Victoria Australia uses a type of voting where you can get instant runoff or just side with a party's preferences by checking only one box. 92.7% of voters just used the simpler method, checking only one box.
Some people in the 7% are really angry about it.
Possibly difficult cognitive dissonance for election wonks to craft a technically robust system then democratically find almost no interest in it from the electorate.
"People express different preferences than me because they are responding to incentives in a flawed system" can sometimes be true. But it is always worth considering whether people simply disagree with you, as an Occam's prior.
I think you're misreading the complaint here. The tweet says "At this year's Senate election, 92.7% of Victorians marked their ballot papers with '1' followed by preