of it will stick, and the last 20% can still be Googled.
I once read a series of research papers by some guys who were trying to figure out why some people fail to learn to program, and they had a test that they claimed was fairly good at predicting who would succeed in a class.
They show incoming students a bunch of short simple programs, focusing on things like variable assignments, and ask students to predict the results of these programs.
Then, they DON'T check which students answered CORRECTLY. The students haven't been taught this programming language yet; there's no particular reason they should get these right.
Instead, they check which students answered CONSISTENTLY. That is, students who came up with SOME set of rules for how the language could work, and then applied those rules systematically to all the questions, rather than answering each question separately in an ad hoc way.
For instance, a statement like "A = B" could hypothetically mean a bunch of different things. Maybe it means you change A to match B, or you change B to match A, or they swap values, or they average values, or this is a test of equality and neither of them change. They don't look for students who guessed the intended meaning, but they look for students who picked SOME possible meaning and then applied it consistently, rather than changing their interpretation the next time they encountered a statement of this form.
.
I don't have any experience teaching introductory programming. In college, I specifically avoided tutoring for the entry-level class, because I couldn't think how I'd explain fundamental concepts like "variables" to someone who didn't just intuitively get them. So I don't know if any of this is right.
But my working hypothesis is that some people get tripped up by the fact that a computer will just do EXACTLY what you said, and nothing else, with absolutely no regard for context or common sense or implied goals.
This is rather different from writing instructions for humans, who mostly try to grasp the purpose of the instructions and then fill in/change/ignore any details to make them more aligned with the inferred purpose. (Often without even realizing that they're doing this.)
Honestly, I'd just sit them down in front of any Zachtronics game and see how they handle it. I learned far more programmatical thinking from playing Space Chem than I ever did in an actual programming class.
My thoughts looking at that if statement are that I would hope for a bit more parenthetical wrapping of the active terms, while being unsure if you mean the = as an assignment operation, an equality operation, or if you are simply attempting to declare the two sides to be logically equivalent statements ala symbolic logic.
>some people get tripped up by the fact that a computer will just do EXACTLY what you said, and nothing else, with absolutely no regard for context or common sense or implied goals.
Reminds me of that Charles Babbage quote:
>"On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question"
I've known a handful of people who just didn't get it. Their brains refused to work that way. I've known a lot of people who took to it like ducks to water, loved it, and became very good at it. And I've known a mass of others who could learn the basics, and do a workmanlike job on the easy stuff, but would never ever be able to handle the kinds of things that give programmers respect from their peers, and seriously good salaries.
I can't even guess at numbers, if everyone were to try to learn programming; I presume those least likely to be able to learn it generally select themselves out, just as people who can't carry a tune in a bucket select themselves out of music classes.
I suspect it's also changing over time. My experience is with classic programming languages. (The kind with for loops, while loops, etc.) Some modern languages are very different, and may be easier - or harder - either on average, or for particular people.
Finally, the set of people who can work well with concurrency - multiple things happening at the same time - is much smaller than the set that can work well with single-threaded programming. Professionals routinely founder. Programming environments are designed to simplify this to the point where most can handle it, and people still mess up regularly. And most simply can't handle the level of generality needed to create those environments.
I can't rule that out, but I tend away from that explanation. Tools like sequence diagrams can allow you to avoid the need for a large working memory and can allow you to be methodical about the work being done.
I suspect it has more to do with being able to reason under cases of uncertainty. There's a need to be able to handle the idea that something else is in an indeterminate state. Since the main goal of concurrency is performance (along some metric), one of the main challenges in doing that kind of programming is to increase the number of possible indeterminate states rather than to reduce them. Reducing them can be done with enough locks, but that ultimately eliminates the benefits of concurrency in the first place.
> Finally, the set of people who can work well with concurrency - multiple things happening at the same time - is much smaller than the set that can work well with single-threaded programming.
I find this very surprising. What's the conceptual difference that makes the former so much harder to understand?
I don't really know whether there's a conceptual difference, or whether it's just that complexity goes way up, and people can't keep all the possibilities in mind. What I mostly observe is the number of bugs in this space, and the number of people who never get competent.
It gets even worse when you have to consider out of order execution. Your program lists three steps one after another; the cpu or the compiler decides to do step 2 before step 1, not seeing any dependency between them. (This is normal; good programmers know when this is allowed and when it is not, and how to forbid reordering when it matters.)
But you can get in trouble - often in the form of a rare, intermittent bug - without this. Thread 1s step 5 only happens before thread 2s step 2 once in a billion times, but if you don't take into account that it *might*, you might get a very unpleasant surprise when it does happen.
Possibly the difference is between people who think "what could happen" and people who think either "what do I intend to happen" or "what did happen in my tests".
"It gets even worse when you have to consider out of order execution." Ouch! Good point! Normally, for serial execution, the compiler (or hardware!) will only do this when it is safe - but that gets much harder (impossible?) to determine in a parallel environment. As you said, reordering can be forbidden when necessary.
Concurrency is a big problem in web development, in which much of what happens depends on a response from a server, which could take any amount of time (or might error out for reasons you have no control over). Almost everything has to work asynchronously. So the discipline has built out lots of tools for managing it, which make it easier for less-than-genius programmers (like me!) to wrap our minds around. Redux is a good example of a widely-implemented one.
The more we build out tools and practices for managing these very difficult problems, the more accessible the field becomes. React is easier than Angular, which is easer than JQuery, which is easier than raw JavaScript.
Multi-threading requires a more extensive mental model to understand what your code is doing and it is also harder to bug hunt. It creates greater demands on your "working memory" basically.
The problem isn't really a conceptual difference. The problem is that without constraints, things can happen in any order. The most accessible example of this is printing; suppose you have one thread that prints "How are you, Isaac?" and another thread that prints "Loading, please wait...". You'll get output that looks like this: "HoLwoadi nagre y,o pu,le Iassaae waic?t...".
(Exercise: in serial code, there is only one potential output value from those two print statements. In parallel code, how many potential output values are there? This might give you an idea why people have more trouble with parallel code.)
Concurrency problems common enough to have names:
- Race condition: the results of your code will differ according to which thread takes a conflicting action first. This gives you output that is nondeterministic when considering only your own code.
- Deadlock: two threads are each waiting for the other one to finish before they continue their own work. This prevents you from having any output at all.
- [I don't know a name for this]: Thread A reads the value of a variable. Thread B changes the value of that variable. Thread A continues its work using the old value. Thread A is going to produce output, but probably not correct output.
(Treating every character in each input string as unique, which is the correct analogical approach, I calculate 446,775,310,800 different ways to print them in parallel, versus, as noted, one way to print them in sequence. This is why people can't reason about unconstrained concurrency.)
But it also has a specific form where thread A and thread B both add 1 to the variable's value, which they do by reading it, then writing back the incremented value. After this happens the value sometimes only goes up by one, because A read it, then B read it, and only then did either one write their incremented value.
In serial code, until you hit a control structure, the order of events matches the order of the lines in the program text. In concurrent programming, you need to constantly be worrying: If the processor executing this thread reads or writes this variable at this point in the code, might some other processor executing a different thread have altered or need to read that variable? ( This is a simple version of what gives rise to "critical sections" ) There are all sorts of other failure modes that don't exist with serial code.
As someone who taught symbolic logic for a bit, which is a bit easier than coding. You get a bimodal distribution even among college students.
Half the class finds it fairly easy, half the class is terrible at it and will maybe get a B if they struggle their ass off.
Mostly probably just tracking if people have any analytical thinking skills. I am sure you could train up most people to some very minimal competency that would barely be useful for anything. But why bother?
Certainly everyone can understand commanding a simple robot, or executing a set of tasks. But you get into more complicated actual programming with logical operators, variables, recursions etc., and you just lose tons of people.
I TAed the intro to computer science class for a few semesters in my undergrad program. I went to Williams, where you can basically expect everyone to be of above-average intelligence.
My experience was that a few people took to it like ducks to water, lots of people kinda... could do it, but it wasn't easy or natural for them, and a few people just, like, absolutely could not manage. I particularly remember one student who was clearly accustomed to succeeding academically (and as far as I know did well at the rest of the school) who just, like, she would come to my TA hours and slowly, painfully, frustratingly for both of us, I would do her homework for her, often by process of elimination -- like, we'd get to something that called for a while loop, and first she would try an if, and I would coach her out of it, and then she'd try a for loop, and no, that wasn't really right either, and then she'd try a repeat loop (this was Pascal -- I'm old), and no, and okay finally yes, here's a while loop. This wasn't her being lazy or unmotivated, it just did *not* make sense to her.
I think it's easier to learn than the math normally taught in high school in the US. Harvard has a class called CS50 that is meant to be something like "What everyone should know about computer science" that's worth checking out I think.
Neither. I'd say about 50% of people can learn to code reasonably well, and 50% can't, and it doesn't correlate heavily with overall intelligence.
I know some very bright people who, even if they gave it 100% effort, would never really "get it". I also know some not-so-bright people who do a decent job writing code for well-defined tasks.
I expect it correlates with intelligence (basically all mental tasks do), but I think there's definitely a talent for coding and that kind of thinking that different people have in different measures.
I've noticed a lot of programmers have a side habit related to RPGs, board gaming, or music.
This leads me to suspect there is some sort of "Making your brain work in new/weird patterns" talent/skill that translates to "making your human meat-brain able to emulate what the silicon-logic-engine is going to do".
If Democrats hadn't rigged the 2020 election, wouldn't they have insisted on an audit to prove their 81 million votes were genuine and true? At a minimum they would have taken steps to ensure future elections are more trustworthy and ease concerns in SOME small way no? Always watch what they are doing not what they are saying. When they accuse others of something there is a 99% chance they are doing that exact crime themselves and telling everyone to LOOK over there ELVIS!
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner, He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.”
It was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes accepted as truth.”
This is something where you need to be a lot more specific about what it is that you expect people to do.
Insisting on "an audit"? We routinely do recounts in close elections - that's literally an audit. And in 2020, we had lots of court cases where the Republicans made specific allegations of fraud and courts looked at the (lack of) evidence.
If those aren't "audits", or aren't sufficient, in your eyes, what *specifically* do you expect the Democratic Party should have done or asked to have done?
Same for "taken steps to ensure elections are more trustworthy". What steps, *specifically*? Because all of the easy ones involve either making voting significantly harder for a fair number of people, or de-anonymizing voting. And there are good reasons why not merely Democrats (the party) but democrats (people who value democracy) are going to be skeptical of both of those.
The Democrats didn't rig the 2020 election. The people who believe that the Democrats *did* rig the election, will not be persuaded by any "audit" because they'd rather believe that the audit was also rigged. So there's no reason for the Democrats to waste lots of time and money, or making voting more difficult or dangerous, over any of this.
But if there is something that you think would be worth doing, then you have to spell out exactly what that is.
I don't think it's possible to prove one way or the other whether the 2020 elections were correctly decided. The best thing that can be done is to make elections more secure in the future.
In most functioning democracies, both/all major parties are keen on eliminating fraud, because they know they themselves don't use it but they don't trust the other guys. In the US, only one side seems to be keen on eliminating fraud, which is a worry.
In my place, I basically could think of two situations: the counting is unclear (or it's simply very close), then you ask for a re-count (it's paper ballots). Or: there were issues disturbing the election process. Then all you can do is repeat the election in certain, problematic districts. (Which will be significantly later, so basically a new election in those districts). What would that audit entail in the US case?
I can think of one thing that we can do, and that I think we should do.
It's a matter of record whether or not you voted. An auditor could call you up and check whether or not you did. There's a widespread theory that in say, Philly, after the doors were closed, the poll workers stuffed the boxes with Biden ballots filled out in the name of people who actually didn't vote.
A double-checking step where we verified whether or not people we recorded voting actually voted would catch that sort of scheme, and also probably the old Chicago thing where dead people voted. Doesn't seem like it would be that expensive, as long as it was done with statistical sampling instead of trying to call every single voter. So I'd like to see that.
This raises two additional questions: first and foremost: why / how is it possible that poll workers are all from one conspiratory group and don't control each other? Mutual control of poll workers is one of the basic things you would ensure in a election.
I have no idea how it worked in the last election(s), but it should be relatively easy to set up and assure for the next elections. Or maybe I'm mistaken and once trust is too low, nothing really works any more?
Edit: the next bit is not relevant here, as it touches only upon the last election.
Second, what has been done to pin that down right after the election by the Trump campaign, and why is there not more concrete data on this than 'theories'?
What I would do if I was involved in a huge campaign, and suspected that 'poll workers stuffed the boxes with Biden ballots' in a concrete place; is sth. like this: within days of the election I'd ask two major polling firms with a good reputation to be non-partisan and not corruptable to figure out which percentage/how many people voted in district x and then compare this with the number of votes allegedly casted there. Imagine in a sub-district you get 51% and 53% of people claiming they voted, and recorded votes of 54% - that's within the error margin. Imagine you get 51% and 53% of people claiming they voted, and recorded votes of 64% - this should give you a solid case to go to court and ask for the respective investigations. As a side-effect, it would also give you three links to respected non-partisan organizations and official results for a sub-district, and everybody who wanted could look that up.
As in my comment below, I don't think that has much of a chance to work properly two years and many debates later.
Ah, that's concrete enough to give me an idea, thanks.
You seem to trust that voters will remember whether they voted or not two years earlier, but believe me they (a relevant part of them) really don't. (And what's worse, they will be convinced they know). Also, in the meantime there have been heated debates on whether the election was stolen or whether Trump attempted a coup ... I think this can lead to people deliberately claiming they voted or didn't vote to support their side. So while I appreciate the idea, I think *now* the error margin would be significantly bigger than the lizardman constant.
I'm not sure where the two years thing is coming from. I don't mean we could do this now for 2020, I mean there should be an Office of Election Integrity that does this sort of thing as a matter of course. OTOH, the question about people forgetting or lying is a good one, and I don't have a great solution.
I think the far easier solution is to make sure the poll workers are controlling each other automatically. That's not difficult, is it? Then you don't need an additional check afterwards.
Edit: in addition, for example in my current place, every citizen has the right to observe the process of counting the votes (without interfering). That's a great additional mechanism for cross-checking.
I just misunderstand your comment and thought you were talking about auditing the last election.
The Lizardman constant is 5%. What are you going to do when five million registered voters, who are recorded as having voted, tell the auditor "No, I didn't vote, who says I voted"? Because that will happen even if the records of who actually voted, are actually 100% accurate.
> If Democrats hadn't rigged the 2020 election, wouldn't they have insisted on an audit to prove their 81 million votes were genuine and true?
This is something that's bothered me for a while. People love to talk about auditing election results. But that can't be done; the *entire point* of anonymous voting is that votes don't have any provenance. You can only do an audit if you decide anonymous voting was a bad idea.
We're talking about people who were looking at ballots to see if they had flecks of bamboo in them because that would prove they were fake ballots from China, so no, nothing would help.
We're also talking about people who think it's *literally inconceivable* that a handful of districts could have scribbled some fake signatures on a few thousand ballots, or threw some ballots in the trash, or double-counted ballots. Because, you know, it was *so* secure.
Because thats not how elections work. The way it works is what happened in 2000: the parties go to court, a decision is rendered, everyone lives with the outcome. In 2016 the efforts to challange the election got laughed out of court.
Seriously, how do you explain that? Mind you, "Trump" judges were no more sympathetic than others.
The PA Supreme Court effectively said that the election was run in an unconstitutional manner (according to the PA Constitution), but declined to take any action which would have remedied the fault.
If you really want to set the precedent of "you must always accept that every election was secure and legitimate and correctly decided, and election fraud is axiomatically impossible," two can play at that game. Red district polling centers in swing states are gonna have a blast in 2024.
After an election, the burden of proof on showing the election was invalid is on people claiming it was invalid.
Before the election, systems should be designed so that someone with a reasonable amount of skepticism can have a reasonable amount of confidence in the outcome.
After the election is too late to debate about how the system was designed.
I would strongly disagree with that framing, but what I'm saying is that if we all accept those assumptions, you can't start complaining in 2024 when tens of thousands of Democrat ballots go missing, or more people vote for Trump than the number of registered voters in a district. If the game we're playing is no longer democracy but instead "we put some basic rules in place, but beyond that, anything goes" then we'll just have a competition of who can scribble fake signatures the fastest. And you won't be able to question it, because that would make you an election denier, and you've spent the last 2 years talking about how elections are *so secure* and how it would require an *inconceivable* level of competency for conspirators to throw some ballots in the trash or fake some signatures.
Yes, you can complain if ballots go missing, but you have to have some evidence that this occurred. Again, Bush v. Gore. I personally think that case was wrongly decided, but there being no lawful alternative, I have accommodated myself. As should you.
My question is unanswered: How do you explain the Republicans poor showing in the many lawsuits they filed?
It seems like there is one: an audit that would show that Trump actually won. But it seems that no audit showing Trump actually won would satisfy the people claiming the election was correctly decided.
Two teams played football. Team B won, clearly. It was close enough, but hardly a nail-biter.
Team B claims the scorer erred in recording goals, and they actually won. (They're a little slow on catching on to sportsmanship.) The two backup scorers compare notes: no error was made; the score was recorded correctly.
The next day, team A shows up to scrimmage. There is a chain-link fence surrounding the field, a padlocked gate, and a 'no trespassing' sign with a statement that team B's Daddy bought the field and will prosecute any trespassers.
Obviously, if you start with the assumption that team A won, then you can reach the conclusion that team A won.
What actually happened is more like:
Two teams played football. Team B was clearly winning during the first half of the game; the score was 2-3 in favor of team B. Then, halfway through the game, team A demanded that the game be paused for the night, so they stopped playing. When the teams came back the next day, the scoreboard said it was 4-3 in favor of team A.
Team B, seeing this, was very surprised. Why had the game paused yesterday? Why did the score change overnight even though the opponents didn't score any goals in that time? It just didn't make sense.
Predictably, team B asked the referee to intervene. "This is obviously fraudulent. Can you change the score back?" But the referee said "Sorry, there's nothing I can do. The scoreboard says 4-3." Team B replied, "But the score was obviously 2-3 when we left off yesterday. How could they have gained two points when we weren't even playing? That's an obvious logical discrepancy." The referee responded, "Sorry, but there's just No Evidence. Can you show me any proof? I'm looking at the scoreboard, and it says 4-3."
You can think of things which could have been demonstrated soon after the election, and which would have been convincing evidence of election fraud in the three relevant states and in the relevant direction. For example, if there really were large numbers of voters who were listed as having sent in mail-in ballots, but who were willing to testify that they had not mailed in a ballot, that would be pretty convincing evidence of one kind of fraud that Trump's followers have claimed. Or if a recount of hand-marked paper ballots had shown that the reported electronic totals were in substantial disagreement with what was on those paper ballots, that would have been pretty convincing evidence of fraud.
But those things were not, in fact, demonstrated. Trump's people had the opportunity to present whatever evidence they had to election officials and judges, including many Republican election officials and judges, but they didn't provide any convincing evidence to them.
Now, one plausible argument is that election security mechanisms used in the US are simply not very good, so that an election-stealing level of fraud may have happened without leaving enough evidence to demonstrate it. This is plausible (election security really isn't all that great), but it applies to every election. That is, the existence of weaknesses that might have been undetectably exploited is no better reason to propose overturning the 2020 elections than it is to propose overturning the 2016 elections.
A second plausible argument is that Trump and his team were comically inept (see the press conference in front of the landscaping company), so maybe that evidence did exist but they were unable to find and present it to judges or election officials or media outlets. But again, "we claim there was fraud that stole this election from us but we can't provide any evidence because we're too inept" is a fully general argument for why you ought not to have to lose any elections.
I think people need to get a lot more comfortable with the idea that there is a "margin of error" in the electoral process just like there is in any polling process and stop fixating on whether a particular result was "correct". Bush v Gore in FL for example was a tie. That is what happened. The result was well within the error bounds.
The danger with that approach is that you've now got two edge cases to worry about instead of one: the boundary between "Candidate A Wins" and "Too Close To Call", and the one between "Candidate B Wins" and "Too Close to Call".
True. Ideally one wants to smoothly transition from "Candidate A Wins" to "Candidate B Wins" as the margin gets smaller and smaller and reverses sign.
Semi-seriously: One way to do this is to deliberately inject a measured amount of randomness to reflect a plausible amount of uncertainty in what the "real" result was - kind of as a memento mori to the "winning" candidate to remind them that their "mandate" is shakier than a binary decision makes it look.
A finer-grained version of this would be to send each decision to one of the two candidates randomly, with the random weights depending on the margin in the election. E.g. if 2020 had been an exact tie, give the sign/veto choice for each bill randomly to Trump/Biden with 50/50 odds.
My usual suggested remedy for all this is to reduce the power of the office sought, until too few people care about the result to raise an audible fuss about it.
Regrettably, I don't think that that is in the cards.
Politically, my preference is to maximize freedom for the median person. In other words, to maximize the live options that they have, choices which are not punished by the federal government, the state government, their employer, their landlord, or internet mobs. I dislike that the left attacks freedom of speech through cancel culture. I dislike that the right attacks bodily freedom through everything from the drug war to abortion bans.
This isn't quite the same as libertarianism. Giving e.g. Bezos free reign to use his bargaining power to maximum effect, barring only force or fraud, would give him vast power over his employees and deprive them of many of their freedoms.
Ehh. Pragmatically, I don't think reducing office power is in the cards for 2022, say, but I think it's relatively low cost to advertise that option as something to press for in 2024 and beyond. (It wouldn't be hard to have a third-party-tier candidate stumping it just to get the message out, and then it gets gradually stronger from there, having a real effect on local elections, etc.)
At the very least, I think it's good for people to think about solving election fraud and automatically consider solving it from the other end.
And low office power doesn't mean high CEO power to me, either. Not in that sense. To me, low office power means high CEO power that is obvious to all; high officer power means *still* high CEO power that is less obvious, as it is disguised as office power.
Some are trying pass legislation to clarify the process of certifying our electors' registering of our votes. I hope they're successful.
The complexity of the current system is rooted in the 19th century, and could use some simplification and transparency. Having said that, I think claiming to be an "auditor" of any election requires more qualification than setting down your beer and turning the baseball cap around.
Very much agreed. I think it is part of a larger problem with refusing to admit that there are margins of error in all processes (college admissions, hiring, safety testing, law). In a saner world, I think Bush v Gore should have been called "too close to call" and the two of them should have tossed a coin.
ISTR that there are states where they resolve a literal tie via some randomization procedure--I think by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing out a poker hand and seeing whose hand wins.
Hm, but then I don't know how this fits the 'too close to call' you mention above. As for casted votes, in my view it should be possible to be really accurate, if needed.
In theory counting cast votes should be very accurate. Even transmitting binary information has some error rate, but http://bucarotechelp.com/networking/nwtech/92050804.asp "Bit error ratio is the ratio of the number of bits received incorrectly compared to the number of bits transmitted in a specified time interval or quantity of bits. The typical acceptable BER levels range from 1e-9 to 1e-12." which would only miscount a single vote in a whole election.
In practice, there are error sources many orders of magnitude larger than this. Voting machines can be dropped, or misconnected, or misconfigured.
On the voters' side, ballots can be misread. Voters can be on the margin of switching their vote - perhaps one cup of coffee away from voting differently.
One way to view the election process is to view any claim of a "mandate" very skeptically if the difference in votes is less than the lizardman constant.
Ah, in terms of 'does the election result always perfectly translate the will of the people', absolutely. Especially as the will of the people is not stable, but flexible.
In terms of: does everybody have a reasonable and equal chance to vote and have his/her voice being counted. Well, I think there need to be a lot of effort into making this sure (and still it'll never be perfect). At least from a distance, the whole gerrymandering for example looks, huh, very weird (and also problematic I guess). At this point in time, it seems even a bipartisan commission assigning districts randomly across the country according to whichever pre-assigned rules seems better than what is going on. But I'm digressing.
To be fair, you can use statistical methods to infer voters' preferences in cases where the ballot was ambiguous (e.g. accidental overvotes for both Buchanan and Gore). In that case the race was firmly won by Gore:
Ouch! I had misreading ballots in mind as one of the contributors to election results not following voters' intents, but I wasn't aware that it showed up as overmarked ballots.
The desire for touch-screen voting was that we wouldn't have the President of the United States decided by the opinion of some guys in a room about what counted as a sufficiently hanging chad.
Partisans will freak out [1] but we'd much rather have an inaccurate measurement that everyone can agree on than a very accurate measurement that we can't agree on.
"The desire for touch-screen voting was that we wouldn't have the President of the United States decided by the opinion of some guys in a room about what counted as a sufficiently hanging chad."
Yes, though it gets tricky. Electronic voting machines can prevent "hanging chad" types of ambiguities. To make it possible to have a recount, the design needs to generate a permanent hard copy record of each vote, that the voter can see and verify, and which can be reviewed later, if a recount is needed. Not all designs do this.
Tom Scott has a nice video on the vulnerabilities of electronic voting:
It's quite likely that a number of people accidentally voted for Buchanan.
But there is no way of actually implementing an actual change in the outcome without turning over the power in elections from voters to statisticians.
Someone said upthread it was a tie, and that's what happened. Re-run November 7 2000 with the slightest change in Florida weather and you cannot predict who wins.
"without turning over the power in elections from voters to statisticians"
Yup, and there are usually multiple plausible ways of doing a statistical analysis.
As you said:
"Re-run November 7 2000 with the slightest change in Florida weather and you cannot predict who wins."
I vote for epistemic humility in this case? :-) We should be more broadly willing to admit that many of our decision processes have a large random component.
We simulate the entire world population, including all conditions on the ground as they were in 2000 (or whatever election we're interested in). We simulate every cloud, every can of coke, every wife cheating with the pool boy. Then we run the simulation 10,000 times, with slight permutations to it, and take the median vote total (or the mode if it's not normally distributed? I'm not a statistician).
Simple, right? Just have to make sure politicians don't try to influence the simulation...
They weren't obligated to prove anything. Someone else's ignorance of election procedures is not their emergency. The Democrats should have referred them to the League of Women Voters for education.
Well I think your first question answers your second. There have been plenty of recounts, court cases, "audits", etc, but nobody who thinks the election was stolen will ever be satisfied by any of them. So there are no steps they can take, that haven't already happened, that will actually assuage those people's concerns..
If they passed some law saying "there has to be an 'audit' of the vote" and then did such an 'audit' of 2020, it would show that Biden won, which would be evidence in the eyes of their opponents that it was fake, and would lead to the exact same set of questions.
I’m not much of a Republican anymore, but the fiscal conservative in me has to ask “what would we get for the money?”
An audit of 81 million votes is gonna be costly, and kinda pointless expense given that it is overwhelmingly unlikely to (a) change the result or (b) change the opinion of any significant number of “stop the steal” believers
I recently finished Bill Barr's memoir, where he talks about the whole fiasco. His conclusion: there were a lot of last-minute changes to election law in the face of COVID-19. Nearly all of those changes have been recognized as undermining election security, which would likely decrease public faith in electoral outcomes. However, the AG's office looked for election fraud and didn't find it - including and especially in all the places Trump fans love to cite. His sense was that election results were skewed - potentially by selective media/social media bias, but certainly by creative rules mongering 'emergencies' putatively justified by COVID-19 (more details in the book) - but that's kind of to be expected at this point.
(He also thought Trump lost by not moderating in the final months before the election - something he says Trump did in 2016. Apparently there was a debate in the inner circle about whether Trump needed to excite his base or play for moderates. Trump though he needed to be more of a fighter and be seen that way, but increasingly many top advisors told him that he needed to tone it down so regular voters would listen to him. He didn't agree, and lost votes in key suburban districts where he had done better in 2016 than in 2020. So, Hanlon's Razor.)
Whenever a Republican wins without getting the popular vote, Democrats decry that the election was illegitimate. The standard rejoinder on the Right is, "That's not the name of the game. If the game was 'win the popular vote' Republicans would run a different campaign, possibly even a different candidate, and the entire election would have been different. You have to play to win by the rules you're given, not cherry pick the rules that would have put your guy on top and then cry foul afterward."
I think that's a sound argument. It's an especially good argument when an election is close, like in Bush vs. Gore. In that contest, Gore complained that he should have won but that due to irregularities in Florida it only looked like he lost. He took that argument to court, SCOTUS said no, we're going to keep it as-is, and Bush assumed the presidency. Don't like how the game is played? Too bad, Gore had other legal arguments he could have made, but chose the strategy he did and the Court didn't buy it. That's how the game is played.
Listen up Republicans: the shoe is on the other foot. A huge part of campaign strategy is effectively managing the legal fights before and after election day. This is something that both parties have used to their advantage before, not just in Bush vs. Gore. In 2008, Democrats won a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the US Senate. Republicans challenged two of those races, and those challenges went on for months before the two Democrats who won got to sit and actually participate in the Senate proceedings. Because of those legal delays (election day results were not changed in either case), the filibuster-proof majority Democrats legitimately won was severely limited (July '09 to Jan '10). Sen. Ted Kennedy of MA died Jan. 2010, MA voters elected a Republican whose major campaign issue was that he would end the filibuster-proof majority. From a strict 'fairness' standard, or from a 'will of the people' standard, this legal strategy by Republicans was decidedly unjust. But from a rules-of-the-game strategy it was genius, and very effective.
Trump is notoriously bad at the legal aspect of the game. He was good at other parts of the political game, but this was a major area of weakness for him, which his opponents identified and exploited. Had he been good at it, he would have challenged the changes to election law BEFORE election day. That would have required him to have a state-by-state legal strategy that was spot-on. The legal challenges didn't need to resolve before election day, but they at least needed to be filed. It's part of the rules the legal system runs on, and not understanding those rules doesn't allow you to just wave your hand in the direction of "justice" and hope your way into a win. That hasn't worked for Democrats or Republicans in the past, and it didn't work for Trump.
This was an unforced error. Many of the changes to election law were made in ways that everyone agreed would help Democrats. Many of the changes were made by state officials, not by the state legislatures, and could therefore have been challenged on a number of legal principles. But only if those challenges were brought before the election. Trump lost the legal part of the election game, then whined about it for months and still whines about it to this day.
You have to know the rules of the game you're playing by. You don't get to say you won based on rules you weren't playing by, then claim the election wasn't legitimate/was stolen.
"But fraud!"
The rule of the game is that Trump has to prove there was fraud. Trump was complaining for months before the election that the campaign was going to be rigged. Instead of focusing on the rules changes that were at that time shifting the odds against him, he focused on complaining to Fox and CNN. His people were responsible for proving that rigging had indeed occurred. He predicted all this ahead of time, so he should have been ready to document it when it happened. Why wasn't he on top of that? If he wanted to win on the fraud claim, the burden of proof was on him to produce evidence. He didn't step up with solid evidence. He had a third-rate legal challenge that was cobbled together after the fact. He tried a strategy that he was weak at and it didn't pan out for him.
This is how the game is played. Trump lost. Play a better game next time.
Neither of us is Barr, and of course you're paraphrased his position, but let me make one point on this:
"His sense was that election results were skewed - potentially by selective media/social media bias, but certainly by creative rules mongering 'emergencies' putatively justified by COVID-19 (more details in the book) - but that's kind of to be expected at this point."
Less secure vs more secure is one aspect, but we should be careful not to conclude that there is one, true set of election laws that are "the right ones", and that any others are "skewing" the results; any set of laws will make it easier or harder for some groups of people to get their votes in, and we need to agree on a some set of those laws, but that doesn't make them the one true law. Early voting, for instance, if in-person, wouldn't seem to have security problems, but people fight over it all the time.
I agree that there's no 'divinely inspired' set of election laws. Barr has his reasons for defending the laws he defends, though I'm not convinced by his logic on all the rules he prefers.
That said, I am partial to the argument that adjustments made in response to COVID-19 within months of the election were probably not a positive step toward greater security and/or confidence in election integrity. To the extent they provided greater access, it was likely sloppily implemented. We can argue whether each of the changes made was rationally designed and/or appropriate to the situation. I think the likelihood that the crisis wasn't exploited for political gain is pretty close to 0%.
I think everyone is a hard conflict theorist once it comes time to define election laws. Democrats want exactly the set of laws/procedures/rules that they believe give them the biggest advantage, and Republicans want the set that they believe will give *them* the biggest advantage.
"Should we have early voting" or "should we require picture ID to vote" are evaluated 100% on that question by essentially everyone.
Changing the rules to allow for early voting and mail in ballots and such ... I don't necessarily agree that it makes it less secure. And I think people forget that a lot of those changes happened on a bipartisan basis. IIRC the Texas Republicans, after the fact, challenged as unconstitutional some change to the voting rules that they'd supported at the time the change was made.
But granting for the sake of argument that they make elections less secure - this sort of messing with the rules happens every election, it's not the same as fraud. Democrats are always complaining about this, Republicans allegedly purging voter rolls, closing down polling stations, shortening hours the polls are open, etc. All skeevy (if you take the allegations at face value) but don't mean the elections were stolen in the sense people normally mean.
"Whenever a Republican wins without getting the popular vote, Democrats decry that the election was illegitimate." - unlike trump, both Gore and Hillary conceded (and Clinton/Obama both treated Bush/trump as the Presidents-elect as well). "Illegitimate" means different things to different people in this context, people often use it as "fuck that guy", but for Gore/Hillary it didn't mean "I'm the lawful President-elect and will try to take power on Jan 20".
"Trump is notoriously bad at the legal aspect of the game." - I question whether this is true, in relation to the election at least. He relied on shit lawyers and lost a lot, but that's because of making arguments and pushing cases that others wouldn't even try. In other words it's not like Marco Rubio would have won those same court cases and successfully overturned the election.
I largely agree with this. The legislature has the Constitutional authority to decide how they want to appoint their electors, so it's hard to see how Trump could have challenged the Texas case. That's entirely different from a State Secretary of State unilaterally changing election rules...
Less secure? Really?:
As you pointed out, these kinds of shenanigans happen every election cycle. Both R & D do it; they do it selectively in ways and in jurisdictions that will help them; and although it undermines elections in its own way, it's technically legal and not the same as election fraud. It happened a lot more in the run-up to the 2020 election, under the influence of COVID-19 reactions, so if Trumpers want to claim that was the difference between W/L for him, they should have challenged, in court, on the merits at the time. But THEY DIDN'T.
Democrats 'officially' concede elections, so that's okay:
I grant that nobody has displayed the same childish charade Trump put on. But at least in Hillary's case I'm not sure she/her party can be said to have behaved better. Between Crossfire Hurricane and 4 years of the entire Democratic party claiming Trump's election wasn't legitimate, it's difficult to say whether they or Trump did more to undermine electoral confidence by pushing bogus claims long after they should have given them up - confusing the public with obvious lies.
Trump sucks at law vs. he never had a case:
It's true that Trump's 'legal team' (after he fired the legitimate lawyers because they wouldn't pursue the idiotic legal strategy he'd prescribed) filed a bunch of lawsuits they had no hope of winning. I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing that if he'd had a good legal strategy from the beginning, he could have filed suits he MIGHT have won. But he didn't. (Like Gore in 2000, we can't know what would have happened with a better legal strategy. But both Trump's legal strategy AND team in 2020 were objectively bad.)
Alternately, if fraud really did play a role in the final outcome (probably not, but for the sake of argument) Trump could have caught some people in the act - especially in critical swing states. He said before election day he thought it was going to happen, why didn't he at least try to document it? (Maybe he did try, but didn't find anything? In that case, WHY CLAIM FRAUD?)
All the losers complain:
I guess this is to be expected at this point. Whoever loses claims the election was illegitimate and we have to listen to them whine for 4-8 years about how it should have been different.
2016-2020 ("Russia Russia Russia")
2008-2016 Obama/Birther (because we should believe Clinton campaign opposition smears that outlive their usefulness when it's a candidate you don't like, but when it's a candidate you do like - Trump/Russia - it's obviously fake and nobody should be fooled into believing it)
2000-2008 "Florida should have gone Gore!"
1992-2000 "The only reason Bush Sr. lost was because of Perot and media bias playing up a recession that had already passed"
Before that I don't remember, but I'm sure there was a lot of bellyaching about how the election might have gone the other way but for something that was just plain "not fair".
Especially unsolicited mail-in ballots. There's a difference between a registered voter sending out for a ballot, the State confirming that person's information fits their records, and then the State sending the ballot back; vs. spamming everyone on the voter rolls without confirming who is even still in the jurisdiction, alive, etc.
I'm looking for a statistician who is experienced in a very specific kind of survey. All our statisticians have told us, basically, "This is a branch of stats I'm not comfortable working in." What are we doing? In general, we're trying to create a validated tool for making a medical assessment based on complex criteria. We have about 15 people who have completed the grading exercise, then they took a break of about 2 weeks and took the exercise again. Now we need to do some statistics comparing inter-rater reliability with pre-determined expected scores, as well as comparing intra-rater reliability.
A similar publication to ours, but in a different indication, used Kendall's tau and another test. I'm not experienced enough to understand the nuances, though. We need someone who understands the statistics well enough to help us understand what we're doing and how to ensure we don't run the wrong test. This would be for publication, but we can also compensate for time spent.
I know this isn't a classified thread, but I was hoping someone could point me to a good statistician who has worked on something like this in the past.
Oh, I can definitely do this--it's not even particularly hard, and it's bizarre that the statisticians refused, although finding time might be an issue for me depending on urgency. Feel free to email me at cdp49@cam.ac.uk
But it *is* possible that they bailed because 15 is way too small of a sample for anything.
It's great when people on here are able to collaborate this way or give each other wonderfully useful bits of info. I've been on both sides of that sort of thing here.
Inter-rater reliability is really standard stuff. It’s used a lot in psychology. Covered in Intro stats textbooks in social science. I’m surprised your statisticians bailed. They could easily just look up how to do it. It should be easy to find someone who can handle this.
That's what we thought! Maybe we need to talk to some psychology statisticians. We've talked to 3 experienced biopharma statisticians, and they've all begged off, saying it's something they haven't had to deal with in years. (We're in clinical trials, so a lot more of RCT design, survival curves, etc.)
Yes, do that. Any grad student could tell you the basic formula, but you want someone mathy enough to understand stuff like adjusting the p values to take into account the fact that you're running significance tests for multiple items. But that's still very simple stats.
I'd ban multiple comparison adjustments if I could TBH; multiple comparisons problems happen because researchers fail to adjust for regression to the mean:
The correct way to deal with the multiple comparisons "problem" is to set regularizing priors and to use multivariate models if you have multiple outcomes.
OK, I'm a believer. The stats I learned I understood well, but that was several decades ago and I have not kept up with advances. But I do grasp the concept of the need to adjust for multiple comparisons, and you sound like you have your head screwed on straight about what's the best way to do that.
There's a sort of viral topic going around: Do people look younger than they used to?
All of the explanations I've seen offered - sunscreen, total sun exposure, and smoking - seem to indicate an interesting research question: Do nerds look younger than non-nerds?
Working at your desk as opposed to in the sun or somewhere without enough air or around chemicals, sleeping enough, eating normal food as opposed to whatever your kids left on their plate or whatever you were able to buy at a gas station, doing some kind of sport instead of either spending that time trying to earn a little extra money or driving your kids somewhere or just lying down exhausted... I could continue. All of this likely contributes to looking younger, and all of this probably describes nerds a lot more than non-nerds.
Anecdotally, I'm one of those fair-skinned people who look a lot younger than they should. I can't claim a good diet, much exercise, or a reasonable sleep schedule, and I never used sunscreen, so I do think that sometimes it's only about skin color.
I was not aware this was a viral topic, but it definitely makes me feel less bad for consistently overestimating peoples' ages. Thought that was just one of the many weak modules in my brain. I feel like there's a bit of a...horseshoe effect? uncanny age valley? where people in the mushy middle of 18-25 or so are of ambiguous age. But past around that point they're identifiably Older. Like, if I did a scatterplot graph of all the people I end up carding or not carding for alcohol purchases, there'd be a very clearly identifiable drop-off point.
Men do seem easier to accurately gauge as Older than women; the gray/receding hair, which fewer guys dye or try to finagle via barber than in the past. Signs of manual labour or sun exposure. Both sexes have the creases-around-eyes which are just really difficult to acquire young. Makeup helps women a lot, obviously, and occasionally plastic surgery...I think masks are also a big part of it, though. The exact area that masks cover includes a lot of the most fragile facial skin, most prone to ageing. (And it hides facial hair, for dudes.) So it's a low-tech hack that effectively makes everyone look a little younger than they would otherwise.
Smoking is definitely one part of it - if someone "smokes" today, at least where I live, it's more likely marijuana. Doesn't have quite the same deleterious effects. Actually I think it biases in the opposite direction, since I assume that's a youth-oriented thing, and makes me more likely to card if someone obviously reeks of reef...
For sure all those things matter. Particularly from my experience as a quite fair skinned person with a lot of fair skinned relatives, people always say we look super young for our age. Avoiding direct sun from 10-2 your whole life will do that for you.
Interesting, because reputationally (and in my personal experience)*, black people (maybe just black women?) tend to be more youthful looking. Maybe the same root effect (lack of sun damage) but with different reasons. Though a friend of mine once told me that it was simply that black people were much more likely to be on point with moisturizing, because they want to avoid looking "ashy".
Much of the gun discourse in the United States is focused on mass-shootings, which while gruesome, account for a miniscule number of deaths, comparable to the number of deaths-by-lightning-strike.
The vast majority of gun homicides are non-mass, non-police, non-accidental shootings (see 2nd BBC graphic), but I don't have a good sense for how all of this one-on-one violence breaks down. Is it mostly gang violence? Personal vendettas? Home invasions?
This seems like a key question to answer to be able to have any sort of factually-grounded gun control debate. (For the record, I agree that basic additional regulations like more in-depth background checks, are warranted.)
Mostly gang violence iirc. The real solution to gun violence is to legalize drugs. On a related note, I did a bit of digging a couple years back and found that most police killings are the result of routine traffic stops, which suggests a variety of solutions, the first of which would be just to get rid of perverse incentives for ticketing people.
How do the non-drug-dealing gangs pay for guns, which are a bit on the expensive side for unemployed teenagers and the like?
I am skeptical that legalizing drugs will put a *big* dent in the nation's homicide problem, but it could possibly shift the equilibrium towards "yeah, we have *some* guns, and we let people know it so they don't mess with us, but our first-line enforcers have switchblades and baseball bats". Though given the guns already in criminal hands, that would be a slow process at best.
Why don't we try an experiment? Democrats could willingly suspend their second amendment rights, then we pass legislation that removes/outlaws 100% of all guns for Democrats. Anyone who votes Democrat but is caught in the vicinity of a gun goes to prison for a few years.
We implement this, then watch for a few years to see how the crime statistics change. That will provide us experimental and control groups on the order of millions of people. We can run the experiment as long as Democrats want.
The icing on the cake is, Democrats get exactly what they want, nearly zero guns in the areas where they live and work, because Democrat areas are, unsurprisingly, mostly Democrats.
Gun crime in Democrat areas would plummet to zero. Everyone is happy! All the mass shootings or whatever would only occur in Republican areas.
I've had in mind for years a similar idea along a different axis. If I held a magic wand which could make one unilateral change to the U.S. constitution, one of the 2 or 3 top contenders for me would be that the 2nd Amendment applies only to women.
This new amendment would not itself deny any gun rights to men, just to be clear; it would simply leave that question up to Congress (regarding federal lands/facilities/employees) and the state legislatures (for all other situations/places).
I predict that a number of states, including some big ones starting with California, would immediately place restrictions on gun ownership by males. Some of them might, in stages, eventually get close to deciding that men simply can't be trusted with guns.
We would then be conducting an experiment at scale: watch for a few years and see how the crime statistics change.
[P.S. thanks in advance for the observation which I definitely haven't heard before, but yes I am aware that "women" and "men" as categories now have an additional cultural/political complication to contend with.]
"If I held a magic wand which could make one unilateral change to the U.S. constitution, one of the 2 or 3 top contenders for me would be that the 2nd Amendment applies only to women."
I like it. (I'm male.) My single largest reason for supporting the 2nd amendment is that armed households deter home invasion. Burglars who don't know if a household is armed have an incentive to at least try to only burglarize when the residents are elsewhere, which is at least _less_ damaging. And your proposal would preserve this.
While women commit relatively few gun crimes, I suspect a nontrivial number of guns used for illegal activity were obtained via straw purchase by a woman (i.e. clean girlfriend buys gun for gangbanger boyfriend). This would become a bigger problem in your scenario.
True, but could more vigorous enforcement of laws against illegal weapons possession (gangbanger boyfriend goes to club fed for a decade) alleviate this?
We have secret ballots so we can't identify anyone's vote. Party membership is another thing, but a lot fewer people vote in primaries than general elections.
has some information, but they find it unsatisfying, and so do I.
"The FBI lists 22 subcategories, which seems like plenty to get a handle on things. They can be broadly sorted into categories explicitly related to:
sex (prostitution, romantic triangles, rape, sexual assault): 2%
theft (robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft): 9%
drugs and gangs (narcotics, gang killings, juvenile gang killings): 14%
other felonies (arson, gambling, other suspected/unspecified): 11%
other, not felony (prison killings, child killed by babysitter, sniper attacks, other unspecified): 24%
arguments (alcohol-influenced brawl, drug-influenced brawl, argument over money or property, other unspecified arguments): 41%
This is probably not most people’s impression of the typical murder. Only 14% of murders are known to be related to drugs or gangs? Only 2% are connected to sexual motives? And 41% of murders are just “arguments” or “brawls” that get out of hand?"
You missed one of the key theses of that article is that a lot of the answers are unknown.
"But beneath those categories, the data quality is terrible: the “other/unspecified” subcategories make up the lion’s share of what’s supposedly known."
Looking at the raw data referenced, the majority of the arguments are "Other arguments", comprising about a total of 20% of murders. The global "Unknown" is responsible for about 40% of murders. And the "Other than felony type total" "Other-not specified" is about 14% of the total. So about 75% of murders fall into some "other" category.
"To begin with, 40% of cases are simply “unknown circumstances.” But even the “known” figures aren’t very helpful."
I respectfully disagree that I missed that thesis. As I wrote, the authors and my view of the data was that "they find it unsatisfying, and so do I".
Ideally, what I would have _wanted_ from a better version of statistics like this, together with time series analysis of the motives, would be to see if some particular motive dominates the Ferguson effect, the post-BLM murders, or the big peak from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Regrettably, there is no way the existing unclear data would illuminate that. Sigh.
( One minor quibble: I can't tell from the author's phrasing whether the 40% with "unknown circumstances" is 40% of the solved cases, or if it refers to the 40% of unsolved cases. )
I recall Peter Moskos of "Cop on the Beat" said that when he was with the Baltimore PD every murder he came across was linked to the drug trade, but is likely both an exaggeration and unrepresentative of murders broadly.
Many Thanks! I have a question about how to parse this: Did he mean that every murder was legitimately found to be linked to the drug trade, or did he mean that the Baltimore PD artificially construed every murder as linked to the drug trade?
I get the impression that police tend to classify things as gang related without a lot of evidence, so if anything the gang number is too high. The argument escalation route is really badly overlooked. The most typical pattern for a murder in America is that two young men are out socializing and get into an argument about something, then one of them goes to his car/house and get (or just has on his person) a club, knife, or gun, and gets even.
It's a bit outdated, but Geoffrey Canada's "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun" provided me with a lot of insight here. He lays out the social scene he grew up with in black New York: because the police wouldn't stop fights and street crime, you had to learn to fight to defend yourself. No one actually wanted to fight if they could help it, but the only way to deter conflict is to get a reputation as being tough, and those reputations went for entire neighborhoods. Thus from when you were a middle schooler older kids would beat you up and teach you how to fight, because if they didn't the neighborhood would get a reputation as weak. I think this is the same basic instinct driving the escalation of street level arguments. Canada really emphasizes how as weapons became more available (wealth effects? changes in laws? crack epidemic?), neighborhoods around him went from fist fighting to using weapons to eventually guns becoming a common means of settling scores, which led to much more murder than otherwise.
Much appreciated! Presumably this isn't the _only_ pattern for murder, though. As even the FBI categories showed, e.g. murders during thefts are a significant part of the statistics too.
Something similar was shared elsewhere in the thread. I can believe it, since the more "mundane" the context, the more people who are likely to be in that situation. And so even if the probability of it escalating to outright murder is low, the base rate is high. It's a similar reason to why most rapes/assaults are committed by friends and partners, rather than by strangers.
Of the 9,102 murder victims (with complete data on victim-offender relationship) in 2002:
- 8.6% were killed by their spouse
- 5.5% were killed by a parent
- 7.4% were killed by a family member other than their spouse or parent
- 7.3% were killed by their boyfriend or girlfriend
- 45.2% were killed by a friend or acquaintance
- 26% were killed by a stranger.
(That's not a direct quote; I edited & reformatted it for readability.)
"Wives were about half of all spouses in the population in 2002 but 81% of all persons killed by their spouse... Girlfriends were about 50% of all boyfriend-girlfriend relationships but 71% of all victims who were a boyfriend or girlfriend of the murderer."
"While males were 49.1% of the U.S. population in 2002, they were 83.4% of murder victims killed by a friend or acquaintance. The victims of stranger murder were also more likely to be male (86.1%)."
There's also some data there about race statistics, but you're better off using the FBI Unified Crime Reporting statistics (https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr) for that, as they're more complete. The file Expanded_Homicide_Data_Table_03_Murder_Offenders_by_Age_Sex_Race_and_Ethnicity_2020, combined with the US 2020 Census data on race, says that "blacks" were 4.5 times as likely as "whites" to be murdered, and 6.5 times as likely to murder someone. (The Census Bureau uses self-identification, which is usually based on the one-drop rule. They're trying to construct new self-reporting categories to avoid that, but the FBI is not; so 2020 may be the last year for which we can make this calculation.) I think we can assume this is pretty close to the statistics for gun homicides (see the 8/10 figure below).
"... suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (24,292), while 43% were murders (19,384), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were unintentional (535), involved law enforcement (611) or had undetermined circumstances (400)."
"Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) U.S. murders in 2020 – 19,384 out of 24,576 – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. A little over half (53%) of all suicides in 2020 – 24,292 out of 45,979 – involved a gun, a percentage that has generally remained stable in recent years."
So, 43% of 26% = 11% of gun deaths in the US are murders committed by strangers. I don't know whether gang killings are counted as "killed by a friend or acquaintance".
The point about most gun deaths being suicides is especially important. News articles sometimes present statistics showing that gun control reduces gun killings, without mentioning that they counted suicides as gun killings. Whether we ought to count suicides in those figures depends on whether, by your metric, suicide is as bad as homicide; newspaper columnists ought not make that decision for us.
But the more-relevant data that must be counted in order to have a factually-grounded gun control debate is, How does private ownership of military-caliber rifles affect the odds of success of a totalitarian or authoritarian revolution or invasion, what are the prior odds of such a revolution, and what is the typical number of deaths caused by such a revolution? This is what the gun control debate is mostly about. People in red states will tell this to you straight up if you ask them. The fact that I have never, in my life, seen this fact mentioned in a news article on gun control, proves that the views of red-state Americans are never represented in the mass media.
Another relevant point is that the link between violent video-games and mass shootings is about as strong as the link between gun ownership and mass shootings, and better-studied; and nearly all psychologists studying the matter agree that violent video-games more likely than not increase violent behavior (with the notable exception of Dr. Christopher Ferguson, who seems to have made a career out of arguing the opposite opinion, and is the psychologist usually quoted in news articles about gun violence and video games). If reducing gun killings is important enough to ban private ownership of rifles, it's certainly important enough to ban private ownership of violent video-games, which have no positive social value.
One note on the gun suicide question is when Australia enacted large gun control, hangings went up considerably. The increase didn't replace all the previous gun deaths, but the overall decrease was pretty small.
Regardless of your assumptions about the people who disagree with you, it is the duty of the press to represent both sides of an issue, and they have never done that wrt gun control.
Because those who advocated for gun control in 1930s Germany were just kind and compassionate, right? Surely none of them would ever end up in a death squad.
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2015. "Children and Video Games: Playing with Violence." (Updated 2015; original publication was no later than 2006.)
American Academy of Pediatrics. "Policy Statement — Media Violence," Pediatrics 124(5): 1495–503.
Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger, Peter Sitzer, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, eds., 2013. School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention. NYC, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London: Springer.
BJ Bushman, LR Huesmann, 2006. "Short-term and long-term effects of violent media on aggression in children and adults." Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160(4):348–352, pmid:16585478.
Constance Emerson Crooker, 2003. Gun Control and Gun Rights. Westport CT: Greenwood Press.
Blair, J. Pete, and Schweit, Katherine W. (2014). A Study of Active Shooter Incidents, 2000 - 2013. Texas State University and Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. 2014.
Chris Ferguson, 2007. "Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: A meta-analytic review." Aggression & Violent Behavior 12:470-482.
Chris Ferguson, 2010. The wild west of assessment: Measuring aggression and violence in video games. In L. Annetta and S. Bronack, (Eds.). Serious Educational Game Assessment: Practical Methods and Models for Educational Games, Simulations and Virtual Worlds (pp.31-44). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Chris Ferguson, 2015. "The case against scholarly consensus." Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug 10 2015.
Chris Ferguson, 2015b. "A Tale of Two Metas: The Video Game Controversy Continues." The Amplifier, Dec 18 2015.
Nathan Kirkman, 2008. Targeted Violence: A Review of Six School Shootings and Implications for School Counselors. MS thesis at University of Wisconsin-Stout.
Jessie Klein, 2012. The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools. NYC & London: NYU Press.
Lawrence Kutner & Cheryl K. Olsen, 2008. Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do.
Peter Langman, 2009. "Rampage School Shooters: A Typology." Aggression and Violent Behavior 14:79–86.
Peter Langman 2012a. School Shooters: Nine Brief Sketches.
Peter Langman, 2013. "Thirty-Five Rampage School Shooters: Trends, Patterns, and Typology". In (Böckler et al. 2013: 131-).
Peter Langman, 2015. School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Peter Langman, 2016b. "School Shooters: The Myth of the Stable Home".
Bob Larson, 1999. Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. [Sketchy.]
Susan Martin, 2017. 5 questions for Peter Langman: The foremost expert on school shooters dispels the myths that surround the perpetrators.
Glenn W. Muschert, 2007. “Research in School Shootings.” Sociology Compass 1(1): pp. 60-80. Wiley.
Glenn Muschert & J. William Spencer, 2009. "The Lessons of Columbine, Part I." American Behavioral Scientist 52(9): 1223-1226. SAGE Publications.
Glenn Muschert & Johanna Sumiala, 2012. School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group.
Katherine Newman, Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, & Wendy Roth, 2004. Rampage: Social roots of school shootings. NYC: Basic Books.
Mike Nizza, 2007. "Tying Columbine to Video Games." New York Times, July 5 2007.
Northern Illinois University Dept. of Public Safety, 2010. Report of the February 14, 2008 Shootings at Northern Illinois University.
Neil Ribner, ed., 2002. Handbook of Juvenile Forensic Psychology. San Francisco CA: Wiley.
Susan Scutti, 2018. "Do video games lead to violence?" CNN. Updated 2:08 PM ET, Thu February 22, 2018.
US Secret Service & US Dept. of Education, 2004. The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attack in the United States. Wash. DC.
Verlinden, S., Hersen., & Thomas, J. (2000). Risk factors in school shootings. Clinical Psychology Review, 20(1), 3-56. Reviews 10 cases with high media coverage: 1: Moses Lake, WA; 2: Bethel, AK; 3: Pearl, MS; 4: Paducah, KY; 5: Jonesboro, AR (M.J.); 6: Jonesboro, AR (A.G.); 7: Edinboro, PA; 8: Springfield, OR; 9: Littleton, CO (E.H.); 10: Littleton, CO (D.K.).
I don't have time to go into the matter here, but psychologists have, and when I checked the research literature in 2018 they were pretty much unanimous in concluding that violent activity and stimuli in general, including violent video games, increase violent behavior. I will copy-paste some quotes here.
[quote]
Results of this research indicated that 100% of the shooting perpetrators made previous threats of violence and all showed a fixation with violent material such as violent video games, stories, and movies [p. ii-iii] … Seven out of eight offenders investigated by Kidd and Meyer (2002) indicated an obsession with violent media [p. 24].
-- (Kirkman 2008), a review of 6 K-12 school shootings by students
Studies of the effects of television violence on children and teenagers have found that children may become immune to the horror of violence, imitate violence they observe on television, and gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems (Murray, 1999). Children with emotional, behavioral, learning, or impulse control problems may be more easily influenced. In a meta-analytic re-Risk Factors in School Shootings view of experimental studies on effects of media violence on viewers’ aggression in unstructured social interaction, Wood, Wong, and Chachere (1991) found that media violence enhances children’s and adolescents’ aggression in interactions with strangers, classmates, and friends. Their research review was designed to address criticisms of the artificial experimental constructions used in earlier studies of the effects of television violence on aggression. They also present evidence suggesting that susceptibility to media effects is likely to peak during early adolescence. In his review of the literature on adolescents and the media, Strasburger (1995) identified four conditions that will increase likelihood that violent media will help guide future behavior:
Is the violence rewarded or punished?
Is it justified and without any consequences?
Is it pertinent to the viewer?
Is the viewer susceptible to it?
-- (Verlinden et al. 2000 p. 14-15)
Almost all of the boys [10 mass murderers] were fans of video games, music, and books featuring graphic violence.
-- (Verlinden et al. 2000 p. 44)
The evidence is now clear and convincing: media violence is 1 of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression.
-- (Amer. Assoc. of Pediatrics 2009)
[Video games] should not use human or other living targets or award points for killing, because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain and suffering to others. .. Summarizing the results of >400 studies including violent media of all types, researchers [Bushman & Huesmann 2006] found there was a significant association between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior (effect size: 0.19; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.19–0.20), aggressive thoughts (effect size: 0.18; 95% CI: 0.17–0.19), angry feelings (effect size: 0.27; 95% CI: 0.24–0.30), and physiologic arousal (effect size: 0.26; 95% CI: 0.20–0.31).
-- AAP July 2016 policy statement on violent video games, "Virtual Violence"
The link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and well established. Of the 31 studies reviewed, 14 investigated the relation between violent video game use and aggressive behaviors. … A positive association between violent video game use and increased aggressive behavior was found in most (12 of 14 studies). …
Of the 31 studies reviewed, 13 included aggressive cognitions as an outcome. All of these studies showed an effect of violent video game use on increased aggressive cognitions, replicating the finding in the pre-2009 research. …
Thirteen of the 31 studies included aggressive affect as an outcome; all were experimental studies with adults. Aggressive affect measures included self-report questionnaires, picture-rating tasks, and experimental proxy. Twelve of the 13 experimental studies that examined the effects of violent video games on affect indicated negative outcomes for adults. The most common negative outcome was increased hostility or aggressive affect. There is also evidence of less emotional reactivity (increased emotional desensitization) as a negative outcome, which is often seen as a result of previous experience with violent video games. …
In addition to increases in aggressive outcomes, nine studies examined decreases in socially desirable behaviors following exposure to violent video games. In particular, prosocial behavior, empathy for the distress of others, and sensitivity to aggression were diminished after exposure to violent video game play (seven of the nine studies). …
CONCLUSIONS:
The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions, and aggressive affect and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and sensitivity to aggression.
-- American Psychological Association Task Force on Violent Media 2015, "Technical report on the review of the violent video game literature."
WHEREAS scientific research has demonstrated an association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement;
WHEREAS there is convergence of research findings across multiple methods and multiple samples with multiple types of measurements demonstrating the association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement;
WHEREAS all existing quantitative reviews of the violent video game literature have found a direct association between violent video game use and aggressive outcomes;
WHEREAS this body of research, including laboratory experiments that examine effects over short time spans following experimental manipulations and observational longitudinal studies lasting more than 2 years, has demonstrated that these effects persist over at least some time spans;
WHEREAS research suggests that the relation between violent video game use and increased aggressive outcomes remains after considering other known risk factors associated with aggressive outcomes;
WHEREAS although the number of studies directly examining the association between the amount of violent video game use and amount of change in adverse outcomes is still limited, existing research suggests that higher amounts of exposure are associated with higher levels of aggression and other adverse outcomes; …
-- The American Psychological Association, August 2015, "Resolution on Violent Video Games"
Also see "22 Charts & Graphs on Video Games & Youth Violence" (Kutner & Olsen 2008), which I can't copy-paste here, which show high correlations between playing violent video-games, and many kinds of aggressive behaviors.
I also found lots of quotes claiming the opposite, but they all derived from Chris Ferguson.
I'll add a 2nd comment wi the bibliography I used; substack won't let me post a comment long enough to include it here.
It seems like every single statement here (except the Jul 2016 one) is of the form "we looked at the mass murderers, and it turns out they had an unusual fixation on violent media"
Like... not a single one of these studies (except jul 2016, which... well, maybe I'll come back and talk about it at another time) started out looking at people who play violent videogames, and then followed them throughout their lives to see if they became mass murderers. Rather, they did the opposite.
I hope you can see the issue with this? All mass murderers breathe oxygen, therefore oxygen-breathing -> columbine... is not valid.
It sucks that this leaves us with no real way to study this question, and I'm not really sure what to do about it, but that doesn't mean these studies are any evidence at all for anything
Fortunately, mass shootings aren't so common that we can do a long-term study and count how many subjects committed mass shootings.
It is possible to compare the fraction of mass shooters who played violent videogames to the fraction of the general population, drawn from comparable demographics (wrt e.g. age, sex, income, race, whatever you think is relevant). It's difficult to do retrospectively because you can't usually tell from old news reports exactly what kind of games the offender played or how often; you really have to interview the offender or their family. Also, even if you get a strong result, you might be overlooking some causal factor when compiling your general-population control set. Maybe you should have matched them for IQ, testosterone level, or number of close friends. And even then, it's not clear how to distinguish correlation from causation.
But that sort of data isn't why psychological associations support the claim that violent video-games increase violence. They look at the causal link between exposure to violent media (including video-games) and later aggression (of many types). The studies typically pick a bunch of kids, divide them into test subjects and controls, expose the test subjects to violent movies or video-games and the controls to non-violent ones, and then measure aggressive behavior for some time period afterwards. These studies unsurprisingly find that witnessing or participating in violence increases aggressive behavior. (There may be exceptions when the violent stimulus is of a nature that would make the aggressive behavior looked for afterwards likely to invoke a repetition of a violent attack. For instance, a study of wolf packs asking whether exposure to aggression by alphas increased aggression towards the alphas would probably find that it did not.)
The theoretical argument that violent games REDUCE violent action is based on the "hydrodynamic theory of emotions", which is just Aristotelian catharsis theory as restated by Freud. There is no scientific evidence to support this theory AFAIK. I've heard that studies of primal-scream therapy show that it makes people more rather than less aggressive, tho I've never looked them up.
One particularly nice thing about prospective studies it that they resolve the worry that the causality goes in the other direction.
"The studies typically pick a bunch of kids, divide them into test subjects and controls, expose the test subjects to violent movies or video-games and the controls to non-violent ones, and then measure aggressive behavior for some time period afterwards."
The correlation in the kids' behavior with the games' or movies' violence _can't_ be due to violent kids selectively choosing violent games, since the researchers pick the movies or video-games, rather than the kids picking them.
Apropos of None of the Above's concern, do you know whether some of the better-looking (prospective, with a control group) studies have been replicated? Many Thanks!
"The studies typically pick a bunch of kids, divide them into test subjects and controls, expose the test subjects to violent movies or video-games and the controls to non-violent ones, and then measure aggressive behavior for some time period afterwards."
Yes, that is indeed better evidence. (Yay, prospective studies and control groups!)
"Much of the gun discourse in the United States is focused on mass-shootings, which while gruesome, account for a miniscule number of deaths, comparable to the number of deaths-by-lightning-strike."
No, its the other way round.
"Lightning kills about 20 people each year in the United States"
"Under the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive[ at least four deaths] , by the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings; by the end of 2020, there had been 611; and by the end of 2021, 693.[36] By mid-May 2021 there were 10 mass shootings a week on average; by mid-May 2022, there was a total of 198 mass shootings in the first 19 weeks of the year, which represents 11 mass shootings a week.[37]" -- WP
> "Under the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive , by the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings; by the end of 2020, there had been 611; and by the end of 2021, 693.[36] By mid-May 2021 there were 10 mass shootings a week on average; by mid-May 2022, there was a total of 198 mass shootings in the first 19 weeks of the year, which represents 11 mass shootings a week.[37]" -- WP
When I visit the Wikipedi article entitled "Mass Shootings in the United States", I find the following:
>There is no fixed definition of a mass shooting in the United States,[4][13] and different researchers define "mass shootings" in different ways.[14] Among the various definitions are:
>Definitions based on injuries
>Gun Violence Archive: More broadly defines "mass shooting" to mean <b>four or more (excluding the perpetrator) shot</b> at roughly the same time and location, <b>regardless of number of fatalities</b> or the motive.[15][16][17] Brady: United Against Gun Violence uses a similar definition.[18]
> Mass Shooting Tracker: Defines "mass shooting" as "an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree," including the perpetrator or police shootings of civilians around the perpetrator, and irrespective of the motive of the perpetrator or the location of the murders.[19][20]
> Definitions based on number of deaths:
> Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012, signed into law in January 2013: Defines a "mass killing" as the killing of at least three victims, excluding the perpetrator, and regardless of the weapon used.[4][21][22][23]
> Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks mass shootings based on press accounts, police records, and court papers, defines mass shooting as "<b>any incident in which four or more people are shot and killed</b>, excluding the shooter."[24] </i>
It appears you have mis-applied the definition used by Everytown for Gun Safety to statistics gathered by the Gun Violence Archive. This results in a massive error in analysis on your part.
To quote from several paragraphs below the paragraph you quoted:
<i>Under the Everytown for Gun Safety definition ("any incident in which four or more people are shot and killed, excluding the shooter") there were an average of 19 mass shootings in the U.S. each year from 2009 to 2020, with 947 wounded by gunfire and 1,363 fatally shot.[24] </i>
I partially agree with you: deaths in mass-shootings appear to be about 4x to 5x more common than death-by-lightning annually in the United States. Mainly because mass shootings with four or more deaths happen at about the rate of death-by-lightning that you quoted.
I partially agree with @trebuchet below: you are either being dishonest with the data you are quoting, or you are not carefully reading the WikiPedia article that you are citing. The definition of mass shooting used by Everytown for Gun Safety is much closer to the definition of "Mass Shooting that makes the national news": events like Parkland, Las Vegas concert shooting, or Pulse Nightclub shooting all fit that definition.
I've seen local news stories of 'shooting at a community event', and even 'shooting at a funeral', that fit the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive. These local stories often had four or more injuries. They did not fit the definition used by Everytown for Gun Safety, because they rarely included more than one death. These mass shootings are not the kind of story that makes national news.
Thank you very much for digging into the data sources to understand the source of the discrepancy. So I guess the numbers being provided by Mother Jones for the graphic at the top of the wiki article are still skewed low (yearly average is 100+, not ~40), and it might be worth taking the time to update that graphic.
I think this is misleading. I believe the OP is directionally correct that the 'mass shootings' that drive the discourse in the US, specifically the spree killing of random people at events or schools, are not the majority of mass shootings under the definition that you are referencing and are a tiny fraction of gun deaths. The definition that is often used conflates gang violence/familial violence/targeted violence that, regrettably, nobody cares about or reports on, with the kind of 'mass shooting' that the American public actually does care about. This is fairly clear if you spend a moment looking over the lists of mass shootings and the reporting on them, several high-death events you will not have heard of outside of local news, because they are drug deals gone wrong, or a man killing his whole family, etc.
I don't think this contradicts what I'm saying? Mass shootings, while scary, account for extremely few deaths, see the top-line graphic on that Wikipedia article. There maybe more of them occurring, which is bad, but most of them aren't resulting in any deaths.
As for the lightening death numbers, the link I provided mentions 43 deaths for one time window and 27 deaths for a another, both higher than your 20 deaths number. Not sure the reason for the discrepancy there, I assume less time being spent outside?
I've heard there's some controversy on how to define a mass shooting, but taking the numbers above at face value, 40 per week equals 2080 per year which equals (taking 330 million as the US population) 0.63 per 100k people. 0.6 per 100k people is also the homicide rate in Spain, South Korea, the Netherlands and Norway according to Wikipedia. Ireland is 0.7, Germany is 0.8, Australia is 0.9, UK and France are 1.2.
So deaths just from mass shootings in the US are as commonplace as total homicides in some other European countries, and half as commonplace or more in a bunch of others.
It's both a relatively small portion of the total and a pretty big problem in and of itself, given how much more homicide there is in the US than other developed countries.
It may not contradict the overall gist, but it starkly contradicts the first sentence.
"As for the lightening death numbers, the link I provided mentions 43 deaths for one time window and 27 deaths for a another, both higher than your 20 "
That doesn't close a two OOM gap.
" There maybe more of them occurring, which is bad, but most of them aren't resulting in any deaths."
The WP quote is DEFINING a mass shooting as resulting in >= 4 deaths.
Sorry, I missed the line defining mass shootings as >=4 deaths. So then I'm genuinely confused how the top-line numbers on Wikipedia are showing that the worst-ever year for mass-shootings (2017) had ~118 deaths, if the definition implies that there had to have been at least 10x that number.
Different cutoff for "mass"? I'll have to look at the Mother Jones article which seems to be the source, over lunch.
That's from the highest year on record. Eyeballing the graph, the average over the past 5 years is ~75, and over the past 10 yr is ~50. So calling it "comparable" based on those numbers is very much warranted.
Lots of countries define mass shootings with a threshold of 3,4 or 5.. I think the problem needs to be turned round. If you are you mean to say that Pulse style shootings are rare you need to be clear that you are using .a different threshold than the one most peop!e uae.
Yeah, there's a definitional issue. Mass shootings of the "nutcase goes postal with a Glock" type seem quite different from "two gangs have a shootout over who gets to sell drugs on this street corner," which is different from "Fred disses Joe at a party, so Joe pulls out a gun and blazes away, missing Fred but hitting four people standing behind him."
The comparison to lightning is silly. If you raise the bar high enough, mass shootings become rarer than deaths by porcupine, but the other shootings don't disappear. The fact remains that the US has a lot of mass shootings, and a lot of other shootings *compared to.other countries*.
One time I decided to look into this issue. I looked at a list of "school shootings", and drilled down to one randomly-selected incident, just to spot check, as a first-pass sanity check. The incident seems to have been a drug deal gone wrong, in a high school parking lot at 2am, where a gun was fired. Neighbors who heard the shot called the police, who didn't find anybody there when they arrived. No injuries, no arrests, no suspects, but a gun was fired on the grounds of a school, so it went into the "school shooting" database.
It felt dishonest to me, and now I feel like to be responsible and smart, I should be very skeptical of these statistics.
Following a chain of links from this study, I think table 10 here is the most specific you can find
Of the half of the cases where a relationship is known between victim and perpetrator, roughly even 1:2:1 split between spouse, friend/acquaintance/other known relationship, stranger
Very helpful clarification! Makes sense that a like of it would be more intimate personal conflicts, since this jives with e.g. rapes/kidnappings being more more likely to be perpetrated by a friend/partner/family member.
There's at least one potential skew in that data, though I don't know how important it is. The police are *way* more likely to solve a murder when the perp is the victim's husband, ex, boyfriend, etc., than when the perp is a stranger.
What evidence would you find persuasive / indicative?
It's easy to notice missing persons. Harder to find dead bodies. Harder still to find the murderer. A further step to identify the motive.
There are local reports from police departments like the linked below, but I'm skeptical there is anything out there with a consistent methodology that can give an accurate aggregate estimate.
Would be very glad / curious to be corrected on this.
Dead bodies are rarely hard to find. *Particularly* dead bodies that result from gunshot wounds, because gunshots are ear-splittingly loud and likely to result in lots of people paying heightened attention to A: the area the gunshot was heard in and B: anyone trying to quickly haul a body-sized roll of carpet or whatever away from that place.
Notwithstanding Walter White's bathtub of hydrofluoric acid, the overwhelming majority of murders result in the discovery of a dead body, usually fairly promptly.
If it's known that the homicide was by gun (which we do, because it's included in the gun homicide statistics), then there's already a body. I was laboring under the assumption that in most of these cases there's at least a suspect, and a rough-outline of the crime committed, given that there had to have been a preliminary police investigation.
I'm not looking to be persuaded in any direction, since I have no idea what the answer is, since it's not included in the top-line statistics, and I haven't dug deeper into it. I would just like some sort of rough aggregate statistics further breaking down these ~20k annual deaths.
Do they? After Uvalde, I'm pretty sure they wanted gun sales to under 21s or 25s banned. What they got was enhanced checks for under 21s. Don't judge what they want by what they achieve. Some of them.want no guns at all, which w ould definitely impact gun crime , if achievable.
What annoys me about conservatives is that they pull the teeth out of gun control legilsat ion, then claim that gun control doesnt work.
And my point is that what they are the my to pass isn t reflective of what they want.They don't have a free hand. If Rs are blocking effective legislation, blame them.
I mean, seriously, this is kinda a don't hate the player, hate the game situation. Politicians are always going to opportunistically try to hitch their causes to whatever local momentum is related enough that it might help a little.
I’ve heard it claimed that some birds, like crows, are incredibly smart, perhaps on par with some of the smarter mammals. Since birds have somewhat different brain structure than mammals do, it may be the case that even if birds and mammals are similarly intelligent overall (for some definition of similar), they could have different intellectual strengths. Is this the case? Are there things that mammals tend to be good at intellectually, but not birds, and vice versa?
Famously octopus brains are these weird rings, but octopuses are one of the smartest animals we know of. I haven't heard anything about them having different intellectual strengths but they might.
I've also heard the hypothesis that the reason some random animals have a lot of intelligence is that it becomes advantageous once you have an ability to carefully manipulate the environment-- with octopuses this is pretty obvious, for birds I think it is supposed to be about the ability to manipulate things with their beak. I wonder if these intelligences are different adapted based on the "problem solving organ" that the brain evolves around, i.e. tentacle versus beak versus hands.
The problem I have with this explanation is that there seems to be some chicken and egg going on, and it doesn't always happen. Simply having a rostrum doesn't seem to cause birds to select for bigger brains in order to manipulate things with it - if it did, then *all* birds would have these huge brains, and they obviously don't. That, or the process is underway - but rostrums have been in birds for at least 125 million years, and we know a large brain can evolve in less time.
It makes more sense to me that beaks don't always get used for complex manipulation, so they don't always require big brains. Something else is probably causing certain bird lineages to select for intelligence, particularly corvids. What, precisely, is unknown to me - I don't know anything special about corvids that moves them toward intelligence, that wouldn't also move other birds in the same environment.
I think you're asking the wrong question. It's likely that, because we see birds solving problems the same way we do, namely using tools, theory of mind, and long-term memory, we call them smart, while other animals which might use equally complex problem-solving methods that aren't relatable to us aren't labeled as such. So the answer to "do they have different intellectual strengths?" might be "by definition no, because they fit *our* definition of intelligence". If birds were good at different things, we wouldn't be so excited about their apparent intelligence.
Still, there are definitely big differences between the smartest birds and the smartest non-human mammals. Birds notably communicate very effectively with human language, in a way that no mammal has managed to do. Because of this, we might have the only proof that non-human animals have a similar ability to model the world, as Alex the parrot, after being trained on recognizing the colors of different objects, asked "What color am I?" after looking into a mirror.
But again, I think we find this most impressive because *we* communicate verbally, unlike most other mammals. Cetaceans might be the only mammals that we share this ability with, but unfortunately they're terrible vocal mimics for humans, so two-way communication is a lot more difficult.
The most interesting question to me is: is avian intelligence the reason why they are able to understand concepts like color and the self? Or do they just have the potential for complex symbolic learning, which goes unused until we provide them with the structure of human language?
I’ve often wondered about the nature of cetacean communication.
Dolphins use echolocation, which means that they are probably able to reconstruct mental representations of objects in 3D space from acoustic data.
This implies the question, ‘can they produce acoustic data that other dolphins perceive as objects in 3D space?’ I think this could have interesting implications for language. Can they send images directly to each other’s minds? How would such a language evolve? Does it allow for abstraction?
> ‘can they produce acoustic data that other dolphins perceive as objects in 3D space?’
In a word, no. Echolocation is not based on acoustic data per se, but *timing*. The echolocator emits a sound and listens for its echo. The time it takes for the echo to arrive back to its ears is what carries the information, not the sound itself. If it was even possible for a dolphin's vocal apparatus to precisely replicate the sound pattern created by an echo, a dolphin listening to it would be unable to interpret it, because you cannot get information from an echo without knowing the sound that created it.
Another potential problem humans and possibly domesticated animals are facing.
Dysgenics (negative correlation between fertility and IQ and increasing mutational load in humans due to a low mortality rate) means we wont be solving future problems more quickly or cheaply. This is explained here -> https://qr.ae/pvMrj3. We need to solve the hard problems now.
"Yes, the human genome is degrading. This is a well-established, noncontroversial finding. This phenomenon is called “increasing mutational load” and is based on concepts developed by one of the great geneticists, H. Muller, roughly 70 years ago.[1]
The theory
Harmful mutations come into being all the time. The average newborn has 50–100 new mutations. Though most are harmless, about 1 to 4 of those are harmful.[2] Normally, natural selection causes people having those mutations to die out or not have children, so eventually, those mutations get eliminated.
But our lives aren’t natural anymore. At the beginning of the 20th century, people having genes predisposing them to diabetes would have died young. That’s the normal process of natural selection. Now, those people get life-saving insulin, so they live normal lives and have as many children as anyone else. (Type 1 diabetes, the kind that can appear before you start having children, is highly heritable.[3]) The children of diabetics inherit the genes that make one susceptible to diabetes, so those genes aren’t being eliminated.
The same thing is happening for many diseases that have a genetic component. People that would have died in the past now live nearly-normal lives, and pass on their genes to the next generation.
It’s scary
One investigator calculated that without natural selection, fitness will decline 1 to 3% per generation, and then went on to write the most frightening paragraph I have ever seen in a biological publication:
Thus, the preceding observations paint a rather stark picture. At least in highly industrialized societies, the impact of deleterious mutations is accumulating on a time scale that is approximately the same as that for scenarios associated with global warming ... Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.[4]
If you don’t normally read biological publications, this paragraph may seem tame to you, but this is as alarmist as biologists ever get.
Not so scary
If medicine and biology keep advancing, they will always stay ahead of the increasing mutational load. Someday, there will be good treatments for asthma, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and other genetic diseases, so it won’t matter if the genes causing them to become common.
But if civilization ever crashes, people with multiple genetic defects might not survive.
Natural selection continues, even if selection pressures change. A mutation that causes you to be stillborn or impotent will still be eliminated. Now mutations that cause you to spend more time in school likely reduce fitness. You could consider that "bad", but from a different perspective it's those variants that are "degradation".
Fitness only makes sense with reference to environment. Our current environment includes routine treatment for diabetes. Those diabetics are just as fit as non-diabetics, for practical purposes.
Sure, many of their descendants would be SOL if their environment changed to no longer have routine treatment for diabetes. But lots of people - and other living creatures - would be SOL in case of environment changes. Nature gives us lots of variation in the hopes that some will do well, whatever the change.
I notice that the article you're relying upon to do most of your heavy lifting (Lynch, M. (2010). Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 961–968. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0912629107) is from a while ago, and is not (so far as I am aware) cited with any frequency except in textbooks and surveys where the analysis of mutation rate and molecular spectrum are used. The "consequences" part which has you worked up is not mentioned outside of the article itself.
Lynch, so far as I know, is now best known for the drift barrier hypothesis (which can be read in corollary as a corrective to this exact issue). Do you happen to know if he has updated or revised his conclusion in light of his own theory and the last decade of evidence?
Improvements to the human environment (e.g., better nutrition) have been dominating genetic selection effects for the last couple of hundred years, hence the Flynn Effect, increasing height, increasing lifespan, and so on. That seems likely to continue or accelerate, with less air pollution, better education, and so on. We're also going to have much better genetic testing and so on to manage the genome itself. So, I think there are various ways this analysis is overly narrow, looking at one potential cause of issues while ignoring all the larger positive trends that make it a moot point.
More generally, any problem that will manifest in 200-300 years is probably the wrong one to focus on. A lot is going to happen between now and then!
The biological misconceptions underlying the idea of "devolution" are well-explained by other answers to the OP (can be found by following your first link). If it's easy for an organism to live a "near-normal life" and reproduce successfully in a given environment, that organism is fit for its environment, period. At best, this is a general observation that civilization changes the fitness landscape, such that many highly successful modern humans would die if left to wander in the New England winter without clothes or in the Great Rift Valley without eyeglasses; at worst (and not attributing this to you), it's a crypto-fascist line meant to create an "objective" excuse for expressing the taboo political idea that spending societal resources on support for disabled people is bad.
The dark speculations in that PNAS paper about "neurobiological incapacitation" sound scary, precisely because the genetic basis of IQ is so sketchy that nobody can disprove the suggestion that we're slowly losing all our smart-person alleles. But the Flynn effect should reassure us that, whatever controls IQ, the past century's dramatic medical advances are perfectly compatible with steady population-level increases; in fact, it's likely that improved medical care contributes to the environmental enrichment that has contributed to improved neurodevelopment. There's no evidence for the dysgenicists' counter-proposal that "genetic intelligence" may have been secretly decreasing below the surface of this environmentally driven improvement.
Finally, many advances in healthcare can be expected to have, if anything, positive effects on intuitive "folk fitness," by eliminating threats that force selection of traits with unpleasant consequences. For example, eradicating malaria removes the selection pressure for thalassemias (e.g. sickle-cell) that impose morbidity and mortality on homozygotes in order to protect hets.
This also seems to be due to environmental effects; a 2018 paper using Norwegian cohort data found that the full halt/reversal can be seen over time within individual families, suggesting that it can't be due to genetic factors that vary more between families. Furthermore the reversal happened during a period of "eugenic" reproduction (slight positive correlation between IQ and fertility) in Norway https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6042097/
I hope it is not controversial to say that just maintaining a society requires some level of intelligence, lets say above that of a insect. If those alleles fall in frequency with time, then the functioning of a society which helps many people who have difficulties surviving without medicine is at risk of collapse, either slowly or all at once.
There is a specific trait that is very important, not because it is good in all environments or that it good in some spiritual or other general sense, but in the specific context that we humans have created. We have created a society where it is necessary and arguably beneficial to have a certain level of intelligence to survive and thrive. Of course, wild animals can survive without high intelligence because intelligence it not essential to survival in all environments and may even be detrimental in many. But a society that was built by a species that is exclusive in its ability to leverage its intelligence cannot be sustained by populations with continually falling intelligence.
Even if intelligence is even slightly heritable, then that implies eventually the environmental gains we have achieved through improved nutrition and education will be eclipsed by the insufficient genetic resources (whatever that may be) to maximally leverage that environment.
Even if IQ is not a good measurement of intelligence, the basic argument doesn't change. We can agree that intelligence exist whether or not we can measure it. If, it exists, each generation the mutational load increases, and these mutations are more often harmful than beneficial, then without some sort of selection mechanism in place, it will fall.
I think the problem with your argument is that the timeframes won't add up. Yes, all else being equal, *eventually* mutational load will pile up and cause problems. But in the short term I expect the environmental improvements driving the Flynn effect and so on to outweigh it, and in the long term genetic engineering or some other dramatic change in society will change things enough that it never becomes relevant.
Since Francis Galton, eugenicists have been making doomsday predictions about imminent race degeneration caused by sentimentalist medical care for defective humans. These predictions never became reality, mainly because intelligence and health are less genetically and more environmentally determined than the eugenicists believed they were; however, misguided eugenicist forced sterilization and mass murder campaigns certainly did.
I'm sure there's some limit of perfect medical care, infinite civilizational stability, diminishing returns from rising standards of living/decreased air pollution/better education, etc, in which the eugenicists are actually right that Müllerian dysgenic effects could threaten societal welfare. However, given the history of eugenicist prediction error resulting in pointless cruelty, we should have a high prior against believing that we are actually in this limit case and leaping to grandiose conclusions like "we need to solve the hard problems now", and we shouldn't update it based on rehashings of the same old a priori arguments with zero evidence that harmful mutations are actually accumulating at levels sufficient to cause civilizational problems.
"If, it exists, each generation the mutational load increases, and these mutations are more often harmful than beneficial, then without some sort of selection mechanism in place, it will fall."
-- Even if this is correct it isn't very meaningful. If there are premature deaths then there is some sort of selection going on. If there are not premature deaths then, even if average intelligence is falling, peak intelligence is rising (as the overall population continues to rise).
If you are trying to prove that the average is falling fast enough that breeding events are unlikely to contain 2 high IQ individuals because X, Y and Z, you are going to need to do math and not just hand wave.
I guess the basic point is that the effectiveness of a society - how quickly and accurately can it achieve its goals ceteris paribus - is a lagging indicator of the past intelligence of a population. Usually, I look at https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx, which list the rarities of each IQ percentile and infer that each point decrease in IQ requires the corresponding increase in population for the maximum IQ to remain the same. So if a population's intelligence falls by 10 points and the size stays constant at 20.6 million then the rise in population to get back to maximum is 1,009,976,678 - 20,696,863 = 989279815 people. This is filled with a bunch of mathematical assumptions which may not hold.
Granting your premises, people who are worse off are subject to more selection and should end up with better genetic health.
In _Sex and Destiny_ by Germaine Greer, which included the tendency of upper class people to have fewer children but not about dysgenic selection, she says the human race is like a candle, burning at the top and drawing wax up from below.
There are also the concerns around assortive mating. As society has become less traditional and more mobile, people are more and more pair up with partners very similar to themselves.
Doctors with doctors, Lawyers with lawyers, retail workers with retail workers. Rather than be concerned about dysgenics, I am personally a little more concerned that were are not too many generations away from notable genetic classism. I think there is enough meritocracy that repeated doctor/doctor and retail worker/retail worker pairings are going to lead to so significant drift. Even if the retail workers outnumber the doctors substantially.
Maybe there is enough trickle up and social advancement from the larger population of retail worker children to maintain genetic contact?
You don't think that today there is more doctor-doctor matching than doctor-nurse matching? I would contend (completely anecdotally) that it has for sure increased.
Literally my 5 closest friend couples are:
Professor-Professor
Professor-Person who worked as post doc for a long time before moving to private industry
Urban Development Consultant-Urban Development ED
Painter-Painter
Doctor-Programmer in Medical Industry
Now not everyone I know is like that, but it is EXTREMELY COMMON. And almost all these couples formed before their educations were complete/finalized.
Granted the next couples might be:
Masters in Social Work-Web Developer
Political Consultant-Armed Forces Officer
But there are almost no, Boss-Secretary type matches you would find from people getting married in 80s and 90s, and especially before then.
Once at a birthday party for a 5 year old, over half the ~15 couples worked in the same industry with the same relative education levels. Now a lot of obvious reasons that would happen...
But I would contend that once women started being treated more commonly as equal partners (especially economically), this was sort of a natural progression and things ARE different.
Reasoning from people you know anecdotally is not very reliable, especially as that method cannot inform you how things were generations prior to your birth.
My understanding is that in preindustrial times, that was the other way around. The upper classes reproduced above replacement and the peasantry below. Second sons of nobility were sent variously into the celibate clergy, to war, or to the colonies as remittance men.
Per Greg Clark, both the nobility & the poor died off. The former kept killing each other off, and the latter were below the Malthursian/Ricardian line. It was successful farmers (they'd be called "kulaks" in the USSR) who reproduced and had downward mobility.
I think until relatively modern times, big cities were all population sinks--people came into them from the countryside to replace those who died off from disease.
This is true. The whole argument rests on the assumption that there are genetically more ways to be less intelligent and than intelligent. If mutations increase, then yes the frequency of dysfunctional diseases increases. The word dysfunctional disease only applies when referencing the environment humans used to live in before the explosion of modern medicine. In our modern environment, people with diabetes and other conditions can and do lead successful lives. The problem is the modern system of medicine requires, on the population level, some basic level of intellectual functioning and other important personality traits to merely maintain. Mutations will more than likely be harmful than beneficial. There are more ways to break intelligence than enhance it on a genetic level. So increasing the mutation load via decreasing selection pressure will likely lead to a continued fall in intelligence.
This is incorrect. A detrimental mutational load pushes the average to the left (not every individual will experience a detrimental mutation). An increasing population caused by lack of selection extends both tails(more people increases the odds of exceptional people).
Only if the mutational load is severe enough to overcome the rising population does the "whole distribution" move left.
The populations that produce most innovation generally aren't increasing in population. If they were, you are correct that this would offset some of the effect of the leftward shift. I think the most reasonable way to model that would be as a leftward shift from the declining average combined with an upward shift from the increasing population.
This seems patently silly: "The populations that produce most innovation generally aren't increasing in population." But I am sure you have some bulletproof study backing up the claim.
I don't know if this is what he was thinking of, but fertility is below replacement in just about every rich first-world country other than Israel. So the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium, France, UK, Switzerland, Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, etc. are all below replacement. Those countries are where most of the innovation has come from over the last 100 years, though probably the causation is that lots of innovation -> getting richer -> fewer kids.
Additionally, middle-income countries like Russia and China (also places that have done some innovation; China has a lot going on these days!) are below replacement.
The interesting question is whether this implies fewer people capable of great innovation in the future or not. You could imagine that happening for a lot of reasons (lack of culture of innovation, material conditions unsuitable for innovation, lack of inborn ability for innovation), but I don't know of any data there.
One hopeful thing is that technology has allowed for a lot of broken government/institutions to be bypassed in very poorly governed places--places where nobody could get a phone without years of waiting or a big bribe are now places where everyone carries a cellphone, for example. Cellphones, satellite internet, solar power, etc., might move a big chunk of the world from "conditions unsuitable for innovation" to "conditions suitable for innovation."
It’s easier to break a race car than it is to improve it. The vast majority of significant mutations are deleterious, and there are a lot of potential targets that reduce cognitive function. That plus the negative correlation between female IQ and fertility means things can get worse in a non-linear way. A small shift in a mean can have outsized effects on the tails, and going from 1 vonNeuman per generation to 0 seems disastrous.
Note in the attached article glucose monitoring and control can be useful with compensating for diabetes.
With a global population rising to 11 billion and the diversity of human genotypes I suspect predicting long term outcomes will like not be successful.
I would like to get some social-interaction advice.
I was waiting in an airport security line, which was quite long, a few days ago. When I was about 3/4 done a man cut in line directly next to me. I told him "Hey, the end of the line is back there." He just shrugged it off. I called him an unsocial a**hole, and he agreed on that, still standing in line.
What should one do in such a situation? I didn't contact any personel, because i was quite late to my flight.
I got in a physical altercation in an airport with some dude over this exact thing. Grabbed his boarding pass and passport and threw them to the back of the line.
He got all "do you know who I am?" huffed off to go pick up his pass and went to talk to airport staff. I heard nothing more of the matter. (Probably helped that I had a foot on him and was with like 8 other dudes.)
(Also, this was in the Middle East, not America, YMMV there.)
I was at Schipol a couple of weeks ago and this happened to me. I'd been the the security line for nearly three hours at that point and figured I was very likely to miss my flight. I said, loudly, "Hey, No!" The lady replied that she was late for her flight. I said, more loudly, that I'd already missed my flight. That the girl behind me in line who was crying had missed her flight, and that we were all miserable but we were all waiting our turn. I'm told I was yelling at the end. The line cutter was subject to the intense attention of a huge crowd of people who were all waiting their turn, and she resumed her place in line.
I don't usually recommend this, but with line jumpers, yell. Loudly. Everyone will be on your side because they're selfish pricks, and if you get the attention of staff, they'll be disposed to punish the line jumper. (I saw this in a security line in Paris a couple of weeks later, where someone tried to jump the line, was called out, and was placed near the head of the line and told to wait. The security desks proceeded to call the people who were in line and ignore the guy's increasingly shrill pleading. He was still there when we went through and I have no idea how long the staff kept him dangling, but everyone around me was quietly (or not so quietly) enjoying his public shaming. It was amazing.)
This reminds me of a top level comment I meant to post. In the 20 years since 9/11 (and before in Europe) why hasn’t the technology or procedure improved for airport security? It’s a matter of getting people on one side of the airport to the other. There’s ample space on the other side. Yet people wait hours, miss flights and so on.
Chalk it up to even more examples of modern incompetence.
Shortly after 9/11 there was an effort to make life beyond the security line enjoyable. Loudly and explicitly guaranteeing of fair pricing, for example. That lasted less than a year. I literally do not remember the last time I saw that promise.
I was going to suggest this same thing. You can never win these things 1 on 1. You need to get a mob against them and quickly, in less than 10 words ideally. Speaking loudly is the easiest thing to do. Stating what they did is good too: "YOU CUT IN LINE". If I was a bystander this would give me the confidence to at least give attention or support the accuser.
Don’t call people an asshole out loud until you are more confident socially. Buddy could end up right next to you on the flight. Shrug it off next time. If it’s directly in front of you, we’ll, just let it happen. People behind you may speak up. Just act like you thought he was the same party as the people in front of you and next time don’t leave enough space for somebody to cut in. Don’t get upset, that just shows them the limited extent of your limited power. Make them think you “know a guy” who will solve this injustice down the line and just remain undistracted.
Next to you? As in, not in your line? It's kinda the job of the person he cut in front of to take issue with it further. Especially since you brought it up, that was their hint that they'd be supported.
This is a bit of a collective action problem. Individually that is the right play. But too much turning the other cheek, and you end up with one of the various queueing hell-holes most of the world is.
Curious what y'all think of starmanning [1], an enhanced version of steelmanning.
My impression is that anyone steelmanning already has the forethought to starman. But one thing I see Scott doing is assuming the good intentions of his opponent even when _criticizing_ their ideas, which I think deserves it's own rhetorical category.
This will sound harsh, but I thought it's bland and unimaginative.
The fundamental problem with the Internet is trust, I'm mean because the other guy is\was\could be mean. This is also the problem with all civilization or more generally any organisation where you interact with people who are not your flesh and blood. The default mode for life is to be an asshole, the special cases is kinship, romance and friendship. Indeed, a lot of people are assholes even to those, but vastly more so to people who are not one of those.
So I'm irritated by what I saw as a "just stop being poor" advice of the author, off course I would like to star-man my opponent or whatever made up word you fancy, but I have no guarantee that my opponent is even interested in a conversation vs. just dunking on me. Sometimes I starman and my opponent is just a jerk, sometimes I'm the jerk who breaks civility but I'm too proud to admit. There is no context or shared state to do reconciliation, and there is 0 cost to just abandoning the conversation and starting afresh with a new stranger. It's just plain shitty, we were not evolved to throw text at each other from thousands of kilometers, the absence of eyes and body language makes you twitchy and seeing hostility in every remark.
I don’t think people do it because they assume the specific commenter they’re replying to is a good person.
Instead, they assume good intentions because it will make a persuasive case to anyone else you want to convince, because they (probably) believe themselves to be good people.
An argument with the worst bad-faith commenter in the world can still produce a good outcome if you keep in mind you’re not just trying to convince that one person.
I think this is the crucial insight in this matter - it's true what N&S said, that we are not evolved (nor could we be evolved) to reconstruct the full disposition of a remark when all we have is text, but the crucial error that this leads to is the presumption that the limit of the battle we are fighting is the, as it were, opponent in front of us.
Whereas the application of a firm but forthright principle of charity to an opponent and their points, with an eye to the wider populace of fence-sitters and those other opponents who are non-fanatical, is not only morally righteous but good business, if your business is persuasion and recruitment on behalf of your own ideas.
Sure, it might - but who cares? What's the fundamental point of trying to engage in arguments online? If you're hoping your opponent will fold and say "you're right, I'm wrong," you're going to be disappointed almost every time. If you're just trying to score Internet Points in your own mind, you can do that if you want, but I'd question your choice of hobby.
If you're hoping to actually advance the discourse in the world, then your metric should be something like "number of people who will seriously engage with the arguments and data I present," not personal satisfaction.
Of course, you could argue that you find arguments more convincing when they're trying to attack their counterpart specifically and expose bad faith, but I would guess that that's not common. Or, even if it is more common than I'd like to think, it's not something I want to encourage in the world.
Ah - I think we're talking about different contexts here. I took OP's comment to mean what happens in a public-ish place (like, say these comments here). If I utterly fail to get my debating opponent to budge, but some portion of the audience walks away thinking more fondly of my arguments, I'll take that as a win. I don't necessarily care about convincing that specific person.
Now, if we're talking about a private conversation, obviously that's different - but in a private conversation, if you think the other person is in bad faith, or has some fundamental difference from what you consider to be good morals, then I would think arguing with them in the first place is pointless.
Can you elaborate a bit on how and why you think steelmanning is a bad idea?
To be specific, say you have some person using some really bad arguments that add nothing of value to the discussion. Why not suggest some stronger arguments to replace them with; then at least that can be used as a step to begin a better discussion.
Maybe your opponent actually does not like the stronger arguments. Maybe you disagree on what is a strong argument and what is not.
A: "We should ban X, because X is wrong."
B: "Okay, this is a stupid argument, but we could improve it by saying 'we should ban X, because X has some negative consequences'. Now let's list the negative consequences that anti-X people frequently mention, and let's examine the evidence for them..."
A: "That is not what I said. Like, of course, X has all kinds of bad consequences, but this is not the true reason why I oppose X. I oppose X, because X is *wrong*. I only argue by the bad consequences to get more people on my side... like the stupid ones who don't see how wrong X is."
I think I've seen something like that happen a few times, but that's a special case. Most people wouldn't act like that. Anyway, is this just a bravery debate?
I can see how both would be used to fix different problems.
Steelmanning is there to avoid the cowpox of doubt problem, that engaging with poorly developed arguments makes you worse at argumentation. Then you might as well prepare for the best argument your interlocutor could make, since all their other arguments are probably easier to rebut. At some point you are also just stress testing your own beliefs in a pretty straightforward way, by coming up with the strongest arguments against what you believe and figuring out if/why they're wrong. I agree that if you attempt to steelman within the context of an actual argument itself, that's silly, but I usually see the invocation of steelmanning as the author explicitly saying "I am making up a guy here."
Starmanning is perhaps underdeveloped, but the basic idea that you should assume the best intentions of your opponent makes sense to me. On a basic level if you are arguing with someone operating in bad faith you can't win, so you should always assume good faith or else cease arguing. Once you've made that assumption, I think that "assume they have the best intentions" often just translates to "find a way of thinking about what they want which is legible and comprehensible to me." Which is a really important part of actually convincing someone! In my view the most reliable way to convince someone who disagrees with you is by speaking in their "final language," i.e. their usual way of talking about their own moral values. It's your job to show them how your case actually satisfies their moral instincts better than their own case in a way that is easy for them to understand. You're showing them how to change their mind while changing as little else about your thinking as possible. Even if you are too optimistic about what actually motivates a person's view, often just assuming the best of them can be a way of pushing them to think in a way they're more proud of.
What if I want to understand the other guy's point so I get smarter, even if that risks the possibility that someone on the internet will remain wrong?
I like "woodmanning". Maybe clean up your opponents arguments a bit, help them a bit. But do not completely reorchestrate them into the best possible version of themselves.
Why not, if the best possible version of themselves might actually be right?
The best case scenario is that in the process of constructing a steelman of your opponent's position, you suddenly realise that steelman-opponent is right and you were wrong all along.
The far more common scenario is that in the process of constructing a steelman of your opponent's position you at least discover some flaws in your own position.
So one of my friends ( a fellow math grad student) raised the idea of holding a virtual math conference via minecraft (sort of like a fortnite concert I guess). As far as we can tell, this hasn’t been done before, and the idea is that there might be some combinatorial/applied math/topology problems that could be presented creatively using Minecraft, and some presenters might also be intrigued/amused by the setting.
So, I figured I’d ask here if anyone happens to know research/researchers that might fit well with such a setting.
Just to note, this is more to try and assess what the focus of the conference might be on rather than hunting for specific speakers at the moment. Thanks!
There’s a line in Kafka’s diaries that goes something like: “All social circles are united by a particular form of insanity and that insanity prevents the members of the circle from being aware of it.”
I always found that darkly funny without really understanding what it means. But I recently caught myself thinking about how I view a particular informal group as more or less The Voice of Reason and how if they find my thoughts on a subject reasonable then those thoughts probably are and vice/versa. Then I thought, wait, perhaps I deem this group reasonable precisely because they are unreasonable in the same kind of way I am, which is the real reason we all find each other so uncommonly sane and reasonable. Then I remembered the Kafka quote and realized I had likely discovered its meaning at long last.
It seems that we are all in the dark when it comes to determining what is reasonable.
R D Laing back in the sixties was doing a study of lower middle class families around London concluded, "the whole thing was crazy, but somewhere someone would be bringing in enough money to keep it all going" that kind of dynamic in so many groups and the tendency to persist in a failing course of action could explain a lot.
I think there's a conflation in here of what is 'reasonable' - a concept that is historically murky and ill-defined but with islands of light in various places - with preference for the norms of that group - a concept that is far murkier and less well understood systematically.
It's preference for in-group norms that is the unifying insanity Kafka speaks of, but they exist entirely self-sufficient of whether that group is really 'reasonable'. Well, not entirely self-sufficient; you can see from examples all over the place that groups in which allegiance to in-group norms is particularly strong quickly proceed to become simultaneously much more rational and much more unreasonable, as well as less-knowledgeable.
It might be that you like the informal group in question because they really are more knowledgeable and reasonable. It might be that you like them because the norms of the group have a magnetic appeal to you, while the fact that the group is objectively reasonable actually exerts no effect on your fond feeling for them. Or you might be so wedded to in-group norms that you see the group as reasonable when it is, in fact, not.
Either way, what is reasonable can still be commonly ascertained to a certain degree, more so the closer you get to ethical fundamentals; and in-group norms can be risen above with effort.
A more optimistic perspective: it is easier to verify truth than to come up with it, and different people find different truths meaningful. Perhaps social circles are based on a truth both confirmed and found meaningful by the members.
Reasonable isn't well-defined, and neither is "insanity". There MUST be postulates which cannot be justified. Call them axioms, though that isn't quite correct, because they are rarely a minimal set. Different groups of people clearly have different fundamental postulates, and slightly different rules of inference. And in a large, mobile, society individuals will often select those they interact with to be those whose postulates and rules of inference are similar. Even then the exact goals will often differ.
None of this justifies calling those who disagree with you insane, or even irrational. You don't expect a warthog and a house cat to have the same goals, evaluations of the situation, etc. People aren't quite that different, but it's just a matter of degree.
I don't think it's a hopeless cause, but "determining what is reasonable" is also not something that can be solved once and for all. It requires constant reflection and self-critique.
I wrote "Long COVID Doesn't Affect 25% of Kids" which is an analysis of a recent meta-analysis that was widely circulated on social media. I appreciate any input and suggestions.
A lot of the trouble with long covid discussions is that we don't all mean the same thing, If I get covid and a year later I still can't walk up the stairs without being out of breath, and you get covid and it takes you a month and a half after recovering before food tastes right, we both kinda have long covid, but the causes may well be quite different, and the seriousness is very different.
The best explanation I've seen for long covid in general is that there are a lot of illnesses that give you a lingering post-viral syndrome--you still occasionally feel extra tired, flushed, run a fever, have a racing heart, etc., for a few months after the infection. Some small fraction of people who get a bad case of the flu end up having this afterward. But with covid, tons of people got a viral infection at around the same time, and so there are lots of visible instances of people with a post-viral thing going on.
Agreed, I think there is a lot of definitional muddling going on. There are several different and broad 'diseases' going on, and even subtypes within that. I have some paragraphs on this but I'm saving them for the piece on adult Long COVID. This piece on childhood Long COVID just barely made the email limit.
Probably conventional nationalistic morality from some or another democratic country. Say 1990s American civic class ethical theory as a random example.
Not one of the leading ethical theories (which are all fatally flawed anyway).
Is Rawlsianism the most conducive to democracy? I always found his limitations around what could be considered "politically reasonable" to be a bit harsh. It's hard for me to see a system as properly democratic if you regularly rely on the hand of the censor to crack down on political parties that drift away from your philosophical framework. At the extreme end of interpreting how Rawls thinks about "political reasonableness," you end up with a democracy which can only include liberal parties, and excludes all else by definition.
There was an extensive discussion of the consequences of "summed" or "total" utilitarianism in the last open thread, starting at Parrhesia's https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-233/comment/7805444 . That interpretation of utilitarianism leads to what I consider a rather extreme natalist position (particularly if combined with a long-termist position). It might (maybe) be compatible with voting, but not with many individual rights.
I don't think your first statement is quite accurate. In reality, many (if not most) people do not actually vote in a way that maximizes their utility, and indeed a very common political tactic is to run on a platform of making sure another group *does not* maximize their utility. Which I suppose explains the utilitarian tendency towards technocracy that the above commenter pointed out (or at least, how they try to justify it.).
For many years I've wanted to kill myself. I have no dreams or interest in doing anything whatsoever. From an outsider's perspective I probably look like a leech upon society. It is in society's best interest to let me kill myself.
All needs and desires seem to stem from continued existence, while my only desire is to end this life.
Prior attempts at ending my life have all ended in failure. The only thing that fills me with hope is the knowledge that sooner or later I will succeed, or time will end me.
Why do so many people feel the need to impose their values and beliefs onto others, forcing them to live against their will?
Every tool and service related to suicide is setup to try and prevent you from engaging in this act, so they're useless to me.
When I post about this online, people usually report me as if that will actually help or do anything. It's the ultimate form of trying to brush someone off without doing anything to ease their suffering.
People are different. There are some situations where you would probably agree that suicide is a bad outcome, and without enough information it is not obvious for other people that you are not in one of them:
* some people want to kill themselves, then something in their life changes, and they don't want to kill themselves anymore;
* some people want to kill themselves, they make an unsuccessful attempt, and suddenly realize that they actually don't want to die;
* some people want to kill themselves, there is a possible intervention that would solve their problems and they would hypothetically approve of it, only they are not aware of the possible solution.
I frankly have no idea how frequent these three groups are... compared to the group that wants to kill themselves, wouldn't change their mind under any circumstance, and there truly is no solution to their problems that they would accept. From certain perspective, the people in the "true hopeless" group are sacrificed so that that the people in these three groups can live.
I used to think I wanted to write a book. I would occasionally make an attempt at it, but it would always peter out after a while with only a few thousand words written.
Eventually I realised something important: I don't actually want to write a book. If I actually wanted to write a book, I'd have written a book by now. There was something appealing about the idea of writing a book, for sure, but that's not the same thing. Once I understood that I didn't _really_ want to write a book I was much more at peace with myself.
You don't really want to kill yourself. I can tell this by the fact that you're still alive. Whatever suicidal desires you may have, they're clearly, as revealed by your actions, smaller than your desire to live. I think if you can come to terms with this fact you'll feel better about it.
I was quite suicidal for a number of years. Come home after work and load a pipe and a gun and ask myself which one I wanted to use on myself, every night.
And then, eventually, realized that; if I'm really willing to die; I can do... anything else first. I started doing dangerous stuff, solo climbing mountains, going to sketchy areas and daring cracked out meth heads to try shit, driving my car on frozen lakes, ect.
But as I did so, I had to fight to stay alive. By putting myself into hazardous situations where the *circumstances* could kill me, I somewhat "reset" the survival urge and conditioned my brain to try to stay alive. And because I was doing it in a risky manner, the part of my brain telling me to off myself was quite willing to go along.
It's been years since I've been in a bad way; but I still have this in my back pocket, and no one can take it away from me.
As you acknowledge, you're going to die, sooner or later, one way or another, you'll get there. You want it to come sooner right now; you could just do it quietly in your bathtub, sure. But why not take a little more time and try some "unsafe" things?
Worst case, you survive, you still want to die, and you've wasted time.
Best case, you have a great time and either die doing it or don't want to die anymore.
You may already have heard that the Buddha's first core insight was that "life is suffering", and his second that there is an escape from it. Seriously though, a key function of meditation is that you became more aware of your mental and emotional processes, including those that cause suffering. Another benefit is that because meditation is, more or less by definition, practicing to be more aware of your physical sensations. That's the best remedy for rumination, which is more or less a synonym for activation of the the "default mode network", which is a major cause of, and symptom of, depression. (I say this not as a psychotherapist but as a meditator.)
I mean feel free to kill yourself, it isn't that hard, unless you are are institutionalized. I for one won't hold it against you. The world has too many people, we can afford to spare a few.
I would encourage you to perhaps think about the root causes and whether they are temporary. And also think about all the people who care for you, and how they would feel.
I was very suicidal from ~13-19, mostly stemming from hating my single incompetent mother, and my crummy early teenage life. But once I got into college and got more control over my life (and my self frankly), I got a lot better. Another big element was I had at from a young age almost no emotional core, no family affection, or feeling of group membership. And my initial forays into women all ended in disaster from an early age up through ~16.
But then once things started going better with women I was able to find something I had an emotional connection with, and while each time one of those relationships ended, it was a big destructive spiral again, I slowly built up more self-esteem/positive patterns of thinking whatever.
So even though my early 20s included a bunch of disappointments, and in many ways should have been more objectively disappointing than my teens when my life had much more promise despite its temporary struggles, I was actually less depressed/suicidal.
And my life has been amazing from most of of the period ~27-41, so boy am I glad I stuck around. But I don't think I would have been "wrong" to kill myself at 16 or 17 per se. I was in legitimate distress. And I/you certainly don't owe it to anyone to live.
That said looking back from this perspective, I can see where it just would have devastated my family and a couple of my friends. And while I didn't like many people in my family (or care about their suffering), the devastated people would have included many people I did like (from extended family and close friends).
Anyway, I tend to think if you are 75 and in pain you should be able to kill yourself if you want, and society shouldn't discourage you. Or if you are a broken substance abusing 45 year old veteran who just cannot get their life together and hurts everyone around you. Some people really do rarely improve, and playing out the string is just a waste of resources.
But if you are still youngish, and particularly a teenager, so often your perceptions about what is important, or what problems/feelings are permanent are just wildly off base.
Well I can't really do anything about your suffering either, but I will say that I feel very similarly. I don't have it nearly as bad as it sound like you do right now, but I've been there before and the prevailing attitudes around suicide really are terrible. Any attitude other than "against" being taboo, the threat of essentially being locked up if you so much as talk about it wrong... At least there's internet anonymity to let you get some small fragment of your feelings out there. Still a far cry from anything useful.
I am so sorry for your pain. You don’t deserve this. When others try to stop you, please know that many of them also understand a cavernous despair. They are not trying to brush you off. They know from experience that it is possible to emerge from the abyss, and they want the same for you. They - I - care for a fellow human in pain.
You call yourself Love, and I take it as a hopeful seed to put this link here: https://www.lettersagainst.org. It has helped me.
You're projecting that suicide is the only way to ease your suffering. This is unlikely to be true if this comes from a place of mental distress, anguish and depression. At any rate, no one wants to die; they want their suffering to end. As for society's compulsion to impose values, the more honest framing is they want to help relieve suffering out of compassion, or sense of duty to their fellow man.
If you're willing to do something as drastic as suicide, then other forms of intervention or dramatic life changes should just as easily be on the table - nothing's a bridge too far. When evaluating through the lens of a suicidal state, the path to recovery seems too abstracted away and inconceivable, nothing makes sense, and we just want to make it go away at the press of a button. This is why help from those offering matters, notwithstanding that validation is a fundamental need. Anyway, you could do worse than a scorched earth approach of just throwing everything at the problem and seeing what sticks (and there's a lot to throw). Talk to someone, watch videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu1FMCxoEFc), pick up a CBT or 3rd-wave CBT therapist guidebook, read research papers on google scholar and try different things, get lots more sunlight, get medication, etc etc. There's always something else.
That doesn't mean it's easy, that doesn't mean any swinging dick whose book you pick up has all the answers. It means that acting in the face of uncertainty is wholly necessary. If you get indignant because I didn't tell you what you want to hear, well, good. There are people out there who give a damn, but they can't do the legwork for you. Wanting to believe you can't improve (absent compelling evidence life terminal disease) is a defense mechanism, where the prospect of recovery is taken as a sign of long-term failure. It's not your fault things got so bad.
> I have no dreams or interest in doing anything whatsoever.
I don't have dreams either. It's not a requirement for being content and having peace of mind. Bias towards action, though, goes a ways.
My medication history is pages long. I've suffered voluntary and involuntary treatments (I've suffered permanent side-effects from those treatments). I have stacks of psychiatric papers on my shelves. I've been to multiple therapists. I've wired enough extra lighting to bring my hovel to daylight levels. I've crawled my way back from homelessness multiple times.
It is offensive that you assume that my suffering is due to my not trying hard enough, or that I have to justify it's ending the only way that can be demonstrated to reliably work after all that.
Yes I've noticed you've been actively discounting everyone. Your experience is not everyone else's. I've not even engaged you, and I'm not "assuming" anything of you - that is a projection. Recovery does not necessarily scale with effort, and there is no implication that there's been a historical lack of it. I've had severe chronic insomnia since my teens, almost 2 decades, and managed to drastically improve my condition after fruitless experiences - the years don't matter either.
So be offended, I won't take your self-pity away from you.
I suspect your post may be to gather reactions to the story line. Can you post your statistics since apparently you post about his often: “ When I post about this online”
Your statement “ It is in society's best interest to let me kill myself.” is obviously incorrect because in general society tries to help those with this aspect of mental illness.
"Why do so many people feel the need to impose their values and beliefs onto others, forcing them to live against their will?"
Tentative theory-- most people aren't sure about whether they want to live or die, and they feel that suicide by someone else risks pushing them over the edge.
Alternate theory: There are people who like you. They want you around for whatever qualities they enjoy. This isn't the same thing as wanting you to be in less pain.
Tentative theory doesn't really jive with the vitriol that I've seen accompany that tendency IRL.
I think there's truth to the alternate theory, although only a facet of it. The language used is that of a betrayal: less “I wish you didn't cut down that tree on your property”, more “I wish you didn't cut down the tree that I planted on your property and sat under occasionally the last ten years after you invited me to”.
I can't find the comment, but I think you're right that people think they *ought* to be able to prevent suicide. I'm not sure why they believe that, but it can lead to a lot of anger fueled by guilt or sheme.
A very small thing, but I appreciate that you've got a small tasteful animation that I like rather than one of those attention grabbers that get on my nerves.
I don't disagree, but I think the source of the fear is probably usually more along the lines that *my* suicide is a judgement about *you*, that it was your fault due to your inadequacies as a parent/friend/sibling/whatever.
Which is entirely understandable as an insecurity, but it's still frustrating. Guess what, I don't want to hurt people, even if under different sets of cause and effect tickling such an insecurity wouldn't be considered my “fault”. Turns out being suicidal doesn't imply turning into an amoral monster without feelings or remorse for the pain caused.
If you have a chronic condition, then you might be able to go to a country like Switzerland where assisted suicide is legal, and get permission to use barbiturates to end your life. In theory, these drugs act like anaesthetics. Just like you don't feel yourself getting cut open when you're under a general anaesthetic, you shouldn't feel yourself suffocating when deliberately overdosing on these. It seems like the ideal death.
I hope you don't go through with this. But I also don't want you to suffer in your last moments. The choice is yours.
[edit] Should I delete this comment? I have too much on my plate to have to defend this comment.
I was going to write something vaguely similar to this, but will add that there is at least one method that appears to be effective and painless but doesn't require international travel.
However, I'm not going to suggest it here, because it's easily researched and I agree with the commenters who said that if the OP *really* wanted to die, they would have managed it by now after multiple attempts. I personally have a pretty high hedonic setpoint and have never been suicidal, but take great comfort in knowing it's an option for me if I ever need it in the face of a chronic and/or deteriorating condition. Having done the research, I'm very confident I could manage it myself on a first attempt if I ever really wanted to (assuming I wasn't gravely physically disabled).
Leave it up, your edit is clear and sufficient. People are unusually respectful around here. If someone has a different view they can create a subthread and your lack of reply won't imply anything.
I hope you have someone in real life who knows you well enough to help ease your suffering, one way or the other.
It's not impossible that in your case suicide is the answer, but an online forum is not a good place to figure that out. If you really have no one to talk to who is open minded to your position, I'd be willing to have an hour long chat.
Counterpoint: 25 years and multiple voluntary and involuntary procedures later, the lesson I've learned is that being open with people in real life is gamble that has little expected payoff and significant downsides.
Honestly, the worst part is how for the most part, everybody means well, but the net result is just more suffering.
25 years of suicidal mental illness is absolutely horrific. I don't know whether that's an accurate depiction of Maybe later's life, or whether it's a distortion from a current bout of depression (it's very good at erasing belief in prior happiness.)
It's complicated, but I'm not in anything like a “spiralling” state. There have definitely been better/less-bad times, but I'm reaaaally tired of metaphorically clawing my way out of holes. I am, in fact, fucking exhausted.
It's really easy to get bitter, which in turns makes it really easy to misinterpret things--or maybe interpret things from my own perspective and forget that other people mean well (which I alluded to elsewhere).
It amuses me somewhat that I'm largely thinking the same things for the same reasons (specifics have varied of course) as when I was first told “things will get better”. It's probably true for most people, but… I'm not most people :)
It's been 25-ish years since I've wanted to stop hurting. Did you mean that I'm not allowed to want a permanent solution until I have _more_ than 25 years experience with the problem? I'm… not inclined to take that notion very seriously.
It gets to me that Effective Altruism is a reasonable effort to get good results from charity (and it's done some of that), but it's also led to a lot of people making themselves and each other miserable, not to mention a lot of wasted effort.
It doesn't seem quite like Moloch, and it's a bit subtle for Coyote's sense of humor. Maybe Murphy?
I don't think it actually makes anyone miserable, I just think it attracts people who are good at making themselves miserable and who would be miserable wherever they end up.
Suppose I find my girlfriend attractive but not as much as I’d like to. Suppose also that I can think of at least two things she could do that would make her more attractive to me, which require a small or large effort from her and none from me. Suppose further that she cares very much how attractive I find her - for her own sake as well as mine - and would likely be eager to put in considerable effort to maximise it, given the option. Suppose finally that finding out that I don’t already find her maximally attractive would be confirmation of her worst fear and would lead to considerable disutility on her part.
To little detail on what you want changed to offer specific advice.
For example this is something that she would likely already want to change about herself (e.g. losing weight if overweight, being more fit, being less self-conscious at parties, etc.) if so framing it as something you'd find more attractive is likely only going to make her feel worse about it and instead you should look for ways to help her (e.g. if you're also even a bit overweight note that you've gained a few pounds and maybe you guys could do a diet together, suggest some active activities you can do together, say you'd like to try an improve class together etc.).
Alternatively is this is something more aesthetic preference kind of thing and reversible (e.g growing hair out/cutting hair shorter, intimate grooming, clothes etc.), propose it as more of an experiment / mixing it up. E.g. have you ever though about growing your hair out, I'd be curious to see how it would look on you, I bet it would look good, etc. If you do like a change or steps towards it be sure to compliment it. Actually, in general try to make an effort to compliment things you like, that will make her feel more secure in the relationship and desired by you.
Break up with her. Any woman so insecure she has to believe you find her maximally attractive and simultaneously so self-deluded she's *able* to believe this is a hive of neurosis and walking on those eggshells will only get worse and worse over time.
I'm serious. This kind of "narcissistic"[*] oversensitivity is one of the absolute worst traits a person can have.
[*] Not in the literal psychological sense, of course, but I don't know a better word for the need to maintain a brittle quasi-belief that you're perfect as a way to counteract low self-esteem.
Irrational insecurity about relationship future is so freaking common though. Monkey brains care an insane amount about social status, relationships, mating prospects and security. You're ruling out something like 80% of the population if you rule them out for being oversensitive about their romantic-interest's attachment to them.
You should either breakup with them or learn to not care about these aspects. There is no way to change her in these ways without destroying this relationship or being extremely manipulative.
Why do you think so? I'm confident that both me and my girlfriend could just straight-up ask the other to make a small-effort change (get a haircut, shave more often, wear a difference scent, or whatever) and there would be no drama.
Second. I don't wear a beard because my wife prefers me clean-shaven. My wife wears her hair long because I like it that way. This isn't absolute - I grew my beard out last winter and she hacked her hair off this summer when the heat hit, both after a brief discussion. You should be able to do little things like this for your partner, IMO anyway.
OTOH, the way the OP is hedging around what he actually wants makes me suspect that his things are non-trivial asks. In specific, I'd bet the hard thing is weight loss, which is very hard indeed.
> Suppose further that she cares very much how attractive I find her - for her own sake as well as mine - and would likely be eager to put in considerable effort to maximise it, given the option.
This sounds toxic. What is your girlfriend willing to do to win your approval and to what end? If she's self-conscious about how she looks now, time will only chip away at her attractiveness. Can she handle that deterioration in the long term? If you don't think so, then consider ending the relationship.
Supposing all those suppositions are supposedly true - maybe test the waters first with one of the "small effort" things, and see how that goes. If even a very small marginal improvement is enough to neurotically unsettle the relationship on her end, that's a) not a good sign for longevity; and b) a clear signal to never touch this line of reasoning again, if it's still worthwhile to stick together for other reasons. Trust is really important in interpersonals, so consider whether you "lying" (by omission) about this in the future is continually plausible + reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Do keep in mind that women are much better than men at smelling bullshit when someone says they Look Great, since they're faced with this selection pressure more intensely and from a much earlier age than guys.
(I imagine you only ask the question here in the first place cause it kinda bothers you. Possibly mistaken about that? Also inherently assuming a hetero relationship based on ACX statistical priors, apologies if that's also wrong, disregard last sentence if so.)
I think kind of impossible to say without more direct knowledge of the specifics.
I would provide my experience from a parallel problem and see if that is helpful.
From ~16-24 I was in a series of long term relationships with some very attractive women (lets be crass and call them mostly 8s and 9s). Generally relatively intelligent too, with good personalities and educational/professional prospects. All highly attractive mates. It didn't work out with any of them, though could have if I had had my shit slightly more together.
Just before turning 27 I met the woman who is still and will likely always be my wife. She was probably the least attractive, or 2nd least attractive out of all those women, and when we got together I was not super attracted to her. But after our first (or second depending on what counts as a "date") date I was like "this is probably the person I will marry".
Why? Well she seemed incredibly emotionally stable, very intelligent without being threatening, interesting, earnest, ethical, into me, had good professional prospects, and all told my evaluation was that I was unlikely to do better (which I think was correct). We got married after 18 months together, had children after 6 years together.
And my decision has super paid off in a couple ways.
1) I am a sexual enough person, that even a woman I am not super attracted to, I find quite attractive, honestly more attractive than she would probably like on a day-to-day basis.
2) Romance slowly makes people more attractive to you, so my evaluation of her has improved over time for that reason.
3) Since she isn't a model, but just above average, there isn't the constant need to fight off competition, or nearly the level of paranoia (some unjustified, a lot of it justified) I felt in some previous relationships.
4) I lucked out in that she has aged very well. She ended up being one of those women who is overlooked in the general attractiveness of youth, but now in her late 30s still looks almost as good as she did at 23, and so has risen in relative position substantially, particularly among mothers as motherhood is often hard on people.
5) The evaluation of her emotional/professional/other traits was right on, and she has been an amazing partner.
6) I have enough success in other elements in my life and feel secure enough in my own self-esteem and accomplishments, that I don't feel insecure internally, or the need to get into status pissing matches with clients/friends/whoever.
Anyway, some things I have done that have helped at times.
I constantly reinforce how attracted I am to her and point out when I like what she is wearing. That way when I sparingly given negative feedback, there isn't insecurity on her end and it isn't a big deal. It is still a little fraught, once a dress I said I hated turned out to be her favorite and one she thought looked great on her. But there was enough relationship capital there that it mostly just became a joke.
I also try to make it clear to her all the ways I value her outside her appearance. So appearance based comments don't undermine the sense I value her.
I actively take her shopping and steer her towards things I think look good on her.
I try to include her in active athletic hobbies, (though these days it is really she who needs to do this more with me).
I don't make contact or strong emotional relationships with other women, particularly ones who are more attractive. The easiest way to avoid being unfaithful is to not ever put yourself in a position where it is possible. No business trips with your cute assistant, no drinks after the presentation alone with the cross country colleague you really hit it off with.
Would I rather she look like a supermodel? Probably...yes. I am sure she would rather I look like Tommy Shelby or Henry Cavil. But all sorts of things aren't just how I would like them. I would also rather be a billionaire than a mere petty bourgeoisie (or low end bourgeoisie).
Also to be totally Machiavellian, don't underestimate the life value from maintaining a friend group at or around your level. Being friends with the rich and powerful has a lot of perks, it also often makes you feel like shit about your life. Having friends of your same social standing or that right below yours has economic downsides in terms of networking, but great emotional upsides. Being the rich friend is much more emotionally fulfilling than being the poor friend, even if economically/professionally you should want to be the poor friend.
IDK that is a lot of words maybe not directly about your problem. But it was fun/therapeutic for me to write and think about, and maybe useful to you :)
Martin Blank made a big effort post and another user made a one-word drive-by snark, their only contribution in this entire page, and somehow we're supposed to treat the one-word snark as worthy of discussion.
Martin's post is what young immature in their 20s should read in order to become mature about their dating futures and Get The Fuck over worrying too much about looks.
That point #4 is super important and so often overlooked due to temporal discounting...thanks for mentioning it. Young people rarely ask me for advice about growing up, but it's one of the things I wish I could get across more often. Yes, absolutely do a bit of YOLO insanity while you can still physically take it - there are some incredible life experiences only possible with the vigour (and naivete-open-to-learning) of youth. But there will be a cost to hard living sooner or later, and it's not pretty. Literally. (In this regard I'm thankful for declining rates of youth smoking and drinking. The Kids won't be Alright necessarily, but they'll probably be attractive longer. Raising the aesthetic waterline ought to be a sub-goal of sanity-raising.)
Attractiveness may get the initial hormones jazzed, but it's in constant decay, and any relationship with the potential to turn long-term should try to model whether that'll be closer to "linear" or "exponential". I no longer value high Present Attractiveness in people obviously (if perhaps obliviously) determined to spend that capital down as soon as possible, rather than conserve it for the next 80 years of their life. Not just because it's a losing rearguard battle, but "partner spends too much time/money/effort on Maintaining Vanity" is a classic relationship failure mode. Better to just avoid that trap entirely by preferring Durable Goods.
The two things I would suggest are mutuality and framing.
Mutuality meaning, start a conversation about relationship goals you should each have to improve the strength of the relationship, ask for what she would want from you first, to give her the emotional context of seeing that she can find requests to make despite already liking you a lot, and put it in the frame of both of you working together to achieve goals rather than just criticizing a problem with her she needs to fix.
Framing depends on what things you actually want. The idea is to offload the problem/desire from her onto something else in the world. Pretty easy if you wished she would wear more skirts or whatever, just wait till you're both watching a movie with someone in a skirt or walk past a store selling skirts and muse about how you like skirts and always find they make women more attractive to you. Harder if you want her to lose 50 lbs, in that case I would frame it in terms of concerns about long-term health and still being active together in 40 years or w/e, and make being in shape a mutual couple goal you can work on together. Whatever it actually is, see if you can find a framing like this which is 'here's an external thing I'm interested in' rather than 'here's a problem with you.'
If she were significantly less attractive than she currently is (say, 50 lbs heavier, or with some disfigurement or permanent stretch marks) would you consider leaving the relationship for that reason? (I know there's a moral impulse to say 'Of course not!', but this is a question for you about your honest interests and decisions; the moral judgement just gets in the way here.)
If so, there's nothing you can really do; her fear about changes in your opinion of her attractiveness is well-founded. You can (and maybe should) do the obvious 'try bringing it up gently', but this is bound to be a fraught situation; suggestions that she could be more attractive inevitably carry a threat to the relationship, and so are a Big Deal to her monkey brain.
If not, try to fight the insecurity directly. Tell her that your love isn't contingent on beauty. Find a romantic picture of an older couple and say you're looking forward to that too. Do generally romantic things unprompted. Try to give her an excess number of reminders that you're fond of her: the usual tropes of surprise sticky notes left in places she'll eventually find them, obvious thoughtfulness on things that matter to her, love letters, etc. Consider marriage/engagement, depending on your culture; it's one of the biggest security blankets around for romantic relationships. (Note that love languages matter a lot here; figure out or ask what gestures she finds most meaningful, and dedicate time and effort to pushing those buttons.)
Security buys you both the ability to be honest about what you want, and to get more of it, without threatening the relationship. If it's a stock you can invest in with this girlfriend, it's got a good return.
If it's the case that your relationship is based on genuine interpersonal connection, not on your assessment of her as an aesthetic object, find ways to convince her of this so that she can stop agonizing over whether she's pretty enough for you. Establishing this baseline should take the pressure off, such that if it's true that she cares very much what you think of her appearance, she can more easily just ask you "hey, do you think I'd look good with this haircut?" or whatever.
If this is not the case, and she's right to worry about what will happen if and when you start to find her less attractive, then communicating this honestly will improve long-term utility for both of you.
Depends: If this thing can be framed as a personal kink of yours ( " I am really into green hair " ), it is probably not much of a problem to communicate. But if it is one of the things that society thinks make people attractive or unattractive, it will hurt a lot.
I don't think it's really possible to answer that without more details... But maybe you should ask yourself - and her - what you should do to make yourself more attractive to her.
Well ordered attractiveness begins with the other.
Hey! I understand that maybe interest in Ukrainian-Russian War is dwindling in the West, but maybe some people are interested in learning more about Ukraine, and if so - what do you want to know?
I would be interested in your take of the following explanation that I have heard:
Life in the republics DNR/LNR in the last years has been absolutely terrible, and everyone in Ukraine could see this. This has pretty much extinguished any support for Russian actions in Ukraine, because these republics serve as an example for how disastrous that might become for anyone living in an area controlled by Moscow. This also contributed a lot to the fierce resistance that Russian troops encountered from the very beginning: the prospect of living a life as in DNR/LNR is just too terrible.
Would you agree with this? Is it too extreme, but contains some truth? Or is it just grossly oversimplified?
Well yeah, I think that's the attitude in Ukraine towards DNR/LNR.
Many people left separatist-controlled areas for 'mainland' Ukraine, around 1 million, in 2014-2018 or so.
What has happened in L/DNR is a clear example that Moscow would not even try to establish a semblance of normal society in the areas it does not care about.
To put into perspective — Donetsk was the second most important city in Ukraine after Kyiv, with a lot of investment into infrastructure, businesses, software industry, universities...
I have not been there since the separatists and Russians seized it, but I know people who visited these areas to see their relatives, and well, yeah, it is not nice.
Thank you very much! It can be quite hard to understand the situation from the outside, so I really appreciate that you take the time to answer our questions!
I read it's been normalized, which I find a mixture of what I'd expect and hard to imagine.
(How) did your outlook on your country, life, the world, the future ... change since february? Or how do you perceive this to be in your circles? Whenever I'm meeting friends we talk about the war and what it means, even though we're some 1000 km west.
In your different circles, does it matter, who has Russian as a primary language and who Ukrainian? (How) did it change since February?
Are there Ukrainian citizens that you (or some other groups) would perceive as 'Russian' and does it matter? If Russians are living in Kyiv right now, how difficult or easy is that?
From what you observe personally, what is the sentiment vis-a-vis eg. Poland, Hungary, Germany, France?
How do people in your circles perceive the EU candidate status? Also in terms of: do they think this is about years or decades ... (if it matters)?
From different statements of Ukrainians in my country it seems that many wouldn't mind NATO actively engaging, even if it meant a direct Russian-NATO war. What's the take on that in your circles or in what you read?
Continuing on the language questions: to my understanding, there is only one official language, which is Ukrainian. Have there however been two administrative languages, at least in some regions? (How) did this change in the last two decades? Related: I keep reading that there was some move to limit Russian language (as language of instruction in schools, in the administration ...?) around 2014, that it was met with protest and withdrawn later. But I couldn't get to the specifics. What was actually introduced (and retracted) and why?
How similar is Ukraine to Polish language? How well would you be able to communicate with sb. who speaks Polish?
Is there an Ukrainian author you'd specifically recommend? (I'm thinking of fiction, but ultimately could be anything).
I realize my questions are often at the border of being private versus knowledge about Ukraine ... but then clearly there is no obligation to answer any of those, so just putting them out there.
I have some questions that could be perceived as being more political, I'm holding off with those for the moment. Btw., I read some of your answers below, thanks for taking the time.
I'm glad to hear. Pressure to change internal practices/audit seems realistic. EU has a bad track record for new admissions taking really long (both for good and for bad reasons), which made me wonder, if the newest EU candidacy status gives rise to expectations that cannot or probably will not be fullfilled quickly.
I appreciate your answers and I'm happy to read more and still *please* don't feel obliged to answer every single of my questions!
Many great questions, I'll answer them one by one.
So about life in Kyiv (which I think would also be applicable to other cities not on the frontline) —
1. There are still air-raid sirens. Not so frequent as before, but they are still common.
2. Actual missile strikes on Kyiv are happening maybe once per month for the last couple of months, Russians do not have so many cruise missiles.
3. There are no air strikes, Russian planes fly only over frontlines
4. People are trying to go back to the "normal" life, because that's what they can do, people need to make money to support their families. Another option is joining the army. Many people moonlight as volunteers — help refugees, try to raise money to support troops with supplies — drones, equipment, cars.
5. People are aware that probably this will be a long war, so they adjust their plans accordingly
6. Almost everyone is carefully tracking all the news about the war, whether it is websites, Telegram channels, or Youtube, and spends some hours on it daily. some sort of "war-scrolling"
7. Society is very mobilized.
8. Public infrastructure is working fine in Kyiv (well, except for hot water in my house)
9. Most of the stores are open, most of the cafes, and restaurants.
10. Some people are even starting new businesses, as crazy as it sounds, some return to the previously occupied areas (Kyiv suburbs like Bucha, Irpen), and repair their homes.
11. Mid-March Kyiv gave kinda Fallouty vibes, turning desolate, now it's closer to pre-war, but you can still see signs of the situation — anti-tank metal blockades, bags of sand, army members, buildings that suffered the damage, more homeless on the street.
12. Many people lost their jobs, but many have retained them.
13. 2014 was probably a bigger shock because before that Ukraine was peaceful since WW2, this war is a continuation of 2014.
How many people in Ukraine do NOT speak Russian as a second (or first), language? Is Ukrainian and Russian mutually inteligible? Non-Ukrainians have different opinions on this question. For me, as a Czech person, Russian and Ukrainian are both non-inteligible and I am unable to distinguish between them when I overhear them on the street, but some people claim they are very different. How many people speak intermediate dialect, called, I think, s-something? Do Ukrainians learn Russian at school (or at what year they stopped)? For that matter, when did they start teaching English; I noticed that most middle-aged refugees do not speak English, but children do?
Education:
How come Ukraine has so high proportion of college graduates, given that this really does not match structure of its economy? Is "college" just an equivalent of high school or something?
Land reform:
Before the war, there were some reports of proposed land restructuring as an important political topic. Can you tell us more about that (I do not remember anything more)?
Alcohol:
Does Ukraine produce some good beer or wine that can be recommended? :-) If so, it is shamefully unknown in Europe(edit: in the West, in the West, sorry :-) given how famous for its agriculture your country is
Yes, most Ukrainian would try to get Masters or Bachelor's degree, in my social bubble almost everyone has it. So it is a university degree, four or six years. I think it is an issue of social mobility, you are blocked out of white-collar work if you do not have a degree. Many work during University.
Land:
Previously, there was a moratorium in place on selling land, now it is revoked (under Zelensky).
Alcohol: I do not drink (almost), but I think Ukrainian beer is rather good and has a good reputation. Something from the smaller more boutique breweries. The best wine I think was in Crimea.
Society in Ukraine is 100% bilingual, literally. You have a primary language, but you can still understand the other one. I think it is similar to Catalan and Spanish in Catalan-speaking regions in Spain. Grammar is very similar, there is a 60-70% maybe overlap in vocabulary but the phonetics are very different, so even Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens have a distinct accent. In Central Ukraine, people would use more Russian loan words in a more colloquial speech. It is called Surzhyk, there are different attitudes towards it.
Ukrainian is not hard to learn for Russians but is not mutually intelligible, some adaptation is required.
English is a primary foreign language in school at least since 1991, or maybe even in late Soviet times. I think the quality of instruction has improved, plus you interact with English language content more (like video games, websites, songs, etc).
About Russian in schools, is a complicated topic, because for example there were a lot of "Russian as a language of instruction" schools, and their number has been declining since 1991. Such schools still exist but in a much smaller number. Russian as a foreign language, hard to say, I think it depends on the school, I need to google the latest legislation.
Ehhhh, I don't know. Ethnic Russians are not segregated in Ukraine, plus most of the families are ethnically mixed, especially in the cities, and 80% of Ukraine's citizens live in cities.
And ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian would speak it not only at home :). The only place where you kind of required to speak Ukrainian is education, especially during high school, but only when you are directly answering the teacher, and even that would not happen always.
Plus, there is ethnicity and there is nationality, and in many cases, nationality is more important for an identity — younger people who were born in independent Ukraine would consider themselves Ukrainians first and foremost, even though their parents may come from Russia, they may have a Russian surname or something.
There is an exception, though, I think — in Crimea a distinctly "Russian" identity was strong — among Slavic people who live there. Crimea is the only place in Ukraine where Russians (hard to say, ethnicity or identity) were in majority.
When I referred to speaking Russian at home, I meant that the language one speaks at home (the original, parental home - not the possibility of a home shared with a spouse or flatmates) is most likely the language that one identifies with most strongly.
I sporadically ask bilingual people both what they speak at home and what they dream in. It's almost always the same.
I'll defer to the actual Ukrainian but Ukraine mainly exports primary resources or heavy industry like wheat or steel. Ukraine is a bit player in the beer, wine, and vodka markets which are dominated by places like Sweden, Poland, Italy, or France. Ukraine does make wine but the biggest wine producing region of Ukraine is Crimea. So that's obviously not widely available.
Nemiroff is both available in the west and common in Ukraine. And Chernigivske if you can get it is stereotypical. At least in my experience. I'm not sure how the siege of their home city affected Chernigivske but the Russians have since retreated from the city.
I do not interact much with authorities, I do not need any permits for some business or something. I think in Ukraine most of the corruption happened on a more business owner/government official level. A good example would be real estate developers skimming regulations or influencing the decisions of lawmakers, courts, etc.
How did it change? I don't know. I feel that civil society is much stronger now, but the focus is mostly on war, helping the troops, and helping refugees. There are some questionable laws being passed right now.
Another aspect is that oligarchs are losing influence rapidly now and I don't know what will come out of it.
There was a law that made it easier to exclude foreigners from Supervisory Boards of state companies — it required them to spend be present at meetings personally, not online. This law made quite a stir in the business community, not sure if it was passed.
There was also something about audit processes, need to find it.
Reports are that about ten million people have fled the country (out of a population of about 44 million). Reports are this group is about 90% women because Ukraine has banned men from leaving the country. If so that's a bit less than half of all the women in the country. Is that accurate? Is there now a two to one male to female ratio in who's left in the country?
I think it is still less than that, and many people are returning. I would say 5 million (after excluding those who returned by now) went to the west (elderly, women, and children), and around maybe 2 million or less (both sexes) went from occupied areas to Russia (mainly due to passage to Ukraine being blocked).
To be honest, it does not feel like that on the streets, mainly because that group is not only women (Ukraine has a rather old population with many retirees). But anecdotally a lot of my female friends went to the West
Hard to say, depends on the place and situation. There are filtration camps in Mariupol for example, as far as I understand FSB or whoever runs them have more interest in males. There is a way out of occupied areas through Russia to Estonia, people I know went that route.
When you say on the street where are you? I expect different cities to have different experiences.
We have decent statistics on Ukrainian refugees in the EU and a few other countries and the answer does still look to be, at a minimum, 6-8 million. Plus the 1-2 million who went to Russia. And a large majority female. Though this number could well accomodate millions of returnees since at least ten million people crossed the western borders and possibly more.
My thought is that maybe the countryside is emptying out and people are going to better defended cities?
People are going away from the frontline, basically North and West. I do not think it is about countryside vs city, (but maybe true in some regions, like Odesa), basically getting away from places like Mykolaiv and Kharkiv which are in range of artillery and under constant shelling.
I think it's 90% women and children or: 90% of persons aged 18-65 are women.
I'm also a bit frustrated that news outlets I'd look at would be often very unspecific here. Relately, I'm unsure to which extend the roughly ten million already count those that have returned in the meantime, or not.
Is there anything time or financially effective that one can do to result in the war ending faster? Or reducing the number of people who die in the long run.
What is Putin's aims/decision calculus.
Is there a way to figure out how much support Russia has in different areas of the Donbass/Luhansk/Crimea. Is that support mixed around or concentrated?
Is a stable resolution to the conflict possible, if so what might that look like.
Russian state media propaganda is really well produced / persuasive, it seems most Russians are supportive of the war / state, and basically all possible internal threats to Putin have been killed / arrested / silenced since the start of the war. Are these statements true, and what implications does that have ?
----Russian state media propaganda is really well produced / persuasive, it seems most Russians are supportive of the war / state, and basically all possible internal threats to Putin have been killed / arrested / silenced since the start of the war. Are these statements true, and what implications does that have ?
I think the situation is more complicated. From my observation propaganda works when you don't know much about the subject. So I think that many Russians do not buy propaganda when it is actually about Russian Federation, but believe what they are told about NATO plans and such.
I think there is a vocal minority in Russian society that is pro-war, and have a full understanding of what is happening there (with their own biases of course, similar to pro-Putin people here). Then there is a vocal anti-war minority, but these people are in serious danger and do not have that much radical component. Then comes the majority that is super conformist, hopes that the war will end soon, does not see themselves as responsible, and tries to believe that "we're the good guys here" — but it is more of a coping mechanism.
I've noticed that there is something that for many Russians is hard to acknowledge — atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol, recent bombings in Kremenchuk, and so on. They cling to any conspiracy theory that this didn't happen because otherwise, it breaks something in their view of the world.
About access to "independent" media — Youtube is not blocked in Russia, Telegram works too — and a lot of Russians have a smartphone or computer of some sort, so it's not as hard to get info.
And last point — there is convincing data that younger Russians (18-25) are overwhelmingly anti-war. The older, the more pro-war.
-- Is there a way to figure out how much support Russia has in different areas of the Donbass/Luhansk/Crimea. Is that support mixed around or concentrated?
First, you need to distinguish Ukraine controlled Donbas and Separatist areas.
For example, Severodonetsk had a population of more than 100 000 before the war, yet when the Russians came, only roughly 8000 were still there. Everybody else evacuated to mainland Ukraine or further West (to my knowledge).
In Separatist areas, 2/3rds of the population left between 2014-2021. Whether the people who are still there support Putin is hard to say, they may already have a distinct identity, that is not Russian and not Ukrainian. DNR/LNR are strict dictatorships, where general mobilization is run, contrary to Russia proper. I think that people there are quite weary of this whole situation but have no control over what is happening, living in a quasi-Stalinist state. That doesn't mean that they support Ukraine, though.
In Crimea I think Russians and ethnic Ukrainians are more pro-Putin than anywhere else, Crimean Tatars and other indigenous nations are against Putin.
I don't know to be honest. My guess is (totally unoriginal) that he wanted Ukraine to become second Belarus — install a friendly ruler. And if Ukraine is pacified then all other former republics will go back into the fold. That is absolutely rational, due to the Russian demography crisis, stagnant economy, and systemic issues — there is no way back to the "superpower" status except by annexation of neighbors.
Probably he understands now that this may not happen, but he can still destroy the Ukrainian economy (sea blockade is very important), chop off the southern part and bits of Donbas and test the West.
Another important issue is the "Crimean consensus". After the annexation of Crimea Putin enjoyed high support among Russians roughly for four years, until 2018. So this invasion tries to replicate that success.
A speculation that sounds somewhat plausible why Putin might want to destroy Ukrainian economy (and keep it in war state since 2014):
Living standards for the average Russian is/was much worse than for average Ukrainians. This is a potential threat for Putin. Russian citizen (not counting the elites) will not compare their living standards with the US or even Europe, because those are degraded societies in their (or at least Putin's) worldview. But Ukrainians are the same people as Russians, which only happen to live across the border, as Putin keeps on emphasizing. So if Ukrainians have much higher living standards than Russians, this is a much bigger source of discontent for Russians than if some other country has higher living standards. If Ukraine was just a peaceful and prosperous country, this would eventually threaten Putin's authority.
Ukraine has a better Gini ratio, gdp per capita would not give a full picture. The point is, there is no such disparity between capital and the province in Ukraine, as in Russia. That’s why soldiers from underdeveloped parts of Russia would be amazed by some Ukrainian smaller cities and villages.
I think that it is not particularly about living standards in a purely material sense, because Moscow/St. Petersburg/Ekaterinburg are pretty affluent, but more about decentralization, more participatory institutions, and so on. A typical village in Western Ukraine is very nice, a typical Russian village (especially in depressive regions) is anything but.
I think what Putin fears is the de-sacralization of authority and power. Successfully protesting against a member of post-Soviet nomenklatura, voting for a Jewish standup comedian as a president, all of that destroys a certain societal consensus — "Higher-ups know what they are doing, we shouldn't interfere"
Nit: I think that's true of the *median* Russian vs. Ukrainian, not the *average*. Russia's average is skewed by the huge gap between residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and just about everywhere else.
But, yes, it's not healthy for Vladimir Putin to have a bunch of healthy, happy, relatively prosperous Russian-speaking Slavs living right next door talking to their friends and family in Russia about how much better things have been since they had themselves a little color revolution and gave democracy a try.
Ok, thanks a lot. That gives me a lot of direction on what I may cover in long-form content.
Again, I can't give a good answer to everything (or at least unbiased).
I'll try to answer them briefly.
1. Currently, I do not believe in any diplomatic resolutions. There is a massive gap between what the Kremlin wants and what the Ukrainians want (I mean most of the population, not necessarily the political figures). Key to the war ending on terms favorable to Ukrainians is support, material and financial. The problem is this support is costly –– the cost of weapons, financial help, and adverse effects of sanctions on the Western economy. So for this to happen, politicians in the "West" need to understand that their voters are ok with it.
So I recommend reaching out to local politicians and asking them about their position on Ukraine, asking them to pledge support, etc.
Something to understand about Ukraine is that the war would go on with or without Western help — there would not be a surrender. I don't believe in ceasefire either; it doesn't matter who is in charge, even if Zelensky is killed or anything else.
I am trying to improve my forecasting skills and I was looking for a tool that would allow me to design a graph/network where I could place some statement as a node with an attached probability (confidence level) and then the nodes can be linked so that I can automatically compute the joint or disjoint probability etc.
It seems such a tool could be quite useful, for a forecast with many inputs.
I am not sure if bayesian networks or influence graphs are what I am looking for or if they could be used for such scope. Nevertheless, I haven't exactly found a super user-friendly tool for either of them.
Several tools for this exist; they're called probabilistic programming languages. These would include Stan, PyMC, and Turing.jl. JASP lets you do this with a GUI, but I tend to warn people away from it because it makes it very easy to think you know what you're doing when you don't.
That being said, the node-based interface you're thinking of wouldn't really work once you move onto anything even slightly more advanced than what you'd cover in the first week of a probability class, like updating on new observations when you have multiple unknown variables.
The last time I saw this comment I had a thought that you could probably do something like this with gnu r, although it would be pretty hacky and r is pretty old at this point, who knows if people still use it
Since you haven't had any replies yet I figured I would throw out my probably crappy suggestion
Do you know of a truly international news site? Sth. that has no specific geographical focus. Or can you recommend news outlets which cover one continent or some part of it?
The Economist is perhaps not entirely international in focus, but has sections dedicated to news on each Continent and does a good job of covering a wide breadth of news.
The Christian Science Monitor leans slightly toward the US, but even just now it has things from Tunisia, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe on the front page. I'd recommend giving it a look.
I assume that a fairly large number of readers of ACX were brought into the Dall-E beta in the last week. Anyone have any big insights?
I have mostly been hoping to use Dall-E as a tool to assist with crafting collateral for tabletop RPGs -- for example, I hoped to make character portraits, evocative pictures of settings, and perhaps maps. Some experiences:
1. Dall-E's content filters for violence are a hindrance. Mentioning a weapon (like "war mace") will sometimes get your prompt thrown out, even if you are looking for a portrait of a single character just holding it.
2. I have not found it to be really able to create the kind of outfits that I'm looking for for classic D&D-style games from just a text prompt. It's much easier to use an image prompt to get it into the right general search space and then use the editing tools.
3. Dall-E had pretty strong biases against some of the "almost realistic, but with one feature that's fantastic" things that you commonly see in fantasy. For example, it doesn't really like to show people with pointy elf ears, and if you do a variant on a picture with pointy ears, my experience is that all the variants will have normal ears. I tried to get it to draw a fox with multiple tails with very little success -- Dall-E knows how many tails a fox has, and it's one!
4. I got a lot better results with portraits when I basically treated the face and the rest of the portrait as separate problems. Dall-E struggles with faces, so you're pretty unlikely to both get a good face and a good everything else you want in a single pass. Instead, I've learned to work on getting a good "everything else," then edit the image, erase the face (or the part of it that seems bad), and try a few passes at getting Dall-E to just create a good face.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 10 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian victory 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 losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
29 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 25 % on June 20).
63 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 65 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what 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 became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
It surely seems that predictions of Russia-doomers (like Kamil Galleev, but I have Twitter blocked, so don’t ask me for examples) how Russian collapse is just around the corner are not panning out.
Italian government collapsed and there will be new elections on September 25. Italy is third largest EU country, very important in its decision-making processes. I know little about Italian politics, but from foreign reporting it seems like ousted prime minister Draghi is, in Italian context, something like a Russia hawk, and among Italian parties there is almost no one who would want to do MORE to support Ukraine (unlike in Germany), so election are going to result in either “no changes” or a government with an attitude more conciliatory to Russia (happy to be corrected on this).
On the other hand, Ukraine, and Western support for it, is not on track to collapse either. Possible opening of Black sea ports might help Ukrainian economy. Since my previous update, fivethirtyeight.com unveiled their prediction of US congressional elections, with Democrats currently having 15 % chance to retain the House; that is higher than I guessed based on Biden's approval rating. I think that if Republicans win, probability that US gradually and subtly scales down its support for Ukraine increases, since Biden will look for ways to “change course”, as US pundits say. And it is rather unlikely that he would change course in the direction of more support for Ukraine.
*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.
(1) As a thought exercise, how would your percentages change if "Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine" were defined in terms of Russia's stated goals at the war's outset? If the success condition were Russia were (a) the liberation of the Donbas, and (b) the "demilitarization and denazification" of Ukraine, what do you think are the % odds of that happening?
(2) I'd be cautious about relying on a Republican victory to meaningfully change course for the US in Ukraine. Currently only treasure is being spent, and we as a people (particularly our Republican friends and neighbors), are not historically good at connecting "the public treasury seems a little thin" with "wow we are spending a lot on the military." Plus, although there is an "America First means isolationism" strain in the Republican Party, there also is a *lot* of militarism and foreign policy maximalism in those ranks. It seems to me that a victorious Republican party will most likely to be a two-headed monster for the Biden Administration, with as many voices criticizing *failure to do more* for Ukraine as criticizing overinvestment there. If that happens, the administration has the luxury of appearance that it is navigating a middle course between two extremes, providing cover to continue the status quo until at least the 2024 election.
Ad 1) I would have to change them to "indeterminate", since those demands are so vague. What does in mean to denazify a Slavic country whose president is of Jewish ancestry? Even borders of what constitutes Donbas are unclear.
Ad 2) I agree, I think that changing the course is only a possibility, by no means certain.
(1b) A plausible interpretation of Russia's demand to "denazify" Ukraine is: Russia gets veto power over Ukrainian leadership. Russia could declare any politician in Ukraine a Nazi, even if they're Jewish, and Ukraine would have to replace them with someone Russia does not consider a Nazi.
(1a) The Donbas refers to the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They have well specified borders. Russia did not just want to liberate the Donbas at the beginning. Their goal was Novorussyia. The borders of this are less clear, but you could take something like: Russia or its proxies control at least 90% of the territory of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizha, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv Oblasts.
What do you think the odds of these three things happening: Russia gets veto power over Ukrainian leadership, Russia or its proxies control at least 90% of Novorussyia, and Russia or its proxies control all of the Donbas?
Donbas is short for Donets coal basin; its firm identification in Western media with Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (i.e. provinces) is a new, and by that I mean few months old, development. Before the war, "Donbas" in Western media often meant just separatist controlled regions of Ukraine, entirely located within those provinces, but not constituting whole of them. As Wikipedia says, "There are numerous definitions of the region's extent.[11] It is now most commonly defined as the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. The historical coal mining region excluded parts of these oblasts, and included areas in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Southern Russia.[7]".
1a) I think there is less than 5 % chance that Russia gets veto power over government controlling Uzhorod (Ukrainian city near Slovakia, west of Carpatian mountains). There is, on the other hand, very high chance it gets veto power over de facto government controlling Mariupol; let's say, 80%. It will not be called Ukrainian, though. Other cities east of the Dnieper, like Kharkiv, are somewhere between those two extremes. I.e. question is complicated by the fact that Ukraine is likely to be split between different governments.
1b) At least 90 % of Novorussia - 10 % chance (There is a somewhat higher chance that they manage to briefly occupy it, but then give part of it back as a part of a peace deal, in exchange for something), whole of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces - 50 % chance.
According what I read, a lot hinges on Ukrainian major counter-offensive, the date of which has been slipping since Spring, but which will probably have to start someday. Nobody seems to be sure if Ukraine actually can stage it, so there is still chance that all the talk will come to nothing, but personally, I don't think so (let's say I'm about 75% sure that a we will see counter-offensive before the year ends). Without that test of strength, there can be no final position for peace negotiations.
A complete rout for either side is unlikely, but there are a lot of possible outcomes in between, some of which might make negotiations more or less likely.
A major Ukrainian victory (e.g. if they manage to recapture a big city, or a whole region) would be a shock for Russia, which will either lead to a fuller commitment to war, or pave a way to negotiations. Former is more likely, as a mobilization might be less unpopular than admitting a defeat, in the end. This will prolong fighting for quite some time, maybe years, as the West will be emboldened by Ukraine's victory, and might renew its support.
A major Russian victory (e.g. Russia at least manages to more-or-less hold the line while inflicting very heave casualties on Ukrainian forces) might prove to Ukrainian leadership and its western backers that the fight is over. That, in my opinion, might make negotiations more likely, but the question is, will Russia accept its current gains or use the momentum to push for more (specifically, Odessa). That, in turn, will depend on the damage Ukrainians manage to inflict during the counter-offensive and the state of Ukrainian forces afterwards.
A minor victory for either side, a stalemate, or a lack of a major action will leave situation as it is, where Russia slowly advances. Nobody, but the top HQ staff probably can say where this advance will end, but negotiations in this case will be unlikely for quite some time.
Well, there is also a funny case (pushed by some propagandists) where Poland and Hungary will divide what's left of Ukraine with Russia "for protection". I think this is very, very unlikely (despite some strange recent laws that allow Polish citizen the same rights as Ukrainian citizen in Ukraine), but it would be an interesting development if it happens. In a way, it's a best-case scenario for both Russian and Ukraine, as Ukraine gets EU and NATO membership (by being a part of EU and NATO countries), and Russia gets to claim a total victory (as there is nothing left to conquer). If this was a book, and not a real life, I'd bet on this happening, but well...
ISW coverage has been pretty good, and they indicated Saturday that “Ukrainian forces are likely preparing to launch or have launched a counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast as of July 23,” so we may know soon if there is an offensive or how successful/unsuccessful it will prove to be.
I suspect that most even western Ukrainians would not like to be integrated into Poland. Polish and Ukrainian cultures are different (admittedly northwestern Ukraine is more similar to Poland than the rest of the country, but still), and there are long-standing historical.... problems between them. And no one except Magyar minority would like to be integrated to Hungary.
Otherwise though I think your analysis is spot on. If Ukrainians are serious about reconquering lost territory, they kind of have to do a counter-offensive, which is more likely than not going to end badly for them. Hence my pessimism about their chances.
There isn't going to be a serious counter-offensive because the Ukrainians no longer have the forces to counter-offend with. They haven't been able to stage anything above the tactical level since the Spring, and in any event their objectives are not primarily military, they are to keep the conflict going by continuing to attract western support, and, as a by-product, start creating the myth that the Ukrainians would have won if only the West had supported them more. The Russians are trying to win a conventional military victory, which means the destruction of the UA as a fighting force, since they are not interested in taking territory as such. The pattern so far has been for small Ukrainian attacks with lots of publicity, which the Russians normally allow to develop and then pull back. Once the Ukrainians have moved into position the Russians then hit them with missiles and artillery, the Ukrainians retreat and the Russians move back in. This makes sense from the Russian perspective, because if faced with a choice between attacking the UA dug in in defensive positions prepared over many years in urban areas, and letting them attack over open ground, you don't need to be Clausewitz to prefer the second.
This is an attritional war, therefore, and not much is left of the UA as a high-intensity armoured force. You can't train mechanised brigades in a few weeks, even if the equipment and the ammunition was there. UA ammunition stocks are nearly exhausted and they have received a whole pile of different, often elderly, western systems, for which they don't necessarily have the ammunition, the spares or the training. So we're quite close to the situation of, say, January 1918 in Europe, when the German Army started to fall to pieces. Here, it's worse because you can have hundreds of thousands of untrained reservists and grannies with AK47s, but sending them East to fight a modern mechanised force with command of the air is just butchery. As a result, once the heavily fortified and defended area in the Donbas is cleared, the UA simply won't have the forces left to oppose any move the Russians want to make. The betting at the moment is they'll finish taking control of the Russian-speaking rebel areas, and then, but possibly not until next year, move to take the coast as far as Odessa. They should be able to do that with very little fighting, as long as they continue to grind the UA down.
Are you in Ukraine? Are you on the frontlines? You are just repeating the whole Russian propaganda "voenkor" scene.
" Once the Ukrainians have moved into position the Russians then hit them with missiles and artillery, the Ukrainians retreat and the Russians move back in. This makes sense from the Russian perspective, because if faced with a choice between attacking the UA dug in in defensive positions prepared over many years in urban areas, and letting them attack over open ground, you don't need to be Clausewitz to prefer the second. "
There are a number of online resources that you can use to track the progress of fighting on a daily basis, if you can read a map and understand military symbology. The most pro-Ukraine site is https://liveuamap.com, which is generally seen as giving the official Ukrainian view. If you track the changes from day to day, you'll see on several occasions the pattern I describe: UA advance, Russian retreat, UA retreat, Russian advance. Other sites give more pro-Russian interpretations of essentially the same data. I think the one that's probably regarded as most objective by military experts is https://defensepoliticsasia.com, based in Singapore and therefore with no direct axe to grind. They are very good at explaining their sources and acknowledging when they are not sure of something. Today, for example, they are reporting both Ukrainian and Russian offensives on the Kryvyi Rih Front, so the key will be to follow these offensives over the next few days, and to see if, and how far, they are sustained.
I'm not so sure. First, there were rumours about Britain and possibly other countries training UA recruits for several months. Whether this training is any good without actual combat experience remains to be seen, but at least those people might be able to use modern weapons competently. Some also suggest that NATO countries might even send their own troops under the guise of NATO-trained Ukrainians.
Most importantly, though, UA government must see that it cannot win the war of attrition by now. So an all-or-nothing offensive might be the only card left to play to stop the creeping Russian advance and maybe eke a bit more help from the West.
And another conspiracy theory to add to the mix: maybe Zelensky is all ready to negotiate, but he needs to get rid of most nationalists who are hard-set against it, preferably in a final manner, by letting them die in a fanatic charge against Russian positions.
Due to the excessive govt bonds that Italy has they have little excess capacity to spend on distant military matters, probably the Netherlands and Poland are bigger players on Ukraine topics in the EU.
Well, Poland obviously sent far more weapons to Ukraine than Italy. But Italy is important because it has almost complete power to block any collective EU decision. We are seeing how Hungary alone is able to soften EU sanctions, and Hungary is a small country heavily economically dependent on pipelines going through Ukraine.
I do not see any chance of Italy electing a pro-Russian government. They do not have any reason to get in the EU's way over this, the bonds are much more important to them and that requires Northern European support.
I think any kind of negotiated peace agreement now has a vanishingly small probability, simply because the Ukrainians have nothing much left to negotiate with. But the larger structural problem is that any peace agreement is a treaty, and a treaty can be denounced or simply not implemented (look at Minsk 1 and 2). A Ukrainian agreement not to join NATO signed tomorrow would be effectively meaningless. Moreover, Ukraine was probably more of a "real" NATO state before 24 February than, say, Portugal, despite not being a formal member. The Russians are pretty clear that they are fed up with all this and intend to create facts on the ground. They are also very clear that the longer the war goes on, the harsher the terms will be - which is not surprising given what usually happens in history.
But I would say that I think the chances are very high that there will be a solution that both sides can *claim* as a victory. Indeed, for the West this has been clear from the start: the western political ego will accept no other outcome. So we can already see a fantasy scenario developing, where the Russians were "really" always intending to take Kiev and the whole country, and possibly the Baltic States as well, for all I know, and the heroic resistance etc. etc. and the unprecedented efforts by NATO etc. etc. frustrated Putin's vile designs. I don' t think that, whatever the reality, an outcome involving acknowledged NATO failure can be permitted: it would destroy too much and too many careers. In a sense therefore, at least rhetorically, victory has already been decided.It's just the mundane reality that needs appropriate manipulation.
>> I don' t think that, whatever the reality, an outcome involving acknowledged NATO failure can be permitted: it would destroy too much and too many careers.
It's interesting that you think that the war will end with NATO leveraging a fantasy scenario to save face, because I’ve believed pretty strongly for some time that that shoe is very much on the Russian foot. Remember, when the invasion was launched, the stated goals were to: (a) liberate the Donbas, and (b) “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine.
Russia now occupies the Donbas and other territories (goal A, check). But ever since the failed push on Kyiv it’s been pretty clear that there isn’t much prospect for success when it comes to “demilitarizing and denazifying” Ukraine. Western weapons keep pouring in, and although the fact that the Ukrainian regime wasn’t a Nazi one to begin with affords Russia a certain flexibility to claim “successful denazification” whenever it wants, it remains unlikely that Russia will be able to actually replace the current Ukrainian government with a pro-Russian one.
So faux-nazi references aside, it seems pretty clear that the “demilitarize and denazify” goal is unlikely to be achieved. And that is the one that actually matters from a Russian security perspective. Consider 3 scenarios:
(1) an Anti-Russian oriented Ukraine exists, and includes the Donbas and the territory currently occupied by Russia,
(2) an Anti-Russian oriented Ukraine exists, but does not include the Donbas or the territory currently occupied by Russia,
(3) there is no anti-Russian oriented Ukraine, because Russia successfully topples the current Ukrainian government and replaces it with a pro-Russian one.
From a Russian national security perspective #3 is obviously and dramatically different from #1 and #2, but honestly, how meaningfully different are #1 and #2 from each other? If Ukraine with an oppositional stance to Russia, steadily undergoing decommunization and courting the EU and NATO was a dagger pointed at the heart of Russia, how meaningfully has Russian security improved by just making that dagger 20-30% smaller? How much more secure is Russia if American, Polish, British forces et al could still theoretically launch an attack on Russia from Ukraine, but would need to travel a few hundred more kilometers because the Donbas is already in Russian hands? As the crow flies, the launch point would be Kharkiv anyway.
So at war's end, whenever it comes, it seems to me that a Ukraine that survives in almost any form without a regime change can say “holy shit we fought Russia and survived.” And a NATO that funds/supports a Ukraine that manages to survive without a regime change can point to Ukraine still standing, even if significantly diminished in territory (together with all the blood and treasure Russia will have expended in the process), as a success. But a Russia that fails to achieve a regime change in Kiev either has to acknowledge to its populace that all the loss and cost of the war was taken on for only marginal-at-best gains for Russian security, or try to convince its populace that it “really only ever was trying to protect the Donbas.”
So I agree with you insofar as the trend towards and endgame where both sides of the conflict try to "claim" a victory, but it seems like unless things change and a regime change becomes a more viable goal for Russia, it seems like Moscow is the one who will have the biggest gap between the narrative they need to claim in the war's aftermath and the "mundane reality." Certainly more than NATO would need to given that it hasn't even committed troops to the fight.
Ehh no, Russia controls now less of Donbas than separatists in May of 2014. Ukrainian forces are still in Avdeevka, close to Donetsk city.
-(3) there is no anti-Russian oriented Ukraine, because Russia successfully topples the current Ukrainian government and replaces it with a pro-Russian one.
I don't see this happening without full occupation.
Russia doesn't need to topple the government to demilitarize Ukraine for the near-term -- destroying/killing most of the Ukrainian military infrastructure/soldiers in a grinding war of attrition would also do it.
True, but unless the government of Ukraine is changed, the biggest danger Russia expressed national security concerns about (Ukraine aligning with NATO) would remain largely unmitigated, and the more of the Russian-aligned east Moscow bites off, the harder it will be to change the alignment of whatever rump Ukraine remains after the war ends.
"I think any kind of negotiated peace agreement now has a vanishingly small probability".
What do you expect will happen instead? Russia just annexing the whole of Ukraine? It seems incosistent with your second paragraph, and war can hardly last forever. Imho some sort of an agreement is virtually inevitable.
Why can't the war last forever? Or at least something big happens in Russian politics.
Due to attrition it is possible that the war activities are severely diminished but not completely stopped. Ukraine is getting more western help to destroy all immediate Russian targets but Russia continues to shell Ukrainian cities once in a while. It could become a frozen conflict without any side making any concessions or agreements.
Russia is burning through weapons and ammunition faster than they can hope to replace them, e.g. losing four years of tank production in four months. So is Ukraine, and it's not clear that NATO can keep up the difference. The "war" can go on forever if it turns into something like the "war" that was fought from 2015 to 2021. But the sort of high-intensity war that we're seeing now, that ends when one side or the other runs out of guns, shells. or men willing to stand up to being shelled. And that's unlikely to be more than a year from now, probably less.
The distinction is between a negotiated settlement where both sides give up something, and the terms of a negotiated surrender. Think the end of the war in 1945, rather than, say, the end of the Korean War. There will have to be some detailed negotiations, because there always are, but nothing substantial. The Russians have zero interest in taking Kiev or annexing the rest of the country, so the negotiations won't cover those points
War in 1945 would be require a heck of a trend reversal. That war ended with the fall of Berlin, regime change, and total occupation of the loser by the victor.
Japan likewise surrendered without assurances and was totally occupied.
Korean War seems much more like the analogous outcome, especially if as you say Russia has no desire to take Kyiv.
I doubt there is much of an individual decision to make. For a person with average or higher talent for kindness and decency, it takes an effort to act disagreeable or unfair. Indivudially, life is harder for kind and decent people who try to avoid such efforts altogether. I wouldn't call that a fool's game. It's the price for the commodity of not having to practice something you have little talent and inclination for.
Other persons, to whom antisocial behaviour comes more naturally, can play important and well compensated roles providing leadership and protection to a majority. They are expected to rein their antisocial impulses in where their ingroup is concerned, of course.
Trust, But Verify is at least an OOM different than Verify, Don't Trust. There are real costs to the user of latter adversarial/defensive mindset; the one I hear about most often is losing the ability to trust at all, even when one really wants to (e.g. close interpersonal relationships, when seeking medical or mental health services, etc). So yeah, you avoid the false positive of Being The Fool a lot more often, but also end up leaving a lot more opportunities on the table cause the filtering's too strict.
I think it's entirely possible (and desirable!) to be kind and decent by default, but still train one's punching muscles so as to not be mistaken for an easy mark. Tit for tat, percent-likelihood defections in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and so on...yet Cooperate-Cooperate remains the usually-ideal long-term optimal equilibrium, and one has to take some chances on Kind and Decent to start that chain off.
There are certainly some fields of human endeavor where one necessarily has to at least have the *credible threat* of Going Cutthroat, because the competition is suitably intense and that's just table stakes...but I hardly think that's a fully-generalizable principle.
I've never got how people believed stuff like this. People generally really appreciate interpersonal kindness and decency, and the environments in which this isn't true are unlikely to be places where you'll be happy. But honestly, even in a stereotypically cutthroat world like business you're much better off being the guy people want to work with because you're honest and hardworking than the guy who screws over anyone he can (which works for some people but is high variance and unstable). Overall you'll have a much more enjoyable and less chaotic time with your work if you're being honest than if you're constantly lying to people or ripping them off.
Then you get to the stuff that you're actually going to care about on your deathbed, like your relationship with your spouse, children, and friends. All of these relationships are way richer when you're a kind and decent person, not to mention that is easier to find/raise similar people when you act that way.
It's a fool's game if you're a fool about it. There are millions of people out there ready to attack and take advantage of kindness and decency, but there are plenty who appreciate and respect it too.
I was very impressed recently, when I found myself lining up at a social security office, with how decent everyone was. In particular, there was a woman about my age, who'd got there before me (both of us before the office opened) to stand in line on behalf of her 94 year old mother. The doors opened before her mother arrived, so she let others in ahead of her. Once the old lady arrived, the person who would have been next said "she goes first" and waited while she got out of the car. The daughter wasn't allowed to wait with her mother (covid rules), but was allowed to come in to assist her. When the old lady's number was called, she didn't respond, so two different random people stood up and pointed "its her", and the security guard fetched the daughter.
There was also no line jumping, and a lot of people repeating what was said by staff at the door to people farther back in the line. (There were plenty of folks with poor hearing, some of them equipped with hearing aids.)
I don't see any fool's game there. Helping the old lady and her daughter was the right thing to do. So was helping others in the line.
The moral of the story: If you believe in kindness and fairness, you end up on welfare. If you believe in brutal cutthroat competition, you end up a CEO.
Nah. I was a case worker for two years. There's a lot of totally selfish assholes with no friends on welfare who have no personal social safety net because they burned every bridge in their lives.
*blink* You believe social security - which mostly provides for old folks - to be welfare? Even though anyone who earns wages contributes to both social security and medicare all their lives.
Not to nitpick, but Social Security *is* literally a social welfare program. Contributing to society an needing a welfare program are not mutually exclusive.
It's a social welfare program, but it isn't "welfare" in the normal usage of that term, which basically means "aid to poor people".
Colloquially, the difference tends to be based on means testing. If you need to prove you are poor enough to receive it, it's welfare (or charity, when not provided by government). If everyone gets it, or everyone meeting some non-monetary requirement, it's not.
Add some fuzz because politicians rarely use honest names for anything ;-) Then remove some of it, because e.g. "Aid to Families with Dependent Children", not being a simple baby bonus (money depending only on having children) got renamed "welfare" by just about everyone except the bureaucrats and politicians involved.
Before I digress into ideology, I'd like to continue nitpicking and point out that a lot of people relying on social security *are* "poor people", to the point where I fairly frequently see posts online talking about how elder poverty is A Problem That Gets Ignored And Should Be Addressed.
But yes, it was kind of my intent to point out that "welfare" is a term that's been corrupted by its use as a pejorative, and efforts should be made to destigmatize it - like using it as the correct term to describe programs like SS. Providing for the "common welfare" should be *the goal* of society. Turning that term into a pejorative is the kind of cartoon villainy that only politicians are capable of.
And beyond that, it should be emphasized that even the "poor people" on it often *are* contributing to society and the economy. There's a great number of underpaid service workers who are on welfare - people who (as covid forced the powers in place to recognize) are literally "essential" to the economy. Even the derided "welfare queens" are providing a service to the economy, by producing young workers, without which we would be facing a demographic collapse similar to the ones caused by mismanagement in Japan and soon China.
(And yes, some of them are freeloaders. But that's not a problem inherent to welfare, it's a problem inherent to organized systems. It's not like capitalism in general doesn't have a ton of freeloaders, fraudsters, and financial criminals, and most of those are afforded a much higher standard of living at a much more substantial cost to the commons. I'm not concerned about someone barely scraping by under the poverty line getting a few extra dollars they didn't "earn")
Farther fuzz because some programs have an earnings cap that's well above the poverty line. They generally are not considered welfare. E.g. the covid19 stimulus payments.
Hi Mo - the question is not coming from any personal sense of inadequacy or frustration. It's coming from the following observation - that as a person becomes more successful, wealthy, etc. there seems to be an invisible point at which personal decency is overpowered either by self-enrichment, obligations to a group or individual stakeholders, or ego. I'm thinking of politicians, entrepreneurs, etc. Hence the question about it being a fool's game.
Yes, this is a strawman but I'm interested to see how other readers dismember it.
Does everyone have his price, and if so what is it? Your question seems cynical. If you're right, does that mean our prisons are filled with principled people?
I'd reverse the cause and effect. It can be difficult to remain kind and decent when achieving a certain level of success. because that success can easily thwart your kindness. .
I wrote the below the other day about politicians in response to another substack post on politics, but it could be applied to other fields as well.
In 1991, Vaclev Havel gave a wonderful speech about politics and morality. If I had to choose one excerpt, it's this: "Those who claim that politics is a dirty business are lying to us. Politics is work of a kind that requires especially pure people, because it is especially easy to become morally tainted." That speech plus a recent experience vote canvassing is the subject of a post I put out this morning on my free sub stack. I think it's relevant to this morning's French Press.
tl;dr: The amyloid hypothesis predated the fraud by decades and the fraudulent oligomer was never targeted in any clinical trials. Most of this money and time would likely have been spent anyway; the fraudulent data only added to the pressure on amyloid treatments, and even that probably not decisively in any way.
Would someone in the field please put the Nature paper into context? How influential was it, really? Without this fraud would we still have seen billions of dollars in amyloid targeted research? My impression is that the amyloid hypothesis would have still been pursued aggressively.
I just want to say (that even without the malfeasance) it seems that science often errs by allowing one hypothesis to take over a field. All the money, talent and ideas are focused through this one hypothesis and that is often a mistake.
Yeah, it seems like the science community has an especially hard time taking a portfolio-based approach to lines of inquiry. More time should be spent finding under-appreciated hypotheses, or even betting against popular hypotheses, similar to value or short investing.
It's a kick in the nuts for the entire field, but I can't say I'm surprised by the news. The failure of any of the therapeutic candidates to produce a meaningful effect was a major warning sign that our understanding of Alzheimer's was very wrong. That it was wrong because of. fraud just makes the whole exercise even more galling. Billions of dollars were wasted because of this, tens of billions if not hundreds.
Yeah, absolutely maddening. Does anybody know how scientific institutions ended up responding to the mid-2010s reproducibility crisis? I remember hearing of inquiries and conferences to try to fix this, but it seems they may not have succeeded...
That is a remarkably... optimistic piece. 1-2% of survey respondents admit to fraud, but the number is probably less? Not more, but less. That goes against all sorts of expectations, not least social desirability bias.
Thanks. If I'm reading her right, the only data point supporting AB56..(protein? peptide?) Is that it caused dementia type effects when injected into mice brains. And that result is from 16 years ago.
Would be most efficacious to do this after somebody has figured out how, exactly, we get all the relevant parties to agree to reverifying everything, and find reverification enthusiasts to carry out the process plus, of course, somebody eager to fund it.
I also suspect that "listening to my heart" may be a learnable skill that can give access/control over the stress response at least as it relates to heart rate variability. Unfortunately, when I "listen to my heart" through meditation, all I hear is ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump.
Has anyone had any luck with this? Is this a worthwhile direction to explore?
By the way, a zen master once told me to "open my heart". I didn't quite understand that and didn't get far trying. Probably it is something like training emotional contagion. Or improving one's Theory Of Mind? Some neurotypical feature.
Maybe some people are able to approximately sense more features of their heartbeat than just frequency and contractility. HRV is a window to the vegetative nervous system, which can be used to get information about possible stress overload, for example in order to fine-tune training intensities. I have never heard about studies concerning direct experience of HRV, though.
If you like to try and develop more sensitivity to your heart functions, maybe biofeedback can be a way to go. Marco Altini's HRV logger app for example could give you real-time data.
It's not exactly a secret, but deliberately breathing slower will force your cardiovascular system to switch into a lower gear. I imagine you can do something similar by trying to breathe faster. This is a reasonable direct way to control what is often called arousal-- not the sort of arousal you might be thinking of, but the big picture psychological factor that goes from the rest state of sleep to the hyperactivity of heavy exercise. I would be extremely surprised if the cardiovascular system was linked to any emotional feeling that went beyond key stuff linked to arousal, like tiredness or excitement.
You mention downthread that you're interested in the link between the stomach and mood, which IME is a lot stronger. I often feel a lot different after eating well versus eating poorly. I don't think it's mechanistic exactly how you respond to one thing or another (probably the mechanism is which guy bacteria you are feeding and how well) but in general eating green vegetables, foods high in nutrition and fiber, raw fruits and vegetables, probiotics, etc. are all going to make you feel your best, and other foods or foods that are bad for you (basically those with a lot of added sugar, saturated fat, or salt) will make you feel bad in various ways.
The heart and stomach (guts) are in fact where a lot of emotions are felt. Most. The “upload your brain” guys seem to ignore this. If you are anxious and your heart starts to pound that isn’t your conscious brain telling you to be nervous, and may not be led by any part of your brain at all.
Beta blockers, which slow the heart, can have significant effects on personality.
A pounding heart is not an emotion. It may be a physical sensation associated with certain emotions, but we can feel anxiety absent a pounding heart, and a pounding heart can occur entirely absent anxiety. And you say "where a lot of emotions are felt". You've named one (non-emotion), and I cannot think of anything else which may be (mis-)construed as being an emotion.
And this is to say nothing of the fact that everything we experience takes place in the mind, not a a physical location in space. That your pounding heart is felt *in your chest* is an illusion, just as much the pain being felt *in your toe* when you stub it is. We know this from phantom limbs. In amputees, there's no neurons to "cause" pain, no tissue in which the pain can be felt at all, and yet the pain exists in these non-limbs all the same.
The pounding heart isn’t just on the brain, now is it. It can literally be measured by an ECG. It’s clearly happening where it is. It can be heard on extreme cases.
Anxiety and worry is clearly felt in the gut, not just the brain. Either that or my own body is lying to me, and the entire corpus of literature.
And a beating heart is part of the emotional state, of nervousness or love. Or whatever. Emotions are not felt just in the brain. We don’t logically think ourselves as falling in love or being anxious.
No. This is some sort of logical fallacy or other, probably avoiding the question.
We don’t feel emotions in our mouth - not directly. Not in the lip muscles. We do feel emotions in the gut.
That’s not the brain telling the gut what to do but the entire nervous system. If you want to stick to the mind then the mind isn’t just the software of the brain but the entire nervous system.
So I’m sticking to the gut and heart the as places we do feel emotion, emotions that cannot be felt by external actors, but can be observed by them.
I’m fairly surprised at the reaction to this, would have thought it was fairly obvious.
The basic notion of embodied cognition is mostly uncontroversial: I think we can all agree that with zero sensory input from anything below the neck, whether conscious or unconscious, our perceptions and feelings would be substantially different. But this does not imply that the heart and gut are necessary to feel emotions. Bariatric surgery, for example, doesn't cause emotional dysfunction.
If you want to argue that emotional sensations themselves can be felt in the heart and gut, then yes. This is as obvious as how stubbing your toe makes you feel pain in your toe, rather than in your head. But where your brain tells you a particular emotion is felt does not change that the actual processing of these emotions happens in the brain.
Since we lack any kind of senses for what happens inside the brain, where a certain function is located is fundamentally impossible to perceive. Therefore, any information we get about the location of an emotion must be fabricated. This means that the pain of heartbreak or the gut-churning of fear carries no information about the role of those organs in creating or sensing emotion. All the information we have indicates that it's only the brain.
I'm only aware of people saying "I didn't know when people talked about heartbreak they meant actual physical pain in their heart after losing a loved one, but that's what it feels like," but that's the only seemingly-metaphorical-but-not heart-related sensation I can think of.
What I think might be the reason that 'listen to your heart' is an expression is that strong emotions are often expressed somatically, and more people than you might expect suffer from alexithymia, the inability to recognize their own emotions. If you lack this cognitive ability, then 'listening to your heart' might be a useful workaround, because it's much easier to identify physical sensations than cognitive ones.
I don't think this works in reverse, though. Sure, you can (probably) learn to control your heart's response to basic stressors, but that doesn't give you any special access or control over your emotions. The psychosomatic response only goes one way.
You could "offload" some emotionally-driven sensing to other parts of the body - feeling stress factors through their impact on gut/heart muscles or desire to tear up. Even if your brain activity might be impacted directly by them it is easier for consciousness to tie things to other discernable signals there, and adjust expectation of your own behaviour (like "i'm feeling stressed and need to withdraw before i lash out").
Or a difference between "I'm pumped with adrenaline and ready to fight back" (because body indicates resources to do so) and "Guess i'll just die/suffer because i have no strength to resist".
It definitely works both ways; but in some situations brain can create shortcuts where for known situations it goes straight to result without activating/waiting for usual body-wide response cascade first (or skipping a few steps). Similar to people instantly feeling pain when they expect pain even if they never were actually wounded.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'both ways'. I can definitely see how it can be advantageous for strong emotions to be felt physically, as the brain's way of telling you "Pay attention, this is what's important right now." It might even skip past trying to express that particular emotion cognitively. But I don't think that has anything to do with the nocebo effect, like when people with a fear of needles already feel pain if a needle so much as touches their skin.
I interpreted MoreOn's question as "Is 'listening to your heart' more than just a metaphor and can I benefit from practicing this skill?" My answer would be that, if it is more than just a metaphor, you might still not get any benefit from practicing it, because while your brain can express emotions through your heart, I doubt that a psychologically normal person (as loaded as that term is) could get more out of listening to their heart than out of thinking about how they feel. It's not like that channel magically gives you more or better information about your mental state.
My idea is that by practicing "heart rate control" to achieve certain state of mind you can train your mind to skip straight to that state on cue (with or without heart rate being actually affected).
Initially it'll be "i'm calm because my heart rate is steady; if i slow my heart rate i become calmer", and later you can skip straight to being calm and heart rate and other responses following it rather then leading it.
On his page in Lorien Psychiatry (https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/), Scott says that electroconvusive therapy has a basically-100% success rate in treating depression, the closest thing we have to a miracle cure. However, when I had ECT, it didn't help at all; I spent a month in a very confused state of mind, and then my depression returned in full force. Why could that happen? What are some of your hypotheses? Or was I just one of the year's unlucky 100 000?
Direct quote: "But ECT is extremely effective. I’ve seen it completely cure the most difficult patients, people who nothing else has worked for. It doesn’t have a 100% success rate, but it’s as close as you’re going to get. "
I think it is important to note that depression is really hard to treat, so just being the closest treatment to 100% doesn't mean much. Also, and I don't know any details about ECT, I'm just making a dumb suggestion, this does sound like the kind of thing that could require some tacit knowledge. Maybe the person you went to just didn't know how to use the machines properly.
I loathe psychiatry and have probably met antipsychiatry advocates who had ECT. I
but the one *pro-ECT* person I've known has taken it I don't know how many times. so, I have to think, how well could it have worked?
two things worth noting: 1) ECT does get given to people against their wills on occasions. 2) ECT, as I far as I know, always injures the brain (hence the memory loss).
my prior: I loathe psychiatry. really loathe it. ECT in particular.
One of my relative's mother also had ECT and it had no significant effect. I didn't expect it to work though because she had long-term mental problems and the doctors decided on ECT as the last effort.
Maybe if you use ECT as an alternative to other treatments it has better success rate because you are using it on people who have reasonable chance of recovery. Similarly, if you had a very effective cancer drug (for whatever specific cancer type) but you would decide to use it only on terminal stage 4 disease. It would mostly fail then despite being shown very effective for stage 2 or 3.
I think you may be right. I only know of 3 people who have had it. All of them were people who had depression plus other diagnoses (PTSD, OCD, Borderline Personality Disorder . . .) and had been in bad shape for years, in and out of hospitals. They weren't ideal candidates for ECT, but docs offered ECT in hopes that it would help. 2 were unhelped. The third became outrageously manic, for only the second time in his life: talking a blue streak, thought he was God. As a consequence of being manic he lost his apartment, where he was living with several housemates who cared about him, and his therapist. So that guy was definitely *harmed* by the treatment.
I suspect that the mechanism of action is closer to that of sleep deprivation (also a miracle cure for depression, until you sleep at least). I mean, maybe I wasn't depressed for month or two after my treatment, but I also can't _remember_ anything for about same period of time after my treatment.
I've described ECT elsewhere as having your essence blown into a cloud of a billion droplets that gradually settle to the ground and flow back into a MaybeLater-shaped hole. If the shape or location of that hole is in some way the cause of the depression, it's not surprising that the depression comes back when your essence reasserts itself.
I've never had ECT (one of the few awful things that haven't happened to me as a result of psychiatry) but this sounds like the ego dissolution I've undergone using psychedelics.
all I'll say. the topic of psychiatry and ECT in particular (even though I haven't had it and no one I know well has had it) (although one fellow inmate in an institution who I knew well did face the possibility... long story, though) never fails to piss me off so I won't say much more...
We probably get better listening at to our guts as we get older because our stomach linings get thinner, and so we become more sensitive to changes in acidity
Any economist want to opine on whether raising interest rates is the best or fairest ways, these days, to fight an inflation that’s clearly not driven by wage increases. Is there really no other tool to fight inflation?
Thanks. Very interesting. I think link dumps aren’t encouraged here so a summary would have been handy. What I got out of it is that if the market believes that the fed is serious about raising interest rates then they may not have to raise them so much. Which is a great opt out.
There's no substitute for reading Scott Sumner regularly since he started blogging during the Great Recession, but the main point he has to keep hammering home is to stop focusing on interest rates. The popular press (and many commenters) associate high interest rates with tight money policies and low interest rates with easy money, but high interest rates are commonly found alongside hyperinflation and low interest rates alongside contractions. Milton Friedman told people what a mistake that was many decades ago, but people keep saying it anyways. There are some Neo-Fisherians who also reason from interest rates, just in the opposite direction of the conventional wisdom, and they are also wrong (it certainly hasn't worked in Turkey).
I have read some of his articles, not that impressed. The claim that inflation is always a monetary problem can be dismissed by looking at the past. In the 12th C, the reason for food inflation was always some form of crop failure. If crops failed, food inflation rose. People starved or reduced calorie intake.
The reason for food inflation today, in Europe at least, is the reduction in fertiliser use due to high costs driven by the war, the reduction in food exports from Ukraine, and reduced production in Europe due to droughts.
These factors influence the US as well.
To blame the money supply is to clearly mix up cause and effect, the amount of money is indeed too much, relative to supply, but it was supply that changed not the money.
If this ideology had existed in the 12th C Kings would have taxed the starving peasantry and explained that food prices were too high because they had too much money relative to food supply.
Had that happened Europe would have had anti monarchial revolutions long prior to the ones they actually had.
You talk about "food inflation", but inflation is an increase in the general price level, not one good. Here he distinguishes between some rather different kinds of "inflation":
Inflation, at least in this case, is too much demand chasing too little supply. The best way to solve this is to increase supply. We've seen sporadic attempts to increase oil supply, but we have yet to see serious pushes on things like housing supply. There are also a lot of logistical bottlenecks as supply chains face strain and bottlenecks like ports choke imports.
If I were Biden, I would 1) invest as much as I can in increasing port capacity by any means, 2) figure out anywhere else that government is holding up supply chains, 3) create a national policy on housing production and work with governors and mayors to build more, 4) push for various alternatives to gas consumption like electric cars, alternative energy, or public transit, 5) try to find any way of getting more gas without fucking our geopolitical situation, and 6) repeal as many tariffs as possible as well as stupid shipping rules like the Jones Act. In rough order of priority, focused on what would probably move the needle for the basket of goods driving inflation.
But the straightforward part of this is that if you can't increase supply, the only way to halt inflation is to cut demand, and it's hard to find a way to do that doesn't just make everyone poorer, whether directly or as a second order effect.
I think this is largely right. I want to clarify a point and then break it down a bit further.
Inflation is less "too much demand chasing too little supply" than "too large a flow of money chasing too little flow of supply at the prices goods were offered at, causing prices to rise". I think that's important to distinguish because it lets you separate out all the components more neatly: there's the flow of goods (itself a quantity (capital stock) and velocity), the quantity of money (and changes thereto) and the velocity of money. There's also a politico-spatial component, in that goods in in Russia and Ukraine are no longer readily transportable to (in this case) the US, but for our purposes we can consider them to be unavailable after previously having been available. I don't like the "too much demand chasing supply" framing because demand is not what gets traded for goods, money is.
So let's take a simplified look at what happens before and in a "typical" recession (if there is such a thing). Let's say 1991 or 2001. Low interest rates led to lots of lending (which increased the money quantity because of fractional reserve banking). That lent money was spent on wages and capital goods in dubious industries (increase in velocity of money). Unemployment falls. But the wage-earners were spending that money on previously existing goods and services rather than the new goods and services. Prices in those goods and services rose (inflation!), the Fed raised interest rates, deposits looks better than risky investments. The quantity of money falls as loans are not rolled over. Businesses with marginal business plans being held up by debt and equity financing before start to go bust as the market realizes they were actually worthless. Unemployment rises as workers are laid off, the velocity of money falls, and inflation is tamed. (In 2001, people start finding that housing is the highest-returning asset they can put money into, the seeds of the next bubble are planted, but that's not really relevant except to demonstrate the cyclical nature of the business cycle.)
The key in this story is that everything that really changed was a monetary phenomenon. Money goes up, high-utility goods and services got more expensive. Money goes down, the supply of high-utility goods and services _was largely unchanged_, except insofar as the higher prices encouraged more production of those goods and services.
As a -short- long aside, let's take a -quick- look at the housing market crash. Similar story at the beginning, except that it's housing debt that was where all the extra money was parked, instead of in new business ventures. Housing, unlike internet company products in 2001, is actually valuable! But it was housing *debt* was in high demand as an investment for its ultra-stable returns underlain by the ability of ordinary Americans to pay their mortgages. Except that, well, that was illusory (and that was the banks' and ratings companies' faults for fraudulently producing and marking inferior products as superior to satisfy that demand). Bad debts needed to be written off. But the market was leveraged to such a degree that the quantity of money didn't just fall when that happened, it cratered like the Chixulub asteroid, doing what the lowered quantity of money did in 2001. Only this time it wasn't only to marginal businesses, but also to less marginal businesses that relied on short-term loans for ordinary operation, and even fully cash-flow positive business that didn't run on credit as everyone earlier in this sentence was laid off and the velocity of money dropped further and further. But if you had cash (and a secure income) in 2008-10, it was great! Housing was actually cheaper than it had been before because housing is a good with high utility at any time, and whatever goods-producing businesses were left had to lower their prices to keep their customers. In reaction, the Fed and federal government took various measures to increase both the velocity and quantity of money. Stimulus (velocity), zeroed interest rates (quantity), employment programs (velocity), Quantitative Easing I and II ad infinitum (quantity), bailouts (stop the velocity from falling further), TARP (stop the quantity from falling further), etc. Being not entirely unconcerned with the vast quantities of money that were being printed (because if velocity actually did pick up and quickly, the Fed also did something unheard of: they started paying interest on banks' deposits with the Fed. The message was "hey, here's trillions of dollars to keep yourselves and your good customers solvent, but if you're thinking of making more risky loans with all that money, we'll pay you not to do that, and we'll pay you more than the interbank overnight (FedFunds) rate so you don't get any ideas about helping out any of your fellow banks who aren't taking this message seriously." Whether that was necessary or not is debatable, but either the message was received loud and clear or the banks were very gun shy after the crash and didn't want to lend to anyone they weren't absolutely sure was good for it anyway, and both the quantity of money available to ordinary people (as opposed to on the Fed's balance sheet) was low and velocity of that money was slow for years, and we got the L-shaped recovery.
Overall, almost everything before and in the housing crash was a monetary phenomenon except for a minor overproduction of housing. The capital stock didn't change. The housing stock went up only a little bit. The flow of goods didn't really change until ordinary businesses were disrupted by the cratering quantity and then velocity.
Contrast with the late 70s or today. Yes, interest rates had been low for a while (much longer today). Yes, there's probably a bubble somewhere in the economy, but it hasn't popped. Instead we have an actual supply shock in highly useful goods. Oil production was cut in the 70s, and Ukraine and Russia are at war while China is locked down today. Supply chains have been disrupted for a myriad of reasons. So what's the look like under this framework? Well, it looks like both capital stock has been decreased (and in the case of Ukraine, literally destroyed), and the goods flow has been decreased by a fair bit. This is not a monetary phenomenon at all! We (global) are simply less wealthy and we (globally also but especially in the US) are less able to supply goods to consumers than before. Fewer goods command higher prices. This is not the same inflation as 1991 or 2001 or 2009. Which means that decreasing the quantity or velocity of money, while it will bring prices down, is going to cause a recession and unemployment, and then we have stagflation, because people still need to eat and buy staples, staples which we are still not producing. Under this interpretation, the 80-83 recession ended through a combination of the economy finishing adjusting to the lowered oil production, domestic oil production increasing as imports picked back up again... and there being no one left to lay off.
So this is not a money supply problem. This is a goods supply problem. We need goods supply solutions. Framed in this way, causing unemployment seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. The price signals that should tell entrepreneurs "hey, focus on domestic production of goods and supply chain-hardening businesses pronto, there's a lot of profit to be made," will be distorted by the decreased money quantity (and velocity, if unemployment goes up). So what gives? Why is the Fed raising interest rates and talking about raising interest rates even more?
The quantity of money. Instead of just increasing the supply by lowering the FedFunds interest rates, the Fed also buys long-term securities, and not just government bonds, on the open market, adding private debt to its balance sheet.
• The Fed is raising interest rates because they don't believe that the price signals can work in time to increase capital stock and goods production domestically and give investors a return. The precise definition of "in time" is the big unknown in this case. It could be political (eg, before the midterms). It could be they think that the supply shock will end before investment in domestic goods production and hardened supply chains starts paying off, which will probably lead to lots of abandoned projects as the world returns to the old normal; they don't want to create a domestic-goods-production-and-hardened-supply-chains bubble that will pop. Maybe they believe a universal betacoronavirus or sarbecovirus vaccine is on a short horizon and will let us get back to our just-in-time supply chains a lot sooner than it looks like right now.
• The Fed is raising interest rates in order to cause unemployment to lower the cost of labor to make it easier for entrepreneurs to do supply chain-hardening and increase domestic goods production.
• The Fed is raising interest rates because the Fed is expected to raise interest rates when inflation occurs. As per the article TGGP linked to (grandparent-sibling comment) a large part of money supply management is expectations management. The whole thing is performative to try to deflate whatever the existing bubble is before it eats up more investment so the economy can better weather the supply shock.
• The Fed is raising interest rates because they don't understand or don't agree that this is fundamentally a goods supply problem.
None of these options are mutually exclusive. It could be a mix of any or all of them. Personally, I think they're wrong to be doing it. They should let the price signals through. Everything in the parent [edit: grandparent] comment is a good move (although I don't think 4 would be particularly useful towards this goal, but has other benefits), and I'd add that Biden should be using the bully pulpit to encourage entrepreneurs to get into domestic goods production and supply chain hardening ASAP. Maybe even get some token legislation to support it, a signal that investment in this area won't turn out to be pointless in a few years.
Or maybe the lack of such signals out of the administration is itself a signal that the first option is the actual answer. Are they communicating with the Fed about this sort of thing, or does that look too much like presidential interference with the Federal Reserve, and they avoid doing that for optics reasons? In which case, lack of movement in that direction from the administration may only signal its own confusion.
If anyone has any more answers to the unknowns, I'd certainly like to hear about them.
Yeah, I am in 100 % agreement with this. Above in my comment I just cut straight to the assumption that sufficiently increasing supply is impossible, so central bank has to increase interest rates or we have to find another way to decrease demand. But I have to admit that it is a false assumption.
Kind of, but even that article dedicates only a single paragraph to anything that isn't tax policy. It's really not a great name for actual measures designed to increase supply. And most of its non-tax low-hanging fruit has already been adopted - containerization, globalization. About all that's left on the non-marginal income tax rate policy is tariff reduction.
I wouldn't be quite so harsh. To start with its natural to think from the point of view of the central bank, which is limited to monetary policy and not fiscal policy, and the traditional macro assumption that monetary policy only changes supply in the long run makes sense here. I also think as a matter of political economy it makes sense to have the Fed be the primary respondent to inflation, assuming that politicians don't really understand what to do about it.
Also, it depends on what walls you throw up in the name of "political infeasability." I am sort of joking when I say that if increasing supply is politically infeasible we ought to just raise taxes, because of course raising taxes is the most politically infeasible thing the government can do. But if you assume enough things are politically infeasible then you just get into the weird dance of finding ways to make people poorer which won't be immediately obvious, which I don't think is really a good or sustainable way of doing policy most of the time.
Can somebody ELI5 the connection between interest rates and inflation? Or rather ELI somebody who vaguely understands micro and knows that higher interest rates should mean less short-term inflation but not why that is.
(of course the actual method of setting the interest rate is OMO, which involves the central bank creating or destroying money and should obviously affect the rate of change of the stuff:money ratio. But it seems that the short tem lending rate between banks is an important enough part of this that it is used as a barometer of how much money to make or destroy? And Japan goes for 10 years instead of overnight rates for some reason?)
The simple high level explanation is that high interest rates give investors an attractive place to park their money, which draws investment dollars away from new investment and towards not doing much. This slows the economy on a bunch of different levels-- less growth overall, probably weaker wages via a few different pathways-- and slackens demand. It also pops speculative bubbles because those bubbles deflate as investors are drawn away from risk due to interest rates, which then triggers a panic among those who remain in the bubble. Hope that is helpful.
Well higher interest rates take more money out of the economy by increasing the cost of money. More money spent on interest repayments is less money in the general economy. Plus loans are less likely to be granted. It’s a sledge hammer, but it works. At a big cost.
Interest rates are the basic way fight inflation, but curbing government spending and borrowing, along with removing limits and retardants on production, are about the only real ways out going forward. In other words, create less money while allowing more goods to be produced. At root that is what is required. How well the gov controls the creation of money is another question, but it definitely has been wrecking peoples ability to produce.
Interest rates aren't a lever, they're just an indicator that changes in response to a policy. The exception is when the Fed introduced interest paid on excess reserves. The Fed typically conducts policy via Open Market Operations, buying & selling treasury debt. But they announce that they're targeting an interest rate. Other banks target an exchange rate.
That's true, the interest rates that are targeted are the results of policy not the lever itself, (with the exception of overnight loans). You should add repo-agreements to your list of actual levers, as those have become far more important than Open Market Operations. Writers such as Arnold Kling have argued that the repo market is the biggest lever for the Fed these days, and has been for the past two decades.
It's not the spending that matters, it's the overall stance of fiscal policy (mainly the deficit). If you increase demand, you create jobs in the short run and inflation in the long run; this is basically just the Keynesian Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply model you cover in introductory macro. This is why economists say you should borrow in a recession and pay those loans off in a boom: if you keep borrowing money in a boom you just get inflation, and then you have no tools to fight a slump in demand during the next recession. ATM we're in a boom with high inflation and very low unemployment, so the standard Keynesian response is to cut spending (or raise taxes, either works).
Fed gov doesn’t act alone. States are also heavily debt financed.
That’s the spending side. Production wise we have hosed up production across multiple margins. Between lock downs, restrictions on eg oil drilling, regulation generally, etc. production is held down. Overall supply chain issues from other governments doing the same cause problems.
So maybe the gov spending only causes 3-4% inflation. Maybe supply side is causing 3-4%. Together they are stacking to cause 8-10% because inflation is not linear with its causes.
The ways banks control and change the money supply is also not well understood by anyone, including the banks. Possibly their behavior is adding some issues too? Who knows.
When it gets down to brass tacks, however, prices are a ratio between the available amount of money and the amount of stuff to spend it on. If all the prices are going up, not just changing relative to each other, that means you have more money in the system, fewer goods to buy, or both. I am arguing for both in the current economy.
My whole life I heard people say that government spending and borrowing is too high and will create high inflation. But for the great majority of my life inflation has been very low.
There’s a lot of debate about why inflation didn’t kick in before and it is now. My guess is that world production growth was keeping up better before, then the COVID response ended that. Possibly there are level effects as well, or other nonlinear effects. Hyper inflation is definitely nonlinear for what it’s worth.
Ok so same as me; convenient, that. I think over the past 40 years the higher (till recently) interest rates, large increase in production through efficiency and putting plants in lower cost production areas (China, but some others) tied to a lot of investment going into US debt (keeping growth cheap), all that served to keep inflation lower than otherwise.
It is also worth noting that that last 16 years have seen a HUGE increase I gov. debt. We had surpluses for a bit in the 90’s. So the first third of our lives wasn’t so bad for deficit and debt as the last third.
Not at all. It might short term, but once people realize there is not more stuff but just more money prices adjust. If production is near capacity, which it often is, more money does nothing.
Not necessarily? It might make the production be of more legible things (i.e., "people will start building whatever you've created the extra money to pay for, instead of what they were building before"), but that doesn't on its own imply that the previous use was less productive overall.
If you mean raising interest rates to put up prices to stop people buying things, then that's a strange way to fight inflation. If you mean the old 1980s idea that there's a mystical relationship between inflation rates and the money supply and that you can measure and even control the latter through interest rates, then that's largely forgotten now. The position is complicated by the fact that central banks have been handing out money zero interest for years now in hope of kick-starting the economy, but the money has gone to banks who have used it in complicated financial gambles now becoming unravelled. It hasn't gone to ordinary people.
Are you arguing that when the Fed says they have a target of 2% inflation, and they will adjust interest rates to meet that target, they are using an old largely forgotten 1980s mystical idea? Or they are using a strange way to fight inflation?
I don't think the person you're responding too has a good understand of monetary economics, but the Fed is in a bit of an interesting bind. Basically, the central banking system created in the 20s (and existing basically everywhere by the 50s) was premised on the Phillips curve, the idea that there is a tradeoff between having low inflation and low unemployment. Thus, the Fed has a "dual mandate" to control both inflation and unemployment, standardly by keeping unemployment at NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment).
Since then, we've discovered that the Phillips curve, like a lot of older economic concepts, is only true under certain stylized assumptions. When the economy rises quickly inflation usually goes up, and when the economy falls quickly unemployment usually goes up, but there are tons of intermediating factors. So the Fed is now in charge of controlling both inflation and unemployment but the internal logic as to why those to factors was chosen doesn't work well. The Fed can control both via interest rates and other tools, of course, but another problem that comes up is that both inflation and unemployment are hard to measure-- its a little arbitrary exactly what goods you include in your inflation index and who you count as unemployed.
One issue that's come up more in recent years is NAIRU. While the Fed has a target for inflation of 2%, their target for NAIRU has gone down over the years as they've tried to model it better. During the Trump admin, the unemployment rate went way under what economists thought it could do without inflation happening. It's not easy to say why but it probably has to do with Jerome Powell, chair of the Fed, turning the Fed towards more expansionary (anti-unemployment) policy relative to the previous ten years of Fed policy which was more worried about inflation.
There are various proposals for how the Fed could change its targeting, and these proposals often involve binding the Fed to respond mostly automatically to changing macro variables. But also the current Fed is doing, you know, fine. It's set up in a way that is now not really justifiable from first principles, but it can do its job of keeping the economy on a level path through monetary policy well enough.
If the government is allowed to create stimulus by sending everyone a $700 cheque, I'd like to see it do the opposite by sending everyone a $700 tax bill (to be paid within a month).
I don’t think a lot of people are getting that inflation is causing problems for people, and reducing their real disposable income. All solutions that make that worse are not going to be popular.
I am not an economist, but in one of the previous threads, I suggested temporary increase in the progressivity of consumption taxes - i.e. instead of targeting interest rates, Government Inflationary Fighting Authority would, in times of high inflation, lowered taxes on food and increased taxes on smartphones; and in it would do the reverse in times of low inflation. It should encourage saving since peopIe would postpone their iphone purchase until taxes would go down. It is of course entirely outside of the Overton window.
But I do not agree that current inflation is "clearly" not driven by wages (or more precisely, labor scarcity). It does play a role, although not as an only factor.
So to address the problem of people not being able to afford things, you're going to make them less affordable. What problem were you trying to solve again?
Inflation in most cases, or at least in the case of post-2020-pandemic inflation, is about too much money chasing too few goods. If anything the issue is that people can afford too much of goods-as-normally-priced. Adding on taxes is perhaps the most straightforward way to fix the issue. If you can't raise the supply of goods because its politically infeasible, the only way to solve inflation is to make people poorer so that demand slacks, and taxes are probably a more precise mechanism than interest rate hikes.
Politically untenable. In this case the too much money chasing too few goods isn’t because demand (ie wages) significantly increased but because supply decreased. So if my energy and gas (petrol) are $1000 dollars more expensive in this full year, and groceries costing an extra $500 I’m poorer in real terms. Taxing me an extra $700 isn’t going to help much with regard to my need for these necessities. It will however make me poorer again. Some people will, because of the lower demand, lose their jobs. I think people expect recessions after booms, but there hasn’t been a boom. Not in average wages anyway.
The external factors may even cause inflation to stay high even if you taxed me; the war and the tariffs, the mess that is post covid. China and it’s stuttering attempt to maintain zero covid. Stagflation is a disaster, and not something that can be nearly economically modelled. It’s going to be highly destabilising for Biden, who isn’t firing on all cylinders.
Alesziegler's proposed policy would have the effect of *shifting* the affordability of things from low-priority items (e.g. smartphones) to items which people need to buy right now (e.g. food).
TANSTAAFL, so we shouldn't expect there to be a magic solution, but this suggestion strikes me as a sensible trade-off.
Why are smartphones low priority in the modern age?
We would have to do some working out on this, it definitely would help the poor (that is if there are significant taxes on food in any given county or state) but might increase inflation on other goods. Whether or not we think it’s more worthy to spend on food rather than smartphones the level of inflation is measured from a basket of goods. I don’t think increasing taxes when inflation falls is tenable either.
Smartphones are low-priority because, usually, delaying the replacement of an old phone by a few months isn't much of a problem. Food is high-priority because, usually, delaying the purchase of food by a few months is a substantial problem.
Alesziegler's proposal (if I understand it correctly) is to fight inflation, by decreasing consumer demand, by encouraging consumers to postpone their spending ... but selectively, only on goods for which they *can* postpone their spending. Whether the expenditure is "worthy" is irrelevant.
Yea, this is exactly what I had in mind. My goal is to increase saving (i.e. what central banks more or less aim to do via increases in interest rates) without too many negative consequences for essential consumption, or long-shot investment, or employment.
This particular idea doesn’t fly if we can’t reduce taxes on food (that is they are low already), and it doesn’t reduce the inflation rate necessarily. Inflation isn’t just measured on food. It seems largely driven by the idea that poorer people will sacrifice food for smartphones, and this this tax change will make that harder. My feeling is in general that it will have no effect. The basket of goods cost stays the same. Inflation stays the same.
"Increasing consumption taxes is itself inflationary". Yes, but it is an one-off increase in prices, that would be clearly communicated as temporary (yea, I know, it is difficult to clearly communicate such things), so that it should not to cause classic inflationary spiral where people increase their spending, so prices go up, so people demand more money printing, so their incomes increase, so they increase their spending, so prices go up....
But people don’t increase their spending under inflation. They decrease it. The inflationary cycle is caused by wage demands. I personally don’t think that’s happening much these days and inflation might correct anyway, but it might now.
"But people don’t increase their spending under inflation. They decrease it." Says who? I think that spending generaly goes up under inflation. Living standards might go up or down, but when I say spending I mean it in nominal terms.
Yea, in the EU, we do have a consumption tax, but this is outside of an Overton window over here regardless.
It should help to an extent that it would reduce consumption spending; other things being equal, lower consumption spending should mean lower inflation.
It might decrease total consumption spending but it will increase it on the goods you've lowered taxes on, won't it? That would cause the price to inflate. And things that aren't substitutes should inflate/deflate at least partly independently. So it seems like a method to decrease inflation of iPhone prices and increase it on bread prices. Unless I'm missing something. This is a pretty naive analysis. ETA: I mean my analysis and I mean that in the technical sense.
My analysis is also pretty, um, basic, of course. But in fact, my proposal would increase prices that consumers are actually paying for smartphones, and decrease them for food, because, you know, consumers are paying those taxes. It should result in lower quantity of smartphones being sold during the times of inflation; aim is that people would save money for non-inlationary times instead of "non-essential" consumption.
IMHO it's because people with that disorder are tolerant of risk and stress. They tend not to get nervous socially, an ingredient of charisma I think, and their risk-taking makes them exciting to be around. Their low empathy makes them poor long-term partners.
I've dated women with such issues. The experience was exhilarating! It took me a while to recognize, that it did not bode well for a long-term relationship.
The inherent problem with medications (especially psychiatric medications) is that there is a long tail of real-but-weird side-effects including paradoxical effects. It's possible that in this one person the drug lowered impulse control somewhat.
My guess is that it's a lawyer throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks, but it's not impossible.
The problem isn't (just) the SCOTUS, it's the entire philosophy of the US constitution (although the extent to which the current* SCOTUS appears to take partisan political concerns into account when ruling is also a problem).
The American approach to constitutional government is to have politicians slap down a few sentences worth of noble-sounding but massively ambiguous platitudes on paper, and then leave disambiguating them enough to make them applicable to the SCOTUS.
Everyone likes to whinge about "legislating from the bench". And I think that they're right that it happens, and is a bad thing, but usually wrong to blame activist judges rather than lazy politicians (not always - sometimes judges make rulings that go beyond disambiguation into actually challenging the meaning of the constitution).
A technical specification for a machine or a computer programme written as sloppily as the US constitution would get you fired. As the technical specification for the second-largest democracy on Earth, it's grossly unfit for purpose.
I think that trying to resolve that by placing responsibility for disambiguating the constitution in the hands of a differently-constructed SCOTUS would still invite the same problems. My solution would be to add an additional option for amending the constitution: whenever the SCOTUS is asked to rule on a point of constitutional law which they judge to be both important and ambiguous, rather than producing a disambiguation themselves they shall produce a set of referendum questions whose answers will do so.
That still leaves quite a lot of power in the hands of judges - which precise questions get asked, and in which order, will have a big impact on the outcome - but I think it's better than the alternative. Obviously, some of the time people won't really understand what they're voting on, but that's fine - they can decide which set of politicians to listen to, and the judges will only have put things that they consider to be a plausible and reasonable interpretation of the constitution among the possible outcomes, so even confused voting can't cause a catastrophe.
*There have been lots of individual judges who did this in the past; the reason I say "current" is that in the past they've usually mitigated one another, whereas now with a 5-1-3 extremist-right/moderate-right/left split one wing can always overrule the other.
I've thought for some time that it would be nice if, every time Congress passed some legislation, the legislation had to be accompanied by a longer discussion and interpretation of it, explaining their reasons and intentions--very much like a Supreme Court ruling, and with the same relative authority to the legislation (less authority than the legislation itself, but enough that it must either be adhered to, reinterpreted, or explicitly overruled with a justification, such as when the Supreme Court overrules an earlier Supreme Court ruling.)
It is. This is referred to as "legislative history"--typically bills are accompanied by reports prepared by the House and Senate that explain the purpose of the bill, address alternative proposals, etc. Courts used to rely heavily on this legislative history to resolve ambiguities or figure out how to apply legislation to weird unanticipate situations/corner cases/etc.
Over the course of the 80s and 90s, conservative jurists, led by Antonin Scalia, effectively killed legislative history as an accepted source of legislative interpretation.
I'd like to see a system whereby the Supreme Court chooses its own justices. Not by a simple majority vote because then one "side" would get hold of the court and never let it go. But with a bit of randomisation it should work.
Whenever there's a vacancy, each justice writes the name of a candidate on a slip of paper, the slips go into a hat, and then one is drawn to determine who the next justice will be. The identity of the nominating justice is publicised to provide an extra incentive for justices to nominate well-qualified individuals rather than just their own buddies and former clerks.
I was going to comment that if one side gets the advantage then as a matter of probability the court will just tend to being dominated by that side, assuming that justices always nominate another from their own side (they will, if the nominations are public). But I wrote down the actual probabilities (assuming republican and democrats die at the same rates) and it turns out that for any such court of n justices, where k are republican, n-k democrats, the probability of one seat "turning" from D to R, and R to D, will always be equal. I did not bother to compute the expected time until a court "turns" from one majority to the other but it seems like yours could actually be a fair and workable system, if we perhaps add the condition that the last living judge of either faction will get to pick its successor with probability 1 (to prevent the event of a complete takeover of the court by one faction).
this kind of attempt at a constitutional balancing act between groups that exist at the time it is signed is not necessarily going to result in a long-term outcome you want. See Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Lebanon
Every four years, one week after Presidential inauguration, the incoming President chooses a new justice for the Court. One third of either house rounded up is necessary to confirm the justice (or rather, blocking confirmation is akin to overriding a veto).
Justices who die or retire are not replaced, except that at any time if the Court has fewer than three justices then the sitting President may nominate and confirm an additional person without the need for Congressional approval (statistically this would almost never happen, but the provision is in place to mitigate even the slightest chance of losing the Court altogether).
This would not only encode party politics into the Constitution, but would hard-code in that the parties must be Democrat and Republican, and in a way that would make it even more difficult for a new party to arise.
More than that, it encodes partisanship into the court itself. Yes, I know it's that it's there whether we want it to be or not, but much the same way as "all men are created equal" - obviously and egregiously ignored at the time - provided the ideals for the basis of abolition and the 14th amendment, I'd rather have the conception of non-partisan justices (and by implication, lessened need for party/tribal politics at all) encoded as an ideal to work towards, than to just give up and encode partisanship like it was some commission in the executive branch.
I would hope (but not expect, because I'm cynical like that) that if this were enacted, that every lawyer and judge would switch their party affiliations to whatever the required one is at each opening.
Counter-pro-tip: always eat lots of bacon and ice cream. That way if you gain weight you can blame the bacon and ice cream, they taste better than medication and are less inconvenient.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/world/americas/haiti-government-gangs.html
This frightening article about Haiti prompts me to repost something I wrote previously.
Rodes.pub/Haiti
Peter Rodes Robinson
Does anyone know of a study looking at what are the best predictors of whether a public policy will get chosen and implemented ? My guts tell me it's public opinion aka how popular the policy is, but I wad wondering if someone looked at that quantitatively.
How do people find interesting books? I read Scott's review of "Sadly, Porn" and during a question in the back of my mind was how I might find more weird and interesting books like that in the mass of literature being produced.
Here's how I found some of mine:
- Recommendation in Christian Science Monitor for *Index, A History of the* by Duncan, which made me wonder how someone could possibly write an entire book about the history of the index and get a glowing recommendation
- Reddit thread asking for books about the meta topics of language learning led me to *Becoming Fluent* by Roberts and Kreuz. I don't remember what made it stand out as something to actually read compared to the rest of the thread.
- A question I posted in a semi-recent hidden OT asking for what people read recently that they found interesting led me to *For All The Tea in China* by Rose (among several others that I haven't read yet). This was probably the most fruitful source because I ended up adding 10+ books to my list across a range of subjects.
Based on those, I'd recommend either following some book recommendation stream or just asking people. You're likely to get subject-specific answers if you ask in a subject-specific place like a subreddit, but asking here will probably get you varied responses.
Link to the HOT: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hidden-open-thread-2235/comment/6522031
Has anyone written a really high quality take down of antinatalism? I find it kind of "obviously" wrong and "edgy" but it would be easier to reject fully if I see a well articulated "case against antinatalism" article, if anyone has seen one. Thanks!
That would be quite difficult.
If you let people define their own preferences, I can choose a value system where anything bad is "infinitely bad" and anything good is "meh". (I am only making statements about *my* life and values -- hypothetically -- not anyone's else.) Under such system, inevitably, my life is infinitely bad. -- To contradict this, you would have to say something like: "nope, good things that happen to you are objectively good, and even if you deny enjoying them, an MRI scan clearly shows that you do, therefore I insist that your life is good". This seems like a dangerous direction, if you think about implications for e.g. rape or involuntarily giving drugs to people.
I did not consent to be born, and my parents had an option not to have me. This is a fact.
Now it depends on what rules of moral reasoning you consider okay. (And your opponent will attack you at this point.) For example, if you think that the preferences of many outweigh the preferences of a few, then you just need to prove that most people enjoy having been born, which could technically be achieved by a questionnaire. This way of thinking leads to some collectivist conclusions which you might not like. Also, the results of the questionnaire are not guaranteed; consider the popularity of Buddhism, which kinda says "the worst thing that could happen to you after you die is to be born again; you should spend your life working hard to prevent this".
Or you could be a deontologist and say something like "well, your preferences do not matter, the ethically important thing is doing what God wants, and he commanded humanity (that includes your parents) to multiply, therefore shut up; your ungratefulness only brings you closer to Hell."
Or you could do the usual thing and compartmentalize, i.e. say "well, clearly this is a special case and the usual rules do not apply here". If many people agree with you, it becomes a respected philosophical position.
(For the record, my own approach here is a combination of the collectivist and compartmentalizing solution -- not being able to ask people for consent before they are born only leaves us with two options: violating the preferences of the few, or violating the preferences of the many, and the former seems like a lesser evil.)
BEG: I recently saw a link and comment to a news story or article on AI and the Chinese Social Credit system with the comment on the link stating surprise at Chinas desire to have/not have AI manage the social credit system. Now I cannot find that post, I thought it was ACX, but also looked at ZVI and Marginal Revolution. Does anyone know or recognize this post and where I can find it? Thank you
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained ?
I was watching Robert Miles last video on the "rational animation" yt channel. At a certain point he mention that we should not be concerned about well-aligned AGI stealing our jobs because it will accelerate progress, eliminate scarcity, extend life etc..
Leaving aside the fact that maybe scarcity of intellectual labour is not the bottleneck in the most sci-fi of those things, i still don't see why i shouldn't be scared of losing my job to a well-aligned AI. I have no problem believing that if you are in the top 1% IQ it is going to be great for you, but what about midwits like myself? As it stands, the "utopian" future sound really like we are going to be completely useless to economy and society and kept at bay by a monthly check (and a vr set on our head).
Yes, material conditions would be improving a lot in this scenario, but as rampant mental ilnesses in people of my age in first world countries are showing, material conditions are necessary but not sufficient. What good it is to have radical abundance and live meaningless boring lifes where all days look like sunday afternoon?
And even if there will be no superintelligent AI (indeed, i am pretty skeptical), the jobs that could be automated by evolutions of today AIs like GPT and DALLE are not menial jobs that make our life worse. Are precisely those creative jobs like artists, writer, that make life meaningful. I do not want to live in a world where all art is produced by a machine.
(And as a phd student, neither i want AI in science)
History argues powerfully against the tech-caused mass unemployment thesis. Imagine if you had told farmer in 1900, when 36% of Americans were employed in agriculture, that only 2% of of the population would be employed in farming in 100 years. What on earth would their children and grandchildren be doing? Technology eliminated over 90% if farming jobs. Yet Americans are far wealthier and almost everyone who wants a job has one. Technology tends to eliminate the most boring and back-breaking jobs. The Luddites were smashing looms in the early 1800s. Here are more examples of historical fear of technology, including the technology of writing: https://lenwilson.us/11-examples-of-fear-and-suspicion-of-new-technology/. Your ability to do science will likely be vastly enhanced by AI rather than made redundant. I can't tell you exactly how, but that's the point. We literally can't imagine what technology will bring any better than the smartest futurists as recently as 1980 imagined pocket computers, the world-wide web, drones, or doing your shopping from your recliner. Fear of technology was rampant in the 19th century, just as the living standards started rocketing. The industrial revolution was technology based. Would you rather live then or now?
The difference is that the technologies of the past were never able to replace humans *completely*. There always remained tasks that an average human could do better than a machine. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
If one day we get machines that are *general* intelligences, and can do everything better than an average human, and can be mass produced... that would be a different case. It will no longer be "the machines will do X, so the humans who previously did X are now available to do more Y and Z", but it will become "the machines will do X, Y, Z, and the humans will be at mercy of whoever owns the machines (either a human elite, or another machine)".
Well, I wouldn't want to live in the 19th century, but I would much rather live in the '80s-'90s, before the invention of the web or of pocket computers. I found that the more time I spend at the smartphone, the worse my mental state. Other people's mileage may vary, of course. But yes, technology also have negative effects.
Fact is, we are not in the 19th century, life in the first world (even in my country italy) is pretty nice today. Perennial technological and economical stagnation doesn’t really sound that bad of a deal.
But all of this is a different point. Tbf I am unconvinced that technology have not pushed people in lower skill jobs (relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)
And yes, in the most realistic scenario superintelligent AGI is not coming and realistic AI is probably not going to push phds out of their jobs (even if I really dislike the idea of having to use a black box)
However I maintain that the (implausible) singularity scenario (the one assumed in the mentioned video) is not going to be an utopia.
Edit: and indeed, since you mention, I have (for now) chosen to not have childrens because I don't want to raise kids in a world in which internet exists.
I think one reason pessimism dominates everywhere and always is that happiness is, for many reasons, elusive. Whatever our condition, we quickly find reasons to be unhappy or at least dissatisfied. Our reflex is to ascribe it to external conditions, but I think it has more to do with the inescapable "human condition". We're on a hedonic treadmill, which is another way of saying things are better--and improving--by any objective measure but we find reasons things could be better still. In particular there's never a shortage of problems in our personal lives. Regarding the internet, Socrates believed that writing would weaken our minds--which just illustrates that it's easy to find reasons why things are bad and getting worse. P.S.: Maybe writing did worsen our lives.
Wondering how demining looks as an EA goal.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axwe3/wildfires-are-setting-off-100-year-old-bombs-on-wwi-battlefields
Can someone recommend a "popular art history" book? I read a fair bit of "popular science," and am looking for something similar but applied to (not-exceptionally-modern) art. Some examples of what I'd be interested in reading:
- where [time period / geographic location / school] sourced its materials, and how this is reflected in the visual qualities. E.g. the ways in which painting in tempera is different from painting in oil, or the way in which glass availability influences Byzantine mosaics.
- how [time period / geographic location / school] thought about religion, and how this is reflected in the art. I know some very broad things like "reformation => iconoclasm => fewer Virgin Mary statues" but would like some fine details like "canonical iconography in Eastern Orthodox representations of Virgin Mary".
- how backgrounds evolve. Flemish paintings of Biblical scenes are invariably set in, well, Flanders, which makes sense given that the goal is to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, but presumably traditions about how exactly you represent Palestine or Egypt evolved over time?
The above is pretty Western-European-Christian-painting-centric, largely because that's the tradition I know most about, but I'll take very tangentially related recommendations, too -- although e.g. the evolution of Quranic calligraphy might be tricky given how I don't read Arabic.
I would also like to hear if there are any good ones.
Despite majoring in art education and participating in multiple art education professional groups, I can't think of any examples of this -- everything just seems to be communicated peicmeal through discussion, lecture with slides, workshops, museums, or videos. I started reading "The Judgement of Paris," but didn't get very far in. More the fault of reading while motion sick than with the book itself, though.
The State of Oregon passed Measure 110 almost two years ago, decriminalizing many, if not all street drugs. Is it possible to find an unbiased analysis of it's effects, if any?
I don't live in Oregon: has the experience changed in the last two years, in ways that can be disentangled from Covid?
The USA should limit presidents to single term only. Clearly the nation can't trust itself to not support wannabe dictators' bids for power. Single term executive branch would not prevent an overall single party rule from happening but that is still strictly better outcome than the governance captured by a single individual where merit becomes equal to the personal loyalty. Any cons?
Each President would probably treat his or her first term like second terms are treated now, and would be more willing to go for broke politically. Could be good or bad, depending on whether you support the policies they really really really want to pursue.
The USA already have a problem of extremely short electoral terms where the president's hands are tied after the midterm elections. A one term limit for president should at least come with a longer term or some change to the mid-term elections.
They would still get first 2 years of potentially workable Congress as they do now. I think single term is an easy patch we could implement now that leaves other things relatively intact.
> president's hands are tied after the midterm elections
It seems that we should then *increase* the rate of elections. Perhaps to daily.
One of the arguments is that a weak executive throws the power to the bureaucarcy.
I assume you are not one of those people who like to complain that "the country is ungovernable" or that "we are unable to achieve our goals like we used to do" ?
We have a discord server for Dutch rationalists and rationalists in NL. Feel free to come join us! We're pretty active! Meetups and other activities are also organized there.
Link: https://discord.gg/uDc8geEt
Self-promotion, but here's a blog about the General Factor of Personality. It has been debated since Galton but still no consensus about what it is or if it exists: https://vectors.substack.com/p/primary-factor-of-personality-part
Could depression be a result of high self-confidence? (speculative)
After reading a couple of books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I have started questioning my interpretation of past events that have caused me trauma. This often causes me relief, as I am forced to interpret events in a new light. Prior to this, I used to have a very high confidence that my interpretations of past events were the "correct ones", and that alternate interpretations weren't possible. Hence, I would be stuck in a hell-hole of my own making.
This high confidence in beliefs also shows in other aspects of my life. I can be bad at solving puzzles because I often think that an arbitrary choice that I have made at some stage is the "correct one". My girlfriend, on the other hand, who is generally unsure about her choices, does not have any semblance of depression. I realize that this is an n=1 hypothesis, but every day I find more evidence for this proposition.
Is the general principle behind this idea basically "I can be right about everything but it ultimately doesn't really benefit me or change things much. This sucks."?
I see it more like "I was wrong, but I was very convinced that I was right, thereby not finding a reason to change my world view".
I suppose if a lot of your self-conception is wrapped up in being right, you tend to take it harder than most when you find out you were wrong.
I think a better term for what you're noticing might be rigidity -- difficulty with trying on novel points of view. Self-confidence seems like to broad a term for what you're identifying.
I think you’re on to something, but I wouldn’t label it self-confidence. I hypothesize that what you’re describing falls into what cognitive behavioral therapy would call “cognitive distortions.”
Self-confidence negatively correlated with depression, at least as far as surveys are concerned. Maybe look to something like vulnerable narcissism though; thinking too much of yourself can cause pain.
Have been on a Julian Jaynes kick, and he claims we only recently became conscious (a few thousand years ago). As part of that claim he says that we did not have the ability to ruminate until recently. Fear can now become anxiety. This agrees with a description of depression I like from the Purple Mountains, "storyline fever". Relates to your idea that being convinced of one story creates pain. And telling stories to ourselves may be a new skill (that we are too good at).
I don't know. I'm a woman, I second-guess my decisions often, and tend to be depressive.
For some values of "forever" this would be possible, simply because the Russians have made it clear that their objectives are not primarily territorial. After the serious fighting is over, there will still be a "Ukraine", at perhaps two thirds of its current size, with a government of sorts and a limited military capability. It could commit itself politically to recovering the Donbas, refuse to sign a peace treaty and so forth, and in that sense the war would not be "over."
But it would be over in every other sense. I think that a new generation of pundits has come to think of Afghanistan as typical of what wars are like, and that war could indeed have gone on forever (it seemed to, to those of us who remember the beginning). But the war in Ukraine is not a low-intensity counter-insurgency, it's a modern high-intensity attrition war, and such a war is lost by the side whose military capability is destroyed the fastest. The Russians have opted to fight the war largely with missiles, artillery and airpower/drones, and have been targeting, according to their press statements, not just formed units, but more importantly HQs, repair depots, ammunition depots and training facilities. In other words, they are targeting the long-term capability of the Ukrainians to regenerate a serious military force. Most of the ground troops engaged have been locals from the Lugansk and Donetsk militias, and the Russians have kept their more modern, mobile forces in reserve for whatever the next phase is going to be. Western arms deliveries will slow this down slightly, but even western governments admit that its all they can do. the HIMARS system, for example, available in small numbers with limited ammunition, only makes up very partially for the similar Soviet and Russian-designed systems the UA had at the beginning of the war and which have mostly been destroyed.
I suspect that what will be decisive is the attitude of the West. If you read western statements carefully, they are much more downbeat than they were a couple of months ago, and no major western government now seriously believes in "victory" in the sense they described it earlier. Recent arms deliveries for example have been justified as "improving Ukraine's bargaining position." And the West is getting towards the end of what it is willing and able to send. I'm sure there are those, not least in Washington, who dream of embroiling the Russians in some kind of guerrilla war on the frontiers of the Russian-speaking areas, but how much continued appetite western governments have for this conflict isn't clear. So it really does depend on what you mean by "war" and "forever."
I suspect you posted this as a standalone post by mistake and instead you wanted to answer in the thread here? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-234/comment/7955964. In any case, I disagree already with your first sentence about Russian objectives; Putin made them not clear at all. And imho that was a smart move from him.
---the HIMARS system, for example, available in small numbers with limited ammunition, only makes up very partially for the similar Soviet and Russian-designed systems the UA had at the beginning of the war and which have mostly been destroyed.
I think you read Russian propaganda a bit too uncritically.
Soviet Smerch and Uragan are very different from HIMARS, and mostly use unguided rockets. It is an area weapon, very inaccurate.
---Most of the ground troops engaged have been locals from the Lugansk and Donetsk militias, and the Russians have kept their more modern, mobile forces in reserve for whatever the next phase is going to be
This is simply not true. And LNR/DNR where only used in Donbas offensive, not in the South, not in the North, and not in Kharkiv area.
Yes, I didn't of course mean to imply that the LNR/DNR forces were used outside the Donetsk area.
So, the Lugansk and Donetsk militias did the fighting, they've made slow gains. The places the "more modern, mobile forces" were actually committed to battle, the Russians got themselves chased back to the border on two fronts out of three, burned through over a thousand tanks in the process, and seem hard-pressed to hold their gains even in the south.
I do not think this adds up to the story of Russian invincibility and inevitability that you think it does.
On the other hand, in the very beginning, many evacuated their embassies outside of Ukraine, even from Lviv, i.e. they expected Ukraine to lose quickly...
Here's a topic I'd love to explore in more depth - the impacts of pollutants on low birth rates. To be clear, I think scientists in the area have a VERY good grasp on this topic, but based on what I see in lay conversation, I don't think this knowledge has penetrated into society as a whole.
I see a lot of conversations about low birth rates which focus on economic and social factors as well as on access to birth control, which I'm not trying to contradict at all, but it seems odd that such conversations very rarely touch on the direct reductions in biological fertility for both men and women caused by environmental pollutants.
These effects are not small - for *individual* types of pollutants such as fertilizers we see results like:
"women who ate more than two servings of high-pesticide fruits or vegetables each day, compared with women who ate an average of one each day, were 18% less likely to become pregnant and 26% less likely to have a live birth than women with the lowest exposure."
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/pesticides-produce-fertility-women/
"Women with the highest levels of PCBs have a serious 50% decrease in their ability to get pregnant5 and if become pregnant are much more likely to miscarry.6 In women farmers in Ontario, fertility decreased in proportion to pesticide use.7,8 The worst pesticides and herbicides appear to be dicamba (49% decrease in fertility), glyphosate (39%), 2,4-D (29%), organophosphates (25%), and thiocarbamates (24%). When infertile couples seek IVF, those with the highest levels of PCBs were much more unlikely to achieve pregnancy."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6396757/
I find these figures somewhat alarming (especially having lived for years next to fields treated with glyphosate and 2,4-D!) but they don't seem to be the prevailing non-scientist opinion as to why birth rates are low. Thoughts?
The demographic transition long predates modern chemical pollutants, with similar patterns playing out in a variety of countries with different agricultural practices
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/1037156/crude-birth-rate-us-1800-2020.jpg
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-a22631ff9851eb736d621fecaf036f12
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/media/2414_main.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Fertilty_rate_of_the_United_Kingdom_from_1541_to_2019.svg/579px-Fertilty_rate_of_the_United_Kingdom_from_1541_to_2019.svg.png
I could see those being a factor on the margins, but the vast majority of low fertility is cause by people actively not wanting kids until they're 30+, if at all; Maybe absent pollutants it'd be easier for 35-year-old women to have kids, and that would help make more 2-children families, but the lack of 4+ children families is almost entirely a cultural shift
I haven't read the study at all, but I don't think this (pollutant exposure) is a significant cause of low birth rates overall. My anecdata is from growing up in a community of farmers, and knowing lots of people in the farm-connected world still.
I know of a tiny number of couples in that world who don't have children. It seems that "regularly having sex and not using contraception" starting in your 20's has an overwhelming chance of larger-than-typical families -- even in a world with rather high pollutant exposure.
I can certainly imagine health conditions like type II diabetes being a discouragement.
MidJourney is an AI for making images from a text prompt that gets tiny fractions of the publicity that Dall-E does, but is available via a beta to the public right now, and in my testing is pretty good, better at some things than Dall-E.
I find the discord-based UI maddening, but the model is still worthwhile. I am in no way affiliated with the project.
https://www.midjourney.com/home/
Yeah I gave it a shot but bounced when it required I sign up for Discord. I was hoping you meant the UI was based on discord (which would be bizarre and unforgivable) rather than requiring discord.
I could not get it to work.
Nope, it's literally a discord bot. I really hate it, and it strongly limits my use of MidJourney.
The site isn't automatically updating the page with new comments as quickly as it used to. I have no idea whether it's a problem at my end or your end.
I've noticed this as well.
Sideways griping at the Powers That Be: it really is quite annoying that Substack sends notification emails for *both* replies and Likes, and those are bundled under the same account control setting. I care very much about the former and not at all about the latter. In fact it's quite alarming to wake up to several dozen unread emails on those rare occasions I write something likeable on a Substack that didn't default-disable that system. Sure makes maintaining Inbox Zero* a lot more annoying! This alone makes me appreciate Scott removing the functionality, and I hope that stays the policy indefinitely.
* (Wise People have told me not to pursue Inbox Zero. It's Sisyphean, they said. Unfortunately I'm just Neurotic enough that Plausibly-Achievable Perfections are not really things I can pass up without feeling really bad about it. Some rocks you just gotta roll, no matter what.)
To achieve the noble ideal of Inbox Zero, these days you have to employ machines to fight against the machines that send you e-mails. Like, set up a rule that automatically deletes all "like" notifications (based on sender, content, whatever), or at least puts them into a separate folder and marks them as read.
It's actually something I usually maintain without issue, having finally reached high enough WIS to realize the Trivial Inconvenience cost of giving out my email for...anything that does not strictly require it. ("No, actually, I do not want to Create A Free Account For Dubious Benefits, I am just fine with Guest Checkout and will never purchase anything here ever again...") And those that do, sometimes I just nope out and refuse that service entirely instead, on principle. Most automated notifications can really just be sent as texts, wish that were a more widely available option...I know companies wanna leave a paper trail, but when 90% of the relevant info is in the header itself, that's inefficient use of format. Skim-delete.
Helps to not have a white collar job, too, there's no "work email" for me to *also* check on top of Default Address. I used to try the maintain-multiple-addresses-for-different-things thing, but eventually had to cut a bunch of those loose cause they'd get used so rarely + somehow get exponentially more spam than my Actual Address. Somewhere out there on a server, there's my old Yahoo! email account from childhood, with probably like six digits worth of unread emails on it...*shudder*
Substacks make up something like 60% of all my "subscriptions" now though, so those are by far the biggest bulk. I'll probably filter all "likes" into a for-posterity Likes folder, just for ghits and shiggles. (h/t Laurence)
Looking at my inbox, I see that notification e-mails for likes come from a different substack e-mail address (reaction@mg1.substack.com) than those for replies (forum@mg1.substack.com). You can just block that e-mail address.
Why not disable both and then monitor replies by checking for the little orange number next to your profile when you happen to browse to Substack?
Cause I like being able to read replies through my email when on the go, mostly. If it's something I really wanna engage back with ASAP, then I'll dedicate a sub-thread or two in my brain's processing to compose a potential reply until I can get back to a Real Computer. This is one of the very few things I'll use my phone for in public besides listen to music. (The Substack mobile experience/app is awful + if it wasn't that sure seems like a huge Molochian temptation I'd rather avoid.) But yes, tradeoffs abound, if it annoys me enough eventually I might go that route.
For anyone who missed them buried at extremities of the last two Open Threads, and who'd like to be able to connect with fellow ACX regulars beyond these pages, my partners and I have released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
You can check it out here https://www.imsurf.in/
Lots of great requests, from ACX users and beyond, on there already!
I seem to be paranoid at the moment. Will it be possible to block people on Surf?
Oh most certainly Nancy; when the full app launches, every user will have to be ID verified, and if a user were to have a bad experience with another, then they would be able to block them as they would on any other platform.
Our hope is that the ID-verified/real-names-and-faces aspect will minimise the kind of behaviour that would lead one user to want to block another.
From what I've heard, a real ID requirement will do much less to block bad behavior than you hope, and will also drive away people you want. Again second hand, but I gather there is no substitute for competent human moderation (you're up against humans, after all).
The best conversational places I know of online are moderated by humans.
Maybe you could have an anonymous people/ accept interaction with anonymous people option.
You're right that there is testimony/research to suggest this, but our plan is to devise ways and means of productisation - and to build a record of essential trustworthiness as a platform - that will both reduce that unwillingness and make bad behaviour more trouble than it's worth.
Social media platforms - to the extent that Surf is one - are amazingly innovation-shy on fronts like these; the predominating parties we know and use have only explored a fraction of what's possible in terms of a user journey that minimises the kind of bad incentives you're rightly worried about. Bucking that trend is one of the challenges we're most enthused about.
Appreciate your suggestion, too; it may be something we explore.
I wish you the best.
Your premise is interesting, I just need to figure out what I'm looking for.
Thank you Nancy; I only wish every online community I'd piloted this in had the same level of generosity and engagement shown time and again on ACX.
And best of luck figuring out what you're looking for. I know it's all basically hot air at the minute, as the platform is neither built nor tested, but my deepest ambition for Surf is for people, when they think of it, to feel able to use it with a completely justified absence of fear of the kinds of things we've been discussing.
If we can't get that right nothing else we can get it to do will matter much.
I was thinking about your piece on the homicide spike and I have an alternate theory, a variant on the cabin fever theory. Basically my thinking is it's possible that cabin fever made people generally edgier and lowered their threshold for committing violence, and that combined with the ready availability of guns in the US was the powder keg that the BLM protests put a match to (and I say that as someone who thinks "shall not be infringed" should be interpreted literally). As I recall, until around May people were still taking the whole "stay inside" thing fairly seriously; after BLM everyone was going back out, either to protest or because it was clear that if people were protesting, covid must not be such a big deal. Close proximity+guns+cabin fever=homicide.
This theory makes some predictions. First of all, you'd expect to see increased domestic violence relative to baseline from the cabin fever aspect even before the loosening of lockdowns and BLM. Second of all, you'd expect in countries without easily available guns to still see an uptick in violent crime, just not necessarily homicide because it's not as easy to kill someone without a gun, and you'd expect those upticks to coincide with easing of lockdowns. Countries that had multiple lockdowns would be good case studies for this hypothesis. Third, you'd expect to see more of a spike in demographics that have higher levels of gun ownership. Fourth, as the cornerstone of the theory, you'd expect people to be willing to commit violence more easily than pre-lockdown, although I don't know if there's a good way to confirm that; I don't know what sort of data on "violence thresholds" pre and post-lockdown is out there.
I'm not sure yet if the data bears any of this out, but it strikes me as a plausible alternate theory. Maybe I'll write something up on it at some point.
This is not a variant, it's just the cabin fever theory in different words. And it's already been addressed.
It cannot explain the original Ferguson effect, which means its would be some grand coincidence that two widespread instances of BLM rioting and anti-police rhetoric/policy resulted in homicide increases were coaused by two entirely separate things.
And it cannot explain why homoicides have remained elevated for 2 years and counting. If your theory is that TWO MONTHS of generally staying inside caused a semi-permanent change in the psychology of people across the country (and less for the kinds of people who commit homicides), I see no reason to give this explanation the time of day.
>This is not a variant, it's just the cabin fever theory in different words. And it's already been addressed.
It is substantively different than the original cabin fever theory. The criticism that the original theory couldn't account for differences between countries was correct. This theory can account for those differences.
>It cannot explain the original Ferguson effect, which means its would be some grand coincidence that two widespread instances of BLM rioting and anti-police rhetoric/policy resulted in homicide increases were coaused by two entirely separate things.
This I agree with, but I don't see why two things couldn't both be contributing to the homicide spike. I haven't looked at the statistics, but if the current homicide spike is more drastic than the original Ferguson effect, it's possible other factors are contributing.
>And it cannot explain why homoicides have remained elevated for 2 years and counting. If your theory is that TWO MONTHS of generally staying inside caused a semi-permanent change in the psychology of people across the country (and less for the kinds of people who commit homicides), I see no reason to give this explanation the time of day.
This incredulity people have about the lockdowns having persistent effects just baffles me, though. The negative effects of, for example, solitary confinement and social isolation in general on peoples' psyches is extremely well established. If you don't think it's at least plausible that lockdowns could have had persistent negative psychological effects, I don't know what to tell you other than, try spending two months completely alone now and see if you act more aggressive after that.
Here's a small thing-- I was talking with a guy on the street and his dog growled at me.
He said that his dog is less socialized/more protective of him as a result of lockdown-- no contact with people other than him.
Could there be a similar effect on (some) people? It wouldn't take a huge increase of anger/suspicion to increase the violence level and it wouldn't necessarily reverse easily.
What a profound coincidence that similar trends in violent crime were observed the last time there were widespread BLM riots and no lockdowns.
Not as directly about aggression, but our cat now gets actively neurotic whenever we leave the house because we spent so many months at home all day every day. Mind you, lockdowns here in Melbourne were far far stricter than those in the USA.
I have friends who got a dog during lockdown with a similar problem.
That seems very plausible to me. And there could be a positive feedback loop when increased violence sows more anger and distrust.
You're claiming that people are STILL angry, 2 years later? What possible advantages does this explanation have over the much more straightforward explanation of less policing -> more crime.
I forgot to mention that he's heard about similar problems from other dog owners.
I think we can do a little bit better than anecdotes about dogs.
And the vast majority of the homicide increase has come from black americans. Can we just appeciate how unacceptable this kind of analogy would be if somebody were trying to use animal behavior to implicate rather than exonerate black people for committing crimes?
You already posted this in a different open thread and this topic has been widely addressed.
If it was cabin fever this would not have continued for two years after, and it would've happened in many countries, etc.
>If it was cabin fever this would not have continued for two years after
That's a reasonable assumption, but I don't think it has to be true. We don't know what if any persistent psychological effects lockdowns and extended isolation, and the pandemic itself, may have had.
>and it would've happened in many countries
Not if, like I was thinking, it hinges upon the easy availability of guns. You'd expect to see more homicide in the US and more of other kinds of violent crime in many countries, but not necessarily homicide.
I'm not married to this theory though, and if the data doesn't reflect that point I'm happy to abandon it.
I am taking magnesium for depression, I read that it is an NMDA blocker like ketamine but I can afford it, would this be a good idea?
Magnesium isn't so much of an NMDA "blocker" as much as it is a core functional component of the receptor. The Mg ion sits in the ion channel itself, and is displaced when the neuron that it sits in depolarizes, allowing the flow of ions through the pore. I don't know how saturated the NMDA receptors tend to be, but my guess is that supplementing with Mag won't appreciably change the dynamics of NMDA receptor functioning in the way that ketamine does.
Look into taking Magnesium L-Threonate. I'm not sure how much of what I've heard about it originates from the people who hold the patent on it, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's said to cross the blood brain barrier more effectively. Also, Threonic acid may play some role in allowing increased extracellular magnesium to translate into increases in intracellular magnesium. Worth a shot, I'd say. I believe there's some evidence that lowering NMDA signalling can increase AMPA signalling (ie ketamine doesn't just increase AMPA due to the action of its metabolites, but also due to its own NMDA antagonism), which is associated with an antidepressant effect, probably due to increased neurotrophic factors such as BDNF and GDNF
A "real" antidepressants? Would that be an SSRI? I tried them all, no thank you. Besides the monoaminergic hypothesis has already been refuted, it cannot explain why ketamine (no monoaminergic drug) works, and why it's mechanism of action is fast. Unfortunately the current generation of psychiatrists have been trained on it and most of them don't want to exit the comfort zone. Only the rich can get it
In the 20 years since 9/11 (and before in Europe) why hasn’t the technology or procedure improved for airport security? It’s a matter of getting people on one side of the airport to the other. There’s ample space on the other side. Yet people wait hours, miss flights and so on. Why haven’t airports tried to get security times down to say 5 minutes per person even at busy times by the radical example of opening more security lanes, hiring more staff, upgrading scanning technology, even moving to a random searches and scans.
Chalk it up to even more examples of modern incompetence.
They should just profile. Scan everyone who might be up to no good and let everyone else skip the theater. I would be ok with being checked every single time (and probably would) if that meant not having to wait hours so families of six traveling together also get scanned.
Examples of modern incompetence, as opposed to ancient incompetence? Because in the olden days there were no airplanes.
Modern as in the last twenty years.
You can pay money to get through faster (https://www.clearme.com/)
Precisely. So the supposed "incompetence" is in fact a way to <s>extort</s> convince folks who still fly to pony up extra $$$. Looks like "good" business practice to me, if you happen to be a rapacious MBA without even a hint of a conscience.
Almost all of those solutions would cost lots of money, which nobody wants to pay. The "random searches and scans" one would leave the whole edifice open to charges of "but now the terrorists can get through, if they're willing to take a chance, and they were planning to die anyway". If the scans aren't random, no one will trust the algorithm.
Plus, understand that the purpose isn't really to stop terrorists that's mostly addressed invisibly by e.g. locks on the reinforced cockpit doors, and drone strikes halfway around the world. The purpose to offer a spectacle that convinces the ignorant and untrusting that the terrorists have been stopped, by something they can see. And to deter the idiot wannabes, again by showing them up front that their simple fantasies will not work. So the optimal level of "stop and look and see the *security*!", is not "as minimal as possible".
I don’t see why scanning technology would cost lots of money. Why would any organisation ever invest otherwise. The problem is that there’s no incentive. Airports have captive markets and are local monopolies. And even if they aren’t monopolies (as in very few cities like london) you buy the ticket on price and maybe airline. The airport isn’t really a choice.
In Australia I rarely wait more than a few minutes to get through airport security. It's an absolute slog in the US.
My guess is that the problem is that there's no real desire to make airport security more efficient. The TSA exists now and has a huge budget, the people in charge of it would like to increase their budget and headcount, and any efforts to make things more efficient with the existing number of staff would be counterproductive to that aim.
There are lots of simple ways to make security checkpoints more efficient, they just don't bother. Even the simple modification of having longer tables so that more people can simultaneously unload their pockets into the trays makes a huge difference. (And of course the crazy shoe thing, which as I understand it is still a US-only ritual.)
The worst thing about the shoes is that airports still don't provide seats to sit on while taking shoes on or off, making the process extremely difficult and even dangerous for old people.
The last time I flew (a few weeks ago), I didn't have to take my shoes off, or take my laptop out of its case. It may have had something to do with some of what I assume were bomb-sniffing dogs that you had to walk past before the X-ray machines/metal detectors.
TSA guidelines have excluded seniors from having to take off their shoes since 2012.
Yeah, TSA has only been 100% effective at preventing another 9/11. That's some good theater! Imagine if the DEA or ICE were as good at fulfilling their mandates: we'd have no illegal drug trade and 0 illegal immigrants in this country.
I have this rock that keeps away tigers.
Well, I think it's interesting that (apparently) no one else has even attempted anything along those lines. I suppose that might be just coincidence.
I was under the impression that changes in airline policy have effectively made a repeat impossible. For example, securing the cockpit and not allowing hijackers to take control of the plane.
And if you try to take over a plane now, the passengers will no longer think "oh, if we comply we'll be all right" but "they want to crash this plane" and will do whatever they can to stop it.
In SSC speak, the Common Knowledge has changed.
Has anyone else felt some small part of their brain being vindicated re: carbon tax feasibility, with inflation raising food prices and people still continuing to buy lots of groceries? I'm thinking of meat consumption in particular - can't speak for national trends, but shoppers in SF absolutely do still continue the covid-provoked "buy 6 family sized packages of chicken" thing, even 2.5 years later. This hasn't slowed down at all even as prices have gone up prodigiously.
Obviously I don't think this is a Good Thing(tm), we're not getting anything meaningful out of losing Value to inflation, and it's not a perfect natural experiment. But it gives me hope, or at least retroactive hope, that such works-on-paper ideas may indeed work in real life if conditions are different. People adjust to New Normals faster than they expect.
As a base, spherical-cow model, inflation raises the price of everything equally, so it wouldn't be expected to cause much shift in buying preferences; by contrast, a carbon tax ought to make some things more expensive while leaving others virtually unchanged.
Real world question: does inflation really raise the price of everything equally?
It's going to depend on the underlying cause of the inflation. If we're talking about inflation from the increase in the money supply then all prices will rise equally over time.
If we're talking about increases in prices due to something else, like a labor shortage, then prices will increase roughly based on the amount of that input they use.
Chicken thighs are cheap and delicious. A fav cooking method. De-bone and season. Put a Tbsp of oil in your iron skillet at medium high heat. Place chicken thighs skin side down and put a big can of tomatoes (or any can.. even a pot with some water.) on top of the thighs to press them down into the skillet. Let them cook ~10 minutes or so, till the chicken fat is rendered and the skin is nice and crispy. Flip 'em over, cook the other side and serve. Yum!
Thighs are way better than "tenderloins" or "breasts", I agree. Chicken is bland enough to begin with, removing skin/fat/darkmeat just makes it even sadder. This is the method I learned to cook thighs and similar-property meats, it's pretty similar to your recommendation: http://food52.com/recipes/35813-canal-house-s-chicken-thighs-with-lemon
("does it have bones?" is a more-general heuristic for high-value meat cuts...homemade bone broth is great. Every time I tell people that's a thing I do, they see it as some sorta Master Chef Hack. And I'm like ??? no this is just what poor cooks have done for generations. Food gentrification is maddening...)
I think it would be better to focus on eliminating beef and ethanol subsidies than to introduce a carbon tax. Also, this would seem to be part of a long leftist tradition of raising the prices of essentials (like food), in order to raise more money for things highly valued by upper-class leftists who can easily afford the price hikes.
I agree, but see those Obvious Price Control shenanigans as even more sacrosanct than pricing GHG externalities. The latter got close to passing in some form on some occasions; the former...well...that's *literally* a Sacred Cow issue, no way in hell it's ever happening.
A counterfactual where we greatly increased supply instead of crimping demand is probably most fair and ideal; that's something Matt Yglesias dreams of on several issues, like energy (remember "too cheap to meter"?) I'd prefer less regressive policies all around, but also think that's probably not productive as a Fully General Counterargument to implementing anything ever, either...the class version of "racial disparity". Then again, I also notice that's a double-Probably, so my beliefs here are not terribly concrete.
I’m not aware of any beef subsidies. The ethanol stuff is obscene. And unnecessary.
When I wrote "beef subsidies", I meant all subsidies that reduce the price of beef (and, really, of meat in general). That includes things like low-cost grazing on national land, disaster assistance for livestock, and special covid-19-justified payments to livestock owners. But I know nothing about this except what Google tells me. See https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestock-subsidies-near-50-billion-ewg-analysis-finds , which claims livestock subsidies (which includes subsidies for dairy cows and laying hens) is now about $50 billion / year. Good luck figuring out how much of that is for meat, or finding a quotable source for any data on that site, though--they say it's "USDA data", but AFAI can tell, never give a URL or publication providing that data.
I would caution against equating "low-cost grazing" with *underpriced* grazing; it's very plausibly both, but the former does not imply the latter.
It was definitely underpriced last I looked into it, which was 30 or 40 years ago.
Thanks. The subsidies, I think, are actually for farmers. That definitely affects the pricing structure of their production, so to some degree I think you are right. On the other hand, people with ulterior motives (their ideology) often seem to make dishonest claims — not you, just left or right wing ideologues in general.
In my opinion, all the best carbon tax suggestions are revenue neutral and financially progressive, inasmuch as they give 100% of the tax back to the citizens, but in a flat way, so that people who emit the most carbon (generally speaking the richest people) are subsidizing those who use the least. This explicitly incentivizes emitting less carbon while not punishing the poorest Americans.
Really? Carbon taxes are clearly regressive - as all sales are. Where’s the rebate coming from?
Yes, a carbon tax without a rebate _is_ regressive. That's _why_ you do the rebate. And I'm honestly confused about what you mean "where does it come from".....from the tax....obviously. That's what "revenue neutral" means. Whatever amount comes in, that much goes back out. It doesn't go to the general fund, it doesn't go anywhere. It goes straight back out the door.
Note the "give 100% of the tax back to the citizens". It seems sort of self explanatory to me.
Be careful with your tone. Your suggestion isn't clear at all.
We tax people as point of sale and then rebate them the same tax, so exactly how does that change behaviour? I'd like to see the actual workings out here, because I am not seeing it. Food is a much larger cost to low income households, if you tax their purchases and then rebate ( via what ever mechanism you are not mentioning here) then there won't be any reason for a behavioural change. Maybe some people with an extra $100 a month to spend won't spend it all on the food they are used to which is now $100 more expensive, but they probably will spend most of it on food.
The middle classes and rich don't spend disproportionally on food, and can afford moderate increases in food taxes. So I am not sure what exactly is expected to change here.
Because the rebate isn't related to how much they spend. It's a flat rebate to every user (and most schemes would send the rebate quarterly/yearly/some not-too-frequent-interval for simplicity sake so that the spending and the rebate are at least partially disconnected). So every user is always incentivized to emit less carbon. If you personally can emit less carbon, then you are (potentially) _making_ money on the backs of those who emit the most. So on the margins, it will shift behavior that is capable of being shifted. A tax and rebate scheme (where the rebate is a flat rebate to every user) will always incentivize less use.
And, as I mentioned elsewhere, a "properly" set carbon tax doesn't actually matter if it shifts behavior or not, because the only problem with emitting carbon is that a portion of the costs are not born by the people transacting. A carbon tax fixes this. Of course, the issue here is that not everyone agrees what the externalized cost is so your tax level will never please everyone. But that's true of everything.
I guess it might be useful to discuss the carbon tax abstractly, sort of, but given how utterly unimaginable it is in the US politically, is there really a point?
It's fun to discuss hypothetical counterfactuals on blogs with pretentions towards intellectualism (i.e. very little actual power/influence on policy, we're mostly not activists here)? What-Ifs make for fun topics. Do concede that it's effectively a dead-letter at this point in history, not sure there'll ever be another shot at it in the future. So it's certainly a distraction in practical terms; I think post-mortems are still useful to learn from though. Carbon tax wasn't the first and won't be the last wonk-approved climate policy.
But …. The carbon tax is supposed to change behaviour. It’s not successful if it just raises revenue.
Unless that revenue is (reliably & efficiently) directed to funding carbon reduction.
Carbon taxes aren’t sold like that.
I've heard it both ways.
I was thinking of it along the lines of: right now, "extra" money "lost" to inflation doesn't generate any revenue, or actually any Value period (unless I'm seriously misunderstanding economics). In a counterfactual where extra food money, specifically meat money, specifically-specifically beef money, instead went towards carbon tax revenue - that'd be an improvement on the current factual, even if behaviour remained equally unchanged. Plus it's better to have a legible economic lever; one can always tinker with a carbon tax and affect prices immediately. Inflation is a bit more challenging a beast.
Or, orthogonally: I wonder what actually *would* cause people to significantly change behaviour in this realm, if big price increases don't do it. (Idk if it's applicable outside my specific store, but we have some products like roma tomatoes that have literally tripled in price vs 2019 levels...)
Could you provide a source for your data on meat purchases?
Well, I'm just a grocer - I know the sales data for my store and could give generalities (the generality given here is "selling as much or even more meat products than pre-covid, even with restaurant dining back up to full capacity"), but it'd risk employer sanctions to leak any specifically-quantifiable data like dollar value or whatever. I already skirt that line enough here, sadly. (Sometimes I dream of being fired so I can divulge as much dirt as I want...)
I'm sure there's data out there in the Google wilds somewhere? It's not something I went to look for, cause most of my Open Thread comments are just based on personal anecdata and general observations; I am usually not looking to "prove" a hypothesis or "win" an argument. The only claim I'll stick to is Local Validity, it's entirely possible my picture of the world is deeply flawed or not generalizable elsewhere.
But I do take your point seriously elsewhere in thread, that ideological motives often make for wrong-claims. FWIW, I probably register as center-right and libertarian, but try hard to update my Map whenever I encounter significant update-worthy evidence...the Rationalist credo of "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" is something I try to embody for my own mental models. So if I make any wrong-claims here, it's definitely out of ignorance, not malice or deception. After all, I am just a poor blue-collar grunt; ACX is pretty much the extent of what little "life of the mind" I get. (Scott's great but I am sure I've picked up lots of wrong-beliefs from him over the years, even the Rightful Caliph isn't perfect.)
High single digit inflation is making Joe Biden the second most unpopular postwar president (and most unpopular at this point in his presidency). And your takeaway is that your preferred policy is feasible? Surely it's extreme evidence to the contrary?
And that's without mentioning DangerouslyUnstable's points about why it's different. I'll add: no one claimed people wouldn't buy groceries. They claimed consumption would go down as people prioritized buying food and so didn't consume other things.
I think there's a distinction to be made between "feasible" (i.e. could it be passed if put to a vote - this was historically contendable but very much No now) and "so disruptive it collapses under its own weight" (*also* not happening). It's the level of normalcy and carrying-on that surprises me, hence the OP. People went and marched regarding Roe, there were rallies for Ukraine, lots of covid-related protests...I'm not aware of anyone protesting inflation more generally, not in the sense of Great Recession widespread economic disaffection leading to mobilization.
(Fair counter: people know inflation isn't just a switch that can be turned on and off instantly, it's entirely possible they would be out in the streets rioting if 300% price increases came from something legible like a carbon tax. There's always gotta be a boogeyman.)
Are people indeed not-consuming lots of other things to keep food (and gas) at stable levels, and thus I'm only observing a shift in consumption patterns with no broader implications? (besides still-borked-by-covid things, which are understandable given the continued prominence of Permanent Midnight) I freely admit to not being very well-read on this topic, since my own low income constrains most of my purchases to such basic necessities. (Definitely made me take longer to pay for subscription here than I'd felt comfortable with...)
You march and rally for controversial things. If everyone agrees inflation is bad and should be dealt with there's no reason to apply pressure. You're assuming silence means they're fine with it rather than the truth which is they care about inflation far more than those other things. As they are about to express in November.
And yes, a decline in real income (which has been widely reported on) means a general decline in consumption. Though food has a lower elasticity of demand (everyone needs to eat) and so will be affected less. No one, to my knowledge, denies that you can tax food. But it's unpopular and disproportionately affects the poor.
Hmm, your heuristic for determining Marchableness and Ralliness doesn't quite match mine; there are certainly lots of Loud Minority-type protests where that's one of their only ways to raise the awareness waterline, but when I think back on all the biggest baddest noteworthiest protests I've seen in my lifetime, they were largely non-controversial. Maybe that's a bubble experience; "what good does it do protesting Roe in San Francisco?" and all that. It was sorta refreshing to occasionally see Trump rallies out here, just because it seemed to "have a point" rather than effectively throwing a block party for activists. This is probably just #semantics though.
I vaguely recall reading that real income decline has been negligible or nonexistent for the lower percentiles, due to huge wage increases on that end prior to inflation kicking in, but perhaps that was more of a relative-comparison than an absolute-comparison ("declined less [quickly] than others"), or just bad math from outdated calculations.
>But it's unpopular and disproportionately affects the poor.
Pigovian taxes always trip me up ideologically, especially when proposed by Smart People I'm otherwise inclined to agree with on economic policy...on the one hand, regressive taxes make me very sad, and I vote them down when possible + don't enforce them when given the opportunity. (That "bag tax" at stores in lefty jurisdictions? Yeah, I don't collect it anymore.) On the other hand, the nominal reason for so-called sin taxes is that, no, actually, it'll *help* the poor in the long run...since the worst-off have the most to lose from poor-consumption-decisions and unpriced-negative-externalities. Seems like a tricky tension to resolve. I feel like the default answer of "just alleviate poverty instead, preferably by giving people money" is probably correct. Path dependence is a terrible erosion of freedom, after all...
What are your examples of "largely non-controversial" protests? Because I haven't seen any large protests for anything I can't recognize as highly controversial.
Hmm, I think I spot the confusion. Lemme narrow that claim to "locally largely non-controversial". That is, if it doesn't have significant counter-protestors and/or negative local media coverage, I wouldn't consider it controversial. Even if it'd make a great Fox News chyron "Hysterial Democrazies Riot In Progressive Hotbed SF Again" or whatever. Pick anything on the Big Dartboard 'o Leftist Causes: abortion, LGBT rights*, TDS, anti-fossil fuels/global warming, veganism/factory farming, minimum wage...it's gonna be at least a 90/10 split in favour, with the median bystander happy to honk their car horn or cheer or whatever. Since most of those things are table stakes beliefs here, at least if one doesn't wanna risk alienation from social reality.
At the company I work for, we used to have animal-welfare activists conduct "die-ins" to block our store entrances, because we were heartless enough to sell non-cage-free eggs. Like basically every other supermarket everywhere. This went on for *years* and no one really cared, the public was rather supportive actually. Eventually the company "caved" anyway and we moved to all-free-range, but I'd bet strongly on it being a convenient alignment of corporate interests and renegotiation with suppliers, rather than giving any shits about the protests. (Funny how they didn't expend the same energy protesting our well-known habit of selling chocolate produced using child labour...coincidence?)
*Exception for picketing the actual Official Pride Parade(tm) every year due to Corporate Pinkwashing and sometimes having the temerity to allow gay cops to march. This is always controversial.
Inflation is a bad analogy for carbon taxes and an even worse analogy for carbon taxes on groceries since, while agriculture obviously emits carbon, I have never heard of an actual plan to incorporate non-petroleam ag carbon emisions.
The primary reason it's a bad analogy though is that under an inflationary regime the average price level is increasing (aka, just about everything is going up). Carbon taxes are explicitely supposed to _only_ make things that are carbon intensive more expensive and only to the extent that they are carbon intensive. On the margin, this means that people will switch to less carbon intensive alternatives wherever possible. This will not be possible everywhere and no one seriously believes (nor is it the point) that carbon taxes will completely eliminate carbon emissions. It is merely meant to internalize the cost. Some (likely many) carbon emitting activities are still worth it even with the internalized cost and so they would continue.
-edit- upon rereading your comment...it seems like you think this is a pro-carbon tax argument? I am very pro-carbon taxes but I really don't think we can learn anything about their feasibility from spending habits during an inflationary regime.
Hmm, I definitely remember reading a lot of lefty takes over the years along the lines of "we need to tax *beef specifically* (and maybe meat more generally) cause of its high climate externalities, just like a carbon tax!" So I guess that's a "methane tax". Either way, it was a case to internalize costs so consumption could either stabilize at a new "honest" set point, or reduce consumption by implicitly not subsidizing the price anymore. Maybe I just read a lot of unserious bubbled media though - that's very plausible!
I believe people have said that. Maybe this is semantics, but I'm not sure I'd call a flat tax on beef/meat livestock a carbon tax. When burning fossil fuels, you know exactly how much carbon is emitted per barrel of oil (or whatever). When it comes to livestock, it's much _much_ more variable (by feed, breed, raising and management practices etc. etc. etc.) and I doubt that anyone has suggested (nor would it be possible) to tax them at a variable rate that actually accounted for carbon/ghg emitted. Best you could do is some kind of "average" rate. Having an average rate like that, would not, to my mind, count as a carbon tax. It's just a beef tax.
But again, I suppose that's a bit of semantic debate. It would have a similar affect of internalizing (to a greater or less, or even excessive degree by the nature of averages) the currently externalized costs of raising livestock, which would, on the margins, probably decrease beef consumption. I'm just not personally convinced it's a very good idea, especially when there is so much more lower hanging fruit.
That being said, I'm a big fan of getting rid of the corn/soy subsidies that make feeding cattle and other livestock lot cheaper than they should be.
Fair enough! Measurement difficulties certainly make it harder to price animal product GHG vs, say, factory emissions, so an inefficient flat tax is possibly the best we could get in that solution-space. Not to mention that measurement is itself a cost which cuts into any potential gains. (The argument for flat income taxes always feels predicated on more "waste and red tape" than actually exists, but it is certainly compelling narratively.)
I have been told by Very Reasonable People that there are sometimes legitimate uses for price controls, but the so-called free market of the USA seems to regularly exceed such legitimate use cases. It would be nice to "Less of this, please".
By corn/soy subsidies, you mean the price supports that keep the price of those commodities high?
I'd love a source on the fact that crop subsidies are increasing prices. Everything I've found suggests a moderate decrease in prices (except for sugar cane, where some of the rules are basically banning imports, so the price is higher)
-edit- although I will admit that I found less evidence/support for this than I expected when I was very briefly searching for this response. However, I'd still be for getting rid of subsidies regardless of the impact on prices. The (alleged) impact on reducing livestock feed is, to me, a side benefit. If it goes away or reverses, it wouldn't change my opinion on crop subsidies
Seems like an even more relevant example of continued consumption despite rising prices is the price of gas continuing to skyrocket, but no one I know (anecdotally) decreasing their consumption of gasoline in the short term. several people (including myself) are updating their calculus on long term decisions or plans to reduce their gasoline in the future, however.
That's what's surprised me, yeah. People *not* significantly switching to cheaper alternatives like beans, flour, rice. There was an early-on rush due to the whole Civilizational Collapse vibe, where everyone wanted nonperishables, but that abated fairly quick. Since then people have gone back to buying pre-packaged pre-prepared stuff, meat, pre-cooked frozen rice (that one always makes me #smh), etc. It makes some sense with gasoline, cause the switching costs of recalculating an entire commute on public transit or changing to e.g. a hybrid or EV are pretty immense. But swapping within groceries seems a lot more tractable, even if one is indeed dovish on The Current Troubles not lasting too much longer in the big-picture future.
edit: and anyway gas prices are finally starting to go *down* here, so I suppose they'd have been proven right!
and if they do move to cheaper cuts of meat who is to say that that is carbon/methane saving. might be from the same cow.
Would love a story on the Alzheimer's brouhaha.
Scott, not sure if you are looking into it. There have been some stories that make it seem like a Big Deal(TM). But I have no idea if it really is.
In The Pipeline gave a nice historical framing for this a couple of days ago: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean
tl;dr this is disappointing and also has failed replication trials previously, we've had no success treating AD in people by targeting A beta.
OK, I'm a believer. The stats I learned I understood well, but that was several decades ago and I have not kept up with advances. But I do grasp the concept of the need to adjust for multiple comparisons, and you sound like you have your head screwed on straight about what's the best way to do that.
It looks like you accidentally replied to the main post instead of whatever sub-thread you were using. Not knowing the context, there are many different ways to adjust for multiple comparisons of various levels of complexity. Among the most basic are Bonferroni adjustments or Holmes-Bonferroni adjustments (they are both simple enough that a quick google should demonstrate their use adequately). I'm sure there are likely more complex methods depending on your use case though.
Is there an adjective that means “likely to cause good memories despite being unpleasant in the moment”?
I enjoyed reading the responses you got, especially about Type II fun and the remembering self.
In case you haven't heard of it, you can also ask here for further suggestions: https://www.reddit.com/r/logophilia/
In climbing and endurance sports, this is sometimes called "type 2 fun":
https://kellycordes.com/2009/11/02/the-fun-scale/
Hard fun.
as the actress said...
Eudaimonian/eudaimonistic? Not really a word, but you and Aristotle seem to be operating on similar wavelengths here.
As I read the question I imagined a contemporary Aristotle rephrasing 'no pain, no gain' into 'no hurt you, no virtue'.
"Character-building" comes close, maybe? Although it literally refers to activities that increase virtue, I've found that the stuff I hated at the time, but made me a better person, I remember fondly.
But I suspect this is just one of the many existing things that English has no word for.
There's a "fun scale" that (to my knowledge) is attributed to an REI post from 2014 about types of fun. It started as a joke, I think, but by now myself and everyone I know in the outdoorsy/adventurey world use this scale as something legitimate to explain a situation that is pretty bad but you know will be fun to think back on (Type II Fun) OR a situation that is just so bad that you'll probably choose to almost never bring it up again (Type III Fun). For clarity, Type I Fun is like...uh...sitting in a jacuzzi at a resort with your arms draped across the edge to keep you from sinking, a cold drink within easy reach. https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
That's really useful! I'll have to remember that.
I don't know a word, but it seems closely related to nostalgia.
Yes. At first I was going to phrase it "likely to induce a feeling akin to nostalgia", but decided to reword it for simplicity.
I think of nostalgia as memories we'd rather have than experience; you are wondering about experiences we'd rather remember than have. So it seems like we could rearrange the root of nostalgia; it comes from nostas=return home, algos=pain. Maybe joy of leaving home? Xenochara.
I think the roots express the historical meaning of "homesickness" and the opposite would be "wanderlust".
It's tricky to express exactly what I mean because there does not seem to be a simple word expressing the concept.
Oh another relevant thing is I heard an interview with someone who was discussing the difference between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self". So you could describe such things as "done for the remembering self".
I definitely agree. Are you thinking of the Sam Harris podcast with Daniel Kahneman?
I think it was either on Rationally Speaking, or Sean Carroll's podcast. I've searched both and can't find the episode though. Kahneman was a guest on at least one of those podcasts, so it was probably him.
I don't know of such a word in English, but I have heard expressed before the view that truly great experiences/happiness mostly come from things that are at least somewhat unpleasant in the moment. Things that are pure hedonism, while more enjoyable in the moment, are nearly always shallow and empty (relatively speaking) in hindsight.
While this resonates with me and seems to have a large amount of truth to it (although I can certainly come up with counter examples), I'm curious how much of it isn't due to things like the sunk cost fallacy or the (similar? adjacent?) fallacy of something being better/more worthwhile because it's the thing you did/chose (can't for the life of me find the name, but I'm sure I've encountered it as an official fallacy, sort of the opposite of sour grapes; my googleing is turning up "sweet lemons" even though I'm quite sure I've never heard that before)
I think the counterexamples are more common than the examples, they're just less remarkable and thus less readily available to your mind. Most unpleasant things are just always unpleasant, and many pleasant things are meaningful, but we spend a lot more time arguing over the unpleasant worthwhile things and the empty hedonism we feel guilty over than all the things that are just obviously good or obviously bad.
Just because something is unpleasant in the moment by no means guarantees it will be viewed favorably in the future. I have never heard someone seriously argue this and nor did I mean to imply it. And the fact that some slightly unpleasant things will be viewed positively is not, nor should it be viewed as, evidence that all unpleasant things will be. Rather just that most of the best experiences in life were some degree of unpleasant in the moment. This is true for me (although certainly I have some extremely cherished memories/experiences that were _also_ an unadulterated pleasure in the moment), and I know it's at least partially true for a lot of people I know personally. To be clear, the things I'm thinking of are not _completely_ unpleasent in the moment, they just have an aspect of unpleasantness.
To give a recent example of my own: I went on a backpacking hike with friends. On the way back out we got unexpectedly rained on and I was unprepared gear-wise. I hiked for 4 hours soaked to the bone, carrying a heavy pack, and chilled by the wind. The trip as a whole was still an amazing experience and I'm glad I did it and would do it again in a heartbeat, even though that portion was not very enjoyable in the moment.
I know a guy who calls that "type 2" fun, although I have no idea where he got that from
I think this is relatively common, at least in my circles. It’s not quite as broad as the definition asked for though, as I would it say it refers specifically to being unpleasant *physically* in the moment.
https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale, which is also exactly what I thought of when I read that comment.
Oh that's probably it, he is a climber.
Nominations for books that aren’t so great while reading, but are great to have read? Mine are
Absalom, Absalom! -Faulkner
Blood Meridian -Cormac McCarthy
TV Shows? The Sopranos is one that I didn't enjoy while watching, but somehow it gets better and better in my memory with time.
Hmmm... is it cheating to nominate a work of philosophy?
Schopenhauer's "The World As Will and Representation" altered my mental chemistry like nothing else I've ever read, but it's tough going - especially if you aren't already well steeped in Kant. (Though someone - Karl Popper, I think - said that the best way to understand Kant is to read Schopenhauer.)
I intend to read Blood Meridian someday, but I fear it. McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" left me both aesthetically awed and horrified. I was skeptical of claims that McCarthy stood in the line of Melville and Faulkner, but, having read those three books, I'm now a believer. That said, the sheer level of brutality therein can be overwhelming - there were nights that it deprived me of sleep - and I understand that those books are on the "gentler" side of McCarthy's overall work.
The only book of the Border Trilogy that I read was All The Pretty Horses. Blood Meridian is much, much, much darker.
House of Leaves. Makes a great Bragging Right, adds a new literary lens one is unlikely to pick up elsewhere. Dreadful to actually suffer through. Same conceits have been done better since then (e.g. Zero HP Lovecraft's "God-Shaped Hole"), but none matched the "brand recognition" of the original.
TV is a little harder...I think a great deal of what's been Mass Popular over the last decade or so was actually insufferable triple, but it sure does lock one out of a lot of small-talk to not have even in passing watched said dreck. I used to read TV critics' reviews for exactly this reason, save myself the trouble and bluff a bit. An actual book is a lot harder to effectively socialize off just the Cliff Notes(tm).
I love House of Leaves! It was a gateway to experimental literature, for me. Danielewski guides you gently through the process of learning how to read a novel from the novel itself, like training wheels, where most experimental authors just toss you in.
I feel like I'd have gotten more out of it if I'd read it earlier in life, back before experiencing other Experimental Literature...I used to play a lot of Japanese visual novels, so the whole "unreliable narrator + aggressively nonstandard formatting" schtick wasn't new to me. But yes, despite extravagantly doubling down on the central conceit over and over, it's remarkably "gentle" compared to successors. There's a lot to be said for accessibility in niche genres.
I'll express solidarity with your lack of enjoyment of the Sopranos, though I haven't gotten the benefit of remembering it with fondness. As with "Mad Men", it was a show I watched in order to HAVE watched it, a kind of cultural literacy.
Joyce's Ulysses
Most serious books about the Shoah (or Stalinist Russia...) would fall under this category.
Also, any (good) book that takes a critical viewpoint on your own opinions/ideology.
"Bloodlands" is like that for me. Increasingly difficult to stick with while reading it, but it deepened my perspectives on some big topics, including but not limited to its specific subject matter.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
https://withdata.io/election/media/
I recently heard about the Khan World School through an interview with it's found on the People I Mostly Admire podcast. It's being run by Sal Khan of Khan Academy of in coordination with the University of Chicago (to help design curriculum) and Arizona State University (to run and help finance it, I believe)
As a community that is generally interested in schooling and (in some cases) quite skeptical of traditional schooling, I'm wondering about people's thoughts on it.
Obviously it's too new to be able to say anything concrete, but to me it seems rather exciting and seems like a much bigger experiment/change than even most charter schools. Sal Khan had previously run a small lab school in CA that (despite a whole host of confounders) seemed rather promising.
https://asuprep.asu.edu/khan-world-school/ (website for the school)
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-this-the-future-of-high-school/ (PIMA episode, contains a transcript of the interview)
I think there are some very good ideas here, and it's a good podcast with some smart questions asked. It's probably going to work very well for a certain subset of learners--people who are very smart, but also self-motivated enough to plow through a lot of independent study. I like the idea of a daily seminar and I like the focus on bringing data into classes other than math/science.
But I don't think it's going to magically solve the problem Levitt talks about where his students aren't curious and only care about getting an A. That's part of a much broader societal issue. Universities aren't serving the role of educating people, they're serving the role of credentialing people and saying that this degree-holder is some combination of a) smart and b) conscientious enough to jump through four years of hoops. Not all degrees are useless; I'm a teacher and I have a BA and MA that are both directly related to the subject area I work in, and I learned a lot of things that are relevant to what I do on a daily basis. But there are obviously millions of people out there in some middle-management job somewhere who are required to have a college degree, even if that degree has absolutely nothing to do with their work. (I could also go on a rant about the effects of Griggs v. Duke Power, but that would be going a bit too far astray of the topic at hand.)
I also think online learning in general is not going to work well for a large portion of students. For one thing, it's not ideal for the younger grades where you need physical supervision of students. Certainly there can still be online activities, but it can't work in the same way that it could for a high school student. Then I think you have a large number of students who are reasonably capable, but not necessarily mature enough to manage their time effectively and get work done on their own.
Oh no! Deiseach got banned again? And I can't even see the comment that triggered it since it's in the subscriber only thread. Ah well, at least it's only for a month. I'm sure we'll all muddle through till then.
I'm assuming copy-pasting from subscribers-only to non-subscribers is bad form, but I *think* it's reasonable to meta-comment on banning decisions for the purposes of letting people know what is and isn't over the line from Scott's apparent decisions:
Deisearch got banned for a post that was a long, uniquely written poem that was adapting the format of "Modern Major General." It was neither kind (because it roasting the poster she was replying to) nor necessary (because it was at best tangentially related to the topic at hand), and its truth can be debated, so it was justified for a ban.
It was funny and stylish and high-effort trolling, but still basically pure trolling and those behavior that Scott wants to discourage, I think.
I'm very glad she's not permanently banned, because she's an important part of the community.
Heh, thanks for the rundown. Sounds like pure Deiseach. Now I'm tempted to subscribe just to be able to see it.
Ditto.
Hmm, now I feel bad for possibly encouraging or inciting that post. There wasn't any *necessary* reason for me to pick on the same dude bearing the same cross, based on previous reactions from the last Open Thread; it was a true criticism and I tried to word it kindly, but, eh. Best let sleeping dogs lie, and all that. Pile-ons are a pretty predictable consequence from bringing attention to threads which seem destined to end in obscurity, and I certainly didn't wanna goad anyone into getting banned when obviously-controversial topics are discussed.
It *was* a very funny satire though, so I suppose that's some value created anyway.
I think it hypothetically would have be an acceptable top-level post (even if it was implicitly sub-tweeting someone) because it was high-effort & funny & stylish, but as a reply it was pretty clearly Out Of Bounds enough that it would have been bad to make an exception for it.
Misspelled `Remmelt`'s name
Along the lines of the BLM/Homicide spike there was a pretty similar debate occurring fifteen years ago that started with an Atlantic article titled American Murder Mystery that discussed an academic theory whereby knocking down traditional concentrated high rise housing projects and providing section 8 vouchers through the Federal Hope VI program just spread all the problems of concentrated ghetto housing onto working class neighborhoods. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
Many were not happy with this characterization and many efforts were made to discredit the entire theory:
https://prospect.org/education/false-accusation/
https://shelterforce.org/2008/07/23/memphis_murder_mystery_no_just_mistaken_identity/
I would love to see Scott apply his talent to this as well. On the one hand the theory passed the anecdotal/personal account explanation. Many civilians and police officers in various cities that were affected by this gave a similar account of the Hope VI program spreading the ghetto to low crime but poorish and vulnerable inner ring suburbs that, after ten or so years, just looked much more like the ghetto. I believe academic researchers later showed that while there were big spikes in violent crime in these communities that received the new residents, it couldn't be proven that the section 8 tenants were actually the criminal offenders.
This topic is infinitely interesting to me.
One thing I would say is that this is my field, and the research in this field is highly suspect. I have participated in large cost benefit research analysis projects about programs similar to Hope VI, where the literal instructions were "only look at the benefits, do not look at or try to calculate any costs". Then when the report is done everyone can make a big press release patting themselves on the back about how beneficial it all was, and look all those nasty nay-sayers were wrong! And unless you actually read through the 400 page monstrosity, and were smarter than a journalist, you wouldn't notice that it no way addressed a single criticism of the approach.
No one was ever disputing that the move from the projects would be better for the people who previously lived in the projects, but that is what we spent hundreds of pages proving. People were interested in the impact on their new neighborhoods, which we were instructed to avoid looking into in any way.
That is insane and exactly what I'm talking about. It just seems like it helps the careers of "experts" who simply move on from these communities with resume line items while actual lives are ruined. Maybe that's too cynical and not the whole picture but it would an easy picture to paint. The more I learn the more I feel like Thomas Sowell's criticism of intellectuals is more accurate than most. Zero accountability.
I mean if the government offers your employer a big contract to study X, aren't you going to do what they ask? You might ask some questions, make a few suggestions. But if they essentially say "stop asking about that we aren't interested in that part of the problem", what are you going to do? Its not like whistleblowing when someone is actually dying. They just want you to conduct some short sighted/stupid analysis.
This happens all the time in the public policy world. Take Economic Development. The University of X's "public impact center" (or whatever) will put together a report indicating the Zoo's request for $25 million to the legislature for a better Dolphin habitat absolutely makes sense and for sure is going to pay for itself.
You read the report and it assumes every single visitor to the Zoo is coming from outside of town, and every single one of them ONLY came to town to see the Zoo. It also makes some likely wildly exaggerated projections about what the upgrade will do to attendance, but we will ignore that for now.
Are the people who wrote signed/off on this report (some of whom are actual economists) actually this stupid? No probably not. But that was the question the Zoo/Legislature asked them to solve and the assumptions they wanted smuggled in.
That way you don't need to actually justify the expense, you have a piece of paper you can point to that indicates this particular piece of legislation is in some vague way going to economically "pay for itself".
I totally understand why it happens and don't necessarily blame the individuals involved for protecting their own careers and interests. I just don't think we appropriately acknowledge this happens or discuss the aggregate effect of this across our entire society. We seem to only encourage more of it, and when someone asks a question or disputes a finding, they are attacked for not bowing down to the "experts".
Oh I completely agree in a perfect world people should be taken to task for things like this. I could almost imagine a world in which this sort of thing was criminal if it involved legislation/lobbying. But so few people are even show interest in such documents, and many of them cannot understand them.
If there is a market out there for giving people pieces of paper saying construction projects are going to pay for themselves, there absolutely will develop an industry to service that market (and there has).
I'd like to see Scott look at it too, but it's kind of gamy for him. Some VERY LARGE PERCENTAGE of this is shakedowns and shakedown enforcement. Bribe me or I move a hundred violent career criminals to your neighborhood. Look what I did to their neighborhood. I will do it to yours or you will pay up.
And in my town, like most places, it was moving a housing project of blacks into a black working class community, so the violent crimes were mostly black on black and mostly unreported and ignored.
That's the more nefarious "isn't this all just political horse-trading/power broking bull shit?" aspect to these stories that he wouldn't be expected to touch...although someone should. Scott should simply audit whether there was sufficient evidence to enact such broad social engineering, the results, and perhaps the academic/media portrayal of the results which is usually wholly lacking in transparency and accountability.
Anecdote, but my city did this, and it had the effect of spreading the 'ghetto' to the surrounding areas.
But it took a while for the process to play out, and in the process the city center gentrified pretty significantly.
(Former ghettos torn down and upscale stuff built in their place)
I'd say it is a wash overall...though I had some attachments to some of the places that got ghetto-ized over time.
I think the ghetto revitalization and gentrification is an important aspect of the story. Someone continues to "hold the bag" for all the crimes and unfortunately in many cases its the black middle class communities getting destroyed. The pushed out communities go somewhere that isn't great but also isn't dangerous...then it becomes dangerous. Although the inner city former ghettos are now filled with 27 year old knowledge workers playing urbanite until they move to the burbs to have kids.
And: the people who bought the ghetto housing to gentrify it made a bunch of money off the process.
See also, https://viewpointvancouver.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/doonesbury.jpg
If you live in the Seattle area, there's going to be an ACX meetup on Wednesday, August 3rd. Free pizza for all participants (until supplies run out).
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/749612359504536/
LW link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-ea-seattle-summer-meetup
"I might or might not get around to writing a Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism"
surely you mean "Highlights Of Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism"
Dear coders of the world,
do you think anyone of average or above intelligence can learn to program?
Or is it something quite hard for most people to grasp?
"to program is vastly under specified here" but the quick answer is yes. The cutoff is probably about anyone who decently understood Algebra II and can follow and write a recipe. Someone who can at least do that (quick googling suggests 75% of students pass Algebra II so we're a bit past average) can learn at least some types of useful programming.
They are already plenty of answer, I'll be short. Intelligence is not relevant to programming IMO. It's just how much time you are willing to learn this and that trick.
You need to learn fast enough to keep up, since they keep inventing new stuff.
Perhaps you could finetune the idea that intelligence above a certain not very dramatic level is not relevant to programming.
When you say intelligence is not relevant to programming, do you mean e.g. there are as many successful IQ<70 programmers as IQ>130 ones? Because that really does not seem compatible with my experience.
I don't have data to back my claim. Do you?
Also, are we talking about an extreme case like this? I'm assuming we are talking about average, maybe even above average but not extraordinary, IQ.
From my experience, a lot of a programmer job boils down to communication with other programmers and with the rest of the team. When doing code reviews, the most important point I'm looking for is readability/debuggability.
Yes a very smart person will be able to do great engineering feat but IMO this is a small part of the job.
The original poster just needs to get going.
I was just asking you to clarify your claim. I've met several programmers with an IQ>130, but I don't think I've met any with an IQ<70, or even IQ<85, so to me it seems clear that intelligence is relevant to programming.
yeah there isn't any research I know of that looks at programming per se, but there are a few papers (and I think Scott mentioned one in a previous post) that intelligence becomes more relevant as the complexity of the job increases.
So I guess it depends on whether you think programming is a complex job or not.
As for getting going, the question wasn't about me (by no means a genius but I use Python a lot in my work, and tutor it to other students), it was more about my students. Have a lot of students from non-STEM backgrounds that come in really wanting to learn to program, but it seems like most of them really struggle going past the basics. It's especially odd because if you show them a few lines of code and ask them to explain what they output and why, they can normally do that pretty well. But if you ask them to create something from scratch with what they've learned it is borderline impossible for most of them. This led me to speculate that it was perhaps a lot more g-loaded than most people realise.
My first advice to you is to stop looking at things from the intelligence angle, programming is already rife with imposter syndrome and if you're going through things constantly looking at your intelligence to justify your competence or lack thereof you're just going to hurt yourself needlessly.
Programming is just teaching a bunch of electrons how to do things. It varies as enormously as teaching, you can teach kindergarteners or teenagers or college grads or industrial workers or soldiers or elderly people or animals, every one of those jobs is radically different, but they are all teaching, and they share some small number of similarities, like patience and the ability to empathize with who you're teaching.
I hate invoking 'intelligence' in generality because, aside from the aesthetic gut-level reasons of disliking any immutable metric aiming to rank people on a ladder, it's just not useful. Suppose you tell a guy he's bad at programming because he's unintelligent, now what ? what have he learned or not learned ? how can he improve his "unintelligence" ? it's just needlessly cruel feedback that achieves nothing. But suppose you tell him he's bad at programming because he can't imagine the state of the machine (the values of different variables) at every point in a computation ? now we're talking, he can get better at this, even if he can't he can better accept he's not good at this specific ability instead of the very general and value-judgemental "unintelligent".
Like I said above, programming is varied, anything essential or fundamental about it is going to be a small part of it, the rest is going to vary according to the sort of programming you're doing. I would say that this small fundamental part is about imagining how another entity executes instruction that you gave it, and how those instructions might be confusing and incomplete, and how you might fix that. Early women programmers likened it to cooking, cleaning and cloth-making, instruction-oriented activities familiar to women. Others liken it to commanding a servant\maid, commanding an army, managing a factory or a bussiness, ... etc. As flawed as all those analogies are, they hint at a fundamental truth : programming is about giving instructions to an entity that can reason and remember in a very pecuilar way, and watching it execute them EXACTLY, so exactly and literally that it's painful. It's the art of breaking down high-level goals into low-level steps, like a commanding general who wants to cripple the enemy's production ability, but he can't exactly tell each soldier to "go cripple the enemy's production ability", he must break it down into more primitive action, like "go bomb a weapons factory" or "go harrass a supply convoy", those actions might themselves be high-level goals that need further breaking down (which weapons factory and when and how to bomb it).
All of this might sound like nonsense to you, and it is, because words are a bad tool to describe activities and habits of mind. I will just answer your question
>is it something quite hard for most people to grasp
No, I don't think so. Not the fundamentals at any rate, the raw notion of telling computers what to do. This is something school kids master. Programming is not a priestly activity, again not at certain levels, and it can be quite rewarding if you're a certain type of person.
Come up with a reason you want to learn programming for, say it to me here or any place for that type of question, and I will give you a programming language to learn and a learning resource to learn from.
You have to be tenacious, it gets frustrating sometimes, I don't say this to intimidate you (your first learning experience need not be frustrating) or show off how we programmers are a tough bunch who are exceptionally good at handling frustration (we're not, we scream and cuss and rage and cry), but just to prepare and reassure you. You will have days and nights where you question if it's just you or if this <programming activity> is really that frustrating, the answer, now and ever, is that it isn't you. Some of that is failure and inferiority of the tools and infrastructure, but some of that is fundamental about programming as command and control and communication, it's frustrating for the same reason dealing with people or kids or animals can be frustrating and hard.
“Programming” covers a lot of ground.
There is working for a company that provides gym management software and you get a development request to add a reportable field for health insurer and policy number because one of your big customers inked a deal with Blue Cross.
And then there is developing the software that allows Falcon 9 rockets to land themselves on a floating platform.
In my experience a lot of the gym management software guys fancy themselves Falcon 9 developers. And they, you know, aren’t.
I understand algorithms and stuff, but can't program because I can never memorize the commands no matter what I try
you severely misunderstand the difficulty I have with this kind of thing. I had an elementary school with like 20 students in the class and didn't have people's name memorized even after a few years. I was meeting a guy named Ted almost weekly for a while, and it took about a year to get his name consistently right. I had an internship at a particle physics place and understood the physics, but it didn't work out because I couldn't be trained on the computer console. Something that most people have is missing in my brain, and your advice is like telling someone with total face blindness that they just need practice
I think the point everyone here is making is that you don’t even have to memorize anything, all of these commands are online.
Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you *already* knew. I’ve been on the other end of this in the past, and I have never, ever let a developer or coder go because I thought they weren’t learning fast enough; it has always been because they weren’t able to code what I needed *right now*. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today, and when I know that you can just take all that experience somewhere else. Getting fired doesn’t mean “You’re learning slowly,” it means “You have to learn more before working here.”
Unless you’ve been in this industry for a decade, this is perfectly normal. The average person will be fired several times during their life, and most of these will come early on while you’re less productive than a highly-experienced worker. I understand why that can feel frustrating; it is. But unfortunately, there’s no magic trick here, just a shitton of Googling and checking the documentation.
you don't need to memorize, you just look them up here https://www.amazon.com/Java-Nutshell-Desktop-Quick-Reference/dp/1449370829
I can't even remember having to memorize anything. Maybe I've gotten good enough that I've just already done it, but for most things there's almost no "commands" to memorize. I know "here is what this library *should* do" and read the documentation to find whatever "find string by start of it" is called.
Some beginner languages, like BASIC, have a pile of commands that you might want to memorize but they fit on one piece of paper.
By commands do you mean language keywords or tools like compilers? If it's the latter why not try an interpreted language like Python, which really has one command, `python`. Even for the former I would recommend it, because it goes easy on the symbols and uses words in places where C-like languages have you conjure a soup of characters.
The trick is to use Google. It will be *very* painful for the first few months looking up every single command, but eventually like 80% of it will stick, and the last 20% can still be Googled.
I once read a series of research papers by some guys who were trying to figure out why some people fail to learn to program, and they had a test that they claimed was fairly good at predicting who would succeed in a class.
They show incoming students a bunch of short simple programs, focusing on things like variable assignments, and ask students to predict the results of these programs.
Then, they DON'T check which students answered CORRECTLY. The students haven't been taught this programming language yet; there's no particular reason they should get these right.
Instead, they check which students answered CONSISTENTLY. That is, students who came up with SOME set of rules for how the language could work, and then applied those rules systematically to all the questions, rather than answering each question separately in an ad hoc way.
For instance, a statement like "A = B" could hypothetically mean a bunch of different things. Maybe it means you change A to match B, or you change B to match A, or they swap values, or they average values, or this is a test of equality and neither of them change. They don't look for students who guessed the intended meaning, but they look for students who picked SOME possible meaning and then applied it consistently, rather than changing their interpretation the next time they encountered a statement of this form.
.
I don't have any experience teaching introductory programming. In college, I specifically avoided tutoring for the entry-level class, because I couldn't think how I'd explain fundamental concepts like "variables" to someone who didn't just intuitively get them. So I don't know if any of this is right.
But my working hypothesis is that some people get tripped up by the fact that a computer will just do EXACTLY what you said, and nothing else, with absolutely no regard for context or common sense or implied goals.
This is rather different from writing instructions for humans, who mostly try to grasp the purpose of the instructions and then fill in/change/ignore any details to make them more aligned with the inferred purpose. (Often without even realizing that they're doing this.)
Honestly, I'd just sit them down in front of any Zachtronics game and see how they handle it. I learned far more programmatical thinking from playing Space Chem than I ever did in an actual programming class.
That aptitude test was (at least partially?) retracted by the author and didn’t replicate well in future research.
https://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf
I think another decent screening tool would be how long does it take them to understand/apply material implication (IF A THEN B = NOT A OR B).
Almost anyone can get that eventually, but some people really need it spelled out extremely explicitly, while others almost immediately understand.
My thoughts looking at that if statement are that I would hope for a bit more parenthetical wrapping of the active terms, while being unsure if you mean the = as an assignment operation, an equality operation, or if you are simply attempting to declare the two sides to be logically equivalent statements ala symbolic logic.
The latter, just trying to be clear about what I mean by what is meant by material implication.
>some people get tripped up by the fact that a computer will just do EXACTLY what you said, and nothing else, with absolutely no regard for context or common sense or implied goals.
Reminds me of that Charles Babbage quote:
>"On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question"
I've known a handful of people who just didn't get it. Their brains refused to work that way. I've known a lot of people who took to it like ducks to water, loved it, and became very good at it. And I've known a mass of others who could learn the basics, and do a workmanlike job on the easy stuff, but would never ever be able to handle the kinds of things that give programmers respect from their peers, and seriously good salaries.
I can't even guess at numbers, if everyone were to try to learn programming; I presume those least likely to be able to learn it generally select themselves out, just as people who can't carry a tune in a bucket select themselves out of music classes.
I suspect it's also changing over time. My experience is with classic programming languages. (The kind with for loops, while loops, etc.) Some modern languages are very different, and may be easier - or harder - either on average, or for particular people.
Finally, the set of people who can work well with concurrency - multiple things happening at the same time - is much smaller than the set that can work well with single-threaded programming. Professionals routinely founder. Programming environments are designed to simplify this to the point where most can handle it, and people still mess up regularly. And most simply can't handle the level of generality needed to create those environments.
Could difficulties with concurrency be about limits of working memory?
I can't rule that out, but I tend away from that explanation. Tools like sequence diagrams can allow you to avoid the need for a large working memory and can allow you to be methodical about the work being done.
I suspect it has more to do with being able to reason under cases of uncertainty. There's a need to be able to handle the idea that something else is in an indeterminate state. Since the main goal of concurrency is performance (along some metric), one of the main challenges in doing that kind of programming is to increase the number of possible indeterminate states rather than to reduce them. Reducing them can be done with enough locks, but that ultimately eliminates the benefits of concurrency in the first place.
> Finally, the set of people who can work well with concurrency - multiple things happening at the same time - is much smaller than the set that can work well with single-threaded programming.
I find this very surprising. What's the conceptual difference that makes the former so much harder to understand?
I don't really know whether there's a conceptual difference, or whether it's just that complexity goes way up, and people can't keep all the possibilities in mind. What I mostly observe is the number of bugs in this space, and the number of people who never get competent.
It gets even worse when you have to consider out of order execution. Your program lists three steps one after another; the cpu or the compiler decides to do step 2 before step 1, not seeing any dependency between them. (This is normal; good programmers know when this is allowed and when it is not, and how to forbid reordering when it matters.)
But you can get in trouble - often in the form of a rare, intermittent bug - without this. Thread 1s step 5 only happens before thread 2s step 2 once in a billion times, but if you don't take into account that it *might*, you might get a very unpleasant surprise when it does happen.
Possibly the difference is between people who think "what could happen" and people who think either "what do I intend to happen" or "what did happen in my tests".
"It gets even worse when you have to consider out of order execution." Ouch! Good point! Normally, for serial execution, the compiler (or hardware!) will only do this when it is safe - but that gets much harder (impossible?) to determine in a parallel environment. As you said, reordering can be forbidden when necessary.
Concurrency is a big problem in web development, in which much of what happens depends on a response from a server, which could take any amount of time (or might error out for reasons you have no control over). Almost everything has to work asynchronously. So the discipline has built out lots of tools for managing it, which make it easier for less-than-genius programmers (like me!) to wrap our minds around. Redux is a good example of a widely-implemented one.
The more we build out tools and practices for managing these very difficult problems, the more accessible the field becomes. React is easier than Angular, which is easer than JQuery, which is easier than raw JavaScript.
Multi-threading requires a more extensive mental model to understand what your code is doing and it is also harder to bug hunt. It creates greater demands on your "working memory" basically.
The problem isn't really a conceptual difference. The problem is that without constraints, things can happen in any order. The most accessible example of this is printing; suppose you have one thread that prints "How are you, Isaac?" and another thread that prints "Loading, please wait...". You'll get output that looks like this: "HoLwoadi nagre y,o pu,le Iassaae waic?t...".
(Exercise: in serial code, there is only one potential output value from those two print statements. In parallel code, how many potential output values are there? This might give you an idea why people have more trouble with parallel code.)
Concurrency problems common enough to have names:
- Race condition: the results of your code will differ according to which thread takes a conflicting action first. This gives you output that is nondeterministic when considering only your own code.
- Deadlock: two threads are each waiting for the other one to finish before they continue their own work. This prevents you from having any output at all.
- [I don't know a name for this]: Thread A reads the value of a variable. Thread B changes the value of that variable. Thread A continues its work using the old value. Thread A is going to produce output, but probably not correct output.
(Treating every character in each input string as unique, which is the correct analogical approach, I calculate 446,775,310,800 different ways to print them in parallel, versus, as noted, one way to print them in sequence. This is why people can't reason about unconstrained concurrency.)
I'd call the third one using "stale data".
But it also has a specific form where thread A and thread B both add 1 to the variable's value, which they do by reading it, then writing back the incremented value. After this happens the value sometimes only goes up by one, because A read it, then B read it, and only then did either one write their incremented value.
In serial code, until you hit a control structure, the order of events matches the order of the lines in the program text. In concurrent programming, you need to constantly be worrying: If the processor executing this thread reads or writes this variable at this point in the code, might some other processor executing a different thread have altered or need to read that variable? ( This is a simple version of what gives rise to "critical sections" ) There are all sorts of other failure modes that don't exist with serial code.
As someone who taught symbolic logic for a bit, which is a bit easier than coding. You get a bimodal distribution even among college students.
Half the class finds it fairly easy, half the class is terrible at it and will maybe get a B if they struggle their ass off.
Mostly probably just tracking if people have any analytical thinking skills. I am sure you could train up most people to some very minimal competency that would barely be useful for anything. But why bother?
Certainly everyone can understand commanding a simple robot, or executing a set of tasks. But you get into more complicated actual programming with logical operators, variables, recursions etc., and you just lose tons of people.
I TAed the intro to computer science class for a few semesters in my undergrad program. I went to Williams, where you can basically expect everyone to be of above-average intelligence.
My experience was that a few people took to it like ducks to water, lots of people kinda... could do it, but it wasn't easy or natural for them, and a few people just, like, absolutely could not manage. I particularly remember one student who was clearly accustomed to succeeding academically (and as far as I know did well at the rest of the school) who just, like, she would come to my TA hours and slowly, painfully, frustratingly for both of us, I would do her homework for her, often by process of elimination -- like, we'd get to something that called for a while loop, and first she would try an if, and I would coach her out of it, and then she'd try a for loop, and no, that wasn't really right either, and then she'd try a repeat loop (this was Pascal -- I'm old), and no, and okay finally yes, here's a while loop. This wasn't her being lazy or unmotivated, it just did *not* make sense to her.
I think it's easier to learn than the math normally taught in high school in the US. Harvard has a class called CS50 that is meant to be something like "What everyone should know about computer science" that's worth checking out I think.
Neither. I'd say about 50% of people can learn to code reasonably well, and 50% can't, and it doesn't correlate heavily with overall intelligence.
I know some very bright people who, even if they gave it 100% effort, would never really "get it". I also know some not-so-bright people who do a decent job writing code for well-defined tasks.
I expect it correlates with intelligence (basically all mental tasks do), but I think there's definitely a talent for coding and that kind of thinking that different people have in different measures.
I've noticed a lot of programmers have a side habit related to RPGs, board gaming, or music.
This leads me to suspect there is some sort of "Making your brain work in new/weird patterns" talent/skill that translates to "making your human meat-brain able to emulate what the silicon-logic-engine is going to do".
For sure - for the 50% who fall into the "able to learn it" bucket, their ability to code correlates heavily with intelligence.
My point is that being in the "able to learn it" bucket and "not able to learn it bucket" only correlates a little with intelligence.
https://www.adaface.com/assessment-test/computer-programmer-aptitude-test
If Democrats hadn't rigged the 2020 election, wouldn't they have insisted on an audit to prove their 81 million votes were genuine and true? At a minimum they would have taken steps to ensure future elections are more trustworthy and ease concerns in SOME small way no? Always watch what they are doing not what they are saying. When they accuse others of something there is a 99% chance they are doing that exact crime themselves and telling everyone to LOOK over there ELVIS!
Steve Bannon on October 31, 2020:
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner, He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.”
It was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes accepted as truth.”
Trump is still repeating the lie.
Liz Cheney’s summary:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UihplOTY_vI
Trump’s full phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VIJU3M-kKhI
This is something where you need to be a lot more specific about what it is that you expect people to do.
Insisting on "an audit"? We routinely do recounts in close elections - that's literally an audit. And in 2020, we had lots of court cases where the Republicans made specific allegations of fraud and courts looked at the (lack of) evidence.
If those aren't "audits", or aren't sufficient, in your eyes, what *specifically* do you expect the Democratic Party should have done or asked to have done?
Same for "taken steps to ensure elections are more trustworthy". What steps, *specifically*? Because all of the easy ones involve either making voting significantly harder for a fair number of people, or de-anonymizing voting. And there are good reasons why not merely Democrats (the party) but democrats (people who value democracy) are going to be skeptical of both of those.
The Democrats didn't rig the 2020 election. The people who believe that the Democrats *did* rig the election, will not be persuaded by any "audit" because they'd rather believe that the audit was also rigged. So there's no reason for the Democrats to waste lots of time and money, or making voting more difficult or dangerous, over any of this.
But if there is something that you think would be worth doing, then you have to spell out exactly what that is.
I don't think it's possible to prove one way or the other whether the 2020 elections were correctly decided. The best thing that can be done is to make elections more secure in the future.
In most functioning democracies, both/all major parties are keen on eliminating fraud, because they know they themselves don't use it but they don't trust the other guys. In the US, only one side seems to be keen on eliminating fraud, which is a worry.
What exactly would / did an audit look like?
In my place, I basically could think of two situations: the counting is unclear (or it's simply very close), then you ask for a re-count (it's paper ballots). Or: there were issues disturbing the election process. Then all you can do is repeat the election in certain, problematic districts. (Which will be significantly later, so basically a new election in those districts). What would that audit entail in the US case?
I can think of one thing that we can do, and that I think we should do.
It's a matter of record whether or not you voted. An auditor could call you up and check whether or not you did. There's a widespread theory that in say, Philly, after the doors were closed, the poll workers stuffed the boxes with Biden ballots filled out in the name of people who actually didn't vote.
A double-checking step where we verified whether or not people we recorded voting actually voted would catch that sort of scheme, and also probably the old Chicago thing where dead people voted. Doesn't seem like it would be that expensive, as long as it was done with statistical sampling instead of trying to call every single voter. So I'd like to see that.
This raises two additional questions: first and foremost: why / how is it possible that poll workers are all from one conspiratory group and don't control each other? Mutual control of poll workers is one of the basic things you would ensure in a election.
I have no idea how it worked in the last election(s), but it should be relatively easy to set up and assure for the next elections. Or maybe I'm mistaken and once trust is too low, nothing really works any more?
Edit: the next bit is not relevant here, as it touches only upon the last election.
Second, what has been done to pin that down right after the election by the Trump campaign, and why is there not more concrete data on this than 'theories'?
What I would do if I was involved in a huge campaign, and suspected that 'poll workers stuffed the boxes with Biden ballots' in a concrete place; is sth. like this: within days of the election I'd ask two major polling firms with a good reputation to be non-partisan and not corruptable to figure out which percentage/how many people voted in district x and then compare this with the number of votes allegedly casted there. Imagine in a sub-district you get 51% and 53% of people claiming they voted, and recorded votes of 54% - that's within the error margin. Imagine you get 51% and 53% of people claiming they voted, and recorded votes of 64% - this should give you a solid case to go to court and ask for the respective investigations. As a side-effect, it would also give you three links to respected non-partisan organizations and official results for a sub-district, and everybody who wanted could look that up.
As in my comment below, I don't think that has much of a chance to work properly two years and many debates later.
Ah, that's concrete enough to give me an idea, thanks.
You seem to trust that voters will remember whether they voted or not two years earlier, but believe me they (a relevant part of them) really don't. (And what's worse, they will be convinced they know). Also, in the meantime there have been heated debates on whether the election was stolen or whether Trump attempted a coup ... I think this can lead to people deliberately claiming they voted or didn't vote to support their side. So while I appreciate the idea, I think *now* the error margin would be significantly bigger than the lizardman constant.
I'm not sure where the two years thing is coming from. I don't mean we could do this now for 2020, I mean there should be an Office of Election Integrity that does this sort of thing as a matter of course. OTOH, the question about people forgetting or lying is a good one, and I don't have a great solution.
I think the far easier solution is to make sure the poll workers are controlling each other automatically. That's not difficult, is it? Then you don't need an additional check afterwards.
Edit: in addition, for example in my current place, every citizen has the right to observe the process of counting the votes (without interfering). That's a great additional mechanism for cross-checking.
I just misunderstand your comment and thought you were talking about auditing the last election.
The Lizardman constant is 5%. What are you going to do when five million registered voters, who are recorded as having voted, tell the auditor "No, I didn't vote, who says I voted"? Because that will happen even if the records of who actually voted, are actually 100% accurate.
That's . . . a good question. I don't actually have an answer.
A reasonable idea, though you're hardly going to get everyone to reply, especially these days when a lot of people don't answer their phones.
That seems reasonable.
I give the same answer to Republican sore losers in 2020 asking for "an audit" that I give to Democratic sore losers in 2016 asking for "an audit."
Elections are always audited. It already happened. Suggesting we do the thing we already did is a You problem.
> If Democrats hadn't rigged the 2020 election, wouldn't they have insisted on an audit to prove their 81 million votes were genuine and true?
This is something that's bothered me for a while. People love to talk about auditing election results. But that can't be done; the *entire point* of anonymous voting is that votes don't have any provenance. You can only do an audit if you decide anonymous voting was a bad idea.
We're talking about people who were looking at ballots to see if they had flecks of bamboo in them because that would prove they were fake ballots from China, so no, nothing would help.
We're also talking about people who think it's *literally inconceivable* that a handful of districts could have scribbled some fake signatures on a few thousand ballots, or threw some ballots in the trash, or double-counted ballots. Because, you know, it was *so* secure.
Because thats not how elections work. The way it works is what happened in 2000: the parties go to court, a decision is rendered, everyone lives with the outcome. In 2016 the efforts to challange the election got laughed out of court.
Seriously, how do you explain that? Mind you, "Trump" judges were no more sympathetic than others.
The PA Supreme Court effectively said that the election was run in an unconstitutional manner (according to the PA Constitution), but declined to take any action which would have remedied the fault.
If you really want to set the precedent of "you must always accept that every election was secure and legitimate and correctly decided, and election fraud is axiomatically impossible," two can play at that game. Red district polling centers in swing states are gonna have a blast in 2024.
After an election, the burden of proof on showing the election was invalid is on people claiming it was invalid.
Before the election, systems should be designed so that someone with a reasonable amount of skepticism can have a reasonable amount of confidence in the outcome.
After the election is too late to debate about how the system was designed.
I would strongly disagree with that framing, but what I'm saying is that if we all accept those assumptions, you can't start complaining in 2024 when tens of thousands of Democrat ballots go missing, or more people vote for Trump than the number of registered voters in a district. If the game we're playing is no longer democracy but instead "we put some basic rules in place, but beyond that, anything goes" then we'll just have a competition of who can scribble fake signatures the fastest. And you won't be able to question it, because that would make you an election denier, and you've spent the last 2 years talking about how elections are *so secure* and how it would require an *inconceivable* level of competency for conspirators to throw some ballots in the trash or fake some signatures.
Yes, you can complain if ballots go missing, but you have to have some evidence that this occurred. Again, Bush v. Gore. I personally think that case was wrongly decided, but there being no lawful alternative, I have accommodated myself. As should you.
My question is unanswered: How do you explain the Republicans poor showing in the many lawsuits they filed?
As far as I can tell, no audit would satisfy the people who are still claiming that the election was stolen.
It seems like there is one: an audit that would show that Trump actually won. But it seems that no audit showing Trump actually won would satisfy the people claiming the election was correctly decided.
Two teams played football. Team B won, clearly. It was close enough, but hardly a nail-biter.
Team B claims the scorer erred in recording goals, and they actually won. (They're a little slow on catching on to sportsmanship.) The two backup scorers compare notes: no error was made; the score was recorded correctly.
The next day, team A shows up to scrimmage. There is a chain-link fence surrounding the field, a padlocked gate, and a 'no trespassing' sign with a statement that team B's Daddy bought the field and will prosecute any trespassers.
So, who won the game?
Obviously, if you start with the assumption that team A won, then you can reach the conclusion that team A won.
What actually happened is more like:
Two teams played football. Team B was clearly winning during the first half of the game; the score was 2-3 in favor of team B. Then, halfway through the game, team A demanded that the game be paused for the night, so they stopped playing. When the teams came back the next day, the scoreboard said it was 4-3 in favor of team A.
Team B, seeing this, was very surprised. Why had the game paused yesterday? Why did the score change overnight even though the opponents didn't score any goals in that time? It just didn't make sense.
Predictably, team B asked the referee to intervene. "This is obviously fraudulent. Can you change the score back?" But the referee said "Sorry, there's nothing I can do. The scoreboard says 4-3." Team B replied, "But the score was obviously 2-3 when we left off yesterday. How could they have gained two points when we weren't even playing? That's an obvious logical discrepancy." The referee responded, "Sorry, but there's just No Evidence. Can you show me any proof? I'm looking at the scoreboard, and it says 4-3."
Meant to say team A won. (See how easy it is to slip away?)
FYI, there's an Edit Comment option if you click the three dots.
You can think of things which could have been demonstrated soon after the election, and which would have been convincing evidence of election fraud in the three relevant states and in the relevant direction. For example, if there really were large numbers of voters who were listed as having sent in mail-in ballots, but who were willing to testify that they had not mailed in a ballot, that would be pretty convincing evidence of one kind of fraud that Trump's followers have claimed. Or if a recount of hand-marked paper ballots had shown that the reported electronic totals were in substantial disagreement with what was on those paper ballots, that would have been pretty convincing evidence of fraud.
But those things were not, in fact, demonstrated. Trump's people had the opportunity to present whatever evidence they had to election officials and judges, including many Republican election officials and judges, but they didn't provide any convincing evidence to them.
Now, one plausible argument is that election security mechanisms used in the US are simply not very good, so that an election-stealing level of fraud may have happened without leaving enough evidence to demonstrate it. This is plausible (election security really isn't all that great), but it applies to every election. That is, the existence of weaknesses that might have been undetectably exploited is no better reason to propose overturning the 2020 elections than it is to propose overturning the 2016 elections.
A second plausible argument is that Trump and his team were comically inept (see the press conference in front of the landscaping company), so maybe that evidence did exist but they were unable to find and present it to judges or election officials or media outlets. But again, "we claim there was fraud that stole this election from us but we can't provide any evidence because we're too inept" is a fully general argument for why you ought not to have to lose any elections.
I think people need to get a lot more comfortable with the idea that there is a "margin of error" in the electoral process just like there is in any polling process and stop fixating on whether a particular result was "correct". Bush v Gore in FL for example was a tie. That is what happened. The result was well within the error bounds.
The danger with that approach is that you've now got two edge cases to worry about instead of one: the boundary between "Candidate A Wins" and "Too Close To Call", and the one between "Candidate B Wins" and "Too Close to Call".
True. Ideally one wants to smoothly transition from "Candidate A Wins" to "Candidate B Wins" as the margin gets smaller and smaller and reverses sign.
Semi-seriously: One way to do this is to deliberately inject a measured amount of randomness to reflect a plausible amount of uncertainty in what the "real" result was - kind of as a memento mori to the "winning" candidate to remind them that their "mandate" is shakier than a binary decision makes it look.
A finer-grained version of this would be to send each decision to one of the two candidates randomly, with the random weights depending on the margin in the election. E.g. if 2020 had been an exact tie, give the sign/veto choice for each bill randomly to Trump/Biden with 50/50 odds.
My usual suggested remedy for all this is to reduce the power of the office sought, until too few people care about the result to raise an audible fuss about it.
Regrettably, I don't think that that is in the cards.
Politically, my preference is to maximize freedom for the median person. In other words, to maximize the live options that they have, choices which are not punished by the federal government, the state government, their employer, their landlord, or internet mobs. I dislike that the left attacks freedom of speech through cancel culture. I dislike that the right attacks bodily freedom through everything from the drug war to abortion bans.
This isn't quite the same as libertarianism. Giving e.g. Bezos free reign to use his bargaining power to maximum effect, barring only force or fraud, would give him vast power over his employees and deprive them of many of their freedoms.
Ehh. Pragmatically, I don't think reducing office power is in the cards for 2022, say, but I think it's relatively low cost to advertise that option as something to press for in 2024 and beyond. (It wouldn't be hard to have a third-party-tier candidate stumping it just to get the message out, and then it gets gradually stronger from there, having a real effect on local elections, etc.)
At the very least, I think it's good for people to think about solving election fraud and automatically consider solving it from the other end.
And low office power doesn't mean high CEO power to me, either. Not in that sense. To me, low office power means high CEO power that is obvious to all; high officer power means *still* high CEO power that is less obvious, as it is disguised as office power.
Some are trying pass legislation to clarify the process of certifying our electors' registering of our votes. I hope they're successful.
The complexity of the current system is rooted in the 19th century, and could use some simplification and transparency. Having said that, I think claiming to be an "auditor" of any election requires more qualification than setting down your beer and turning the baseball cap around.
Very much agreed. I think it is part of a larger problem with refusing to admit that there are margins of error in all processes (college admissions, hiring, safety testing, law). In a saner world, I think Bush v Gore should have been called "too close to call" and the two of them should have tossed a coin.
ISTR that there are states where they resolve a literal tie via some randomization procedure--I think by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing out a poker hand and seeing whose hand wins.
That sounds reasonable.
I don't know. Margin of error in the process? Or in the counting of votes? The latter should be pretty accurate.
I was thinking of the margin of error in the process as a whole.
Hm, but then I don't know how this fits the 'too close to call' you mention above. As for casted votes, in my view it should be possible to be really accurate, if needed.
In theory counting cast votes should be very accurate. Even transmitting binary information has some error rate, but http://bucarotechelp.com/networking/nwtech/92050804.asp "Bit error ratio is the ratio of the number of bits received incorrectly compared to the number of bits transmitted in a specified time interval or quantity of bits. The typical acceptable BER levels range from 1e-9 to 1e-12." which would only miscount a single vote in a whole election.
In practice, there are error sources many orders of magnitude larger than this. Voting machines can be dropped, or misconnected, or misconfigured.
On the voters' side, ballots can be misread. Voters can be on the margin of switching their vote - perhaps one cup of coffee away from voting differently.
One way to view the election process is to view any claim of a "mandate" very skeptically if the difference in votes is less than the lizardman constant.
Ah, in terms of 'does the election result always perfectly translate the will of the people', absolutely. Especially as the will of the people is not stable, but flexible.
In terms of: does everybody have a reasonable and equal chance to vote and have his/her voice being counted. Well, I think there need to be a lot of effort into making this sure (and still it'll never be perfect). At least from a distance, the whole gerrymandering for example looks, huh, very weird (and also problematic I guess). At this point in time, it seems even a bipartisan commission assigning districts randomly across the country according to whichever pre-assigned rules seems better than what is going on. But I'm digressing.
To be fair, you can use statistical methods to infer voters' preferences in cases where the ballot was ambiguous (e.g. accidental overvotes for both Buchanan and Gore). In that case the race was firmly won by Gore:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228758008_The_Wrong_Man_Is_President_Overvotes_in_the_2000_Presidential_Election_in_Florida
Ouch! I had misreading ballots in mind as one of the contributors to election results not following voters' intents, but I wasn't aware that it showed up as overmarked ballots.
The desire for touch-screen voting was that we wouldn't have the President of the United States decided by the opinion of some guys in a room about what counted as a sufficiently hanging chad.
Partisans will freak out [1] but we'd much rather have an inaccurate measurement that everyone can agree on than a very accurate measurement that we can't agree on.
[1] only if their candidate loses, though
"The desire for touch-screen voting was that we wouldn't have the President of the United States decided by the opinion of some guys in a room about what counted as a sufficiently hanging chad."
Yes, though it gets tricky. Electronic voting machines can prevent "hanging chad" types of ambiguities. To make it possible to have a recount, the design needs to generate a permanent hard copy record of each vote, that the voter can see and verify, and which can be reviewed later, if a recount is needed. Not all designs do this.
Tom Scott has a nice video on the vulnerabilities of electronic voting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
(even _in-person_ electronic voting)
In a nutshell, too much is invisible to the voter:
- For closed source systems, they can't see the code recording their vote
- Even for open source systems, they can't see that the software supposedly installed in the voting machine is _actually_ installed there
- They can't see the storage that records their vote, and see that what they chose was actually recorded
It's quite likely that a number of people accidentally voted for Buchanan.
But there is no way of actually implementing an actual change in the outcome without turning over the power in elections from voters to statisticians.
Someone said upthread it was a tie, and that's what happened. Re-run November 7 2000 with the slightest change in Florida weather and you cannot predict who wins.
"without turning over the power in elections from voters to statisticians"
Yup, and there are usually multiple plausible ways of doing a statistical analysis.
As you said:
"Re-run November 7 2000 with the slightest change in Florida weather and you cannot predict who wins."
I vote for epistemic humility in this case? :-) We should be more broadly willing to admit that many of our decision processes have a large random component.
I have a solution:
We simulate the entire world population, including all conditions on the ground as they were in 2000 (or whatever election we're interested in). We simulate every cloud, every can of coke, every wife cheating with the pool boy. Then we run the simulation 10,000 times, with slight permutations to it, and take the median vote total (or the mode if it's not normally distributed? I'm not a statistician).
Simple, right? Just have to make sure politicians don't try to influence the simulation...
They weren't obligated to prove anything. Someone else's ignorance of election procedures is not their emergency. The Democrats should have referred them to the League of Women Voters for education.
Well I think your first question answers your second. There have been plenty of recounts, court cases, "audits", etc, but nobody who thinks the election was stolen will ever be satisfied by any of them. So there are no steps they can take, that haven't already happened, that will actually assuage those people's concerns..
If they passed some law saying "there has to be an 'audit' of the vote" and then did such an 'audit' of 2020, it would show that Biden won, which would be evidence in the eyes of their opponents that it was fake, and would lead to the exact same set of questions.
+1
I’m not much of a Republican anymore, but the fiscal conservative in me has to ask “what would we get for the money?”
An audit of 81 million votes is gonna be costly, and kinda pointless expense given that it is overwhelmingly unlikely to (a) change the result or (b) change the opinion of any significant number of “stop the steal” believers
I recently finished Bill Barr's memoir, where he talks about the whole fiasco. His conclusion: there were a lot of last-minute changes to election law in the face of COVID-19. Nearly all of those changes have been recognized as undermining election security, which would likely decrease public faith in electoral outcomes. However, the AG's office looked for election fraud and didn't find it - including and especially in all the places Trump fans love to cite. His sense was that election results were skewed - potentially by selective media/social media bias, but certainly by creative rules mongering 'emergencies' putatively justified by COVID-19 (more details in the book) - but that's kind of to be expected at this point.
(He also thought Trump lost by not moderating in the final months before the election - something he says Trump did in 2016. Apparently there was a debate in the inner circle about whether Trump needed to excite his base or play for moderates. Trump though he needed to be more of a fighter and be seen that way, but increasingly many top advisors told him that he needed to tone it down so regular voters would listen to him. He didn't agree, and lost votes in key suburban districts where he had done better in 2016 than in 2020. So, Hanlon's Razor.)
Whenever a Republican wins without getting the popular vote, Democrats decry that the election was illegitimate. The standard rejoinder on the Right is, "That's not the name of the game. If the game was 'win the popular vote' Republicans would run a different campaign, possibly even a different candidate, and the entire election would have been different. You have to play to win by the rules you're given, not cherry pick the rules that would have put your guy on top and then cry foul afterward."
I think that's a sound argument. It's an especially good argument when an election is close, like in Bush vs. Gore. In that contest, Gore complained that he should have won but that due to irregularities in Florida it only looked like he lost. He took that argument to court, SCOTUS said no, we're going to keep it as-is, and Bush assumed the presidency. Don't like how the game is played? Too bad, Gore had other legal arguments he could have made, but chose the strategy he did and the Court didn't buy it. That's how the game is played.
Listen up Republicans: the shoe is on the other foot. A huge part of campaign strategy is effectively managing the legal fights before and after election day. This is something that both parties have used to their advantage before, not just in Bush vs. Gore. In 2008, Democrats won a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the US Senate. Republicans challenged two of those races, and those challenges went on for months before the two Democrats who won got to sit and actually participate in the Senate proceedings. Because of those legal delays (election day results were not changed in either case), the filibuster-proof majority Democrats legitimately won was severely limited (July '09 to Jan '10). Sen. Ted Kennedy of MA died Jan. 2010, MA voters elected a Republican whose major campaign issue was that he would end the filibuster-proof majority. From a strict 'fairness' standard, or from a 'will of the people' standard, this legal strategy by Republicans was decidedly unjust. But from a rules-of-the-game strategy it was genius, and very effective.
Trump is notoriously bad at the legal aspect of the game. He was good at other parts of the political game, but this was a major area of weakness for him, which his opponents identified and exploited. Had he been good at it, he would have challenged the changes to election law BEFORE election day. That would have required him to have a state-by-state legal strategy that was spot-on. The legal challenges didn't need to resolve before election day, but they at least needed to be filed. It's part of the rules the legal system runs on, and not understanding those rules doesn't allow you to just wave your hand in the direction of "justice" and hope your way into a win. That hasn't worked for Democrats or Republicans in the past, and it didn't work for Trump.
This was an unforced error. Many of the changes to election law were made in ways that everyone agreed would help Democrats. Many of the changes were made by state officials, not by the state legislatures, and could therefore have been challenged on a number of legal principles. But only if those challenges were brought before the election. Trump lost the legal part of the election game, then whined about it for months and still whines about it to this day.
You have to know the rules of the game you're playing by. You don't get to say you won based on rules you weren't playing by, then claim the election wasn't legitimate/was stolen.
"But fraud!"
The rule of the game is that Trump has to prove there was fraud. Trump was complaining for months before the election that the campaign was going to be rigged. Instead of focusing on the rules changes that were at that time shifting the odds against him, he focused on complaining to Fox and CNN. His people were responsible for proving that rigging had indeed occurred. He predicted all this ahead of time, so he should have been ready to document it when it happened. Why wasn't he on top of that? If he wanted to win on the fraud claim, the burden of proof was on him to produce evidence. He didn't step up with solid evidence. He had a third-rate legal challenge that was cobbled together after the fact. He tried a strategy that he was weak at and it didn't pan out for him.
This is how the game is played. Trump lost. Play a better game next time.
Neither of us is Barr, and of course you're paraphrased his position, but let me make one point on this:
"His sense was that election results were skewed - potentially by selective media/social media bias, but certainly by creative rules mongering 'emergencies' putatively justified by COVID-19 (more details in the book) - but that's kind of to be expected at this point."
Less secure vs more secure is one aspect, but we should be careful not to conclude that there is one, true set of election laws that are "the right ones", and that any others are "skewing" the results; any set of laws will make it easier or harder for some groups of people to get their votes in, and we need to agree on a some set of those laws, but that doesn't make them the one true law. Early voting, for instance, if in-person, wouldn't seem to have security problems, but people fight over it all the time.
I agree that there's no 'divinely inspired' set of election laws. Barr has his reasons for defending the laws he defends, though I'm not convinced by his logic on all the rules he prefers.
That said, I am partial to the argument that adjustments made in response to COVID-19 within months of the election were probably not a positive step toward greater security and/or confidence in election integrity. To the extent they provided greater access, it was likely sloppily implemented. We can argue whether each of the changes made was rationally designed and/or appropriate to the situation. I think the likelihood that the crisis wasn't exploited for political gain is pretty close to 0%.
I think everyone is a hard conflict theorist once it comes time to define election laws. Democrats want exactly the set of laws/procedures/rules that they believe give them the biggest advantage, and Republicans want the set that they believe will give *them* the biggest advantage.
"Should we have early voting" or "should we require picture ID to vote" are evaluated 100% on that question by essentially everyone.
I agree that there's a lot of motivated reasoning when it comes to election laws.
Changing the rules to allow for early voting and mail in ballots and such ... I don't necessarily agree that it makes it less secure. And I think people forget that a lot of those changes happened on a bipartisan basis. IIRC the Texas Republicans, after the fact, challenged as unconstitutional some change to the voting rules that they'd supported at the time the change was made.
But granting for the sake of argument that they make elections less secure - this sort of messing with the rules happens every election, it's not the same as fraud. Democrats are always complaining about this, Republicans allegedly purging voter rolls, closing down polling stations, shortening hours the polls are open, etc. All skeevy (if you take the allegations at face value) but don't mean the elections were stolen in the sense people normally mean.
"Whenever a Republican wins without getting the popular vote, Democrats decry that the election was illegitimate." - unlike trump, both Gore and Hillary conceded (and Clinton/Obama both treated Bush/trump as the Presidents-elect as well). "Illegitimate" means different things to different people in this context, people often use it as "fuck that guy", but for Gore/Hillary it didn't mean "I'm the lawful President-elect and will try to take power on Jan 20".
"Trump is notoriously bad at the legal aspect of the game." - I question whether this is true, in relation to the election at least. He relied on shit lawyers and lost a lot, but that's because of making arguments and pushing cases that others wouldn't even try. In other words it's not like Marco Rubio would have won those same court cases and successfully overturned the election.
Rules mongering:
I largely agree with this. The legislature has the Constitutional authority to decide how they want to appoint their electors, so it's hard to see how Trump could have challenged the Texas case. That's entirely different from a State Secretary of State unilaterally changing election rules...
Less secure? Really?:
As you pointed out, these kinds of shenanigans happen every election cycle. Both R & D do it; they do it selectively in ways and in jurisdictions that will help them; and although it undermines elections in its own way, it's technically legal and not the same as election fraud. It happened a lot more in the run-up to the 2020 election, under the influence of COVID-19 reactions, so if Trumpers want to claim that was the difference between W/L for him, they should have challenged, in court, on the merits at the time. But THEY DIDN'T.
Democrats 'officially' concede elections, so that's okay:
I grant that nobody has displayed the same childish charade Trump put on. But at least in Hillary's case I'm not sure she/her party can be said to have behaved better. Between Crossfire Hurricane and 4 years of the entire Democratic party claiming Trump's election wasn't legitimate, it's difficult to say whether they or Trump did more to undermine electoral confidence by pushing bogus claims long after they should have given them up - confusing the public with obvious lies.
Trump sucks at law vs. he never had a case:
It's true that Trump's 'legal team' (after he fired the legitimate lawyers because they wouldn't pursue the idiotic legal strategy he'd prescribed) filed a bunch of lawsuits they had no hope of winning. I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing that if he'd had a good legal strategy from the beginning, he could have filed suits he MIGHT have won. But he didn't. (Like Gore in 2000, we can't know what would have happened with a better legal strategy. But both Trump's legal strategy AND team in 2020 were objectively bad.)
Alternately, if fraud really did play a role in the final outcome (probably not, but for the sake of argument) Trump could have caught some people in the act - especially in critical swing states. He said before election day he thought it was going to happen, why didn't he at least try to document it? (Maybe he did try, but didn't find anything? In that case, WHY CLAIM FRAUD?)
All the losers complain:
I guess this is to be expected at this point. Whoever loses claims the election was illegitimate and we have to listen to them whine for 4-8 years about how it should have been different.
2016-2020 ("Russia Russia Russia")
2008-2016 Obama/Birther (because we should believe Clinton campaign opposition smears that outlive their usefulness when it's a candidate you don't like, but when it's a candidate you do like - Trump/Russia - it's obviously fake and nobody should be fooled into believing it)
2000-2008 "Florida should have gone Gore!"
1992-2000 "The only reason Bush Sr. lost was because of Perot and media bias playing up a recession that had already passed"
Before that I don't remember, but I'm sure there was a lot of bellyaching about how the election might have gone the other way but for something that was just plain "not fair".
Mail-in ballots are definitely "less secure" than in-person votes.
You can argue that the amount in decreases security is worth the convenience. That's a good argument!
But pretending that the trade-off doesn't exist at all just looks like having a closed mind.
Especially unsolicited mail-in ballots. There's a difference between a registered voter sending out for a ballot, the State confirming that person's information fits their records, and then the State sending the ballot back; vs. spamming everyone on the voter rolls without confirming who is even still in the jurisdiction, alive, etc.
I'm looking for a statistician who is experienced in a very specific kind of survey. All our statisticians have told us, basically, "This is a branch of stats I'm not comfortable working in." What are we doing? In general, we're trying to create a validated tool for making a medical assessment based on complex criteria. We have about 15 people who have completed the grading exercise, then they took a break of about 2 weeks and took the exercise again. Now we need to do some statistics comparing inter-rater reliability with pre-determined expected scores, as well as comparing intra-rater reliability.
A similar publication to ours, but in a different indication, used Kendall's tau and another test. I'm not experienced enough to understand the nuances, though. We need someone who understands the statistics well enough to help us understand what we're doing and how to ensure we don't run the wrong test. This would be for publication, but we can also compensate for time spent.
I know this isn't a classified thread, but I was hoping someone could point me to a good statistician who has worked on something like this in the past.
If you haven't found someone to talk to yet, my wife would be interested. Power.Melinda@gmail.com
She has credentials and everything
Thanks. I'll keep her in mind if other collaboration efforts fall through.
Oh, I can definitely do this--it's not even particularly hard, and it's bizarre that the statisticians refused, although finding time might be an issue for me depending on urgency. Feel free to email me at cdp49@cam.ac.uk
But it *is* possible that they bailed because 15 is way too small of a sample for anything.
It's great when people on here are able to collaborate this way or give each other wonderfully useful bits of info. I've been on both sides of that sort of thing here.
Inter-rater reliability is really standard stuff. It’s used a lot in psychology. Covered in Intro stats textbooks in social science. I’m surprised your statisticians bailed. They could easily just look up how to do it. It should be easy to find someone who can handle this.
That's what we thought! Maybe we need to talk to some psychology statisticians. We've talked to 3 experienced biopharma statisticians, and they've all begged off, saying it's something they haven't had to deal with in years. (We're in clinical trials, so a lot more of RCT design, survival curves, etc.)
Yes, do that. Any grad student could tell you the basic formula, but you want someone mathy enough to understand stuff like adjusting the p values to take into account the fact that you're running significance tests for multiple items. But that's still very simple stats.
I'd ban multiple comparison adjustments if I could TBH; multiple comparisons problems happen because researchers fail to adjust for regression to the mean:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/multiple2f.pdf
The correct way to deal with the multiple comparisons "problem" is to set regularizing priors and to use multivariate models if you have multiple outcomes.
OK, I'm a believer. The stats I learned I understood well, but that was several decades ago and I have not kept up with advances. But I do grasp the concept of the need to adjust for multiple comparisons, and you sound like you have your head screwed on straight about what's the best way to do that.
I know someone who might fit. He will want to do something bayesian though!
Email me at straw1239@gmail.com
A guy named Roger Biles gets warned for an excessively dyspeptic comment? Sounds like our old friend, nominative determinism.
There's a sort of viral topic going around: Do people look younger than they used to?
All of the explanations I've seen offered - sunscreen, total sun exposure, and smoking - seem to indicate an interesting research question: Do nerds look younger than non-nerds?
Working at your desk as opposed to in the sun or somewhere without enough air or around chemicals, sleeping enough, eating normal food as opposed to whatever your kids left on their plate or whatever you were able to buy at a gas station, doing some kind of sport instead of either spending that time trying to earn a little extra money or driving your kids somewhere or just lying down exhausted... I could continue. All of this likely contributes to looking younger, and all of this probably describes nerds a lot more than non-nerds.
Anecdotally, I'm one of those fair-skinned people who look a lot younger than they should. I can't claim a good diet, much exercise, or a reasonable sleep schedule, and I never used sunscreen, so I do think that sometimes it's only about skin color.
I was not aware this was a viral topic, but it definitely makes me feel less bad for consistently overestimating peoples' ages. Thought that was just one of the many weak modules in my brain. I feel like there's a bit of a...horseshoe effect? uncanny age valley? where people in the mushy middle of 18-25 or so are of ambiguous age. But past around that point they're identifiably Older. Like, if I did a scatterplot graph of all the people I end up carding or not carding for alcohol purchases, there'd be a very clearly identifiable drop-off point.
Men do seem easier to accurately gauge as Older than women; the gray/receding hair, which fewer guys dye or try to finagle via barber than in the past. Signs of manual labour or sun exposure. Both sexes have the creases-around-eyes which are just really difficult to acquire young. Makeup helps women a lot, obviously, and occasionally plastic surgery...I think masks are also a big part of it, though. The exact area that masks cover includes a lot of the most fragile facial skin, most prone to ageing. (And it hides facial hair, for dudes.) So it's a low-tech hack that effectively makes everyone look a little younger than they would otherwise.
Smoking is definitely one part of it - if someone "smokes" today, at least where I live, it's more likely marijuana. Doesn't have quite the same deleterious effects. Actually I think it biases in the opposite direction, since I assume that's a youth-oriented thing, and makes me more likely to card if someone obviously reeks of reef...
VSauce made a video on the former, his theory was that it was mostly about fashion choices.
For sure all those things matter. Particularly from my experience as a quite fair skinned person with a lot of fair skinned relatives, people always say we look super young for our age. Avoiding direct sun from 10-2 your whole life will do that for you.
Interesting, because reputationally (and in my personal experience)*, black people (maybe just black women?) tend to be more youthful looking. Maybe the same root effect (lack of sun damage) but with different reasons. Though a friend of mine once told me that it was simply that black people were much more likely to be on point with moisturizing, because they want to avoid looking "ashy".
*There's even a saying - black don't crack.
I've heard that attributed to lack of facial expression.
Do people in long-term vegetative states look younger?
> "to help process and organize grants relating to long-termism (eg AI, xrisk, forecasting, etc)"
I thought Scott is against treating AI risk as a long-termist cause?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk
Much of the gun discourse in the United States is focused on mass-shootings, which while gruesome, account for a miniscule number of deaths, comparable to the number of deaths-by-lightning-strike.
The vast majority of gun homicides are non-mass, non-police, non-accidental shootings (see 2nd BBC graphic), but I don't have a good sense for how all of this one-on-one violence breaks down. Is it mostly gang violence? Personal vendettas? Home invasions?
This seems like a key question to answer to be able to have any sort of factually-grounded gun control debate. (For the record, I agree that basic additional regulations like more in-depth background checks, are warranted.)
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20NWS%20Storm,with%20various%20degrees%20of%20disability.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081
Mostly gang violence iirc. The real solution to gun violence is to legalize drugs. On a related note, I did a bit of digging a couple years back and found that most police killings are the result of routine traffic stops, which suggests a variety of solutions, the first of which would be just to get rid of perverse incentives for ticketing people.
How do the non-drug-dealing gangs pay for guns, which are a bit on the expensive side for unemployed teenagers and the like?
I am skeptical that legalizing drugs will put a *big* dent in the nation's homicide problem, but it could possibly shift the equilibrium towards "yeah, we have *some* guns, and we let people know it so they don't mess with us, but our first-line enforcers have switchblades and baseball bats". Though given the guns already in criminal hands, that would be a slow process at best.
Why don't we try an experiment? Democrats could willingly suspend their second amendment rights, then we pass legislation that removes/outlaws 100% of all guns for Democrats. Anyone who votes Democrat but is caught in the vicinity of a gun goes to prison for a few years.
We implement this, then watch for a few years to see how the crime statistics change. That will provide us experimental and control groups on the order of millions of people. We can run the experiment as long as Democrats want.
The icing on the cake is, Democrats get exactly what they want, nearly zero guns in the areas where they live and work, because Democrat areas are, unsurprisingly, mostly Democrats.
Gun crime in Democrat areas would plummet to zero. Everyone is happy! All the mass shootings or whatever would only occur in Republican areas.
I've had in mind for years a similar idea along a different axis. If I held a magic wand which could make one unilateral change to the U.S. constitution, one of the 2 or 3 top contenders for me would be that the 2nd Amendment applies only to women.
This new amendment would not itself deny any gun rights to men, just to be clear; it would simply leave that question up to Congress (regarding federal lands/facilities/employees) and the state legislatures (for all other situations/places).
I predict that a number of states, including some big ones starting with California, would immediately place restrictions on gun ownership by males. Some of them might, in stages, eventually get close to deciding that men simply can't be trusted with guns.
We would then be conducting an experiment at scale: watch for a few years and see how the crime statistics change.
[P.S. thanks in advance for the observation which I definitely haven't heard before, but yes I am aware that "women" and "men" as categories now have an additional cultural/political complication to contend with.]
"If I held a magic wand which could make one unilateral change to the U.S. constitution, one of the 2 or 3 top contenders for me would be that the 2nd Amendment applies only to women."
I like it. (I'm male.) My single largest reason for supporting the 2nd amendment is that armed households deter home invasion. Burglars who don't know if a household is armed have an incentive to at least try to only burglarize when the residents are elsewhere, which is at least _less_ damaging. And your proposal would preserve this.
While women commit relatively few gun crimes, I suspect a nontrivial number of guns used for illegal activity were obtained via straw purchase by a woman (i.e. clean girlfriend buys gun for gangbanger boyfriend). This would become a bigger problem in your scenario.
True, but could more vigorous enforcement of laws against illegal weapons possession (gangbanger boyfriend goes to club fed for a decade) alleviate this?
Yes.
We have secret ballots so we can't identify anyone's vote. Party membership is another thing, but a lot fewer people vote in primaries than general elections.
"but I don't have a good sense for how all of this one-on-one violence breaks down. Is it mostly gang violence? Personal vendettas? Home invasions?"
https://medium.com/@danielbier/why-are-people-murdered-7d057ff00f6e
has some information, but they find it unsatisfying, and so do I.
"The FBI lists 22 subcategories, which seems like plenty to get a handle on things. They can be broadly sorted into categories explicitly related to:
sex (prostitution, romantic triangles, rape, sexual assault): 2%
theft (robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft): 9%
drugs and gangs (narcotics, gang killings, juvenile gang killings): 14%
other felonies (arson, gambling, other suspected/unspecified): 11%
other, not felony (prison killings, child killed by babysitter, sniper attacks, other unspecified): 24%
arguments (alcohol-influenced brawl, drug-influenced brawl, argument over money or property, other unspecified arguments): 41%
This is probably not most people’s impression of the typical murder. Only 14% of murders are known to be related to drugs or gangs? Only 2% are connected to sexual motives? And 41% of murders are just “arguments” or “brawls” that get out of hand?"
You missed one of the key theses of that article is that a lot of the answers are unknown.
"But beneath those categories, the data quality is terrible: the “other/unspecified” subcategories make up the lion’s share of what’s supposedly known."
Looking at the raw data referenced, the majority of the arguments are "Other arguments", comprising about a total of 20% of murders. The global "Unknown" is responsible for about 40% of murders. And the "Other than felony type total" "Other-not specified" is about 14% of the total. So about 75% of murders fall into some "other" category.
Ok, perhaps I also should have quoted
"To begin with, 40% of cases are simply “unknown circumstances.” But even the “known” figures aren’t very helpful."
I respectfully disagree that I missed that thesis. As I wrote, the authors and my view of the data was that "they find it unsatisfying, and so do I".
Ideally, what I would have _wanted_ from a better version of statistics like this, together with time series analysis of the motives, would be to see if some particular motive dominates the Ferguson effect, the post-BLM murders, or the big peak from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Regrettably, there is no way the existing unclear data would illuminate that. Sigh.
( One minor quibble: I can't tell from the author's phrasing whether the 40% with "unknown circumstances" is 40% of the solved cases, or if it refers to the 40% of unsolved cases. )
I recall Peter Moskos of "Cop on the Beat" said that when he was with the Baltimore PD every murder he came across was linked to the drug trade, but is likely both an exaggeration and unrepresentative of murders broadly.
Many Thanks! I have a question about how to parse this: Did he mean that every murder was legitimately found to be linked to the drug trade, or did he mean that the Baltimore PD artificially construed every murder as linked to the drug trade?
The former. He was making an argument against the war on drugs.
Many Thanks!
I get the impression that police tend to classify things as gang related without a lot of evidence, so if anything the gang number is too high. The argument escalation route is really badly overlooked. The most typical pattern for a murder in America is that two young men are out socializing and get into an argument about something, then one of them goes to his car/house and get (or just has on his person) a club, knife, or gun, and gets even.
It's a bit outdated, but Geoffrey Canada's "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun" provided me with a lot of insight here. He lays out the social scene he grew up with in black New York: because the police wouldn't stop fights and street crime, you had to learn to fight to defend yourself. No one actually wanted to fight if they could help it, but the only way to deter conflict is to get a reputation as being tough, and those reputations went for entire neighborhoods. Thus from when you were a middle schooler older kids would beat you up and teach you how to fight, because if they didn't the neighborhood would get a reputation as weak. I think this is the same basic instinct driving the escalation of street level arguments. Canada really emphasizes how as weapons became more available (wealth effects? changes in laws? crack epidemic?), neighborhoods around him went from fist fighting to using weapons to eventually guns becoming a common means of settling scores, which led to much more murder than otherwise.
Much appreciated! Presumably this isn't the _only_ pattern for murder, though. As even the FBI categories showed, e.g. murders during thefts are a significant part of the statistics too.
Something similar was shared elsewhere in the thread. I can believe it, since the more "mundane" the context, the more people who are likely to be in that situation. And so even if the probability of it escalating to outright murder is low, the base rate is high. It's a similar reason to why most rapes/assaults are committed by friends and partners, rather than by strangers.
"And so even if the probability of it escalating to outright murder is low, the base rate is high."
Good point!
From "Family Violence Statistics", https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvs03.pdf :
Of the 9,102 murder victims (with complete data on victim-offender relationship) in 2002:
- 8.6% were killed by their spouse
- 5.5% were killed by a parent
- 7.4% were killed by a family member other than their spouse or parent
- 7.3% were killed by their boyfriend or girlfriend
- 45.2% were killed by a friend or acquaintance
- 26% were killed by a stranger.
(That's not a direct quote; I edited & reformatted it for readability.)
"Wives were about half of all spouses in the population in 2002 but 81% of all persons killed by their spouse... Girlfriends were about 50% of all boyfriend-girlfriend relationships but 71% of all victims who were a boyfriend or girlfriend of the murderer."
"While males were 49.1% of the U.S. population in 2002, they were 83.4% of murder victims killed by a friend or acquaintance. The victims of stranger murder were also more likely to be male (86.1%)."
There's also some data there about race statistics, but you're better off using the FBI Unified Crime Reporting statistics (https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr) for that, as they're more complete. The file Expanded_Homicide_Data_Table_03_Murder_Offenders_by_Age_Sex_Race_and_Ethnicity_2020, combined with the US 2020 Census data on race, says that "blacks" were 4.5 times as likely as "whites" to be murdered, and 6.5 times as likely to murder someone. (The Census Bureau uses self-identification, which is usually based on the one-drop rule. They're trying to construct new self-reporting categories to avoid that, but the FBI is not; so 2020 may be the last year for which we can make this calculation.) I think we can assume this is pretty close to the statistics for gun homicides (see the 8/10 figure below).
From "What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.", https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/ :
"... suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (24,292), while 43% were murders (19,384), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were unintentional (535), involved law enforcement (611) or had undetermined circumstances (400)."
"Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) U.S. murders in 2020 – 19,384 out of 24,576 – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. A little over half (53%) of all suicides in 2020 – 24,292 out of 45,979 – involved a gun, a percentage that has generally remained stable in recent years."
So, 43% of 26% = 11% of gun deaths in the US are murders committed by strangers. I don't know whether gang killings are counted as "killed by a friend or acquaintance".
The point about most gun deaths being suicides is especially important. News articles sometimes present statistics showing that gun control reduces gun killings, without mentioning that they counted suicides as gun killings. Whether we ought to count suicides in those figures depends on whether, by your metric, suicide is as bad as homicide; newspaper columnists ought not make that decision for us.
But the more-relevant data that must be counted in order to have a factually-grounded gun control debate is, How does private ownership of military-caliber rifles affect the odds of success of a totalitarian or authoritarian revolution or invasion, what are the prior odds of such a revolution, and what is the typical number of deaths caused by such a revolution? This is what the gun control debate is mostly about. People in red states will tell this to you straight up if you ask them. The fact that I have never, in my life, seen this fact mentioned in a news article on gun control, proves that the views of red-state Americans are never represented in the mass media.
Another relevant point is that the link between violent video-games and mass shootings is about as strong as the link between gun ownership and mass shootings, and better-studied; and nearly all psychologists studying the matter agree that violent video-games more likely than not increase violent behavior (with the notable exception of Dr. Christopher Ferguson, who seems to have made a career out of arguing the opposite opinion, and is the psychologist usually quoted in news articles about gun violence and video games). If reducing gun killings is important enough to ban private ownership of rifles, it's certainly important enough to ban private ownership of violent video-games, which have no positive social value.
One note on the gun suicide question is when Australia enacted large gun control, hangings went up considerably. The increase didn't replace all the previous gun deaths, but the overall decrease was pretty small.
Australia having the fauna that it does... Did "accidents" with venomous animals also rise?
Regardless of your assumptions about the people who disagree with you, it is the duty of the press to represent both sides of an issue, and they have never done that wrt gun control.
If it's bad when Fox News does it, it's bad when your own side does it.
Because those who advocated for gun control in 1930s Germany were just kind and compassionate, right? Surely none of them would ever end up in a death squad.
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2015. "Children and Video Games: Playing with Violence." (Updated 2015; original publication was no later than 2006.)
American Academy of Pediatrics. "Policy Statement — Media Violence," Pediatrics 124(5): 1495–503.
Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger, Peter Sitzer, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, eds., 2013. School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention. NYC, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London: Springer.
BJ Bushman, LR Huesmann, 2006. "Short-term and long-term effects of violent media on aggression in children and adults." Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160(4):348–352, pmid:16585478.
Constance Emerson Crooker, 2003. Gun Control and Gun Rights. Westport CT: Greenwood Press.
Blair, J. Pete, and Schweit, Katherine W. (2014). A Study of Active Shooter Incidents, 2000 - 2013. Texas State University and Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. 2014.
Chris Ferguson, 2007. "Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: A meta-analytic review." Aggression & Violent Behavior 12:470-482.
Chris Ferguson, 2010. The wild west of assessment: Measuring aggression and violence in video games. In L. Annetta and S. Bronack, (Eds.). Serious Educational Game Assessment: Practical Methods and Models for Educational Games, Simulations and Virtual Worlds (pp.31-44). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Chris Ferguson, 2015. "The case against scholarly consensus." Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug 10 2015.
Chris Ferguson, 2015b. "A Tale of Two Metas: The Video Game Controversy Continues." The Amplifier, Dec 18 2015.
Nathan Kirkman, 2008. Targeted Violence: A Review of Six School Shootings and Implications for School Counselors. MS thesis at University of Wisconsin-Stout.
Jessie Klein, 2012. The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools. NYC & London: NYU Press.
Lawrence Kutner & Cheryl K. Olsen, 2008. Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do.
Peter Langman, 2009. "Rampage School Shooters: A Typology." Aggression and Violent Behavior 14:79–86.
Peter Langman 2012a. School Shooters: Nine Brief Sketches.
Peter Langman, 2013. "Thirty-Five Rampage School Shooters: Trends, Patterns, and Typology". In (Böckler et al. 2013: 131-).
Peter Langman, 2015. School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Peter Langman, 2016b. "School Shooters: The Myth of the Stable Home".
Bob Larson, 1999. Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. [Sketchy.]
Susan Martin, 2017. 5 questions for Peter Langman: The foremost expert on school shooters dispels the myths that surround the perpetrators.
Glenn W. Muschert, 2007. “Research in School Shootings.” Sociology Compass 1(1): pp. 60-80. Wiley.
Glenn Muschert & J. William Spencer, 2009. "The Lessons of Columbine, Part I." American Behavioral Scientist 52(9): 1223-1226. SAGE Publications.
Glenn Muschert & Johanna Sumiala, 2012. School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group.
Katherine Newman, Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, & Wendy Roth, 2004. Rampage: Social roots of school shootings. NYC: Basic Books.
Mike Nizza, 2007. "Tying Columbine to Video Games." New York Times, July 5 2007.
Northern Illinois University Dept. of Public Safety, 2010. Report of the February 14, 2008 Shootings at Northern Illinois University.
Neil Ribner, ed., 2002. Handbook of Juvenile Forensic Psychology. San Francisco CA: Wiley.
Susan Scutti, 2018. "Do video games lead to violence?" CNN. Updated 2:08 PM ET, Thu February 22, 2018.
US Secret Service & US Dept. of Education, 2004. The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attack in the United States. Wash. DC.
Verlinden, S., Hersen., & Thomas, J. (2000). Risk factors in school shootings. Clinical Psychology Review, 20(1), 3-56. Reviews 10 cases with high media coverage: 1: Moses Lake, WA; 2: Bethel, AK; 3: Pearl, MS; 4: Paducah, KY; 5: Jonesboro, AR (M.J.); 6: Jonesboro, AR (A.G.); 7: Edinboro, PA; 8: Springfield, OR; 9: Littleton, CO (E.H.); 10: Littleton, CO (D.K.).
I don't have time to go into the matter here, but psychologists have, and when I checked the research literature in 2018 they were pretty much unanimous in concluding that violent activity and stimuli in general, including violent video games, increase violent behavior. I will copy-paste some quotes here.
[quote]
Results of this research indicated that 100% of the shooting perpetrators made previous threats of violence and all showed a fixation with violent material such as violent video games, stories, and movies [p. ii-iii] … Seven out of eight offenders investigated by Kidd and Meyer (2002) indicated an obsession with violent media [p. 24].
-- (Kirkman 2008), a review of 6 K-12 school shootings by students
Studies of the effects of television violence on children and teenagers have found that children may become immune to the horror of violence, imitate violence they observe on television, and gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems (Murray, 1999). Children with emotional, behavioral, learning, or impulse control problems may be more easily influenced. In a meta-analytic re-Risk Factors in School Shootings view of experimental studies on effects of media violence on viewers’ aggression in unstructured social interaction, Wood, Wong, and Chachere (1991) found that media violence enhances children’s and adolescents’ aggression in interactions with strangers, classmates, and friends. Their research review was designed to address criticisms of the artificial experimental constructions used in earlier studies of the effects of television violence on aggression. They also present evidence suggesting that susceptibility to media effects is likely to peak during early adolescence. In his review of the literature on adolescents and the media, Strasburger (1995) identified four conditions that will increase likelihood that violent media will help guide future behavior:
Is the violence rewarded or punished?
Is it justified and without any consequences?
Is it pertinent to the viewer?
Is the viewer susceptible to it?
-- (Verlinden et al. 2000 p. 14-15)
Almost all of the boys [10 mass murderers] were fans of video games, music, and books featuring graphic violence.
-- (Verlinden et al. 2000 p. 44)
The evidence is now clear and convincing: media violence is 1 of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression.
-- (Amer. Assoc. of Pediatrics 2009)
[Video games] should not use human or other living targets or award points for killing, because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain and suffering to others. .. Summarizing the results of >400 studies including violent media of all types, researchers [Bushman & Huesmann 2006] found there was a significant association between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior (effect size: 0.19; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.19–0.20), aggressive thoughts (effect size: 0.18; 95% CI: 0.17–0.19), angry feelings (effect size: 0.27; 95% CI: 0.24–0.30), and physiologic arousal (effect size: 0.26; 95% CI: 0.20–0.31).
-- AAP July 2016 policy statement on violent video games, "Virtual Violence"
The link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and well established. Of the 31 studies reviewed, 14 investigated the relation between violent video game use and aggressive behaviors. … A positive association between violent video game use and increased aggressive behavior was found in most (12 of 14 studies). …
Of the 31 studies reviewed, 13 included aggressive cognitions as an outcome. All of these studies showed an effect of violent video game use on increased aggressive cognitions, replicating the finding in the pre-2009 research. …
Thirteen of the 31 studies included aggressive affect as an outcome; all were experimental studies with adults. Aggressive affect measures included self-report questionnaires, picture-rating tasks, and experimental proxy. Twelve of the 13 experimental studies that examined the effects of violent video games on affect indicated negative outcomes for adults. The most common negative outcome was increased hostility or aggressive affect. There is also evidence of less emotional reactivity (increased emotional desensitization) as a negative outcome, which is often seen as a result of previous experience with violent video games. …
In addition to increases in aggressive outcomes, nine studies examined decreases in socially desirable behaviors following exposure to violent video games. In particular, prosocial behavior, empathy for the distress of others, and sensitivity to aggression were diminished after exposure to violent video game play (seven of the nine studies). …
CONCLUSIONS:
The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions, and aggressive affect and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and sensitivity to aggression.
-- American Psychological Association Task Force on Violent Media 2015, "Technical report on the review of the violent video game literature."
WHEREAS scientific research has demonstrated an association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement;
WHEREAS there is convergence of research findings across multiple methods and multiple samples with multiple types of measurements demonstrating the association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement;
WHEREAS all existing quantitative reviews of the violent video game literature have found a direct association between violent video game use and aggressive outcomes;
WHEREAS this body of research, including laboratory experiments that examine effects over short time spans following experimental manipulations and observational longitudinal studies lasting more than 2 years, has demonstrated that these effects persist over at least some time spans;
WHEREAS research suggests that the relation between violent video game use and increased aggressive outcomes remains after considering other known risk factors associated with aggressive outcomes;
WHEREAS although the number of studies directly examining the association between the amount of violent video game use and amount of change in adverse outcomes is still limited, existing research suggests that higher amounts of exposure are associated with higher levels of aggression and other adverse outcomes; …
-- The American Psychological Association, August 2015, "Resolution on Violent Video Games"
Also see "22 Charts & Graphs on Video Games & Youth Violence" (Kutner & Olsen 2008), which I can't copy-paste here, which show high correlations between playing violent video-games, and many kinds of aggressive behaviors.
I also found lots of quotes claiming the opposite, but they all derived from Chris Ferguson.
I'll add a 2nd comment wi the bibliography I used; substack won't let me post a comment long enough to include it here.
Many Thanks! (albeit John Wittle has a point.)
It seems like every single statement here (except the Jul 2016 one) is of the form "we looked at the mass murderers, and it turns out they had an unusual fixation on violent media"
Like... not a single one of these studies (except jul 2016, which... well, maybe I'll come back and talk about it at another time) started out looking at people who play violent videogames, and then followed them throughout their lives to see if they became mass murderers. Rather, they did the opposite.
I hope you can see the issue with this? All mass murderers breathe oxygen, therefore oxygen-breathing -> columbine... is not valid.
It sucks that this leaves us with no real way to study this question, and I'm not really sure what to do about it, but that doesn't mean these studies are any evidence at all for anything
The description which you said applies to every single statement except the Jul 2016 one, applies only to 2 out of 8.
on reflection you are right and I either misread or misremembered your post while replying
I was wrong and you were right and I have updated my view drastically in the direction of 'violent video games cause violence'
Fortunately, mass shootings aren't so common that we can do a long-term study and count how many subjects committed mass shootings.
It is possible to compare the fraction of mass shooters who played violent videogames to the fraction of the general population, drawn from comparable demographics (wrt e.g. age, sex, income, race, whatever you think is relevant). It's difficult to do retrospectively because you can't usually tell from old news reports exactly what kind of games the offender played or how often; you really have to interview the offender or their family. Also, even if you get a strong result, you might be overlooking some causal factor when compiling your general-population control set. Maybe you should have matched them for IQ, testosterone level, or number of close friends. And even then, it's not clear how to distinguish correlation from causation.
But that sort of data isn't why psychological associations support the claim that violent video-games increase violence. They look at the causal link between exposure to violent media (including video-games) and later aggression (of many types). The studies typically pick a bunch of kids, divide them into test subjects and controls, expose the test subjects to violent movies or video-games and the controls to non-violent ones, and then measure aggressive behavior for some time period afterwards. These studies unsurprisingly find that witnessing or participating in violence increases aggressive behavior. (There may be exceptions when the violent stimulus is of a nature that would make the aggressive behavior looked for afterwards likely to invoke a repetition of a violent attack. For instance, a study of wolf packs asking whether exposure to aggression by alphas increased aggression towards the alphas would probably find that it did not.)
The theoretical argument that violent games REDUCE violent action is based on the "hydrodynamic theory of emotions", which is just Aristotelian catharsis theory as restated by Freud. There is no scientific evidence to support this theory AFAIK. I've heard that studies of primal-scream therapy show that it makes people more rather than less aggressive, tho I've never looked them up.
One particularly nice thing about prospective studies it that they resolve the worry that the causality goes in the other direction.
"The studies typically pick a bunch of kids, divide them into test subjects and controls, expose the test subjects to violent movies or video-games and the controls to non-violent ones, and then measure aggressive behavior for some time period afterwards."
The correlation in the kids' behavior with the games' or movies' violence _can't_ be due to violent kids selectively choosing violent games, since the researchers pick the movies or video-games, rather than the kids picking them.
Apropos of None of the Above's concern, do you know whether some of the better-looking (prospective, with a control group) studies have been replicated? Many Thanks!
"The studies typically pick a bunch of kids, divide them into test subjects and controls, expose the test subjects to violent movies or video-games and the controls to non-violent ones, and then measure aggressive behavior for some time period afterwards."
Yes, that is indeed better evidence. (Yay, prospective studies and control groups!)
"Much of the gun discourse in the United States is focused on mass-shootings, which while gruesome, account for a miniscule number of deaths, comparable to the number of deaths-by-lightning-strike."
No, its the other way round.
"Lightning kills about 20 people each year in the United States"
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims
"Under the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive[ at least four deaths] , by the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings; by the end of 2020, there had been 611; and by the end of 2021, 693.[36] By mid-May 2021 there were 10 mass shootings a week on average; by mid-May 2022, there was a total of 198 mass shootings in the first 19 weeks of the year, which represents 11 mass shootings a week.[37]" -- WP
So, 40 per week versus 20 per year.
> "Under the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive , by the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings; by the end of 2020, there had been 611; and by the end of 2021, 693.[36] By mid-May 2021 there were 10 mass shootings a week on average; by mid-May 2022, there was a total of 198 mass shootings in the first 19 weeks of the year, which represents 11 mass shootings a week.[37]" -- WP
When I visit the Wikipedi article entitled "Mass Shootings in the United States", I find the following:
>There is no fixed definition of a mass shooting in the United States,[4][13] and different researchers define "mass shootings" in different ways.[14] Among the various definitions are:
>Definitions based on injuries
>Gun Violence Archive: More broadly defines "mass shooting" to mean <b>four or more (excluding the perpetrator) shot</b> at roughly the same time and location, <b>regardless of number of fatalities</b> or the motive.[15][16][17] Brady: United Against Gun Violence uses a similar definition.[18]
> Mass Shooting Tracker: Defines "mass shooting" as "an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree," including the perpetrator or police shootings of civilians around the perpetrator, and irrespective of the motive of the perpetrator or the location of the murders.[19][20]
> Definitions based on number of deaths:
> Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012, signed into law in January 2013: Defines a "mass killing" as the killing of at least three victims, excluding the perpetrator, and regardless of the weapon used.[4][21][22][23]
> Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks mass shootings based on press accounts, police records, and court papers, defines mass shooting as "<b>any incident in which four or more people are shot and killed</b>, excluding the shooter."[24] </i>
It appears you have mis-applied the definition used by Everytown for Gun Safety to statistics gathered by the Gun Violence Archive. This results in a massive error in analysis on your part.
To quote from several paragraphs below the paragraph you quoted:
<i>Under the Everytown for Gun Safety definition ("any incident in which four or more people are shot and killed, excluding the shooter") there were an average of 19 mass shootings in the U.S. each year from 2009 to 2020, with 947 wounded by gunfire and 1,363 fatally shot.[24] </i>
I partially agree with you: deaths in mass-shootings appear to be about 4x to 5x more common than death-by-lightning annually in the United States. Mainly because mass shootings with four or more deaths happen at about the rate of death-by-lightning that you quoted.
I partially agree with @trebuchet below: you are either being dishonest with the data you are quoting, or you are not carefully reading the WikiPedia article that you are citing. The definition of mass shooting used by Everytown for Gun Safety is much closer to the definition of "Mass Shooting that makes the national news": events like Parkland, Las Vegas concert shooting, or Pulse Nightclub shooting all fit that definition.
I've seen local news stories of 'shooting at a community event', and even 'shooting at a funeral', that fit the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive. These local stories often had four or more injuries. They did not fit the definition used by Everytown for Gun Safety, because they rarely included more than one death. These mass shootings are not the kind of story that makes national news.
Thank you very much for digging into the data sources to understand the source of the discrepancy. So I guess the numbers being provided by Mother Jones for the graphic at the top of the wiki article are still skewed low (yearly average is 100+, not ~40), and it might be worth taking the time to update that graphic.
I think this is misleading. I believe the OP is directionally correct that the 'mass shootings' that drive the discourse in the US, specifically the spree killing of random people at events or schools, are not the majority of mass shootings under the definition that you are referencing and are a tiny fraction of gun deaths. The definition that is often used conflates gang violence/familial violence/targeted violence that, regrettably, nobody cares about or reports on, with the kind of 'mass shooting' that the American public actually does care about. This is fairly clear if you spend a moment looking over the lists of mass shootings and the reporting on them, several high-death events you will not have heard of outside of local news, because they are drug deals gone wrong, or a man killing his whole family, etc.
The OP refernced wikipedia, and so.did I. If the.OP feels that such sources are. misleading, then don't quote them.
I have no idea if the OP feels they are misleading, I am not the OP. I feel they are misleading and explained why I thought that.
I don't think this contradicts what I'm saying? Mass shootings, while scary, account for extremely few deaths, see the top-line graphic on that Wikipedia article. There maybe more of them occurring, which is bad, but most of them aren't resulting in any deaths.
As for the lightening death numbers, the link I provided mentions 43 deaths for one time window and 27 deaths for a another, both higher than your 20 deaths number. Not sure the reason for the discrepancy there, I assume less time being spent outside?
I've heard there's some controversy on how to define a mass shooting, but taking the numbers above at face value, 40 per week equals 2080 per year which equals (taking 330 million as the US population) 0.63 per 100k people. 0.6 per 100k people is also the homicide rate in Spain, South Korea, the Netherlands and Norway according to Wikipedia. Ireland is 0.7, Germany is 0.8, Australia is 0.9, UK and France are 1.2.
So deaths just from mass shootings in the US are as commonplace as total homicides in some other European countries, and half as commonplace or more in a bunch of others.
It's both a relatively small portion of the total and a pretty big problem in and of itself, given how much more homicide there is in the US than other developed countries.
It may not contradict the overall gist, but it starkly contradicts the first sentence.
"As for the lightening death numbers, the link I provided mentions 43 deaths for one time window and 27 deaths for a another, both higher than your 20 "
That doesn't close a two OOM gap.
" There maybe more of them occurring, which is bad, but most of them aren't resulting in any deaths."
The WP quote is DEFINING a mass shooting as resulting in >= 4 deaths.
Sorry, I missed the line defining mass shootings as >=4 deaths. So then I'm genuinely confused how the top-line numbers on Wikipedia are showing that the worst-ever year for mass-shootings (2017) had ~118 deaths, if the definition implies that there had to have been at least 10x that number.
Different cutoff for "mass"? I'll have to look at the Mother Jones article which seems to be the source, over lunch.
Your 118 is still higher than your 43.
That's from the highest year on record. Eyeballing the graph, the average over the past 5 years is ~75, and over the past 10 yr is ~50. So calling it "comparable" based on those numbers is very much warranted.
Lots of countries define mass shootings with a threshold of 3,4 or 5.. I think the problem needs to be turned round. If you are you mean to say that Pulse style shootings are rare you need to be clear that you are using .a different threshold than the one most peop!e uae.
Yeah, there's a definitional issue. Mass shootings of the "nutcase goes postal with a Glock" type seem quite different from "two gangs have a shootout over who gets to sell drugs on this street corner," which is different from "Fred disses Joe at a party, so Joe pulls out a gun and blazes away, missing Fred but hitting four people standing behind him."
The comparison to lightning is silly. If you raise the bar high enough, mass shootings become rarer than deaths by porcupine, but the other shootings don't disappear. The fact remains that the US has a lot of mass shootings, and a lot of other shootings *compared to.other countries*.
One time I decided to look into this issue. I looked at a list of "school shootings", and drilled down to one randomly-selected incident, just to spot check, as a first-pass sanity check. The incident seems to have been a drug deal gone wrong, in a high school parking lot at 2am, where a gun was fired. Neighbors who heard the shot called the police, who didn't find anybody there when they arrived. No injuries, no arrests, no suspects, but a gun was fired on the grounds of a school, so it went into the "school shooting" database.
It felt dishonest to me, and now I feel like to be responsible and smart, I should be very skeptical of these statistics.
I feel like Scott already did an excellent job at examining this question, in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/ and the followup https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/10/guns-and-states-2-son-of-a-gun/
Ah, I wasn't consistently reading SSC back then, thanks for the links!
It's old, but personal conflicts were the biggest cause shown in this study:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deaths-usa/personal-conflicts-biggest-cause-of-murders-in-u-s-idUSTRE64C53R20100513
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6203a28.htm
Following a chain of links from this study, I think table 10 here is the most specific you can find
Of the half of the cases where a relationship is known between victim and perpetrator, roughly even 1:2:1 split between spouse, friend/acquaintance/other known relationship, stranger
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5904a1.htm#tab10
Very helpful clarification! Makes sense that a like of it would be more intimate personal conflicts, since this jives with e.g. rapes/kidnappings being more more likely to be perpetrated by a friend/partner/family member.
There's at least one potential skew in that data, though I don't know how important it is. The police are *way* more likely to solve a murder when the perp is the victim's husband, ex, boyfriend, etc., than when the perp is a stranger.
How could we know this?
What evidence would you find persuasive / indicative?
It's easy to notice missing persons. Harder to find dead bodies. Harder still to find the murderer. A further step to identify the motive.
There are local reports from police departments like the linked below, but I'm skeptical there is anything out there with a consistent methodology that can give an accurate aggregate estimate.
Would be very glad / curious to be corrected on this.
https://www.slmpd.org › Ho...PDF
2022 Homicide Analysis SLMPD - St. Louis Police Department
Dead bodies are rarely hard to find. *Particularly* dead bodies that result from gunshot wounds, because gunshots are ear-splittingly loud and likely to result in lots of people paying heightened attention to A: the area the gunshot was heard in and B: anyone trying to quickly haul a body-sized roll of carpet or whatever away from that place.
Notwithstanding Walter White's bathtub of hydrofluoric acid, the overwhelming majority of murders result in the discovery of a dead body, usually fairly promptly.
If it's known that the homicide was by gun (which we do, because it's included in the gun homicide statistics), then there's already a body. I was laboring under the assumption that in most of these cases there's at least a suspect, and a rough-outline of the crime committed, given that there had to have been a preliminary police investigation.
I'm not looking to be persuaded in any direction, since I have no idea what the answer is, since it's not included in the top-line statistics, and I haven't dug deeper into it. I would just like some sort of rough aggregate statistics further breaking down these ~20k annual deaths.
Do they? After Uvalde, I'm pretty sure they wanted gun sales to under 21s or 25s banned. What they got was enhanced checks for under 21s. Don't judge what they want by what they achieve. Some of them.want no guns at all, which w ould definitely impact gun crime , if achievable.
What annoys me about conservatives is that they pull the teeth out of gun control legilsat ion, then claim that gun control doesnt work.
And my point is that what they are the my to pass isn t reflective of what they want.They don't have a free hand. If Rs are blocking effective legislation, blame them.
Noooooo.....
I mean, seriously, this is kinda a don't hate the player, hate the game situation. Politicians are always going to opportunistically try to hitch their causes to whatever local momentum is related enough that it might help a little.
I’ve heard it claimed that some birds, like crows, are incredibly smart, perhaps on par with some of the smarter mammals. Since birds have somewhat different brain structure than mammals do, it may be the case that even if birds and mammals are similarly intelligent overall (for some definition of similar), they could have different intellectual strengths. Is this the case? Are there things that mammals tend to be good at intellectually, but not birds, and vice versa?
Famously octopus brains are these weird rings, but octopuses are one of the smartest animals we know of. I haven't heard anything about them having different intellectual strengths but they might.
I've also heard the hypothesis that the reason some random animals have a lot of intelligence is that it becomes advantageous once you have an ability to carefully manipulate the environment-- with octopuses this is pretty obvious, for birds I think it is supposed to be about the ability to manipulate things with their beak. I wonder if these intelligences are different adapted based on the "problem solving organ" that the brain evolves around, i.e. tentacle versus beak versus hands.
The problem I have with this explanation is that there seems to be some chicken and egg going on, and it doesn't always happen. Simply having a rostrum doesn't seem to cause birds to select for bigger brains in order to manipulate things with it - if it did, then *all* birds would have these huge brains, and they obviously don't. That, or the process is underway - but rostrums have been in birds for at least 125 million years, and we know a large brain can evolve in less time.
It makes more sense to me that beaks don't always get used for complex manipulation, so they don't always require big brains. Something else is probably causing certain bird lineages to select for intelligence, particularly corvids. What, precisely, is unknown to me - I don't know anything special about corvids that moves them toward intelligence, that wouldn't also move other birds in the same environment.
Pigeons (Columba livia) perform optimally on a version of the Monty Hall Dilemma.
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0017703
Seriously though,
Birds-> visual
Mammals-> olfactory
I think you're asking the wrong question. It's likely that, because we see birds solving problems the same way we do, namely using tools, theory of mind, and long-term memory, we call them smart, while other animals which might use equally complex problem-solving methods that aren't relatable to us aren't labeled as such. So the answer to "do they have different intellectual strengths?" might be "by definition no, because they fit *our* definition of intelligence". If birds were good at different things, we wouldn't be so excited about their apparent intelligence.
Still, there are definitely big differences between the smartest birds and the smartest non-human mammals. Birds notably communicate very effectively with human language, in a way that no mammal has managed to do. Because of this, we might have the only proof that non-human animals have a similar ability to model the world, as Alex the parrot, after being trained on recognizing the colors of different objects, asked "What color am I?" after looking into a mirror.
But again, I think we find this most impressive because *we* communicate verbally, unlike most other mammals. Cetaceans might be the only mammals that we share this ability with, but unfortunately they're terrible vocal mimics for humans, so two-way communication is a lot more difficult.
The most interesting question to me is: is avian intelligence the reason why they are able to understand concepts like color and the self? Or do they just have the potential for complex symbolic learning, which goes unused until we provide them with the structure of human language?
I’ve often wondered about the nature of cetacean communication.
Dolphins use echolocation, which means that they are probably able to reconstruct mental representations of objects in 3D space from acoustic data.
This implies the question, ‘can they produce acoustic data that other dolphins perceive as objects in 3D space?’ I think this could have interesting implications for language. Can they send images directly to each other’s minds? How would such a language evolve? Does it allow for abstraction?
> ‘can they produce acoustic data that other dolphins perceive as objects in 3D space?’
In a word, no. Echolocation is not based on acoustic data per se, but *timing*. The echolocator emits a sound and listens for its echo. The time it takes for the echo to arrive back to its ears is what carries the information, not the sound itself. If it was even possible for a dolphin's vocal apparatus to precisely replicate the sound pattern created by an echo, a dolphin listening to it would be unable to interpret it, because you cannot get information from an echo without knowing the sound that created it.
Epistemic status- please don't take this too seriously. It's fun.
Surely some information is carried in both harmonic composition and intensity.
If echo time-to-return were completely necessary then object recognition through eavesdropping would not be possible, yet:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03199007
Same holds for using a reference frequency.
Perhaps the "location" in "echolocation" is too restrictive. I mean being able to identify shapes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7642811/
Another potential problem humans and possibly domesticated animals are facing.
Dysgenics (negative correlation between fertility and IQ and increasing mutational load in humans due to a low mortality rate) means we wont be solving future problems more quickly or cheaply. This is explained here -> https://qr.ae/pvMrj3. We need to solve the hard problems now.
"Yes, the human genome is degrading. This is a well-established, noncontroversial finding. This phenomenon is called “increasing mutational load” and is based on concepts developed by one of the great geneticists, H. Muller, roughly 70 years ago.[1]
The theory
Harmful mutations come into being all the time. The average newborn has 50–100 new mutations. Though most are harmless, about 1 to 4 of those are harmful.[2] Normally, natural selection causes people having those mutations to die out or not have children, so eventually, those mutations get eliminated.
But our lives aren’t natural anymore. At the beginning of the 20th century, people having genes predisposing them to diabetes would have died young. That’s the normal process of natural selection. Now, those people get life-saving insulin, so they live normal lives and have as many children as anyone else. (Type 1 diabetes, the kind that can appear before you start having children, is highly heritable.[3]) The children of diabetics inherit the genes that make one susceptible to diabetes, so those genes aren’t being eliminated.
The same thing is happening for many diseases that have a genetic component. People that would have died in the past now live nearly-normal lives, and pass on their genes to the next generation.
It’s scary
One investigator calculated that without natural selection, fitness will decline 1 to 3% per generation, and then went on to write the most frightening paragraph I have ever seen in a biological publication:
Thus, the preceding observations paint a rather stark picture. At least in highly industrialized societies, the impact of deleterious mutations is accumulating on a time scale that is approximately the same as that for scenarios associated with global warming ... Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.[4]
If you don’t normally read biological publications, this paragraph may seem tame to you, but this is as alarmist as biologists ever get.
Not so scary
If medicine and biology keep advancing, they will always stay ahead of the increasing mutational load. Someday, there will be good treatments for asthma, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and other genetic diseases, so it won’t matter if the genes causing them to become common.
But if civilization ever crashes, people with multiple genetic defects might not survive.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1716299/
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/961
https://www.dovepress.com/familial-aggregation-and-heritability-of-type-1-diabetes-mellitus-and--peer-reviewed-article-CLEP
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/961
[1] Our load of mutations
[2] Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation
[3] Familial aggregation and heritability of type 1 diabetes mellitus and | CLEP
[4] Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation"
Natural selection continues, even if selection pressures change. A mutation that causes you to be stillborn or impotent will still be eliminated. Now mutations that cause you to spend more time in school likely reduce fitness. You could consider that "bad", but from a different perspective it's those variants that are "degradation".
Fitness only makes sense with reference to environment. Our current environment includes routine treatment for diabetes. Those diabetics are just as fit as non-diabetics, for practical purposes.
Sure, many of their descendants would be SOL if their environment changed to no longer have routine treatment for diabetes. But lots of people - and other living creatures - would be SOL in case of environment changes. Nature gives us lots of variation in the hopes that some will do well, whatever the change.
I think an ACX Grant was given to someone trying to address this issue.
I notice that the article you're relying upon to do most of your heavy lifting (Lynch, M. (2010). Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 961–968. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0912629107) is from a while ago, and is not (so far as I am aware) cited with any frequency except in textbooks and surveys where the analysis of mutation rate and molecular spectrum are used. The "consequences" part which has you worked up is not mentioned outside of the article itself.
Lynch, so far as I know, is now best known for the drift barrier hypothesis (which can be read in corollary as a corrective to this exact issue). Do you happen to know if he has updated or revised his conclusion in light of his own theory and the last decade of evidence?
Improvements to the human environment (e.g., better nutrition) have been dominating genetic selection effects for the last couple of hundred years, hence the Flynn Effect, increasing height, increasing lifespan, and so on. That seems likely to continue or accelerate, with less air pollution, better education, and so on. We're also going to have much better genetic testing and so on to manage the genome itself. So, I think there are various ways this analysis is overly narrow, looking at one potential cause of issues while ignoring all the larger positive trends that make it a moot point.
More generally, any problem that will manifest in 200-300 years is probably the wrong one to focus on. A lot is going to happen between now and then!
The Flynn effect doesn't persist forever and has halted in some first-world countries.
The biological misconceptions underlying the idea of "devolution" are well-explained by other answers to the OP (can be found by following your first link). If it's easy for an organism to live a "near-normal life" and reproduce successfully in a given environment, that organism is fit for its environment, period. At best, this is a general observation that civilization changes the fitness landscape, such that many highly successful modern humans would die if left to wander in the New England winter without clothes or in the Great Rift Valley without eyeglasses; at worst (and not attributing this to you), it's a crypto-fascist line meant to create an "objective" excuse for expressing the taboo political idea that spending societal resources on support for disabled people is bad.
The dark speculations in that PNAS paper about "neurobiological incapacitation" sound scary, precisely because the genetic basis of IQ is so sketchy that nobody can disprove the suggestion that we're slowly losing all our smart-person alleles. But the Flynn effect should reassure us that, whatever controls IQ, the past century's dramatic medical advances are perfectly compatible with steady population-level increases; in fact, it's likely that improved medical care contributes to the environmental enrichment that has contributed to improved neurodevelopment. There's no evidence for the dysgenicists' counter-proposal that "genetic intelligence" may have been secretly decreasing below the surface of this environmentally driven improvement.
Finally, many advances in healthcare can be expected to have, if anything, positive effects on intuitive "folk fitness," by eliminating threats that force selection of traits with unpleasant consequences. For example, eradicating malaria removes the selection pressure for thalassemias (e.g. sickle-cell) that impose morbidity and mortality on homozygotes in order to protect hets.
The Flynn effect doesn't persist forever and has halted in some first-world countries.
This also seems to be due to environmental effects; a 2018 paper using Norwegian cohort data found that the full halt/reversal can be seen over time within individual families, suggesting that it can't be due to genetic factors that vary more between families. Furthermore the reversal happened during a period of "eugenic" reproduction (slight positive correlation between IQ and fertility) in Norway https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6042097/
I hope it is not controversial to say that just maintaining a society requires some level of intelligence, lets say above that of a insect. If those alleles fall in frequency with time, then the functioning of a society which helps many people who have difficulties surviving without medicine is at risk of collapse, either slowly or all at once.
There is a specific trait that is very important, not because it is good in all environments or that it good in some spiritual or other general sense, but in the specific context that we humans have created. We have created a society where it is necessary and arguably beneficial to have a certain level of intelligence to survive and thrive. Of course, wild animals can survive without high intelligence because intelligence it not essential to survival in all environments and may even be detrimental in many. But a society that was built by a species that is exclusive in its ability to leverage its intelligence cannot be sustained by populations with continually falling intelligence.
Even if intelligence is even slightly heritable, then that implies eventually the environmental gains we have achieved through improved nutrition and education will be eclipsed by the insufficient genetic resources (whatever that may be) to maximally leverage that environment.
Even if IQ is not a good measurement of intelligence, the basic argument doesn't change. We can agree that intelligence exist whether or not we can measure it. If, it exists, each generation the mutational load increases, and these mutations are more often harmful than beneficial, then without some sort of selection mechanism in place, it will fall.
I think the problem with your argument is that the timeframes won't add up. Yes, all else being equal, *eventually* mutational load will pile up and cause problems. But in the short term I expect the environmental improvements driving the Flynn effect and so on to outweigh it, and in the long term genetic engineering or some other dramatic change in society will change things enough that it never becomes relevant.
Since Francis Galton, eugenicists have been making doomsday predictions about imminent race degeneration caused by sentimentalist medical care for defective humans. These predictions never became reality, mainly because intelligence and health are less genetically and more environmentally determined than the eugenicists believed they were; however, misguided eugenicist forced sterilization and mass murder campaigns certainly did.
I'm sure there's some limit of perfect medical care, infinite civilizational stability, diminishing returns from rising standards of living/decreased air pollution/better education, etc, in which the eugenicists are actually right that Müllerian dysgenic effects could threaten societal welfare. However, given the history of eugenicist prediction error resulting in pointless cruelty, we should have a high prior against believing that we are actually in this limit case and leaping to grandiose conclusions like "we need to solve the hard problems now", and we shouldn't update it based on rehashings of the same old a priori arguments with zero evidence that harmful mutations are actually accumulating at levels sufficient to cause civilizational problems.
"If, it exists, each generation the mutational load increases, and these mutations are more often harmful than beneficial, then without some sort of selection mechanism in place, it will fall."
-- Even if this is correct it isn't very meaningful. If there are premature deaths then there is some sort of selection going on. If there are not premature deaths then, even if average intelligence is falling, peak intelligence is rising (as the overall population continues to rise).
If you are trying to prove that the average is falling fast enough that breeding events are unlikely to contain 2 high IQ individuals because X, Y and Z, you are going to need to do math and not just hand wave.
I guess the basic point is that the effectiveness of a society - how quickly and accurately can it achieve its goals ceteris paribus - is a lagging indicator of the past intelligence of a population. Usually, I look at https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx, which list the rarities of each IQ percentile and infer that each point decrease in IQ requires the corresponding increase in population for the maximum IQ to remain the same. So if a population's intelligence falls by 10 points and the size stays constant at 20.6 million then the rise in population to get back to maximum is 1,009,976,678 - 20,696,863 = 989279815 people. This is filled with a bunch of mathematical assumptions which may not hold.
Extremely smart people don't bother to take IQ tests and thus don't show up in the stats.
Those stats are theoretical, not empirical. No one shows up in them.
In the US, the number of people who are extremely smart and do not take the SAT or ACT is vanishingly small.
I figure we're going to be practicing widespread embryo selection before this actually becomes a problem.
Domestic Animals: couldn't it be solved by truncation selection?
Granting your premises, people who are worse off are subject to more selection and should end up with better genetic health.
In _Sex and Destiny_ by Germaine Greer, which included the tendency of upper class people to have fewer children but not about dysgenic selection, she says the human race is like a candle, burning at the top and drawing wax up from below.
There are also the concerns around assortive mating. As society has become less traditional and more mobile, people are more and more pair up with partners very similar to themselves.
Doctors with doctors, Lawyers with lawyers, retail workers with retail workers. Rather than be concerned about dysgenics, I am personally a little more concerned that were are not too many generations away from notable genetic classism. I think there is enough meritocracy that repeated doctor/doctor and retail worker/retail worker pairings are going to lead to so significant drift. Even if the retail workers outnumber the doctors substantially.
Maybe there is enough trickle up and social advancement from the larger population of retail worker children to maintain genetic contact?
It's not clear to what extent assortive mating has changed.
You don't think that today there is more doctor-doctor matching than doctor-nurse matching? I would contend (completely anecdotally) that it has for sure increased.
Literally my 5 closest friend couples are:
Professor-Professor
Professor-Person who worked as post doc for a long time before moving to private industry
Urban Development Consultant-Urban Development ED
Painter-Painter
Doctor-Programmer in Medical Industry
Now not everyone I know is like that, but it is EXTREMELY COMMON. And almost all these couples formed before their educations were complete/finalized.
Granted the next couples might be:
Masters in Social Work-Web Developer
Political Consultant-Armed Forces Officer
But there are almost no, Boss-Secretary type matches you would find from people getting married in 80s and 90s, and especially before then.
Once at a birthday party for a 5 year old, over half the ~15 couples worked in the same industry with the same relative education levels. Now a lot of obvious reasons that would happen...
But I would contend that once women started being treated more commonly as equal partners (especially economically), this was sort of a natural progression and things ARE different.
Reasoning from people you know anecdotally is not very reliable, especially as that method cannot inform you how things were generations prior to your birth.
Well for sure, you don’t need to caution me about the problems with anecdata. Nevertheless it is data.
And it also matches some things I have read that reference more rigorous data.
On top of that assortive mating simply wasn’t very possible in much of human history with people in comparatively small communities.
But anyway, you seem pretty skeptical of the hypothesis. Why don’t you think it is happening?
Consider European Nobility; we had close to a thousand years of genetic classism there and it... didn't seem to produce much difference?
Do you have data on how much of a difference was produced?
My understanding is that in preindustrial times, that was the other way around. The upper classes reproduced above replacement and the peasantry below. Second sons of nobility were sent variously into the celibate clergy, to war, or to the colonies as remittance men.
Per Greg Clark, both the nobility & the poor died off. The former kept killing each other off, and the latter were below the Malthursian/Ricardian line. It was successful farmers (they'd be called "kulaks" in the USSR) who reproduced and had downward mobility.
I think until relatively modern times, big cities were all population sinks--people came into them from the countryside to replace those who died off from disease.
This is true. The whole argument rests on the assumption that there are genetically more ways to be less intelligent and than intelligent. If mutations increase, then yes the frequency of dysfunctional diseases increases. The word dysfunctional disease only applies when referencing the environment humans used to live in before the explosion of modern medicine. In our modern environment, people with diabetes and other conditions can and do lead successful lives. The problem is the modern system of medicine requires, on the population level, some basic level of intellectual functioning and other important personality traits to merely maintain. Mutations will more than likely be harmful than beneficial. There are more ways to break intelligence than enhance it on a genetic level. So increasing the mutation load via decreasing selection pressure will likely lead to a continued fall in intelligence.
An increase in mutational load pushes the whole distribution leftward. I think it should be obvious how that would lead to a decrease in innovation?
Not sure why we'd focus on the lack of purifying selection tho, considering the amount of evidence for selection in the other direction: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/recent-evidence-on-dysgenic-trends-february-2021/
This is incorrect. A detrimental mutational load pushes the average to the left (not every individual will experience a detrimental mutation). An increasing population caused by lack of selection extends both tails(more people increases the odds of exceptional people).
Only if the mutational load is severe enough to overcome the rising population does the "whole distribution" move left.
The populations that produce most innovation generally aren't increasing in population. If they were, you are correct that this would offset some of the effect of the leftward shift. I think the most reasonable way to model that would be as a leftward shift from the declining average combined with an upward shift from the increasing population.
This seems patently silly: "The populations that produce most innovation generally aren't increasing in population." But I am sure you have some bulletproof study backing up the claim.
I don't know if this is what he was thinking of, but fertility is below replacement in just about every rich first-world country other than Israel. So the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium, France, UK, Switzerland, Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, etc. are all below replacement. Those countries are where most of the innovation has come from over the last 100 years, though probably the causation is that lots of innovation -> getting richer -> fewer kids.
Additionally, middle-income countries like Russia and China (also places that have done some innovation; China has a lot going on these days!) are below replacement.
The interesting question is whether this implies fewer people capable of great innovation in the future or not. You could imagine that happening for a lot of reasons (lack of culture of innovation, material conditions unsuitable for innovation, lack of inborn ability for innovation), but I don't know of any data there.
One hopeful thing is that technology has allowed for a lot of broken government/institutions to be bypassed in very poorly governed places--places where nobody could get a phone without years of waiting or a big bribe are now places where everyone carries a cellphone, for example. Cellphones, satellite internet, solar power, etc., might move a big chunk of the world from "conditions unsuitable for innovation" to "conditions suitable for innovation."
It’s easier to break a race car than it is to improve it. The vast majority of significant mutations are deleterious, and there are a lot of potential targets that reduce cognitive function. That plus the negative correlation between female IQ and fertility means things can get worse in a non-linear way. A small shift in a mean can have outsized effects on the tails, and going from 1 vonNeuman per generation to 0 seems disastrous.
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/38/2/236/37833/Risk-Factors-for-Decline-in-IQ-in-Youth-With-Type
I think you well rebutted the thesis.
Note in the attached article glucose monitoring and control can be useful with compensating for diabetes.
With a global population rising to 11 billion and the diversity of human genotypes I suspect predicting long term outcomes will like not be successful.
I would like to get some social-interaction advice.
I was waiting in an airport security line, which was quite long, a few days ago. When I was about 3/4 done a man cut in line directly next to me. I told him "Hey, the end of the line is back there." He just shrugged it off. I called him an unsocial a**hole, and he agreed on that, still standing in line.
What should one do in such a situation? I didn't contact any personel, because i was quite late to my flight.
I got in a physical altercation in an airport with some dude over this exact thing. Grabbed his boarding pass and passport and threw them to the back of the line.
Not all heroes wear capes.
And then what happened?
He got all "do you know who I am?" huffed off to go pick up his pass and went to talk to airport staff. I heard nothing more of the matter. (Probably helped that I had a foot on him and was with like 8 other dudes.)
(Also, this was in the Middle East, not America, YMMV there.)
> Also, this was in the Middle East, not America, YMMV there.
That's good context. If this happened in America, TSA agents would throw you both out of line without issue.
I was at Schipol a couple of weeks ago and this happened to me. I'd been the the security line for nearly three hours at that point and figured I was very likely to miss my flight. I said, loudly, "Hey, No!" The lady replied that she was late for her flight. I said, more loudly, that I'd already missed my flight. That the girl behind me in line who was crying had missed her flight, and that we were all miserable but we were all waiting our turn. I'm told I was yelling at the end. The line cutter was subject to the intense attention of a huge crowd of people who were all waiting their turn, and she resumed her place in line.
I don't usually recommend this, but with line jumpers, yell. Loudly. Everyone will be on your side because they're selfish pricks, and if you get the attention of staff, they'll be disposed to punish the line jumper. (I saw this in a security line in Paris a couple of weeks later, where someone tried to jump the line, was called out, and was placed near the head of the line and told to wait. The security desks proceeded to call the people who were in line and ignore the guy's increasingly shrill pleading. He was still there when we went through and I have no idea how long the staff kept him dangling, but everyone around me was quietly (or not so quietly) enjoying his public shaming. It was amazing.)
This reminds me of a top level comment I meant to post. In the 20 years since 9/11 (and before in Europe) why hasn’t the technology or procedure improved for airport security? It’s a matter of getting people on one side of the airport to the other. There’s ample space on the other side. Yet people wait hours, miss flights and so on.
Chalk it up to even more examples of modern incompetence.
There's no incentive to improve it.
Shortly after 9/11 there was an effort to make life beyond the security line enjoyable. Loudly and explicitly guaranteeing of fair pricing, for example. That lasted less than a year. I literally do not remember the last time I saw that promise.
I was going to suggest this same thing. You can never win these things 1 on 1. You need to get a mob against them and quickly, in less than 10 words ideally. Speaking loudly is the easiest thing to do. Stating what they did is good too: "YOU CUT IN LINE". If I was a bystander this would give me the confidence to at least give attention or support the accuser.
"We're all waiting in line here!" also works.
Don’t call people an asshole out loud until you are more confident socially. Buddy could end up right next to you on the flight. Shrug it off next time. If it’s directly in front of you, we’ll, just let it happen. People behind you may speak up. Just act like you thought he was the same party as the people in front of you and next time don’t leave enough space for somebody to cut in. Don’t get upset, that just shows them the limited extent of your limited power. Make them think you “know a guy” who will solve this injustice down the line and just remain undistracted.
Glasgow kiss?
Next to you? As in, not in your line? It's kinda the job of the person he cut in front of to take issue with it further. Especially since you brought it up, that was their hint that they'd be supported.
This is a bit of a collective action problem. Individually that is the right play. But too much turning the other cheek, and you end up with one of the various queueing hell-holes most of the world is.
> I don't think any sort of confrontation with him is going to accomplish anything other than satisfying your anger.
This is how people without self-respect find themselves getting trampled over and over again. tit-for-tat.
Curious what y'all think of starmanning [1], an enhanced version of steelmanning.
My impression is that anyone steelmanning already has the forethought to starman. But one thing I see Scott doing is assuming the good intentions of his opponent even when _criticizing_ their ideas, which I think deserves it's own rhetorical category.
[1] https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/how-to-star-man-arguing-from-compassion/
This will sound harsh, but I thought it's bland and unimaginative.
The fundamental problem with the Internet is trust, I'm mean because the other guy is\was\could be mean. This is also the problem with all civilization or more generally any organisation where you interact with people who are not your flesh and blood. The default mode for life is to be an asshole, the special cases is kinship, romance and friendship. Indeed, a lot of people are assholes even to those, but vastly more so to people who are not one of those.
So I'm irritated by what I saw as a "just stop being poor" advice of the author, off course I would like to star-man my opponent or whatever made up word you fancy, but I have no guarantee that my opponent is even interested in a conversation vs. just dunking on me. Sometimes I starman and my opponent is just a jerk, sometimes I'm the jerk who breaks civility but I'm too proud to admit. There is no context or shared state to do reconciliation, and there is 0 cost to just abandoning the conversation and starting afresh with a new stranger. It's just plain shitty, we were not evolved to throw text at each other from thousands of kilometers, the absence of eyes and body language makes you twitchy and seeing hostility in every remark.
I don’t think people do it because they assume the specific commenter they’re replying to is a good person.
Instead, they assume good intentions because it will make a persuasive case to anyone else you want to convince, because they (probably) believe themselves to be good people.
An argument with the worst bad-faith commenter in the world can still produce a good outcome if you keep in mind you’re not just trying to convince that one person.
I think this is the crucial insight in this matter - it's true what N&S said, that we are not evolved (nor could we be evolved) to reconstruct the full disposition of a remark when all we have is text, but the crucial error that this leads to is the presumption that the limit of the battle we are fighting is the, as it were, opponent in front of us.
Whereas the application of a firm but forthright principle of charity to an opponent and their points, with an eye to the wider populace of fence-sitters and those other opponents who are non-fanatical, is not only morally righteous but good business, if your business is persuasion and recruitment on behalf of your own ideas.
Sure, it might - but who cares? What's the fundamental point of trying to engage in arguments online? If you're hoping your opponent will fold and say "you're right, I'm wrong," you're going to be disappointed almost every time. If you're just trying to score Internet Points in your own mind, you can do that if you want, but I'd question your choice of hobby.
If you're hoping to actually advance the discourse in the world, then your metric should be something like "number of people who will seriously engage with the arguments and data I present," not personal satisfaction.
Of course, you could argue that you find arguments more convincing when they're trying to attack their counterpart specifically and expose bad faith, but I would guess that that's not common. Or, even if it is more common than I'd like to think, it's not something I want to encourage in the world.
Ah - I think we're talking about different contexts here. I took OP's comment to mean what happens in a public-ish place (like, say these comments here). If I utterly fail to get my debating opponent to budge, but some portion of the audience walks away thinking more fondly of my arguments, I'll take that as a win. I don't necessarily care about convincing that specific person.
Now, if we're talking about a private conversation, obviously that's different - but in a private conversation, if you think the other person is in bad faith, or has some fundamental difference from what you consider to be good morals, then I would think arguing with them in the first place is pointless.
Can you elaborate a bit on how and why you think steelmanning is a bad idea?
To be specific, say you have some person using some really bad arguments that add nothing of value to the discussion. Why not suggest some stronger arguments to replace them with; then at least that can be used as a step to begin a better discussion.
Maybe your opponent actually does not like the stronger arguments. Maybe you disagree on what is a strong argument and what is not.
A: "We should ban X, because X is wrong."
B: "Okay, this is a stupid argument, but we could improve it by saying 'we should ban X, because X has some negative consequences'. Now let's list the negative consequences that anti-X people frequently mention, and let's examine the evidence for them..."
A: "That is not what I said. Like, of course, X has all kinds of bad consequences, but this is not the true reason why I oppose X. I oppose X, because X is *wrong*. I only argue by the bad consequences to get more people on my side... like the stupid ones who don't see how wrong X is."
I think I've seen something like that happen a few times, but that's a special case. Most people wouldn't act like that. Anyway, is this just a bravery debate?
I can see how both would be used to fix different problems.
Steelmanning is there to avoid the cowpox of doubt problem, that engaging with poorly developed arguments makes you worse at argumentation. Then you might as well prepare for the best argument your interlocutor could make, since all their other arguments are probably easier to rebut. At some point you are also just stress testing your own beliefs in a pretty straightforward way, by coming up with the strongest arguments against what you believe and figuring out if/why they're wrong. I agree that if you attempt to steelman within the context of an actual argument itself, that's silly, but I usually see the invocation of steelmanning as the author explicitly saying "I am making up a guy here."
Starmanning is perhaps underdeveloped, but the basic idea that you should assume the best intentions of your opponent makes sense to me. On a basic level if you are arguing with someone operating in bad faith you can't win, so you should always assume good faith or else cease arguing. Once you've made that assumption, I think that "assume they have the best intentions" often just translates to "find a way of thinking about what they want which is legible and comprehensible to me." Which is a really important part of actually convincing someone! In my view the most reliable way to convince someone who disagrees with you is by speaking in their "final language," i.e. their usual way of talking about their own moral values. It's your job to show them how your case actually satisfies their moral instincts better than their own case in a way that is easy for them to understand. You're showing them how to change their mind while changing as little else about your thinking as possible. Even if you are too optimistic about what actually motivates a person's view, often just assuming the best of them can be a way of pushing them to think in a way they're more proud of.
What if I want to understand the other guy's point so I get smarter, even if that risks the possibility that someone on the internet will remain wrong?
I like "woodmanning". Maybe clean up your opponents arguments a bit, help them a bit. But do not completely reorchestrate them into the best possible version of themselves.
Why not, if the best possible version of themselves might actually be right?
The best case scenario is that in the process of constructing a steelman of your opponent's position, you suddenly realise that steelman-opponent is right and you were wrong all along.
The far more common scenario is that in the process of constructing a steelman of your opponent's position you at least discover some flaws in your own position.
Are you sure you're not straw-manning the steel-man here? ;)
So one of my friends ( a fellow math grad student) raised the idea of holding a virtual math conference via minecraft (sort of like a fortnite concert I guess). As far as we can tell, this hasn’t been done before, and the idea is that there might be some combinatorial/applied math/topology problems that could be presented creatively using Minecraft, and some presenters might also be intrigued/amused by the setting.
So, I figured I’d ask here if anyone happens to know research/researchers that might fit well with such a setting.
Just to note, this is more to try and assess what the focus of the conference might be on rather than hunting for specific speakers at the moment. Thanks!
Might be a bit tangential, but also see if VRChat would work.
Upsides:
Better voice chat, fully integrated directional audio.
More varied avatars/worlds, not just blocks.
Native video player support (check out VRCDN if you want livestreaming).
VR support, though contrary to the name it's not required.
No need to host a server.
Downsides:
Much higher system requirements for both CPU and GPU for every user, especially as user counts in the room increase.
Worlds have to be modeled in Unity rather than built with blocks (though plenty of pre-built worlds exist that you can spawn private instances of).
Modding is strictly prohibited, though this is less cumbersome than it sounds at first.
There’s a line in Kafka’s diaries that goes something like: “All social circles are united by a particular form of insanity and that insanity prevents the members of the circle from being aware of it.”
I always found that darkly funny without really understanding what it means. But I recently caught myself thinking about how I view a particular informal group as more or less The Voice of Reason and how if they find my thoughts on a subject reasonable then those thoughts probably are and vice/versa. Then I thought, wait, perhaps I deem this group reasonable precisely because they are unreasonable in the same kind of way I am, which is the real reason we all find each other so uncommonly sane and reasonable. Then I remembered the Kafka quote and realized I had likely discovered its meaning at long last.
It seems that we are all in the dark when it comes to determining what is reasonable.
R D Laing back in the sixties was doing a study of lower middle class families around London concluded, "the whole thing was crazy, but somewhere someone would be bringing in enough money to keep it all going" that kind of dynamic in so many groups and the tendency to persist in a failing course of action could explain a lot.
I think there's a conflation in here of what is 'reasonable' - a concept that is historically murky and ill-defined but with islands of light in various places - with preference for the norms of that group - a concept that is far murkier and less well understood systematically.
It's preference for in-group norms that is the unifying insanity Kafka speaks of, but they exist entirely self-sufficient of whether that group is really 'reasonable'. Well, not entirely self-sufficient; you can see from examples all over the place that groups in which allegiance to in-group norms is particularly strong quickly proceed to become simultaneously much more rational and much more unreasonable, as well as less-knowledgeable.
It might be that you like the informal group in question because they really are more knowledgeable and reasonable. It might be that you like them because the norms of the group have a magnetic appeal to you, while the fact that the group is objectively reasonable actually exerts no effect on your fond feeling for them. Or you might be so wedded to in-group norms that you see the group as reasonable when it is, in fact, not.
Either way, what is reasonable can still be commonly ascertained to a certain degree, more so the closer you get to ethical fundamentals; and in-group norms can be risen above with effort.
Yikes. So reason is a mass hallucination, like gender?
A more optimistic perspective: it is easier to verify truth than to come up with it, and different people find different truths meaningful. Perhaps social circles are based on a truth both confirmed and found meaningful by the members.
Reasonable isn't well-defined, and neither is "insanity". There MUST be postulates which cannot be justified. Call them axioms, though that isn't quite correct, because they are rarely a minimal set. Different groups of people clearly have different fundamental postulates, and slightly different rules of inference. And in a large, mobile, society individuals will often select those they interact with to be those whose postulates and rules of inference are similar. Even then the exact goals will often differ.
None of this justifies calling those who disagree with you insane, or even irrational. You don't expect a warthog and a house cat to have the same goals, evaluations of the situation, etc. People aren't quite that different, but it's just a matter of degree.
I don't think it's a hopeless cause, but "determining what is reasonable" is also not something that can be solved once and for all. It requires constant reflection and self-critique.
I wrote a bit about strategies for doing so in this book review: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-dragon
I wrote "Long COVID Doesn't Affect 25% of Kids" which is an analysis of a recent meta-analysis that was widely circulated on social media. I appreciate any input and suggestions.
https://thecounterpoint.substack.com/p/long-covid-doesnt-affect-25-of-kids
A lot of the trouble with long covid discussions is that we don't all mean the same thing, If I get covid and a year later I still can't walk up the stairs without being out of breath, and you get covid and it takes you a month and a half after recovering before food tastes right, we both kinda have long covid, but the causes may well be quite different, and the seriousness is very different.
The best explanation I've seen for long covid in general is that there are a lot of illnesses that give you a lingering post-viral syndrome--you still occasionally feel extra tired, flushed, run a fever, have a racing heart, etc., for a few months after the infection. Some small fraction of people who get a bad case of the flu end up having this afterward. But with covid, tons of people got a viral infection at around the same time, and so there are lots of visible instances of people with a post-viral thing going on.
Agreed, I think there is a lot of definitional muddling going on. There are several different and broad 'diseases' going on, and even subtypes within that. I have some paragraphs on this but I'm saving them for the piece on adult Long COVID. This piece on childhood Long COVID just barely made the email limit.
Without the context of the original analysis, I assumed your title would claim that long Covid affects 75% of kids…
That's the way my brain reads that title too.
I have to admit that I had not considered this interpretation. My brain reads it as simply the negation of "Long COVID affects 25% of kids."
I guess I'm now the one writing sensational headlines!
Prepending "No, " would resolve the ambiguity for me.
This is a good suggestion. Thank you. I will keep this in mind.
Which ethical theory is most conducive to democracy? Least?
What type of "democracy" are you talking about?
Probably conventional nationalistic morality from some or another democratic country. Say 1990s American civic class ethical theory as a random example.
Not one of the leading ethical theories (which are all fatally flawed anyway).
Virtue-- if democracy is considered virtuous.
Agree
Conducive how?
Another contender for least conducive: slaughter-the-infidels-level religious fundamentalism
Those groups might well favor one of that class of ethical theories, but I don't think either group is a supporter of democracy...
Are you defining Nietzsche as "nihilism" or Nietzsche's own philosophy?
Is Rawlsianism the most conducive to democracy? I always found his limitations around what could be considered "politically reasonable" to be a bit harsh. It's hard for me to see a system as properly democratic if you regularly rely on the hand of the censor to crack down on political parties that drift away from your philosophical framework. At the extreme end of interpreting how Rawls thinks about "political reasonableness," you end up with a democracy which can only include liberal parties, and excludes all else by definition.
There was an extensive discussion of the consequences of "summed" or "total" utilitarianism in the last open thread, starting at Parrhesia's https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-233/comment/7805444 . That interpretation of utilitarianism leads to what I consider a rather extreme natalist position (particularly if combined with a long-termist position). It might (maybe) be compatible with voting, but not with many individual rights.
I don't think your first statement is quite accurate. In reality, many (if not most) people do not actually vote in a way that maximizes their utility, and indeed a very common political tactic is to run on a platform of making sure another group *does not* maximize their utility. Which I suppose explains the utilitarian tendency towards technocracy that the above commenter pointed out (or at least, how they try to justify it.).
There is a strong tendency in almost every utilitarian I've heard off toward technocracy rather than democracy.
For many years I've wanted to kill myself. I have no dreams or interest in doing anything whatsoever. From an outsider's perspective I probably look like a leech upon society. It is in society's best interest to let me kill myself.
All needs and desires seem to stem from continued existence, while my only desire is to end this life.
Prior attempts at ending my life have all ended in failure. The only thing that fills me with hope is the knowledge that sooner or later I will succeed, or time will end me.
Why do so many people feel the need to impose their values and beliefs onto others, forcing them to live against their will?
Every tool and service related to suicide is setup to try and prevent you from engaging in this act, so they're useless to me.
When I post about this online, people usually report me as if that will actually help or do anything. It's the ultimate form of trying to brush someone off without doing anything to ease their suffering.
People are different. There are some situations where you would probably agree that suicide is a bad outcome, and without enough information it is not obvious for other people that you are not in one of them:
* some people want to kill themselves, then something in their life changes, and they don't want to kill themselves anymore;
* some people want to kill themselves, they make an unsuccessful attempt, and suddenly realize that they actually don't want to die;
* some people want to kill themselves, there is a possible intervention that would solve their problems and they would hypothetically approve of it, only they are not aware of the possible solution.
I frankly have no idea how frequent these three groups are... compared to the group that wants to kill themselves, wouldn't change their mind under any circumstance, and there truly is no solution to their problems that they would accept. From certain perspective, the people in the "true hopeless" group are sacrificed so that that the people in these three groups can live.
I used to think I wanted to write a book. I would occasionally make an attempt at it, but it would always peter out after a while with only a few thousand words written.
Eventually I realised something important: I don't actually want to write a book. If I actually wanted to write a book, I'd have written a book by now. There was something appealing about the idea of writing a book, for sure, but that's not the same thing. Once I understood that I didn't _really_ want to write a book I was much more at peace with myself.
You don't really want to kill yourself. I can tell this by the fact that you're still alive. Whatever suicidal desires you may have, they're clearly, as revealed by your actions, smaller than your desire to live. I think if you can come to terms with this fact you'll feel better about it.
I was quite suicidal for a number of years. Come home after work and load a pipe and a gun and ask myself which one I wanted to use on myself, every night.
And then, eventually, realized that; if I'm really willing to die; I can do... anything else first. I started doing dangerous stuff, solo climbing mountains, going to sketchy areas and daring cracked out meth heads to try shit, driving my car on frozen lakes, ect.
But as I did so, I had to fight to stay alive. By putting myself into hazardous situations where the *circumstances* could kill me, I somewhat "reset" the survival urge and conditioned my brain to try to stay alive. And because I was doing it in a risky manner, the part of my brain telling me to off myself was quite willing to go along.
It's been years since I've been in a bad way; but I still have this in my back pocket, and no one can take it away from me.
As you acknowledge, you're going to die, sooner or later, one way or another, you'll get there. You want it to come sooner right now; you could just do it quietly in your bathtub, sure. But why not take a little more time and try some "unsafe" things?
Worst case, you survive, you still want to die, and you've wasted time.
Best case, you have a great time and either die doing it or don't want to die anymore.
This is the best argument for smoking I've seen. It might generalize to the importance of small, reliable pleasures.
This said, your "I could do anything" insight is great. I don't know if important epiphanies can be encouraged.
You may already have heard that the Buddha's first core insight was that "life is suffering", and his second that there is an escape from it. Seriously though, a key function of meditation is that you became more aware of your mental and emotional processes, including those that cause suffering. Another benefit is that because meditation is, more or less by definition, practicing to be more aware of your physical sensations. That's the best remedy for rumination, which is more or less a synonym for activation of the the "default mode network", which is a major cause of, and symptom of, depression. (I say this not as a psychotherapist but as a meditator.)
I mean feel free to kill yourself, it isn't that hard, unless you are are institutionalized. I for one won't hold it against you. The world has too many people, we can afford to spare a few.
I would encourage you to perhaps think about the root causes and whether they are temporary. And also think about all the people who care for you, and how they would feel.
I was very suicidal from ~13-19, mostly stemming from hating my single incompetent mother, and my crummy early teenage life. But once I got into college and got more control over my life (and my self frankly), I got a lot better. Another big element was I had at from a young age almost no emotional core, no family affection, or feeling of group membership. And my initial forays into women all ended in disaster from an early age up through ~16.
But then once things started going better with women I was able to find something I had an emotional connection with, and while each time one of those relationships ended, it was a big destructive spiral again, I slowly built up more self-esteem/positive patterns of thinking whatever.
So even though my early 20s included a bunch of disappointments, and in many ways should have been more objectively disappointing than my teens when my life had much more promise despite its temporary struggles, I was actually less depressed/suicidal.
And my life has been amazing from most of of the period ~27-41, so boy am I glad I stuck around. But I don't think I would have been "wrong" to kill myself at 16 or 17 per se. I was in legitimate distress. And I/you certainly don't owe it to anyone to live.
That said looking back from this perspective, I can see where it just would have devastated my family and a couple of my friends. And while I didn't like many people in my family (or care about their suffering), the devastated people would have included many people I did like (from extended family and close friends).
Anyway, I tend to think if you are 75 and in pain you should be able to kill yourself if you want, and society shouldn't discourage you. Or if you are a broken substance abusing 45 year old veteran who just cannot get their life together and hurts everyone around you. Some people really do rarely improve, and playing out the string is just a waste of resources.
But if you are still youngish, and particularly a teenager, so often your perceptions about what is important, or what problems/feelings are permanent are just wildly off base.
Well I can't really do anything about your suffering either, but I will say that I feel very similarly. I don't have it nearly as bad as it sound like you do right now, but I've been there before and the prevailing attitudes around suicide really are terrible. Any attitude other than "against" being taboo, the threat of essentially being locked up if you so much as talk about it wrong... At least there's internet anonymity to let you get some small fragment of your feelings out there. Still a far cry from anything useful.
I am so sorry for your pain. You don’t deserve this. When others try to stop you, please know that many of them also understand a cavernous despair. They are not trying to brush you off. They know from experience that it is possible to emerge from the abyss, and they want the same for you. They - I - care for a fellow human in pain.
You call yourself Love, and I take it as a hopeful seed to put this link here: https://www.lettersagainst.org. It has helped me.
> without doing anything to ease their suffering
You're projecting that suicide is the only way to ease your suffering. This is unlikely to be true if this comes from a place of mental distress, anguish and depression. At any rate, no one wants to die; they want their suffering to end. As for society's compulsion to impose values, the more honest framing is they want to help relieve suffering out of compassion, or sense of duty to their fellow man.
If you're willing to do something as drastic as suicide, then other forms of intervention or dramatic life changes should just as easily be on the table - nothing's a bridge too far. When evaluating through the lens of a suicidal state, the path to recovery seems too abstracted away and inconceivable, nothing makes sense, and we just want to make it go away at the press of a button. This is why help from those offering matters, notwithstanding that validation is a fundamental need. Anyway, you could do worse than a scorched earth approach of just throwing everything at the problem and seeing what sticks (and there's a lot to throw). Talk to someone, watch videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu1FMCxoEFc), pick up a CBT or 3rd-wave CBT therapist guidebook, read research papers on google scholar and try different things, get lots more sunlight, get medication, etc etc. There's always something else.
That doesn't mean it's easy, that doesn't mean any swinging dick whose book you pick up has all the answers. It means that acting in the face of uncertainty is wholly necessary. If you get indignant because I didn't tell you what you want to hear, well, good. There are people out there who give a damn, but they can't do the legwork for you. Wanting to believe you can't improve (absent compelling evidence life terminal disease) is a defense mechanism, where the prospect of recovery is taken as a sign of long-term failure. It's not your fault things got so bad.
> I have no dreams or interest in doing anything whatsoever.
I don't have dreams either. It's not a requirement for being content and having peace of mind. Bias towards action, though, goes a ways.
Wishful thinking.
My medication history is pages long. I've suffered voluntary and involuntary treatments (I've suffered permanent side-effects from those treatments). I have stacks of psychiatric papers on my shelves. I've been to multiple therapists. I've wired enough extra lighting to bring my hovel to daylight levels. I've crawled my way back from homelessness multiple times.
It is offensive that you assume that my suffering is due to my not trying hard enough, or that I have to justify it's ending the only way that can be demonstrated to reliably work after all that.
Yes I've noticed you've been actively discounting everyone. Your experience is not everyone else's. I've not even engaged you, and I'm not "assuming" anything of you - that is a projection. Recovery does not necessarily scale with effort, and there is no implication that there's been a historical lack of it. I've had severe chronic insomnia since my teens, almost 2 decades, and managed to drastically improve my condition after fruitless experiences - the years don't matter either.
So be offended, I won't take your self-pity away from you.
It's comical how much of society turns out to consist of inventing tripping hazards and then telling you they can't do the legwork for you.
I suspect your post may be to gather reactions to the story line. Can you post your statistics since apparently you post about his often: “ When I post about this online”
Your statement “ It is in society's best interest to let me kill myself.” is obviously incorrect because in general society tries to help those with this aspect of mental illness.
Please provide an audit with respect to
Exercise
Sports
Music
Art
Media
Movies
Science
Technology
Friends
Family
Religion
Volunteering
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351435/
"Why do so many people feel the need to impose their values and beliefs onto others, forcing them to live against their will?"
Tentative theory-- most people aren't sure about whether they want to live or die, and they feel that suicide by someone else risks pushing them over the edge.
Alternate theory: There are people who like you. They want you around for whatever qualities they enjoy. This isn't the same thing as wanting you to be in less pain.
Tentative theory doesn't really jive with the vitriol that I've seen accompany that tendency IRL.
I think there's truth to the alternate theory, although only a facet of it. The language used is that of a betrayal: less “I wish you didn't cut down that tree on your property”, more “I wish you didn't cut down the tree that I planted on your property and sat under occasionally the last ten years after you invited me to”.
I can't find the comment, but I think you're right that people think they *ought* to be able to prevent suicide. I'm not sure why they believe that, but it can lead to a lot of anger fueled by guilt or sheme.
A very small thing, but I appreciate that you've got a small tasteful animation that I like rather than one of those attention grabbers that get on my nerves.
In defense of the tentative theory: I think unadmitted fear can turn into anger very easily.
I don't disagree, but I think the source of the fear is probably usually more along the lines that *my* suicide is a judgement about *you*, that it was your fault due to your inadequacies as a parent/friend/sibling/whatever.
Which is entirely understandable as an insecurity, but it's still frustrating. Guess what, I don't want to hurt people, even if under different sets of cause and effect tickling such an insecurity wouldn't be considered my “fault”. Turns out being suicidal doesn't imply turning into an amoral monster without feelings or remorse for the pain caused.
If you have a chronic condition, then you might be able to go to a country like Switzerland where assisted suicide is legal, and get permission to use barbiturates to end your life. In theory, these drugs act like anaesthetics. Just like you don't feel yourself getting cut open when you're under a general anaesthetic, you shouldn't feel yourself suffocating when deliberately overdosing on these. It seems like the ideal death.
I hope you don't go through with this. But I also don't want you to suffer in your last moments. The choice is yours.
[edit] Should I delete this comment? I have too much on my plate to have to defend this comment.
I was going to write something vaguely similar to this, but will add that there is at least one method that appears to be effective and painless but doesn't require international travel.
However, I'm not going to suggest it here, because it's easily researched and I agree with the commenters who said that if the OP *really* wanted to die, they would have managed it by now after multiple attempts. I personally have a pretty high hedonic setpoint and have never been suicidal, but take great comfort in knowing it's an option for me if I ever need it in the face of a chronic and/or deteriorating condition. Having done the research, I'm very confident I could manage it myself on a first attempt if I ever really wanted to (assuming I wasn't gravely physically disabled).
Leave it up, your edit is clear and sufficient. People are unusually respectful around here. If someone has a different view they can create a subthread and your lack of reply won't imply anything.
Don't forget the “danger to yourself or others” slight-of-hand that's used to demonize us.
I hope you have someone in real life who knows you well enough to help ease your suffering, one way or the other.
It's not impossible that in your case suicide is the answer, but an online forum is not a good place to figure that out. If you really have no one to talk to who is open minded to your position, I'd be willing to have an hour long chat.
Counterpoint: 25 years and multiple voluntary and involuntary procedures later, the lesson I've learned is that being open with people in real life is gamble that has little expected payoff and significant downsides.
Honestly, the worst part is how for the most part, everybody means well, but the net result is just more suffering.
FWIW, 25 years is nothing
25 years of suicidal mental illness is absolutely horrific. I don't know whether that's an accurate depiction of Maybe later's life, or whether it's a distortion from a current bout of depression (it's very good at erasing belief in prior happiness.)
It's a pretty awful situation.
It's complicated, but I'm not in anything like a “spiralling” state. There have definitely been better/less-bad times, but I'm reaaaally tired of metaphorically clawing my way out of holes. I am, in fact, fucking exhausted.
I’m sorry, I see how my comment might be misinterpreted.
I didn’t mean to downplay their suffering, but rather to point out that their psychology still might change quite profoundly over their lifespan.
It's really easy to get bitter, which in turns makes it really easy to misinterpret things--or maybe interpret things from my own perspective and forget that other people mean well (which I alluded to elsewhere).
It amuses me somewhat that I'm largely thinking the same things for the same reasons (specifics have varied of course) as when I was first told “things will get better”. It's probably true for most people, but… I'm not most people :)
It's been 25-ish years since I've wanted to stop hurting. Did you mean that I'm not allowed to want a permanent solution until I have _more_ than 25 years experience with the problem? I'm… not inclined to take that notion very seriously.
Are you 25 years old?
What I mean is that your psychology might change in unexpected ways as you age.
That was certainly my experience. I’m only 30, but I’m a fundamentally different person than I was at 25, in many ways.
Things that I used to think were lifelong problems just kind of evaporated. Life might have a couple surprises in store for you still.
I'm early 40's.
Hoping for the best: maybe dealing with computers and devices is a sort of cognitive exercise that helps fend off dementia.
It gets to me that Effective Altruism is a reasonable effort to get good results from charity (and it's done some of that), but it's also led to a lot of people making themselves and each other miserable, not to mention a lot of wasted effort.
It doesn't seem quite like Moloch, and it's a bit subtle for Coyote's sense of humor. Maybe Murphy?
Moloch, Coyote and Murphy? Who else belongs to that pantheon?
Eris. Loki. Collect the set.
That's five, maybe it's enough.
I may have encountered the secret Murphy cult now and then. They seem to botch the ritual part, though.
I don't think it actually makes anyone miserable, I just think it attracts people who are good at making themselves miserable and who would be miserable wherever they end up.
Suppose I find my girlfriend attractive but not as much as I’d like to. Suppose also that I can think of at least two things she could do that would make her more attractive to me, which require a small or large effort from her and none from me. Suppose further that she cares very much how attractive I find her - for her own sake as well as mine - and would likely be eager to put in considerable effort to maximise it, given the option. Suppose finally that finding out that I don’t already find her maximally attractive would be confirmation of her worst fear and would lead to considerable disutility on her part.
What should I do?
To little detail on what you want changed to offer specific advice.
For example this is something that she would likely already want to change about herself (e.g. losing weight if overweight, being more fit, being less self-conscious at parties, etc.) if so framing it as something you'd find more attractive is likely only going to make her feel worse about it and instead you should look for ways to help her (e.g. if you're also even a bit overweight note that you've gained a few pounds and maybe you guys could do a diet together, suggest some active activities you can do together, say you'd like to try an improve class together etc.).
Alternatively is this is something more aesthetic preference kind of thing and reversible (e.g growing hair out/cutting hair shorter, intimate grooming, clothes etc.), propose it as more of an experiment / mixing it up. E.g. have you ever though about growing your hair out, I'd be curious to see how it would look on you, I bet it would look good, etc. If you do like a change or steps towards it be sure to compliment it. Actually, in general try to make an effort to compliment things you like, that will make her feel more secure in the relationship and desired by you.
All of this works equally well gender swapped.
There might be some kind of "things are good, but they could be better" framing which could work.
I don't know how accurate your model of her reactions is, and I don't know how you'd find out.
For that matter, I don't know how hypothetical your scenario is. Is this even about a real girlfriend?
Break up with her. Any woman so insecure she has to believe you find her maximally attractive and simultaneously so self-deluded she's *able* to believe this is a hive of neurosis and walking on those eggshells will only get worse and worse over time.
I'm serious. This kind of "narcissistic"[*] oversensitivity is one of the absolute worst traits a person can have.
[*] Not in the literal psychological sense, of course, but I don't know a better word for the need to maintain a brittle quasi-belief that you're perfect as a way to counteract low self-esteem.
Irrational insecurity about relationship future is so freaking common though. Monkey brains care an insane amount about social status, relationships, mating prospects and security. You're ruling out something like 80% of the population if you rule them out for being oversensitive about their romantic-interest's attachment to them.
You should either breakup with them or learn to not care about these aspects. There is no way to change her in these ways without destroying this relationship or being extremely manipulative.
Why do you think so? I'm confident that both me and my girlfriend could just straight-up ask the other to make a small-effort change (get a haircut, shave more often, wear a difference scent, or whatever) and there would be no drama.
Second. I don't wear a beard because my wife prefers me clean-shaven. My wife wears her hair long because I like it that way. This isn't absolute - I grew my beard out last winter and she hacked her hair off this summer when the heat hit, both after a brief discussion. You should be able to do little things like this for your partner, IMO anyway.
OTOH, the way the OP is hedging around what he actually wants makes me suspect that his things are non-trivial asks. In specific, I'd bet the hard thing is weight loss, which is very hard indeed.
> Suppose further that she cares very much how attractive I find her - for her own sake as well as mine - and would likely be eager to put in considerable effort to maximise it, given the option.
This sounds toxic. What is your girlfriend willing to do to win your approval and to what end? If she's self-conscious about how she looks now, time will only chip away at her attractiveness. Can she handle that deterioration in the long term? If you don't think so, then consider ending the relationship.
Supposing all those suppositions are supposedly true - maybe test the waters first with one of the "small effort" things, and see how that goes. If even a very small marginal improvement is enough to neurotically unsettle the relationship on her end, that's a) not a good sign for longevity; and b) a clear signal to never touch this line of reasoning again, if it's still worthwhile to stick together for other reasons. Trust is really important in interpersonals, so consider whether you "lying" (by omission) about this in the future is continually plausible + reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Do keep in mind that women are much better than men at smelling bullshit when someone says they Look Great, since they're faced with this selection pressure more intensely and from a much earlier age than guys.
(I imagine you only ask the question here in the first place cause it kinda bothers you. Possibly mistaken about that? Also inherently assuming a hetero relationship based on ACX statistical priors, apologies if that's also wrong, disregard last sentence if so.)
I think kind of impossible to say without more direct knowledge of the specifics.
I would provide my experience from a parallel problem and see if that is helpful.
From ~16-24 I was in a series of long term relationships with some very attractive women (lets be crass and call them mostly 8s and 9s). Generally relatively intelligent too, with good personalities and educational/professional prospects. All highly attractive mates. It didn't work out with any of them, though could have if I had had my shit slightly more together.
Just before turning 27 I met the woman who is still and will likely always be my wife. She was probably the least attractive, or 2nd least attractive out of all those women, and when we got together I was not super attracted to her. But after our first (or second depending on what counts as a "date") date I was like "this is probably the person I will marry".
Why? Well she seemed incredibly emotionally stable, very intelligent without being threatening, interesting, earnest, ethical, into me, had good professional prospects, and all told my evaluation was that I was unlikely to do better (which I think was correct). We got married after 18 months together, had children after 6 years together.
And my decision has super paid off in a couple ways.
1) I am a sexual enough person, that even a woman I am not super attracted to, I find quite attractive, honestly more attractive than she would probably like on a day-to-day basis.
2) Romance slowly makes people more attractive to you, so my evaluation of her has improved over time for that reason.
3) Since she isn't a model, but just above average, there isn't the constant need to fight off competition, or nearly the level of paranoia (some unjustified, a lot of it justified) I felt in some previous relationships.
4) I lucked out in that she has aged very well. She ended up being one of those women who is overlooked in the general attractiveness of youth, but now in her late 30s still looks almost as good as she did at 23, and so has risen in relative position substantially, particularly among mothers as motherhood is often hard on people.
5) The evaluation of her emotional/professional/other traits was right on, and she has been an amazing partner.
6) I have enough success in other elements in my life and feel secure enough in my own self-esteem and accomplishments, that I don't feel insecure internally, or the need to get into status pissing matches with clients/friends/whoever.
Anyway, some things I have done that have helped at times.
I constantly reinforce how attracted I am to her and point out when I like what she is wearing. That way when I sparingly given negative feedback, there isn't insecurity on her end and it isn't a big deal. It is still a little fraught, once a dress I said I hated turned out to be her favorite and one she thought looked great on her. But there was enough relationship capital there that it mostly just became a joke.
I also try to make it clear to her all the ways I value her outside her appearance. So appearance based comments don't undermine the sense I value her.
I actively take her shopping and steer her towards things I think look good on her.
I try to include her in active athletic hobbies, (though these days it is really she who needs to do this more with me).
I don't make contact or strong emotional relationships with other women, particularly ones who are more attractive. The easiest way to avoid being unfaithful is to not ever put yourself in a position where it is possible. No business trips with your cute assistant, no drinks after the presentation alone with the cross country colleague you really hit it off with.
Would I rather she look like a supermodel? Probably...yes. I am sure she would rather I look like Tommy Shelby or Henry Cavil. But all sorts of things aren't just how I would like them. I would also rather be a billionaire than a mere petty bourgeoisie (or low end bourgeoisie).
Also to be totally Machiavellian, don't underestimate the life value from maintaining a friend group at or around your level. Being friends with the rich and powerful has a lot of perks, it also often makes you feel like shit about your life. Having friends of your same social standing or that right below yours has economic downsides in terms of networking, but great emotional upsides. Being the rich friend is much more emotionally fulfilling than being the poor friend, even if economically/professionally you should want to be the poor friend.
IDK that is a lot of words maybe not directly about your problem. But it was fun/therapeutic for me to write and think about, and maybe useful to you :)
Thank you for writing it down. As far as I can remember I never read a well-written text on that topic before. It was very interesting to read.
Ugh
I am curious what is ugh? You don’t make similar kinds of assessments when evaluating mates?
"lets be crass"
Pretty sure you know what is ugh.
Martin Blank made a big effort post and another user made a one-word drive-by snark, their only contribution in this entire page, and somehow we're supposed to treat the one-word snark as worthy of discussion.
Martin's post is what young immature in their 20s should read in order to become mature about their dating futures and Get The Fuck over worrying too much about looks.
We are shocked and horrified that people have a rough sense of each other’s attractiveness? Are we 10 years old here? Grow up.
If you see being crass as a sign of maturity, I feel bad for you. If you read "ugh" as "shocked and horrified", my sympathy increases.
Anyone who says "lets be crass" knows they are being crass, and an "ugh" is a well-earned and mild response.
That point #4 is super important and so often overlooked due to temporal discounting...thanks for mentioning it. Young people rarely ask me for advice about growing up, but it's one of the things I wish I could get across more often. Yes, absolutely do a bit of YOLO insanity while you can still physically take it - there are some incredible life experiences only possible with the vigour (and naivete-open-to-learning) of youth. But there will be a cost to hard living sooner or later, and it's not pretty. Literally. (In this regard I'm thankful for declining rates of youth smoking and drinking. The Kids won't be Alright necessarily, but they'll probably be attractive longer. Raising the aesthetic waterline ought to be a sub-goal of sanity-raising.)
Attractiveness may get the initial hormones jazzed, but it's in constant decay, and any relationship with the potential to turn long-term should try to model whether that'll be closer to "linear" or "exponential". I no longer value high Present Attractiveness in people obviously (if perhaps obliviously) determined to spend that capital down as soon as possible, rather than conserve it for the next 80 years of their life. Not just because it's a losing rearguard battle, but "partner spends too much time/money/effort on Maintaining Vanity" is a classic relationship failure mode. Better to just avoid that trap entirely by preferring Durable Goods.
The two things I would suggest are mutuality and framing.
Mutuality meaning, start a conversation about relationship goals you should each have to improve the strength of the relationship, ask for what she would want from you first, to give her the emotional context of seeing that she can find requests to make despite already liking you a lot, and put it in the frame of both of you working together to achieve goals rather than just criticizing a problem with her she needs to fix.
Framing depends on what things you actually want. The idea is to offload the problem/desire from her onto something else in the world. Pretty easy if you wished she would wear more skirts or whatever, just wait till you're both watching a movie with someone in a skirt or walk past a store selling skirts and muse about how you like skirts and always find they make women more attractive to you. Harder if you want her to lose 50 lbs, in that case I would frame it in terms of concerns about long-term health and still being active together in 40 years or w/e, and make being in shape a mutual couple goal you can work on together. Whatever it actually is, see if you can find a framing like this which is 'here's an external thing I'm interested in' rather than 'here's a problem with you.'
If she were significantly less attractive than she currently is (say, 50 lbs heavier, or with some disfigurement or permanent stretch marks) would you consider leaving the relationship for that reason? (I know there's a moral impulse to say 'Of course not!', but this is a question for you about your honest interests and decisions; the moral judgement just gets in the way here.)
If so, there's nothing you can really do; her fear about changes in your opinion of her attractiveness is well-founded. You can (and maybe should) do the obvious 'try bringing it up gently', but this is bound to be a fraught situation; suggestions that she could be more attractive inevitably carry a threat to the relationship, and so are a Big Deal to her monkey brain.
If not, try to fight the insecurity directly. Tell her that your love isn't contingent on beauty. Find a romantic picture of an older couple and say you're looking forward to that too. Do generally romantic things unprompted. Try to give her an excess number of reminders that you're fond of her: the usual tropes of surprise sticky notes left in places she'll eventually find them, obvious thoughtfulness on things that matter to her, love letters, etc. Consider marriage/engagement, depending on your culture; it's one of the biggest security blankets around for romantic relationships. (Note that love languages matter a lot here; figure out or ask what gestures she finds most meaningful, and dedicate time and effort to pushing those buttons.)
Security buys you both the ability to be honest about what you want, and to get more of it, without threatening the relationship. If it's a stock you can invest in with this girlfriend, it's got a good return.
If it's the case that your relationship is based on genuine interpersonal connection, not on your assessment of her as an aesthetic object, find ways to convince her of this so that she can stop agonizing over whether she's pretty enough for you. Establishing this baseline should take the pressure off, such that if it's true that she cares very much what you think of her appearance, she can more easily just ask you "hey, do you think I'd look good with this haircut?" or whatever.
If this is not the case, and she's right to worry about what will happen if and when you start to find her less attractive, then communicating this honestly will improve long-term utility for both of you.
Depends: If this thing can be framed as a personal kink of yours ( " I am really into green hair " ), it is probably not much of a problem to communicate. But if it is one of the things that society thinks make people attractive or unattractive, it will hurt a lot.
I don't think it's really possible to answer that without more details... But maybe you should ask yourself - and her - what you should do to make yourself more attractive to her.
Well ordered attractiveness begins with the other.
Hey! I understand that maybe interest in Ukrainian-Russian War is dwindling in the West, but maybe some people are interested in learning more about Ukraine, and if so - what do you want to know?
Are there any English language books about the history of Ukrainians during the Russian monarchy, that you would endorse?
"The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine" by Serhii Plokhy is very good albeit brief for any given historical period
I would be interested in your take of the following explanation that I have heard:
Life in the republics DNR/LNR in the last years has been absolutely terrible, and everyone in Ukraine could see this. This has pretty much extinguished any support for Russian actions in Ukraine, because these republics serve as an example for how disastrous that might become for anyone living in an area controlled by Moscow. This also contributed a lot to the fierce resistance that Russian troops encountered from the very beginning: the prospect of living a life as in DNR/LNR is just too terrible.
Would you agree with this? Is it too extreme, but contains some truth? Or is it just grossly oversimplified?
Well yeah, I think that's the attitude in Ukraine towards DNR/LNR.
Many people left separatist-controlled areas for 'mainland' Ukraine, around 1 million, in 2014-2018 or so.
What has happened in L/DNR is a clear example that Moscow would not even try to establish a semblance of normal society in the areas it does not care about.
To put into perspective — Donetsk was the second most important city in Ukraine after Kyiv, with a lot of investment into infrastructure, businesses, software industry, universities...
I have not been there since the separatists and Russians seized it, but I know people who visited these areas to see their relatives, and well, yeah, it is not nice.
Thank you very much! It can be quite hard to understand the situation from the outside, so I really appreciate that you take the time to answer our questions!
How is life in Kyiv?
I read it's been normalized, which I find a mixture of what I'd expect and hard to imagine.
(How) did your outlook on your country, life, the world, the future ... change since february? Or how do you perceive this to be in your circles? Whenever I'm meeting friends we talk about the war and what it means, even though we're some 1000 km west.
In your different circles, does it matter, who has Russian as a primary language and who Ukrainian? (How) did it change since February?
Are there Ukrainian citizens that you (or some other groups) would perceive as 'Russian' and does it matter? If Russians are living in Kyiv right now, how difficult or easy is that?
From what you observe personally, what is the sentiment vis-a-vis eg. Poland, Hungary, Germany, France?
How do people in your circles perceive the EU candidate status? Also in terms of: do they think this is about years or decades ... (if it matters)?
From different statements of Ukrainians in my country it seems that many wouldn't mind NATO actively engaging, even if it meant a direct Russian-NATO war. What's the take on that in your circles or in what you read?
Continuing on the language questions: to my understanding, there is only one official language, which is Ukrainian. Have there however been two administrative languages, at least in some regions? (How) did this change in the last two decades? Related: I keep reading that there was some move to limit Russian language (as language of instruction in schools, in the administration ...?) around 2014, that it was met with protest and withdrawn later. But I couldn't get to the specifics. What was actually introduced (and retracted) and why?
How similar is Ukraine to Polish language? How well would you be able to communicate with sb. who speaks Polish?
Is there an Ukrainian author you'd specifically recommend? (I'm thinking of fiction, but ultimately could be anything).
I realize my questions are often at the border of being private versus knowledge about Ukraine ... but then clearly there is no obligation to answer any of those, so just putting them out there.
I have some questions that could be perceived as being more political, I'm holding off with those for the moment. Btw., I read some of your answers below, thanks for taking the time.
---In your different circles, does it matter, who has Russian as a primary language and who Ukrainian? (How) did it change since February?
Generally, nobody cares who speaks what, more people have started to use Ukrainian, especially the younger ones.
I think there would be a big switch to Ukrainian down the line, and more attention to culture and history.
About EU candidacy - people do not see it as something that tangible.
There is a hope that the start of EU ascension process would bring more anti-corruption practices, more audit.
I'm glad to hear. Pressure to change internal practices/audit seems realistic. EU has a bad track record for new admissions taking really long (both for good and for bad reasons), which made me wonder, if the newest EU candidacy status gives rise to expectations that cannot or probably will not be fullfilled quickly.
I appreciate your answers and I'm happy to read more and still *please* don't feel obliged to answer every single of my questions!
Many great questions, I'll answer them one by one.
So about life in Kyiv (which I think would also be applicable to other cities not on the frontline) —
1. There are still air-raid sirens. Not so frequent as before, but they are still common.
2. Actual missile strikes on Kyiv are happening maybe once per month for the last couple of months, Russians do not have so many cruise missiles.
3. There are no air strikes, Russian planes fly only over frontlines
4. People are trying to go back to the "normal" life, because that's what they can do, people need to make money to support their families. Another option is joining the army. Many people moonlight as volunteers — help refugees, try to raise money to support troops with supplies — drones, equipment, cars.
5. People are aware that probably this will be a long war, so they adjust their plans accordingly
6. Almost everyone is carefully tracking all the news about the war, whether it is websites, Telegram channels, or Youtube, and spends some hours on it daily. some sort of "war-scrolling"
7. Society is very mobilized.
8. Public infrastructure is working fine in Kyiv (well, except for hot water in my house)
9. Most of the stores are open, most of the cafes, and restaurants.
10. Some people are even starting new businesses, as crazy as it sounds, some return to the previously occupied areas (Kyiv suburbs like Bucha, Irpen), and repair their homes.
11. Mid-March Kyiv gave kinda Fallouty vibes, turning desolate, now it's closer to pre-war, but you can still see signs of the situation — anti-tank metal blockades, bags of sand, army members, buildings that suffered the damage, more homeless on the street.
12. Many people lost their jobs, but many have retained them.
13. 2014 was probably a bigger shock because before that Ukraine was peaceful since WW2, this war is a continuation of 2014.
Thanks!
I read your last point before editing, and without going into more detail just wanted to say, yes, I understand that.
I have language questions:
How many people in Ukraine do NOT speak Russian as a second (or first), language? Is Ukrainian and Russian mutually inteligible? Non-Ukrainians have different opinions on this question. For me, as a Czech person, Russian and Ukrainian are both non-inteligible and I am unable to distinguish between them when I overhear them on the street, but some people claim they are very different. How many people speak intermediate dialect, called, I think, s-something? Do Ukrainians learn Russian at school (or at what year they stopped)? For that matter, when did they start teaching English; I noticed that most middle-aged refugees do not speak English, but children do?
Education:
How come Ukraine has so high proportion of college graduates, given that this really does not match structure of its economy? Is "college" just an equivalent of high school or something?
Land reform:
Before the war, there were some reports of proposed land restructuring as an important political topic. Can you tell us more about that (I do not remember anything more)?
Alcohol:
Does Ukraine produce some good beer or wine that can be recommended? :-) If so, it is shamefully unknown in Europe(edit: in the West, in the West, sorry :-) given how famous for its agriculture your country is
Education:
Yes, most Ukrainian would try to get Masters or Bachelor's degree, in my social bubble almost everyone has it. So it is a university degree, four or six years. I think it is an issue of social mobility, you are blocked out of white-collar work if you do not have a degree. Many work during University.
Land:
Previously, there was a moratorium in place on selling land, now it is revoked (under Zelensky).
Alcohol: I do not drink (almost), but I think Ukrainian beer is rather good and has a good reputation. Something from the smaller more boutique breweries. The best wine I think was in Crimea.
Language:
Society in Ukraine is 100% bilingual, literally. You have a primary language, but you can still understand the other one. I think it is similar to Catalan and Spanish in Catalan-speaking regions in Spain. Grammar is very similar, there is a 60-70% maybe overlap in vocabulary but the phonetics are very different, so even Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens have a distinct accent. In Central Ukraine, people would use more Russian loan words in a more colloquial speech. It is called Surzhyk, there are different attitudes towards it.
Ukrainian is not hard to learn for Russians but is not mutually intelligible, some adaptation is required.
English is a primary foreign language in school at least since 1991, or maybe even in late Soviet times. I think the quality of instruction has improved, plus you interact with English language content more (like video games, websites, songs, etc).
About Russian in schools, is a complicated topic, because for example there were a lot of "Russian as a language of instruction" schools, and their number has been declining since 1991. Such schools still exist but in a much smaller number. Russian as a foreign language, hard to say, I think it depends on the school, I need to google the latest legislation.
Before 2014, what were the differences between ethnic Ukrainians who spoke Russian at home, and ethnic Russians?
Ehhhh, I don't know. Ethnic Russians are not segregated in Ukraine, plus most of the families are ethnically mixed, especially in the cities, and 80% of Ukraine's citizens live in cities.
And ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian would speak it not only at home :). The only place where you kind of required to speak Ukrainian is education, especially during high school, but only when you are directly answering the teacher, and even that would not happen always.
Plus, there is ethnicity and there is nationality, and in many cases, nationality is more important for an identity — younger people who were born in independent Ukraine would consider themselves Ukrainians first and foremost, even though their parents may come from Russia, they may have a Russian surname or something.
There is an exception, though, I think — in Crimea a distinctly "Russian" identity was strong — among Slavic people who live there. Crimea is the only place in Ukraine where Russians (hard to say, ethnicity or identity) were in majority.
Thanks for the answer.
When I referred to speaking Russian at home, I meant that the language one speaks at home (the original, parental home - not the possibility of a home shared with a spouse or flatmates) is most likely the language that one identifies with most strongly.
I sporadically ask bilingual people both what they speak at home and what they dream in. It's almost always the same.
Thanks (y)
I'll defer to the actual Ukrainian but Ukraine mainly exports primary resources or heavy industry like wheat or steel. Ukraine is a bit player in the beer, wine, and vodka markets which are dominated by places like Sweden, Poland, Italy, or France. Ukraine does make wine but the biggest wine producing region of Ukraine is Crimea. So that's obviously not widely available.
Nemiroff is both available in the west and common in Ukraine. And Chernigivske if you can get it is stereotypical. At least in my experience. I'm not sure how the siege of their home city affected Chernigivske but the Russians have since retreated from the city.
Ukrainian vodka is of course famous, I do not like hard alcohol, though. Thanks for recommendations, anyway
To be clear, Chernigivske is beer.
How does the everyday corruption situation compare to pre-war levels?
Ehh, hard to say.
I do not interact much with authorities, I do not need any permits for some business or something. I think in Ukraine most of the corruption happened on a more business owner/government official level. A good example would be real estate developers skimming regulations or influencing the decisions of lawmakers, courts, etc.
How did it change? I don't know. I feel that civil society is much stronger now, but the focus is mostly on war, helping the troops, and helping refugees. There are some questionable laws being passed right now.
Another aspect is that oligarchs are losing influence rapidly now and I don't know what will come out of it.
Thanks Artem.
What kind of questionable laws?
There was a law that made it easier to exclude foreigners from Supervisory Boards of state companies — it required them to spend be present at meetings personally, not online. This law made quite a stir in the business community, not sure if it was passed.
There was also something about audit processes, need to find it.
Reports are that about ten million people have fled the country (out of a population of about 44 million). Reports are this group is about 90% women because Ukraine has banned men from leaving the country. If so that's a bit less than half of all the women in the country. Is that accurate? Is there now a two to one male to female ratio in who's left in the country?
I think it is still less than that, and many people are returning. I would say 5 million (after excluding those who returned by now) went to the west (elderly, women, and children), and around maybe 2 million or less (both sexes) went from occupied areas to Russia (mainly due to passage to Ukraine being blocked).
To be honest, it does not feel like that on the streets, mainly because that group is not only women (Ukraine has a rather old population with many retirees). But anecdotally a lot of my female friends went to the West
> around maybe 2 million or less (both sexes) went from occupied areas to Russia (mainly due to passage to Ukraine being blocked).
I had been wondering about this already ... is it allowed to leave as a man in those cases, or simply cannot be controlled?
Hard to say, depends on the place and situation. There are filtration camps in Mariupol for example, as far as I understand FSB or whoever runs them have more interest in males. There is a way out of occupied areas through Russia to Estonia, people I know went that route.
When you say on the street where are you? I expect different cities to have different experiences.
We have decent statistics on Ukrainian refugees in the EU and a few other countries and the answer does still look to be, at a minimum, 6-8 million. Plus the 1-2 million who went to Russia. And a large majority female. Though this number could well accomodate millions of returnees since at least ten million people crossed the western borders and possibly more.
My thought is that maybe the countryside is emptying out and people are going to better defended cities?
I'm in Kyiv.
People are going away from the frontline, basically North and West. I do not think it is about countryside vs city, (but maybe true in some regions, like Odesa), basically getting away from places like Mykolaiv and Kharkiv which are in range of artillery and under constant shelling.
I think it's 90% women and children or: 90% of persons aged 18-65 are women.
I'm also a bit frustrated that news outlets I'd look at would be often very unspecific here. Relately, I'm unsure to which extend the roughly ten million already count those that have returned in the meantime, or not.
Here are two related links, one estimated that about almost half of refugees are children and the other one is a regional report, claiming that a bit more than half of the registered refugees were working age, 80% of them women. Both are not super accurate or representative, but probably sth around this. https://mediendienst-integration.de/migration/flucht-asyl/ukrainische-fluechtlinge.html, https://www.nzz.ch/visuals/ukraine-krieg-die-wichtigsten-zahlen-zu-den-opfern-ld.1674853
Is there anything time or financially effective that one can do to result in the war ending faster? Or reducing the number of people who die in the long run.
What is Putin's aims/decision calculus.
Is there a way to figure out how much support Russia has in different areas of the Donbass/Luhansk/Crimea. Is that support mixed around or concentrated?
Is a stable resolution to the conflict possible, if so what might that look like.
Russian state media propaganda is really well produced / persuasive, it seems most Russians are supportive of the war / state, and basically all possible internal threats to Putin have been killed / arrested / silenced since the start of the war. Are these statements true, and what implications does that have ?
----Russian state media propaganda is really well produced / persuasive, it seems most Russians are supportive of the war / state, and basically all possible internal threats to Putin have been killed / arrested / silenced since the start of the war. Are these statements true, and what implications does that have ?
I think the situation is more complicated. From my observation propaganda works when you don't know much about the subject. So I think that many Russians do not buy propaganda when it is actually about Russian Federation, but believe what they are told about NATO plans and such.
I think there is a vocal minority in Russian society that is pro-war, and have a full understanding of what is happening there (with their own biases of course, similar to pro-Putin people here). Then there is a vocal anti-war minority, but these people are in serious danger and do not have that much radical component. Then comes the majority that is super conformist, hopes that the war will end soon, does not see themselves as responsible, and tries to believe that "we're the good guys here" — but it is more of a coping mechanism.
I've noticed that there is something that for many Russians is hard to acknowledge — atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol, recent bombings in Kremenchuk, and so on. They cling to any conspiracy theory that this didn't happen because otherwise, it breaks something in their view of the world.
About access to "independent" media — Youtube is not blocked in Russia, Telegram works too — and a lot of Russians have a smartphone or computer of some sort, so it's not as hard to get info.
And last point — there is convincing data that younger Russians (18-25) are overwhelmingly anti-war. The older, the more pro-war.
-- Is there a way to figure out how much support Russia has in different areas of the Donbass/Luhansk/Crimea. Is that support mixed around or concentrated?
First, you need to distinguish Ukraine controlled Donbas and Separatist areas.
For example, Severodonetsk had a population of more than 100 000 before the war, yet when the Russians came, only roughly 8000 were still there. Everybody else evacuated to mainland Ukraine or further West (to my knowledge).
In Separatist areas, 2/3rds of the population left between 2014-2021. Whether the people who are still there support Putin is hard to say, they may already have a distinct identity, that is not Russian and not Ukrainian. DNR/LNR are strict dictatorships, where general mobilization is run, contrary to Russia proper. I think that people there are quite weary of this whole situation but have no control over what is happening, living in a quasi-Stalinist state. That doesn't mean that they support Ukraine, though.
In Crimea I think Russians and ethnic Ukrainians are more pro-Putin than anywhere else, Crimean Tatars and other indigenous nations are against Putin.
>>What is Putin's aims/decision calculus.
I don't know to be honest. My guess is (totally unoriginal) that he wanted Ukraine to become second Belarus — install a friendly ruler. And if Ukraine is pacified then all other former republics will go back into the fold. That is absolutely rational, due to the Russian demography crisis, stagnant economy, and systemic issues — there is no way back to the "superpower" status except by annexation of neighbors.
Probably he understands now that this may not happen, but he can still destroy the Ukrainian economy (sea blockade is very important), chop off the southern part and bits of Donbas and test the West.
Another important issue is the "Crimean consensus". After the annexation of Crimea Putin enjoyed high support among Russians roughly for four years, until 2018. So this invasion tries to replicate that success.
A speculation that sounds somewhat plausible why Putin might want to destroy Ukrainian economy (and keep it in war state since 2014):
Living standards for the average Russian is/was much worse than for average Ukrainians. This is a potential threat for Putin. Russian citizen (not counting the elites) will not compare their living standards with the US or even Europe, because those are degraded societies in their (or at least Putin's) worldview. But Ukrainians are the same people as Russians, which only happen to live across the border, as Putin keeps on emphasizing. So if Ukrainians have much higher living standards than Russians, this is a much bigger source of discontent for Russians than if some other country has higher living standards. If Ukraine was just a peaceful and prosperous country, this would eventually threaten Putin's authority.
that is empirically untrue. Prior to the war Ukraine was considerably poorer in gap per capita than Russia.
Ukraine has a better Gini ratio, gdp per capita would not give a full picture. The point is, there is no such disparity between capital and the province in Ukraine, as in Russia. That’s why soldiers from underdeveloped parts of Russia would be amazed by some Ukrainian smaller cities and villages.
I do think, just looking at photos, that Ukraine looks more developed than the GDP suggests alright.
I think that it is not particularly about living standards in a purely material sense, because Moscow/St. Petersburg/Ekaterinburg are pretty affluent, but more about decentralization, more participatory institutions, and so on. A typical village in Western Ukraine is very nice, a typical Russian village (especially in depressive regions) is anything but.
I think what Putin fears is the de-sacralization of authority and power. Successfully protesting against a member of post-Soviet nomenklatura, voting for a Jewish standup comedian as a president, all of that destroys a certain societal consensus — "Higher-ups know what they are doing, we shouldn't interfere"
Nit: I think that's true of the *median* Russian vs. Ukrainian, not the *average*. Russia's average is skewed by the huge gap between residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and just about everywhere else.
But, yes, it's not healthy for Vladimir Putin to have a bunch of healthy, happy, relatively prosperous Russian-speaking Slavs living right next door talking to their friends and family in Russia about how much better things have been since they had themselves a little color revolution and gave democracy a try.
Ukraine was a democracy prior to the color revolution.
Ok, thanks a lot. That gives me a lot of direction on what I may cover in long-form content.
Again, I can't give a good answer to everything (or at least unbiased).
I'll try to answer them briefly.
1. Currently, I do not believe in any diplomatic resolutions. There is a massive gap between what the Kremlin wants and what the Ukrainians want (I mean most of the population, not necessarily the political figures). Key to the war ending on terms favorable to Ukrainians is support, material and financial. The problem is this support is costly –– the cost of weapons, financial help, and adverse effects of sanctions on the Western economy. So for this to happen, politicians in the "West" need to understand that their voters are ok with it.
So I recommend reaching out to local politicians and asking them about their position on Ukraine, asking them to pledge support, etc.
Something to understand about Ukraine is that the war would go on with or without Western help — there would not be a surrender. I don't believe in ceasefire either; it doesn't matter who is in charge, even if Zelensky is killed or anything else.
I am trying to improve my forecasting skills and I was looking for a tool that would allow me to design a graph/network where I could place some statement as a node with an attached probability (confidence level) and then the nodes can be linked so that I can automatically compute the joint or disjoint probability etc.
It seems such a tool could be quite useful, for a forecast with many inputs.
I am not sure if bayesian networks or influence graphs are what I am looking for or if they could be used for such scope. Nevertheless, I haven't exactly found a super user-friendly tool for either of them.
Does anyone have any ideas on such a tool?
Several tools for this exist; they're called probabilistic programming languages. These would include Stan, PyMC, and Turing.jl. JASP lets you do this with a GUI, but I tend to warn people away from it because it makes it very easy to think you know what you're doing when you don't.
That being said, the node-based interface you're thinking of wouldn't really work once you move onto anything even slightly more advanced than what you'd cover in the first week of a probability class, like updating on new observations when you have multiple unknown variables.
Thank you, I will give a look. I did found out a software called AgenaRisk that seems to do what I wanted, but it is extremely expensive.
https://www.getguesstimate.com/ might be close to what you want.
I think "Bayesian network" is the exact thing you are looking for. Here's one online tool: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~gbrown/bayes_nets/
Yes, bayesian network and influence diagrams seems to be what i was looking for
The last time I saw this comment I had a thought that you could probably do something like this with gnu r, although it would be pretty hacky and r is pretty old at this point, who knows if people still use it
Since you haven't had any replies yet I figured I would throw out my probably crappy suggestion
Do you know of a truly international news site? Sth. that has no specific geographical focus. Or can you recommend news outlets which cover one continent or some part of it?
The Economist is perhaps not entirely international in focus, but has sections dedicated to news on each Continent and does a good job of covering a wide breadth of news.
Thanks! This will help me diversify my sources a lot!
The Christian Science Monitor leans slightly toward the US, but even just now it has things from Tunisia, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe on the front page. I'd recommend giving it a look.
Based on replies such as AP, Al Jaz and Wikipedia, and not having come across any myself, I think the answer to your question
Is that there isn’t really one.
I always liked the world coverage of The Economist, although it's certainly West -oriented.
Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia's current events portal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Try Associated Press
I assume that a fairly large number of readers of ACX were brought into the Dall-E beta in the last week. Anyone have any big insights?
I have mostly been hoping to use Dall-E as a tool to assist with crafting collateral for tabletop RPGs -- for example, I hoped to make character portraits, evocative pictures of settings, and perhaps maps. Some experiences:
1. Dall-E's content filters for violence are a hindrance. Mentioning a weapon (like "war mace") will sometimes get your prompt thrown out, even if you are looking for a portrait of a single character just holding it.
2. I have not found it to be really able to create the kind of outfits that I'm looking for for classic D&D-style games from just a text prompt. It's much easier to use an image prompt to get it into the right general search space and then use the editing tools.
3. Dall-E had pretty strong biases against some of the "almost realistic, but with one feature that's fantastic" things that you commonly see in fantasy. For example, it doesn't really like to show people with pointy elf ears, and if you do a variant on a picture with pointy ears, my experience is that all the variants will have normal ears. I tried to get it to draw a fox with multiple tails with very little success -- Dall-E knows how many tails a fox has, and it's one!
4. I got a lot better results with portraits when I basically treated the face and the rest of the portrait as separate problems. Dall-E struggles with faces, so you're pretty unlikely to both get a good face and a good everything else you want in a single pass. Instead, I've learned to work on getting a good "everything else," then edit the image, erase the face (or the part of it that seems bad), and try a few passes at getting Dall-E to just create a good face.
The diversity update seems to lack nuance https://mobile.twitter.com/MrNeilScott/status/1550468892165816320
I quite like the quirks as a spur to creativity.
Indeed it did - simply poisoning user prompts by appending 'black woman' with some random chance is anything but subtle.
I have a new update on my attempt to predict the outcome of Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous prediction here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-229/comment/7240004.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 10 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian victory 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 losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
29 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 25 % on June 20).
63 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 65 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what 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 became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
It surely seems that predictions of Russia-doomers (like Kamil Galleev, but I have Twitter blocked, so don’t ask me for examples) how Russian collapse is just around the corner are not panning out.
Italian government collapsed and there will be new elections on September 25. Italy is third largest EU country, very important in its decision-making processes. I know little about Italian politics, but from foreign reporting it seems like ousted prime minister Draghi is, in Italian context, something like a Russia hawk, and among Italian parties there is almost no one who would want to do MORE to support Ukraine (unlike in Germany), so election are going to result in either “no changes” or a government with an attitude more conciliatory to Russia (happy to be corrected on this).
On the other hand, Ukraine, and Western support for it, is not on track to collapse either. Possible opening of Black sea ports might help Ukrainian economy. Since my previous update, fivethirtyeight.com unveiled their prediction of US congressional elections, with Democrats currently having 15 % chance to retain the House; that is higher than I guessed based on Biden's approval rating. I think that if Republicans win, probability that US gradually and subtly scales down its support for Ukraine increases, since Biden will look for ways to “change course”, as US pundits say. And it is rather unlikely that he would change course in the direction of more support for Ukraine.
*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.
(1) As a thought exercise, how would your percentages change if "Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine" were defined in terms of Russia's stated goals at the war's outset? If the success condition were Russia were (a) the liberation of the Donbas, and (b) the "demilitarization and denazification" of Ukraine, what do you think are the % odds of that happening?
(2) I'd be cautious about relying on a Republican victory to meaningfully change course for the US in Ukraine. Currently only treasure is being spent, and we as a people (particularly our Republican friends and neighbors), are not historically good at connecting "the public treasury seems a little thin" with "wow we are spending a lot on the military." Plus, although there is an "America First means isolationism" strain in the Republican Party, there also is a *lot* of militarism and foreign policy maximalism in those ranks. It seems to me that a victorious Republican party will most likely to be a two-headed monster for the Biden Administration, with as many voices criticizing *failure to do more* for Ukraine as criticizing overinvestment there. If that happens, the administration has the luxury of appearance that it is navigating a middle course between two extremes, providing cover to continue the status quo until at least the 2024 election.
Ad 1) I would have to change them to "indeterminate", since those demands are so vague. What does in mean to denazify a Slavic country whose president is of Jewish ancestry? Even borders of what constitutes Donbas are unclear.
Ad 2) I agree, I think that changing the course is only a possibility, by no means certain.
(1b) A plausible interpretation of Russia's demand to "denazify" Ukraine is: Russia gets veto power over Ukrainian leadership. Russia could declare any politician in Ukraine a Nazi, even if they're Jewish, and Ukraine would have to replace them with someone Russia does not consider a Nazi.
(1a) The Donbas refers to the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They have well specified borders. Russia did not just want to liberate the Donbas at the beginning. Their goal was Novorussyia. The borders of this are less clear, but you could take something like: Russia or its proxies control at least 90% of the territory of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizha, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv Oblasts.
What do you think the odds of these three things happening: Russia gets veto power over Ukrainian leadership, Russia or its proxies control at least 90% of Novorussyia, and Russia or its proxies control all of the Donbas?
Donbas is short for Donets coal basin; its firm identification in Western media with Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (i.e. provinces) is a new, and by that I mean few months old, development. Before the war, "Donbas" in Western media often meant just separatist controlled regions of Ukraine, entirely located within those provinces, but not constituting whole of them. As Wikipedia says, "There are numerous definitions of the region's extent.[11] It is now most commonly defined as the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. The historical coal mining region excluded parts of these oblasts, and included areas in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Southern Russia.[7]".
1a) I think there is less than 5 % chance that Russia gets veto power over government controlling Uzhorod (Ukrainian city near Slovakia, west of Carpatian mountains). There is, on the other hand, very high chance it gets veto power over de facto government controlling Mariupol; let's say, 80%. It will not be called Ukrainian, though. Other cities east of the Dnieper, like Kharkiv, are somewhere between those two extremes. I.e. question is complicated by the fact that Ukraine is likely to be split between different governments.
1b) At least 90 % of Novorussia - 10 % chance (There is a somewhat higher chance that they manage to briefly occupy it, but then give part of it back as a part of a peace deal, in exchange for something), whole of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces - 50 % chance.
According what I read, a lot hinges on Ukrainian major counter-offensive, the date of which has been slipping since Spring, but which will probably have to start someday. Nobody seems to be sure if Ukraine actually can stage it, so there is still chance that all the talk will come to nothing, but personally, I don't think so (let's say I'm about 75% sure that a we will see counter-offensive before the year ends). Without that test of strength, there can be no final position for peace negotiations.
A complete rout for either side is unlikely, but there are a lot of possible outcomes in between, some of which might make negotiations more or less likely.
A major Ukrainian victory (e.g. if they manage to recapture a big city, or a whole region) would be a shock for Russia, which will either lead to a fuller commitment to war, or pave a way to negotiations. Former is more likely, as a mobilization might be less unpopular than admitting a defeat, in the end. This will prolong fighting for quite some time, maybe years, as the West will be emboldened by Ukraine's victory, and might renew its support.
A major Russian victory (e.g. Russia at least manages to more-or-less hold the line while inflicting very heave casualties on Ukrainian forces) might prove to Ukrainian leadership and its western backers that the fight is over. That, in my opinion, might make negotiations more likely, but the question is, will Russia accept its current gains or use the momentum to push for more (specifically, Odessa). That, in turn, will depend on the damage Ukrainians manage to inflict during the counter-offensive and the state of Ukrainian forces afterwards.
A minor victory for either side, a stalemate, or a lack of a major action will leave situation as it is, where Russia slowly advances. Nobody, but the top HQ staff probably can say where this advance will end, but negotiations in this case will be unlikely for quite some time.
Well, there is also a funny case (pushed by some propagandists) where Poland and Hungary will divide what's left of Ukraine with Russia "for protection". I think this is very, very unlikely (despite some strange recent laws that allow Polish citizen the same rights as Ukrainian citizen in Ukraine), but it would be an interesting development if it happens. In a way, it's a best-case scenario for both Russian and Ukraine, as Ukraine gets EU and NATO membership (by being a part of EU and NATO countries), and Russia gets to claim a total victory (as there is nothing left to conquer). If this was a book, and not a real life, I'd bet on this happening, but well...
ISW coverage has been pretty good, and they indicated Saturday that “Ukrainian forces are likely preparing to launch or have launched a counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast as of July 23,” so we may know soon if there is an offensive or how successful/unsuccessful it will prove to be.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-23
I suspect that most even western Ukrainians would not like to be integrated into Poland. Polish and Ukrainian cultures are different (admittedly northwestern Ukraine is more similar to Poland than the rest of the country, but still), and there are long-standing historical.... problems between them. And no one except Magyar minority would like to be integrated to Hungary.
Otherwise though I think your analysis is spot on. If Ukrainians are serious about reconquering lost territory, they kind of have to do a counter-offensive, which is more likely than not going to end badly for them. Hence my pessimism about their chances.
There isn't going to be a serious counter-offensive because the Ukrainians no longer have the forces to counter-offend with. They haven't been able to stage anything above the tactical level since the Spring, and in any event their objectives are not primarily military, they are to keep the conflict going by continuing to attract western support, and, as a by-product, start creating the myth that the Ukrainians would have won if only the West had supported them more. The Russians are trying to win a conventional military victory, which means the destruction of the UA as a fighting force, since they are not interested in taking territory as such. The pattern so far has been for small Ukrainian attacks with lots of publicity, which the Russians normally allow to develop and then pull back. Once the Ukrainians have moved into position the Russians then hit them with missiles and artillery, the Ukrainians retreat and the Russians move back in. This makes sense from the Russian perspective, because if faced with a choice between attacking the UA dug in in defensive positions prepared over many years in urban areas, and letting them attack over open ground, you don't need to be Clausewitz to prefer the second.
This is an attritional war, therefore, and not much is left of the UA as a high-intensity armoured force. You can't train mechanised brigades in a few weeks, even if the equipment and the ammunition was there. UA ammunition stocks are nearly exhausted and they have received a whole pile of different, often elderly, western systems, for which they don't necessarily have the ammunition, the spares or the training. So we're quite close to the situation of, say, January 1918 in Europe, when the German Army started to fall to pieces. Here, it's worse because you can have hundreds of thousands of untrained reservists and grannies with AK47s, but sending them East to fight a modern mechanised force with command of the air is just butchery. As a result, once the heavily fortified and defended area in the Donbas is cleared, the UA simply won't have the forces left to oppose any move the Russians want to make. The betting at the moment is they'll finish taking control of the Russian-speaking rebel areas, and then, but possibly not until next year, move to take the coast as far as Odessa. They should be able to do that with very little fighting, as long as they continue to grind the UA down.
Are you in Ukraine? Are you on the frontlines? You are just repeating the whole Russian propaganda "voenkor" scene.
" Once the Ukrainians have moved into position the Russians then hit them with missiles and artillery, the Ukrainians retreat and the Russians move back in. This makes sense from the Russian perspective, because if faced with a choice between attacking the UA dug in in defensive positions prepared over many years in urban areas, and letting them attack over open ground, you don't need to be Clausewitz to prefer the second. "
Any proof that this actually happened even once?
There are a number of online resources that you can use to track the progress of fighting on a daily basis, if you can read a map and understand military symbology. The most pro-Ukraine site is https://liveuamap.com, which is generally seen as giving the official Ukrainian view. If you track the changes from day to day, you'll see on several occasions the pattern I describe: UA advance, Russian retreat, UA retreat, Russian advance. Other sites give more pro-Russian interpretations of essentially the same data. I think the one that's probably regarded as most objective by military experts is https://defensepoliticsasia.com, based in Singapore and therefore with no direct axe to grind. They are very good at explaining their sources and acknowledging when they are not sure of something. Today, for example, they are reporting both Ukrainian and Russian offensives on the Kryvyi Rih Front, so the key will be to follow these offensives over the next few days, and to see if, and how far, they are sustained.
I'm not so sure. First, there were rumours about Britain and possibly other countries training UA recruits for several months. Whether this training is any good without actual combat experience remains to be seen, but at least those people might be able to use modern weapons competently. Some also suggest that NATO countries might even send their own troops under the guise of NATO-trained Ukrainians.
Most importantly, though, UA government must see that it cannot win the war of attrition by now. So an all-or-nothing offensive might be the only card left to play to stop the creeping Russian advance and maybe eke a bit more help from the West.
And another conspiracy theory to add to the mix: maybe Zelensky is all ready to negotiate, but he needs to get rid of most nationalists who are hard-set against it, preferably in a final manner, by letting them die in a fanatic charge against Russian positions.
Due to the excessive govt bonds that Italy has they have little excess capacity to spend on distant military matters, probably the Netherlands and Poland are bigger players on Ukraine topics in the EU.
Well, Poland obviously sent far more weapons to Ukraine than Italy. But Italy is important because it has almost complete power to block any collective EU decision. We are seeing how Hungary alone is able to soften EU sanctions, and Hungary is a small country heavily economically dependent on pipelines going through Ukraine.
I do not see any chance of Italy electing a pro-Russian government. They do not have any reason to get in the EU's way over this, the bonds are much more important to them and that requires Northern European support.
Hungary is in a far worse position in this respect, though, and yet
I think any kind of negotiated peace agreement now has a vanishingly small probability, simply because the Ukrainians have nothing much left to negotiate with. But the larger structural problem is that any peace agreement is a treaty, and a treaty can be denounced or simply not implemented (look at Minsk 1 and 2). A Ukrainian agreement not to join NATO signed tomorrow would be effectively meaningless. Moreover, Ukraine was probably more of a "real" NATO state before 24 February than, say, Portugal, despite not being a formal member. The Russians are pretty clear that they are fed up with all this and intend to create facts on the ground. They are also very clear that the longer the war goes on, the harsher the terms will be - which is not surprising given what usually happens in history.
But I would say that I think the chances are very high that there will be a solution that both sides can *claim* as a victory. Indeed, for the West this has been clear from the start: the western political ego will accept no other outcome. So we can already see a fantasy scenario developing, where the Russians were "really" always intending to take Kiev and the whole country, and possibly the Baltic States as well, for all I know, and the heroic resistance etc. etc. and the unprecedented efforts by NATO etc. etc. frustrated Putin's vile designs. I don' t think that, whatever the reality, an outcome involving acknowledged NATO failure can be permitted: it would destroy too much and too many careers. In a sense therefore, at least rhetorically, victory has already been decided.It's just the mundane reality that needs appropriate manipulation.
>> I don' t think that, whatever the reality, an outcome involving acknowledged NATO failure can be permitted: it would destroy too much and too many careers.
It's interesting that you think that the war will end with NATO leveraging a fantasy scenario to save face, because I’ve believed pretty strongly for some time that that shoe is very much on the Russian foot. Remember, when the invasion was launched, the stated goals were to: (a) liberate the Donbas, and (b) “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine.
Russia now occupies the Donbas and other territories (goal A, check). But ever since the failed push on Kyiv it’s been pretty clear that there isn’t much prospect for success when it comes to “demilitarizing and denazifying” Ukraine. Western weapons keep pouring in, and although the fact that the Ukrainian regime wasn’t a Nazi one to begin with affords Russia a certain flexibility to claim “successful denazification” whenever it wants, it remains unlikely that Russia will be able to actually replace the current Ukrainian government with a pro-Russian one.
So faux-nazi references aside, it seems pretty clear that the “demilitarize and denazify” goal is unlikely to be achieved. And that is the one that actually matters from a Russian security perspective. Consider 3 scenarios:
(1) an Anti-Russian oriented Ukraine exists, and includes the Donbas and the territory currently occupied by Russia,
(2) an Anti-Russian oriented Ukraine exists, but does not include the Donbas or the territory currently occupied by Russia,
(3) there is no anti-Russian oriented Ukraine, because Russia successfully topples the current Ukrainian government and replaces it with a pro-Russian one.
From a Russian national security perspective #3 is obviously and dramatically different from #1 and #2, but honestly, how meaningfully different are #1 and #2 from each other? If Ukraine with an oppositional stance to Russia, steadily undergoing decommunization and courting the EU and NATO was a dagger pointed at the heart of Russia, how meaningfully has Russian security improved by just making that dagger 20-30% smaller? How much more secure is Russia if American, Polish, British forces et al could still theoretically launch an attack on Russia from Ukraine, but would need to travel a few hundred more kilometers because the Donbas is already in Russian hands? As the crow flies, the launch point would be Kharkiv anyway.
So at war's end, whenever it comes, it seems to me that a Ukraine that survives in almost any form without a regime change can say “holy shit we fought Russia and survived.” And a NATO that funds/supports a Ukraine that manages to survive without a regime change can point to Ukraine still standing, even if significantly diminished in territory (together with all the blood and treasure Russia will have expended in the process), as a success. But a Russia that fails to achieve a regime change in Kiev either has to acknowledge to its populace that all the loss and cost of the war was taken on for only marginal-at-best gains for Russian security, or try to convince its populace that it “really only ever was trying to protect the Donbas.”
So I agree with you insofar as the trend towards and endgame where both sides of the conflict try to "claim" a victory, but it seems like unless things change and a regime change becomes a more viable goal for Russia, it seems like Moscow is the one who will have the biggest gap between the narrative they need to claim in the war's aftermath and the "mundane reality." Certainly more than NATO would need to given that it hasn't even committed troops to the fight.
-Russia now occupies the Donbas
Ehh no, Russia controls now less of Donbas than separatists in May of 2014. Ukrainian forces are still in Avdeevka, close to Donetsk city.
-(3) there is no anti-Russian oriented Ukraine, because Russia successfully topples the current Ukrainian government and replaces it with a pro-Russian one.
I don't see this happening without full occupation.
Russia doesn't need to topple the government to demilitarize Ukraine for the near-term -- destroying/killing most of the Ukrainian military infrastructure/soldiers in a grinding war of attrition would also do it.
True, but unless the government of Ukraine is changed, the biggest danger Russia expressed national security concerns about (Ukraine aligning with NATO) would remain largely unmitigated, and the more of the Russian-aligned east Moscow bites off, the harder it will be to change the alignment of whatever rump Ukraine remains after the war ends.
"I think any kind of negotiated peace agreement now has a vanishingly small probability".
What do you expect will happen instead? Russia just annexing the whole of Ukraine? It seems incosistent with your second paragraph, and war can hardly last forever. Imho some sort of an agreement is virtually inevitable.
Why can't the war last forever? Or at least something big happens in Russian politics.
Due to attrition it is possible that the war activities are severely diminished but not completely stopped. Ukraine is getting more western help to destroy all immediate Russian targets but Russia continues to shell Ukrainian cities once in a while. It could become a frozen conflict without any side making any concessions or agreements.
Russia is burning through weapons and ammunition faster than they can hope to replace them, e.g. losing four years of tank production in four months. So is Ukraine, and it's not clear that NATO can keep up the difference. The "war" can go on forever if it turns into something like the "war" that was fought from 2015 to 2021. But the sort of high-intensity war that we're seeing now, that ends when one side or the other runs out of guns, shells. or men willing to stand up to being shelled. And that's unlikely to be more than a year from now, probably less.
All wars end, eventually. Sometimes it takes decades, though.
The distinction is between a negotiated settlement where both sides give up something, and the terms of a negotiated surrender. Think the end of the war in 1945, rather than, say, the end of the Korean War. There will have to be some detailed negotiations, because there always are, but nothing substantial. The Russians have zero interest in taking Kiev or annexing the rest of the country, so the negotiations won't cover those points
Ok, I disagree, of course, but at least now I understand what you meant
War in 1945 would be require a heck of a trend reversal. That war ended with the fall of Berlin, regime change, and total occupation of the loser by the victor.
Japan likewise surrendered without assurances and was totally occupied.
Korean War seems much more like the analogous outcome, especially if as you say Russia has no desire to take Kyiv.
Is it a fool's game to be a kind and decent person these days?
I doubt there is much of an individual decision to make. For a person with average or higher talent for kindness and decency, it takes an effort to act disagreeable or unfair. Indivudially, life is harder for kind and decent people who try to avoid such efforts altogether. I wouldn't call that a fool's game. It's the price for the commodity of not having to practice something you have little talent and inclination for.
Other persons, to whom antisocial behaviour comes more naturally, can play important and well compensated roles providing leadership and protection to a majority. They are expected to rein their antisocial impulses in where their ingroup is concerned, of course.
Trust, But Verify is at least an OOM different than Verify, Don't Trust. There are real costs to the user of latter adversarial/defensive mindset; the one I hear about most often is losing the ability to trust at all, even when one really wants to (e.g. close interpersonal relationships, when seeking medical or mental health services, etc). So yeah, you avoid the false positive of Being The Fool a lot more often, but also end up leaving a lot more opportunities on the table cause the filtering's too strict.
I think it's entirely possible (and desirable!) to be kind and decent by default, but still train one's punching muscles so as to not be mistaken for an easy mark. Tit for tat, percent-likelihood defections in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and so on...yet Cooperate-Cooperate remains the usually-ideal long-term optimal equilibrium, and one has to take some chances on Kind and Decent to start that chain off.
There are certainly some fields of human endeavor where one necessarily has to at least have the *credible threat* of Going Cutthroat, because the competition is suitably intense and that's just table stakes...but I hardly think that's a fully-generalizable principle.
I've never got how people believed stuff like this. People generally really appreciate interpersonal kindness and decency, and the environments in which this isn't true are unlikely to be places where you'll be happy. But honestly, even in a stereotypically cutthroat world like business you're much better off being the guy people want to work with because you're honest and hardworking than the guy who screws over anyone he can (which works for some people but is high variance and unstable). Overall you'll have a much more enjoyable and less chaotic time with your work if you're being honest than if you're constantly lying to people or ripping them off.
Then you get to the stuff that you're actually going to care about on your deathbed, like your relationship with your spouse, children, and friends. All of these relationships are way richer when you're a kind and decent person, not to mention that is easier to find/raise similar people when you act that way.
People generalize from dramatic events in their own lives and those of others.
It only takes a few betrayals to permanently lower how good you feel about helping other people, I think.
It's a fool's game if you're a fool about it. There are millions of people out there ready to attack and take advantage of kindness and decency, but there are plenty who appreciate and respect it too.
As always, it depends on context.
I was very impressed recently, when I found myself lining up at a social security office, with how decent everyone was. In particular, there was a woman about my age, who'd got there before me (both of us before the office opened) to stand in line on behalf of her 94 year old mother. The doors opened before her mother arrived, so she let others in ahead of her. Once the old lady arrived, the person who would have been next said "she goes first" and waited while she got out of the car. The daughter wasn't allowed to wait with her mother (covid rules), but was allowed to come in to assist her. When the old lady's number was called, she didn't respond, so two different random people stood up and pointed "its her", and the security guard fetched the daughter.
There was also no line jumping, and a lot of people repeating what was said by staff at the door to people farther back in the line. (There were plenty of folks with poor hearing, some of them equipped with hearing aids.)
I don't see any fool's game there. Helping the old lady and her daughter was the right thing to do. So was helping others in the line.
The moral of the story: If you believe in kindness and fairness, you end up on welfare. If you believe in brutal cutthroat competition, you end up a CEO.
Nah. I was a case worker for two years. There's a lot of totally selfish assholes with no friends on welfare who have no personal social safety net because they burned every bridge in their lives.
*blink* You believe social security - which mostly provides for old folks - to be welfare? Even though anyone who earns wages contributes to both social security and medicare all their lives.
Not to nitpick, but Social Security *is* literally a social welfare program. Contributing to society an needing a welfare program are not mutually exclusive.
It's a social welfare program, but it isn't "welfare" in the normal usage of that term, which basically means "aid to poor people".
Colloquially, the difference tends to be based on means testing. If you need to prove you are poor enough to receive it, it's welfare (or charity, when not provided by government). If everyone gets it, or everyone meeting some non-monetary requirement, it's not.
Add some fuzz because politicians rarely use honest names for anything ;-) Then remove some of it, because e.g. "Aid to Families with Dependent Children", not being a simple baby bonus (money depending only on having children) got renamed "welfare" by just about everyone except the bureaucrats and politicians involved.
Before I digress into ideology, I'd like to continue nitpicking and point out that a lot of people relying on social security *are* "poor people", to the point where I fairly frequently see posts online talking about how elder poverty is A Problem That Gets Ignored And Should Be Addressed.
But yes, it was kind of my intent to point out that "welfare" is a term that's been corrupted by its use as a pejorative, and efforts should be made to destigmatize it - like using it as the correct term to describe programs like SS. Providing for the "common welfare" should be *the goal* of society. Turning that term into a pejorative is the kind of cartoon villainy that only politicians are capable of.
And beyond that, it should be emphasized that even the "poor people" on it often *are* contributing to society and the economy. There's a great number of underpaid service workers who are on welfare - people who (as covid forced the powers in place to recognize) are literally "essential" to the economy. Even the derided "welfare queens" are providing a service to the economy, by producing young workers, without which we would be facing a demographic collapse similar to the ones caused by mismanagement in Japan and soon China.
(And yes, some of them are freeloaders. But that's not a problem inherent to welfare, it's a problem inherent to organized systems. It's not like capitalism in general doesn't have a ton of freeloaders, fraudsters, and financial criminals, and most of those are afforded a much higher standard of living at a much more substantial cost to the commons. I'm not concerned about someone barely scraping by under the poverty line getting a few extra dollars they didn't "earn")
Farther fuzz because some programs have an earnings cap that's well above the poverty line. They generally are not considered welfare. E.g. the covid19 stimulus payments.
No, I just read your original comment really quick and didn't notice that until you pointed it out now.
A counter point would be this essay about being an "honest broker": https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1404821730120679424?lang=en
So people don't have to stop through Twitter, the essay is here https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-broker
It's pretty great for your community, just not ideal for your social media prescence.
Care to elaborate on the social media presence part?
Social media networks promote anger-inducing content more than any other category.
Is this a way of saying that you don't have an effective social media presence if you're not stirring people up?
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Trying to think of counter examples. Sadly, it's difficult. Neil Gaiman comes to mind though.
This is a sufficiently mystifying question to ask that I have to ask in turn -- where is this question coming from?
Hi Mo - the question is not coming from any personal sense of inadequacy or frustration. It's coming from the following observation - that as a person becomes more successful, wealthy, etc. there seems to be an invisible point at which personal decency is overpowered either by self-enrichment, obligations to a group or individual stakeholders, or ego. I'm thinking of politicians, entrepreneurs, etc. Hence the question about it being a fool's game.
Yes, this is a strawman but I'm interested to see how other readers dismember it.
Does everyone have his price, and if so what is it? Your question seems cynical. If you're right, does that mean our prisons are filled with principled people?
The question can definitely be viewed from a cynical perspective.
Me, I'm betting on Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney.
I think that the constant requests for charity and the targeting by grifters and schemers has a non positive effect on decent people.
Annoyance and tuning out.
I'd reverse the cause and effect. It can be difficult to remain kind and decent when achieving a certain level of success. because that success can easily thwart your kindness. .
I wrote the below the other day about politicians in response to another substack post on politics, but it could be applied to other fields as well.
In 1991, Vaclev Havel gave a wonderful speech about politics and morality. If I had to choose one excerpt, it's this: "Those who claim that politics is a dirty business are lying to us. Politics is work of a kind that requires especially pure people, because it is especially easy to become morally tainted." That speech plus a recent experience vote canvassing is the subject of a post I put out this morning on my free sub stack. I think it's relevant to this morning's French Press.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/peanut-gallery-vote-canvassing-vaclav
Fair point.
Apparently there's reason to believe that the whole edifice of Alzheimer's research has been built upon a fraudulent study.
Seems relevant to this blog, given the previous post about Aducanumab.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/22/2111914/-Two-decades-of-Alzheimer-s-research-may-be-based-on-deliberate-fraud-that-has-cost-millions-of-lives
https://wallstreetpro.com/2022/07/23/two-decades-of-alzheimers-research-was-based-on-deliberate-fraud-by-2-scientists-that-has-cost-billions-of-dollars-and-millions-of-lives/
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/w6wwxd/two_decades_of_alzheimers_research_was_based_on/
For a more measured take (from Derek Lowe, who's a long-time pharmaceutical chemist and generally insightful on these things): https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean
tl;dr: The amyloid hypothesis predated the fraud by decades and the fraudulent oligomer was never targeted in any clinical trials. Most of this money and time would likely have been spent anyway; the fraudulent data only added to the pressure on amyloid treatments, and even that probably not decisively in any way.
Many Thanks for both the link and the summary!
Would someone in the field please put the Nature paper into context? How influential was it, really? Without this fraud would we still have seen billions of dollars in amyloid targeted research? My impression is that the amyloid hypothesis would have still been pursued aggressively.
Derek Lowe did an excellent job on that here: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean
Yeah, this particular fake isn't key to the whole amyloid edifice.
Excellent. Thanks
I just want to say (that even without the malfeasance) it seems that science often errs by allowing one hypothesis to take over a field. All the money, talent and ideas are focused through this one hypothesis and that is often a mistake.
Yeah, it seems like the science community has an especially hard time taking a portfolio-based approach to lines of inquiry. More time should be spent finding under-appreciated hypotheses, or even betting against popular hypotheses, similar to value or short investing.
It's a kick in the nuts for the entire field, but I can't say I'm surprised by the news. The failure of any of the therapeutic candidates to produce a meaningful effect was a major warning sign that our understanding of Alzheimer's was very wrong. That it was wrong because of. fraud just makes the whole exercise even more galling. Billions of dollars were wasted because of this, tens of billions if not hundreds.
Yeah, absolutely maddening. Does anybody know how scientific institutions ended up responding to the mid-2010s reproducibility crisis? I remember hearing of inquiries and conferences to try to fix this, but it seems they may not have succeeded...
The "crisis" is at somewhat overblown
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708272114
That is a remarkably... optimistic piece. 1-2% of survey respondents admit to fraud, but the number is probably less? Not more, but less. That goes against all sorts of expectations, not least social desirability bias.
>https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation
Interesting comment from one of the researchers in question (first comment)
Thanks. If I'm reading her right, the only data point supporting AB56..(protein? peptide?) Is that it caused dementia type effects when injected into mice brains. And that result is from 16 years ago.
At what point do we draw a line and say, ok, *EVERYTHING* after this has to be re-verified, whether we suspect the authors of anything or not?
Would be most efficacious to do this after somebody has figured out how, exactly, we get all the relevant parties to agree to reverifying everything, and find reverification enthusiasts to carry out the process plus, of course, somebody eager to fund it.
I suspect that heart metaphors like "listen to your heart" and "my heart is telling me ___" may be describing an actual phisiological phenomenon.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
I also suspect that "listening to my heart" may be a learnable skill that can give access/control over the stress response at least as it relates to heart rate variability. Unfortunately, when I "listen to my heart" through meditation, all I hear is ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump.
Has anyone had any luck with this? Is this a worthwhile direction to explore?
By the way, a zen master once told me to "open my heart". I didn't quite understand that and didn't get far trying. Probably it is something like training emotional contagion. Or improving one's Theory Of Mind? Some neurotypical feature.
Maybe some people are able to approximately sense more features of their heartbeat than just frequency and contractility. HRV is a window to the vegetative nervous system, which can be used to get information about possible stress overload, for example in order to fine-tune training intensities. I have never heard about studies concerning direct experience of HRV, though.
If you like to try and develop more sensitivity to your heart functions, maybe biofeedback can be a way to go. Marco Altini's HRV logger app for example could give you real-time data.
It's not exactly a secret, but deliberately breathing slower will force your cardiovascular system to switch into a lower gear. I imagine you can do something similar by trying to breathe faster. This is a reasonable direct way to control what is often called arousal-- not the sort of arousal you might be thinking of, but the big picture psychological factor that goes from the rest state of sleep to the hyperactivity of heavy exercise. I would be extremely surprised if the cardiovascular system was linked to any emotional feeling that went beyond key stuff linked to arousal, like tiredness or excitement.
You mention downthread that you're interested in the link between the stomach and mood, which IME is a lot stronger. I often feel a lot different after eating well versus eating poorly. I don't think it's mechanistic exactly how you respond to one thing or another (probably the mechanism is which guy bacteria you are feeding and how well) but in general eating green vegetables, foods high in nutrition and fiber, raw fruits and vegetables, probiotics, etc. are all going to make you feel your best, and other foods or foods that are bad for you (basically those with a lot of added sugar, saturated fat, or salt) will make you feel bad in various ways.
The heart and stomach (guts) are in fact where a lot of emotions are felt. Most. The “upload your brain” guys seem to ignore this. If you are anxious and your heart starts to pound that isn’t your conscious brain telling you to be nervous, and may not be led by any part of your brain at all.
Beta blockers, which slow the heart, can have significant effects on personality.
A pounding heart is not an emotion. It may be a physical sensation associated with certain emotions, but we can feel anxiety absent a pounding heart, and a pounding heart can occur entirely absent anxiety. And you say "where a lot of emotions are felt". You've named one (non-emotion), and I cannot think of anything else which may be (mis-)construed as being an emotion.
And this is to say nothing of the fact that everything we experience takes place in the mind, not a a physical location in space. That your pounding heart is felt *in your chest* is an illusion, just as much the pain being felt *in your toe* when you stub it is. We know this from phantom limbs. In amputees, there's no neurons to "cause" pain, no tissue in which the pain can be felt at all, and yet the pain exists in these non-limbs all the same.
The pounding heart isn’t just on the brain, now is it. It can literally be measured by an ECG. It’s clearly happening where it is. It can be heard on extreme cases.
Anxiety and worry is clearly felt in the gut, not just the brain. Either that or my own body is lying to me, and the entire corpus of literature.
And a beating heart is part of the emotional state, of nervousness or love. Or whatever. Emotions are not felt just in the brain. We don’t logically think ourselves as falling in love or being anxious.
Happiness makes me smile. Does that mean the emotion is actually located on my mouth?
No. This is some sort of logical fallacy or other, probably avoiding the question.
We don’t feel emotions in our mouth - not directly. Not in the lip muscles. We do feel emotions in the gut.
That’s not the brain telling the gut what to do but the entire nervous system. If you want to stick to the mind then the mind isn’t just the software of the brain but the entire nervous system.
So I’m sticking to the gut and heart the as places we do feel emotion, emotions that cannot be felt by external actors, but can be observed by them.
I’m fairly surprised at the reaction to this, would have thought it was fairly obvious.
The basic notion of embodied cognition is mostly uncontroversial: I think we can all agree that with zero sensory input from anything below the neck, whether conscious or unconscious, our perceptions and feelings would be substantially different. But this does not imply that the heart and gut are necessary to feel emotions. Bariatric surgery, for example, doesn't cause emotional dysfunction.
If you want to argue that emotional sensations themselves can be felt in the heart and gut, then yes. This is as obvious as how stubbing your toe makes you feel pain in your toe, rather than in your head. But where your brain tells you a particular emotion is felt does not change that the actual processing of these emotions happens in the brain.
Since we lack any kind of senses for what happens inside the brain, where a certain function is located is fundamentally impossible to perceive. Therefore, any information we get about the location of an emotion must be fabricated. This means that the pain of heartbreak or the gut-churning of fear carries no information about the role of those organs in creating or sensing emotion. All the information we have indicates that it's only the brain.
I parse "listen to your heart" symbolically, which represents what some would call your "soul". Literally the thing in the center of your soulspace.
I'm only aware of people saying "I didn't know when people talked about heartbreak they meant actual physical pain in their heart after losing a loved one, but that's what it feels like," but that's the only seemingly-metaphorical-but-not heart-related sensation I can think of.
What I think might be the reason that 'listen to your heart' is an expression is that strong emotions are often expressed somatically, and more people than you might expect suffer from alexithymia, the inability to recognize their own emotions. If you lack this cognitive ability, then 'listening to your heart' might be a useful workaround, because it's much easier to identify physical sensations than cognitive ones.
I don't think this works in reverse, though. Sure, you can (probably) learn to control your heart's response to basic stressors, but that doesn't give you any special access or control over your emotions. The psychosomatic response only goes one way.
You could "offload" some emotionally-driven sensing to other parts of the body - feeling stress factors through their impact on gut/heart muscles or desire to tear up. Even if your brain activity might be impacted directly by them it is easier for consciousness to tie things to other discernable signals there, and adjust expectation of your own behaviour (like "i'm feeling stressed and need to withdraw before i lash out").
Or a difference between "I'm pumped with adrenaline and ready to fight back" (because body indicates resources to do so) and "Guess i'll just die/suffer because i have no strength to resist".
It definitely works both ways; but in some situations brain can create shortcuts where for known situations it goes straight to result without activating/waiting for usual body-wide response cascade first (or skipping a few steps). Similar to people instantly feeling pain when they expect pain even if they never were actually wounded.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'both ways'. I can definitely see how it can be advantageous for strong emotions to be felt physically, as the brain's way of telling you "Pay attention, this is what's important right now." It might even skip past trying to express that particular emotion cognitively. But I don't think that has anything to do with the nocebo effect, like when people with a fear of needles already feel pain if a needle so much as touches their skin.
I interpreted MoreOn's question as "Is 'listening to your heart' more than just a metaphor and can I benefit from practicing this skill?" My answer would be that, if it is more than just a metaphor, you might still not get any benefit from practicing it, because while your brain can express emotions through your heart, I doubt that a psychologically normal person (as loaded as that term is) could get more out of listening to their heart than out of thinking about how they feel. It's not like that channel magically gives you more or better information about your mental state.
My idea is that by practicing "heart rate control" to achieve certain state of mind you can train your mind to skip straight to that state on cue (with or without heart rate being actually affected).
Initially it'll be "i'm calm because my heart rate is steady; if i slow my heart rate i become calmer", and later you can skip straight to being calm and heart rate and other responses following it rather then leading it.
Everything about the sentence is pretty much wrong, or not exclusive to Christianity.
In any case I’m not positing a soul but whether the heart, stomach etc are part of the human emotional system, whether we feel emotions there or not.
On his page in Lorien Psychiatry (https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/), Scott says that electroconvusive therapy has a basically-100% success rate in treating depression, the closest thing we have to a miracle cure. However, when I had ECT, it didn't help at all; I spent a month in a very confused state of mind, and then my depression returned in full force. Why could that happen? What are some of your hypotheses? Or was I just one of the year's unlucky 100 000?
Direct quote: "But ECT is extremely effective. I’ve seen it completely cure the most difficult patients, people who nothing else has worked for. It doesn’t have a 100% success rate, but it’s as close as you’re going to get. "
I think it is important to note that depression is really hard to treat, so just being the closest treatment to 100% doesn't mean much. Also, and I don't know any details about ECT, I'm just making a dumb suggestion, this does sound like the kind of thing that could require some tacit knowledge. Maybe the person you went to just didn't know how to use the machines properly.
I loathe psychiatry and have probably met antipsychiatry advocates who had ECT. I
but the one *pro-ECT* person I've known has taken it I don't know how many times. so, I have to think, how well could it have worked?
two things worth noting: 1) ECT does get given to people against their wills on occasions. 2) ECT, as I far as I know, always injures the brain (hence the memory loss).
my prior: I loathe psychiatry. really loathe it. ECT in particular.
Kinda weird for you to loathe psychiatry and be in a community rallied around a psychiatrist
true, but I can live with that contradiction.
Maybe Scott was wrong. He's not omniscient.
One of my relative's mother also had ECT and it had no significant effect. I didn't expect it to work though because she had long-term mental problems and the doctors decided on ECT as the last effort.
Maybe if you use ECT as an alternative to other treatments it has better success rate because you are using it on people who have reasonable chance of recovery. Similarly, if you had a very effective cancer drug (for whatever specific cancer type) but you would decide to use it only on terminal stage 4 disease. It would mostly fail then despite being shown very effective for stage 2 or 3.
I think you may be right. I only know of 3 people who have had it. All of them were people who had depression plus other diagnoses (PTSD, OCD, Borderline Personality Disorder . . .) and had been in bad shape for years, in and out of hospitals. They weren't ideal candidates for ECT, but docs offered ECT in hopes that it would help. 2 were unhelped. The third became outrageously manic, for only the second time in his life: talking a blue streak, thought he was God. As a consequence of being manic he lost his apartment, where he was living with several housemates who cared about him, and his therapist. So that guy was definitely *harmed* by the treatment.
I suspect that the mechanism of action is closer to that of sleep deprivation (also a miracle cure for depression, until you sleep at least). I mean, maybe I wasn't depressed for month or two after my treatment, but I also can't _remember_ anything for about same period of time after my treatment.
I've described ECT elsewhere as having your essence blown into a cloud of a billion droplets that gradually settle to the ground and flow back into a MaybeLater-shaped hole. If the shape or location of that hole is in some way the cause of the depression, it's not surprising that the depression comes back when your essence reasserts itself.
"MaybeLater-shaped hole".
What a wonderfully accurate description.
I've never had ECT (one of the few awful things that haven't happened to me as a result of psychiatry) but this sounds like the ego dissolution I've undergone using psychedelics.
all I'll say. the topic of psychiatry and ECT in particular (even though I haven't had it and no one I know well has had it) (although one fellow inmate in an institution who I knew well did face the possibility... long story, though) never fails to piss me off so I won't say much more...
Epistemic status: fun speculation
We probably get better listening at to our guts as we get older because our stomach linings get thinner, and so we become more sensitive to changes in acidity
Any economist want to opine on whether raising interest rates is the best or fairest ways, these days, to fight an inflation that’s clearly not driven by wage increases. Is there really no other tool to fight inflation?
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/monetary-policy-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/
Thanks. Very interesting. I think link dumps aren’t encouraged here so a summary would have been handy. What I got out of it is that if the market believes that the fed is serious about raising interest rates then they may not have to raise them so much. Which is a great opt out.
There's no substitute for reading Scott Sumner regularly since he started blogging during the Great Recession, but the main point he has to keep hammering home is to stop focusing on interest rates. The popular press (and many commenters) associate high interest rates with tight money policies and low interest rates with easy money, but high interest rates are commonly found alongside hyperinflation and low interest rates alongside contractions. Milton Friedman told people what a mistake that was many decades ago, but people keep saying it anyways. There are some Neo-Fisherians who also reason from interest rates, just in the opposite direction of the conventional wisdom, and they are also wrong (it certainly hasn't worked in Turkey).
I have read some of his articles, not that impressed. The claim that inflation is always a monetary problem can be dismissed by looking at the past. In the 12th C, the reason for food inflation was always some form of crop failure. If crops failed, food inflation rose. People starved or reduced calorie intake.
The reason for food inflation today, in Europe at least, is the reduction in fertiliser use due to high costs driven by the war, the reduction in food exports from Ukraine, and reduced production in Europe due to droughts.
These factors influence the US as well.
To blame the money supply is to clearly mix up cause and effect, the amount of money is indeed too much, relative to supply, but it was supply that changed not the money.
If this ideology had existed in the 12th C Kings would have taxed the starving peasantry and explained that food prices were too high because they had too much money relative to food supply.
Had that happened Europe would have had anti monarchial revolutions long prior to the ones they actually had.
You talk about "food inflation", but inflation is an increase in the general price level, not one good. Here he distinguishes between some rather different kinds of "inflation":
https://www.econlib.org/stagflation-and-boomflation/?to_print=true
Inflation, at least in this case, is too much demand chasing too little supply. The best way to solve this is to increase supply. We've seen sporadic attempts to increase oil supply, but we have yet to see serious pushes on things like housing supply. There are also a lot of logistical bottlenecks as supply chains face strain and bottlenecks like ports choke imports.
If I were Biden, I would 1) invest as much as I can in increasing port capacity by any means, 2) figure out anywhere else that government is holding up supply chains, 3) create a national policy on housing production and work with governors and mayors to build more, 4) push for various alternatives to gas consumption like electric cars, alternative energy, or public transit, 5) try to find any way of getting more gas without fucking our geopolitical situation, and 6) repeal as many tariffs as possible as well as stupid shipping rules like the Jones Act. In rough order of priority, focused on what would probably move the needle for the basket of goods driving inflation.
But the straightforward part of this is that if you can't increase supply, the only way to halt inflation is to cut demand, and it's hard to find a way to do that doesn't just make everyone poorer, whether directly or as a second order effect.
I think this is largely right. I want to clarify a point and then break it down a bit further.
Inflation is less "too much demand chasing too little supply" than "too large a flow of money chasing too little flow of supply at the prices goods were offered at, causing prices to rise". I think that's important to distinguish because it lets you separate out all the components more neatly: there's the flow of goods (itself a quantity (capital stock) and velocity), the quantity of money (and changes thereto) and the velocity of money. There's also a politico-spatial component, in that goods in in Russia and Ukraine are no longer readily transportable to (in this case) the US, but for our purposes we can consider them to be unavailable after previously having been available. I don't like the "too much demand chasing supply" framing because demand is not what gets traded for goods, money is.
So let's take a simplified look at what happens before and in a "typical" recession (if there is such a thing). Let's say 1991 or 2001. Low interest rates led to lots of lending (which increased the money quantity because of fractional reserve banking). That lent money was spent on wages and capital goods in dubious industries (increase in velocity of money). Unemployment falls. But the wage-earners were spending that money on previously existing goods and services rather than the new goods and services. Prices in those goods and services rose (inflation!), the Fed raised interest rates, deposits looks better than risky investments. The quantity of money falls as loans are not rolled over. Businesses with marginal business plans being held up by debt and equity financing before start to go bust as the market realizes they were actually worthless. Unemployment rises as workers are laid off, the velocity of money falls, and inflation is tamed. (In 2001, people start finding that housing is the highest-returning asset they can put money into, the seeds of the next bubble are planted, but that's not really relevant except to demonstrate the cyclical nature of the business cycle.)
The key in this story is that everything that really changed was a monetary phenomenon. Money goes up, high-utility goods and services got more expensive. Money goes down, the supply of high-utility goods and services _was largely unchanged_, except insofar as the higher prices encouraged more production of those goods and services.
As a -short- long aside, let's take a -quick- look at the housing market crash. Similar story at the beginning, except that it's housing debt that was where all the extra money was parked, instead of in new business ventures. Housing, unlike internet company products in 2001, is actually valuable! But it was housing *debt* was in high demand as an investment for its ultra-stable returns underlain by the ability of ordinary Americans to pay their mortgages. Except that, well, that was illusory (and that was the banks' and ratings companies' faults for fraudulently producing and marking inferior products as superior to satisfy that demand). Bad debts needed to be written off. But the market was leveraged to such a degree that the quantity of money didn't just fall when that happened, it cratered like the Chixulub asteroid, doing what the lowered quantity of money did in 2001. Only this time it wasn't only to marginal businesses, but also to less marginal businesses that relied on short-term loans for ordinary operation, and even fully cash-flow positive business that didn't run on credit as everyone earlier in this sentence was laid off and the velocity of money dropped further and further. But if you had cash (and a secure income) in 2008-10, it was great! Housing was actually cheaper than it had been before because housing is a good with high utility at any time, and whatever goods-producing businesses were left had to lower their prices to keep their customers. In reaction, the Fed and federal government took various measures to increase both the velocity and quantity of money. Stimulus (velocity), zeroed interest rates (quantity), employment programs (velocity), Quantitative Easing I and II ad infinitum (quantity), bailouts (stop the velocity from falling further), TARP (stop the quantity from falling further), etc. Being not entirely unconcerned with the vast quantities of money that were being printed (because if velocity actually did pick up and quickly, the Fed also did something unheard of: they started paying interest on banks' deposits with the Fed. The message was "hey, here's trillions of dollars to keep yourselves and your good customers solvent, but if you're thinking of making more risky loans with all that money, we'll pay you not to do that, and we'll pay you more than the interbank overnight (FedFunds) rate so you don't get any ideas about helping out any of your fellow banks who aren't taking this message seriously." Whether that was necessary or not is debatable, but either the message was received loud and clear or the banks were very gun shy after the crash and didn't want to lend to anyone they weren't absolutely sure was good for it anyway, and both the quantity of money available to ordinary people (as opposed to on the Fed's balance sheet) was low and velocity of that money was slow for years, and we got the L-shaped recovery.
Overall, almost everything before and in the housing crash was a monetary phenomenon except for a minor overproduction of housing. The capital stock didn't change. The housing stock went up only a little bit. The flow of goods didn't really change until ordinary businesses were disrupted by the cratering quantity and then velocity.
Contrast with the late 70s or today. Yes, interest rates had been low for a while (much longer today). Yes, there's probably a bubble somewhere in the economy, but it hasn't popped. Instead we have an actual supply shock in highly useful goods. Oil production was cut in the 70s, and Ukraine and Russia are at war while China is locked down today. Supply chains have been disrupted for a myriad of reasons. So what's the look like under this framework? Well, it looks like both capital stock has been decreased (and in the case of Ukraine, literally destroyed), and the goods flow has been decreased by a fair bit. This is not a monetary phenomenon at all! We (global) are simply less wealthy and we (globally also but especially in the US) are less able to supply goods to consumers than before. Fewer goods command higher prices. This is not the same inflation as 1991 or 2001 or 2009. Which means that decreasing the quantity or velocity of money, while it will bring prices down, is going to cause a recession and unemployment, and then we have stagflation, because people still need to eat and buy staples, staples which we are still not producing. Under this interpretation, the 80-83 recession ended through a combination of the economy finishing adjusting to the lowered oil production, domestic oil production increasing as imports picked back up again... and there being no one left to lay off.
So this is not a money supply problem. This is a goods supply problem. We need goods supply solutions. Framed in this way, causing unemployment seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. The price signals that should tell entrepreneurs "hey, focus on domestic production of goods and supply chain-hardening businesses pronto, there's a lot of profit to be made," will be distorted by the decreased money quantity (and velocity, if unemployment goes up). So what gives? Why is the Fed raising interest rates and talking about raising interest rates even more?
continued in part 2
In QE, what's the quantity in the title?
The quantity of money. Instead of just increasing the supply by lowering the FedFunds interest rates, the Fed also buys long-term securities, and not just government bonds, on the open market, adding private debt to its balance sheet.
part 2 (sorry, max comment length):
Options:
• The Fed is raising interest rates because they don't believe that the price signals can work in time to increase capital stock and goods production domestically and give investors a return. The precise definition of "in time" is the big unknown in this case. It could be political (eg, before the midterms). It could be they think that the supply shock will end before investment in domestic goods production and hardened supply chains starts paying off, which will probably lead to lots of abandoned projects as the world returns to the old normal; they don't want to create a domestic-goods-production-and-hardened-supply-chains bubble that will pop. Maybe they believe a universal betacoronavirus or sarbecovirus vaccine is on a short horizon and will let us get back to our just-in-time supply chains a lot sooner than it looks like right now.
• The Fed is raising interest rates in order to cause unemployment to lower the cost of labor to make it easier for entrepreneurs to do supply chain-hardening and increase domestic goods production.
• The Fed is raising interest rates because the Fed is expected to raise interest rates when inflation occurs. As per the article TGGP linked to (grandparent-sibling comment) a large part of money supply management is expectations management. The whole thing is performative to try to deflate whatever the existing bubble is before it eats up more investment so the economy can better weather the supply shock.
• The Fed is raising interest rates because they don't understand or don't agree that this is fundamentally a goods supply problem.
None of these options are mutually exclusive. It could be a mix of any or all of them. Personally, I think they're wrong to be doing it. They should let the price signals through. Everything in the parent [edit: grandparent] comment is a good move (although I don't think 4 would be particularly useful towards this goal, but has other benefits), and I'd add that Biden should be using the bully pulpit to encourage entrepreneurs to get into domestic goods production and supply chain hardening ASAP. Maybe even get some token legislation to support it, a signal that investment in this area won't turn out to be pointless in a few years.
Or maybe the lack of such signals out of the administration is itself a signal that the first option is the actual answer. Are they communicating with the Fed about this sort of thing, or does that look too much like presidential interference with the Federal Reserve, and they avoid doing that for optics reasons? In which case, lack of movement in that direction from the administration may only signal its own confusion.
If anyone has any more answers to the unknowns, I'd certainly like to hear about them.
Yeah, I am in 100 % agreement with this. Above in my comment I just cut straight to the assumption that sufficiently increasing supply is impossible, so central bank has to increase interest rates or we have to find another way to decrease demand. But I have to admit that it is a false assumption.
There's a whole school of thought on how to increase supply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics
I know Biden doesn't want to ever use those words, but he can pick parts out of it and implement them while calling them something else.
Kind of, but even that article dedicates only a single paragraph to anything that isn't tax policy. It's really not a great name for actual measures designed to increase supply. And most of its non-tax low-hanging fruit has already been adopted - containerization, globalization. About all that's left on the non-marginal income tax rate policy is tariff reduction.
I wouldn't be quite so harsh. To start with its natural to think from the point of view of the central bank, which is limited to monetary policy and not fiscal policy, and the traditional macro assumption that monetary policy only changes supply in the long run makes sense here. I also think as a matter of political economy it makes sense to have the Fed be the primary respondent to inflation, assuming that politicians don't really understand what to do about it.
Also, it depends on what walls you throw up in the name of "political infeasability." I am sort of joking when I say that if increasing supply is politically infeasible we ought to just raise taxes, because of course raising taxes is the most politically infeasible thing the government can do. But if you assume enough things are politically infeasible then you just get into the weird dance of finding ways to make people poorer which won't be immediately obvious, which I don't think is really a good or sustainable way of doing policy most of the time.
Can somebody ELI5 the connection between interest rates and inflation? Or rather ELI somebody who vaguely understands micro and knows that higher interest rates should mean less short-term inflation but not why that is.
(of course the actual method of setting the interest rate is OMO, which involves the central bank creating or destroying money and should obviously affect the rate of change of the stuff:money ratio. But it seems that the short tem lending rate between banks is an important enough part of this that it is used as a barometer of how much money to make or destroy? And Japan goes for 10 years instead of overnight rates for some reason?)
The simple high level explanation is that high interest rates give investors an attractive place to park their money, which draws investment dollars away from new investment and towards not doing much. This slows the economy on a bunch of different levels-- less growth overall, probably weaker wages via a few different pathways-- and slackens demand. It also pops speculative bubbles because those bubbles deflate as investors are drawn away from risk due to interest rates, which then triggers a panic among those who remain in the bubble. Hope that is helpful.
Well higher interest rates take more money out of the economy by increasing the cost of money. More money spent on interest repayments is less money in the general economy. Plus loans are less likely to be granted. It’s a sledge hammer, but it works. At a big cost.
Here’s a more complex overview.
https://theconversation.com/amp/how-raising-interest-rates-curbs-inflation-and-what-could-possibly-go-wrong-176426
Interest rates are the basic way fight inflation, but curbing government spending and borrowing, along with removing limits and retardants on production, are about the only real ways out going forward. In other words, create less money while allowing more goods to be produced. At root that is what is required. How well the gov controls the creation of money is another question, but it definitely has been wrecking peoples ability to produce.
Interest rates aren't a lever, they're just an indicator that changes in response to a policy. The exception is when the Fed introduced interest paid on excess reserves. The Fed typically conducts policy via Open Market Operations, buying & selling treasury debt. But they announce that they're targeting an interest rate. Other banks target an exchange rate.
That's true, the interest rates that are targeted are the results of policy not the lever itself, (with the exception of overnight loans). You should add repo-agreements to your list of actual levers, as those have become far more important than Open Market Operations. Writers such as Arnold Kling have argued that the repo market is the biggest lever for the Fed these days, and has been for the past two decades.
Federal government spending is about 30% of the economy in the US, so I'm skeptical that it's the main driver of inflation.
It's not the spending that matters, it's the overall stance of fiscal policy (mainly the deficit). If you increase demand, you create jobs in the short run and inflation in the long run; this is basically just the Keynesian Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply model you cover in introductory macro. This is why economists say you should borrow in a recession and pay those loans off in a boom: if you keep borrowing money in a boom you just get inflation, and then you have no tools to fight a slump in demand during the next recession. ATM we're in a boom with high inflation and very low unemployment, so the standard Keynesian response is to cut spending (or raise taxes, either works).
Fed gov doesn’t act alone. States are also heavily debt financed.
That’s the spending side. Production wise we have hosed up production across multiple margins. Between lock downs, restrictions on eg oil drilling, regulation generally, etc. production is held down. Overall supply chain issues from other governments doing the same cause problems.
So maybe the gov spending only causes 3-4% inflation. Maybe supply side is causing 3-4%. Together they are stacking to cause 8-10% because inflation is not linear with its causes.
The ways banks control and change the money supply is also not well understood by anyone, including the banks. Possibly their behavior is adding some issues too? Who knows.
When it gets down to brass tacks, however, prices are a ratio between the available amount of money and the amount of stuff to spend it on. If all the prices are going up, not just changing relative to each other, that means you have more money in the system, fewer goods to buy, or both. I am arguing for both in the current economy.
My whole life I heard people say that government spending and borrowing is too high and will create high inflation. But for the great majority of my life inflation has been very low.
How long has your life been?
There’s a lot of debate about why inflation didn’t kick in before and it is now. My guess is that world production growth was keeping up better before, then the COVID response ended that. Possibly there are level effects as well, or other nonlinear effects. Hyper inflation is definitely nonlinear for what it’s worth.
41. It was bad when I was born, and bad now, but in between mostly fine.
Ok so same as me; convenient, that. I think over the past 40 years the higher (till recently) interest rates, large increase in production through efficiency and putting plants in lower cost production areas (China, but some others) tied to a lot of investment going into US debt (keeping growth cheap), all that served to keep inflation lower than otherwise.
It is also worth noting that that last 16 years have seen a HUGE increase I gov. debt. We had surpluses for a bit in the 90’s. So the first third of our lives wasn’t so bad for deficit and debt as the last third.
Eh? Creating money surely increases production on aggregate.
Not at all. It might short term, but once people realize there is not more stuff but just more money prices adjust. If production is near capacity, which it often is, more money does nothing.
Not necessarily? It might make the production be of more legible things (i.e., "people will start building whatever you've created the extra money to pay for, instead of what they were building before"), but that doesn't on its own imply that the previous use was less productive overall.
If you mean raising interest rates to put up prices to stop people buying things, then that's a strange way to fight inflation. If you mean the old 1980s idea that there's a mystical relationship between inflation rates and the money supply and that you can measure and even control the latter through interest rates, then that's largely forgotten now. The position is complicated by the fact that central banks have been handing out money zero interest for years now in hope of kick-starting the economy, but the money has gone to banks who have used it in complicated financial gambles now becoming unravelled. It hasn't gone to ordinary people.
Are you arguing that when the Fed says they have a target of 2% inflation, and they will adjust interest rates to meet that target, they are using an old largely forgotten 1980s mystical idea? Or they are using a strange way to fight inflation?
I don't think the person you're responding too has a good understand of monetary economics, but the Fed is in a bit of an interesting bind. Basically, the central banking system created in the 20s (and existing basically everywhere by the 50s) was premised on the Phillips curve, the idea that there is a tradeoff between having low inflation and low unemployment. Thus, the Fed has a "dual mandate" to control both inflation and unemployment, standardly by keeping unemployment at NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment).
Since then, we've discovered that the Phillips curve, like a lot of older economic concepts, is only true under certain stylized assumptions. When the economy rises quickly inflation usually goes up, and when the economy falls quickly unemployment usually goes up, but there are tons of intermediating factors. So the Fed is now in charge of controlling both inflation and unemployment but the internal logic as to why those to factors was chosen doesn't work well. The Fed can control both via interest rates and other tools, of course, but another problem that comes up is that both inflation and unemployment are hard to measure-- its a little arbitrary exactly what goods you include in your inflation index and who you count as unemployed.
One issue that's come up more in recent years is NAIRU. While the Fed has a target for inflation of 2%, their target for NAIRU has gone down over the years as they've tried to model it better. During the Trump admin, the unemployment rate went way under what economists thought it could do without inflation happening. It's not easy to say why but it probably has to do with Jerome Powell, chair of the Fed, turning the Fed towards more expansionary (anti-unemployment) policy relative to the previous ten years of Fed policy which was more worried about inflation.
There are various proposals for how the Fed could change its targeting, and these proposals often involve binding the Fed to respond mostly automatically to changing macro variables. But also the current Fed is doing, you know, fine. It's set up in a way that is now not really justifiable from first principles, but it can do its job of keeping the economy on a level path through monetary policy well enough.
Ok but central banks are in fact raising rates to combat inflation. I take it then that there is no other tool.
If the government is allowed to create stimulus by sending everyone a $700 cheque, I'd like to see it do the opposite by sending everyone a $700 tax bill (to be paid within a month).
The government could debase the value of everyone's savings by increasing inflation to reduce the value of the savings.
Or you could have an adjustable ubi loosely determined by gdp.
They're allowed to do that but it does tend to cause unrest. (Peasants' revolt, Poll Tax Riots etc.)
I don’t think a lot of people are getting that inflation is causing problems for people, and reducing their real disposable income. All solutions that make that worse are not going to be popular.
I am not an economist, but in one of the previous threads, I suggested temporary increase in the progressivity of consumption taxes - i.e. instead of targeting interest rates, Government Inflationary Fighting Authority would, in times of high inflation, lowered taxes on food and increased taxes on smartphones; and in it would do the reverse in times of low inflation. It should encourage saving since peopIe would postpone their iphone purchase until taxes would go down. It is of course entirely outside of the Overton window.
But I do not agree that current inflation is "clearly" not driven by wages (or more precisely, labor scarcity). It does play a role, although not as an only factor.
So to address the problem of people not being able to afford things, you're going to make them less affordable. What problem were you trying to solve again?
Inflation in most cases, or at least in the case of post-2020-pandemic inflation, is about too much money chasing too few goods. If anything the issue is that people can afford too much of goods-as-normally-priced. Adding on taxes is perhaps the most straightforward way to fix the issue. If you can't raise the supply of goods because its politically infeasible, the only way to solve inflation is to make people poorer so that demand slacks, and taxes are probably a more precise mechanism than interest rate hikes.
Politically untenable. In this case the too much money chasing too few goods isn’t because demand (ie wages) significantly increased but because supply decreased. So if my energy and gas (petrol) are $1000 dollars more expensive in this full year, and groceries costing an extra $500 I’m poorer in real terms. Taxing me an extra $700 isn’t going to help much with regard to my need for these necessities. It will however make me poorer again. Some people will, because of the lower demand, lose their jobs. I think people expect recessions after booms, but there hasn’t been a boom. Not in average wages anyway.
The external factors may even cause inflation to stay high even if you taxed me; the war and the tariffs, the mess that is post covid. China and it’s stuttering attempt to maintain zero covid. Stagflation is a disaster, and not something that can be nearly economically modelled. It’s going to be highly destabilising for Biden, who isn’t firing on all cylinders.
Alesziegler's proposed policy would have the effect of *shifting* the affordability of things from low-priority items (e.g. smartphones) to items which people need to buy right now (e.g. food).
TANSTAAFL, so we shouldn't expect there to be a magic solution, but this suggestion strikes me as a sensible trade-off.
Why are smartphones low priority in the modern age?
We would have to do some working out on this, it definitely would help the poor (that is if there are significant taxes on food in any given county or state) but might increase inflation on other goods. Whether or not we think it’s more worthy to spend on food rather than smartphones the level of inflation is measured from a basket of goods. I don’t think increasing taxes when inflation falls is tenable either.
Smartphones are low-priority because, usually, delaying the replacement of an old phone by a few months isn't much of a problem. Food is high-priority because, usually, delaying the purchase of food by a few months is a substantial problem.
Alesziegler's proposal (if I understand it correctly) is to fight inflation, by decreasing consumer demand, by encouraging consumers to postpone their spending ... but selectively, only on goods for which they *can* postpone their spending. Whether the expenditure is "worthy" is irrelevant.
Yea, this is exactly what I had in mind. My goal is to increase saving (i.e. what central banks more or less aim to do via increases in interest rates) without too many negative consequences for essential consumption, or long-shot investment, or employment.
You are the one arguing worthiness, not me.
This particular idea doesn’t fly if we can’t reduce taxes on food (that is they are low already), and it doesn’t reduce the inflation rate necessarily. Inflation isn’t just measured on food. It seems largely driven by the idea that poorer people will sacrifice food for smartphones, and this this tax change will make that harder. My feeling is in general that it will have no effect. The basket of goods cost stays the same. Inflation stays the same.
Well, driven means the primary driver. At least that’s how I am using it.
Increasing consumption taxes is itself inflationary, though. That’s the problem.
"Increasing consumption taxes is itself inflationary". Yes, but it is an one-off increase in prices, that would be clearly communicated as temporary (yea, I know, it is difficult to clearly communicate such things), so that it should not to cause classic inflationary spiral where people increase their spending, so prices go up, so people demand more money printing, so their incomes increase, so they increase their spending, so prices go up....
But people don’t increase their spending under inflation. They decrease it. The inflationary cycle is caused by wage demands. I personally don’t think that’s happening much these days and inflation might correct anyway, but it might now.
"But people don’t increase their spending under inflation. They decrease it." Says who? I think that spending generaly goes up under inflation. Living standards might go up or down, but when I say spending I mean it in nominal terms.
How would that help inflation? (Setting aside that the Federal government doesn't really have a consumption tax.)
Yea, in the EU, we do have a consumption tax, but this is outside of an Overton window over here regardless.
It should help to an extent that it would reduce consumption spending; other things being equal, lower consumption spending should mean lower inflation.
It might decrease total consumption spending but it will increase it on the goods you've lowered taxes on, won't it? That would cause the price to inflate. And things that aren't substitutes should inflate/deflate at least partly independently. So it seems like a method to decrease inflation of iPhone prices and increase it on bread prices. Unless I'm missing something. This is a pretty naive analysis. ETA: I mean my analysis and I mean that in the technical sense.
My analysis is also pretty, um, basic, of course. But in fact, my proposal would increase prices that consumers are actually paying for smartphones, and decrease them for food, because, you know, consumers are paying those taxes. It should result in lower quantity of smartphones being sold during the times of inflation; aim is that people would save money for non-inlationary times instead of "non-essential" consumption.
IMHO it's because people with that disorder are tolerant of risk and stress. They tend not to get nervous socially, an ingredient of charisma I think, and their risk-taking makes them exciting to be around. Their low empathy makes them poor long-term partners.
I've dated women with such issues. The experience was exhilarating! It took me a while to recognize, that it did not bode well for a long-term relationship.
Be crazier to be more attractive. Got it.
Tired of being a good guy? Try DeLorien therapy! Recommended by 10 out of 10 Sexy Psychopaths.
There *is* a difference between borderlines and psychopaths.
The inherent problem with medications (especially psychiatric medications) is that there is a long tail of real-but-weird side-effects including paradoxical effects. It's possible that in this one person the drug lowered impulse control somewhat.
My guess is that it's a lawyer throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks, but it's not impossible.
If you feel the urge to rob a bank for more than four hours, call a doctor!
Have you or a family member robbed a bank after taking deplin? You may be entitled to compensation!
Just curious, did you consider the court to be broken before ~2018?
The problem isn't (just) the SCOTUS, it's the entire philosophy of the US constitution (although the extent to which the current* SCOTUS appears to take partisan political concerns into account when ruling is also a problem).
The American approach to constitutional government is to have politicians slap down a few sentences worth of noble-sounding but massively ambiguous platitudes on paper, and then leave disambiguating them enough to make them applicable to the SCOTUS.
Everyone likes to whinge about "legislating from the bench". And I think that they're right that it happens, and is a bad thing, but usually wrong to blame activist judges rather than lazy politicians (not always - sometimes judges make rulings that go beyond disambiguation into actually challenging the meaning of the constitution).
A technical specification for a machine or a computer programme written as sloppily as the US constitution would get you fired. As the technical specification for the second-largest democracy on Earth, it's grossly unfit for purpose.
I think that trying to resolve that by placing responsibility for disambiguating the constitution in the hands of a differently-constructed SCOTUS would still invite the same problems. My solution would be to add an additional option for amending the constitution: whenever the SCOTUS is asked to rule on a point of constitutional law which they judge to be both important and ambiguous, rather than producing a disambiguation themselves they shall produce a set of referendum questions whose answers will do so.
That still leaves quite a lot of power in the hands of judges - which precise questions get asked, and in which order, will have a big impact on the outcome - but I think it's better than the alternative. Obviously, some of the time people won't really understand what they're voting on, but that's fine - they can decide which set of politicians to listen to, and the judges will only have put things that they consider to be a plausible and reasonable interpretation of the constitution among the possible outcomes, so even confused voting can't cause a catastrophe.
*There have been lots of individual judges who did this in the past; the reason I say "current" is that in the past they've usually mitigated one another, whereas now with a 5-1-3 extremist-right/moderate-right/left split one wing can always overrule the other.
I've thought for some time that it would be nice if, every time Congress passed some legislation, the legislation had to be accompanied by a longer discussion and interpretation of it, explaining their reasons and intentions--very much like a Supreme Court ruling, and with the same relative authority to the legislation (less authority than the legislation itself, but enough that it must either be adhered to, reinterpreted, or explicitly overruled with a justification, such as when the Supreme Court overrules an earlier Supreme Court ruling.)
It is. This is referred to as "legislative history"--typically bills are accompanied by reports prepared by the House and Senate that explain the purpose of the bill, address alternative proposals, etc. Courts used to rely heavily on this legislative history to resolve ambiguities or figure out how to apply legislation to weird unanticipate situations/corner cases/etc.
Over the course of the 80s and 90s, conservative jurists, led by Antonin Scalia, effectively killed legislative history as an accepted source of legislative interpretation.
Wow! Do you know how to find the legislative history for a bill?
IIRC, Scalia wasn't even fond of using the Constitution as a source of legislative interpretation.
I'd like to see a system whereby the Supreme Court chooses its own justices. Not by a simple majority vote because then one "side" would get hold of the court and never let it go. But with a bit of randomisation it should work.
Whenever there's a vacancy, each justice writes the name of a candidate on a slip of paper, the slips go into a hat, and then one is drawn to determine who the next justice will be. The identity of the nominating justice is publicised to provide an extra incentive for justices to nominate well-qualified individuals rather than just their own buddies and former clerks.
Chooses its own justices? Where we seen this? Politburo? (btw, it was lifetime too)
I was going to comment that if one side gets the advantage then as a matter of probability the court will just tend to being dominated by that side, assuming that justices always nominate another from their own side (they will, if the nominations are public). But I wrote down the actual probabilities (assuming republican and democrats die at the same rates) and it turns out that for any such court of n justices, where k are republican, n-k democrats, the probability of one seat "turning" from D to R, and R to D, will always be equal. I did not bother to compute the expected time until a court "turns" from one majority to the other but it seems like yours could actually be a fair and workable system, if we perhaps add the condition that the last living judge of either faction will get to pick its successor with probability 1 (to prevent the event of a complete takeover of the court by one faction).
So the SCOTUS is already unacountable & unelected, but you want them to be self-selected?
But that would have the exact same problem as the current system: it wouldn't result in my side always getting what they want.
this kind of attempt at a constitutional balancing act between groups that exist at the time it is signed is not necessarily going to result in a long-term outcome you want. See Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Lebanon
Another example, albeit slightly less explicit, for better or worse, is Northern Ireland.
I'd rather have something like:
Every four years, one week after Presidential inauguration, the incoming President chooses a new justice for the Court. One third of either house rounded up is necessary to confirm the justice (or rather, blocking confirmation is akin to overriding a veto).
Justices who die or retire are not replaced, except that at any time if the Court has fewer than three justices then the sitting President may nominate and confirm an additional person without the need for Congressional approval (statistically this would almost never happen, but the provision is in place to mitigate even the slightest chance of losing the Court altogether).
This would not only encode party politics into the Constitution, but would hard-code in that the parties must be Democrat and Republican, and in a way that would make it even more difficult for a new party to arise.
More than that, it encodes partisanship into the court itself. Yes, I know it's that it's there whether we want it to be or not, but much the same way as "all men are created equal" - obviously and egregiously ignored at the time - provided the ideals for the basis of abolition and the 14th amendment, I'd rather have the conception of non-partisan justices (and by implication, lessened need for party/tribal politics at all) encoded as an ideal to work towards, than to just give up and encode partisanship like it was some commission in the executive branch.
I would hope (but not expect, because I'm cynical like that) that if this were enacted, that every lawyer and judge would switch their party affiliations to whatever the required one is at each opening.
Counter-pro-tip: always eat lots of bacon and ice cream. That way if you gain weight you can blame the bacon and ice cream, they taste better than medication and are less inconvenient.
The dead decay over time, so any medication that keeps you alive is also a kind of weight-gaining medication.
Thanks for the recommendation
I see these posted on Reddit and they are great.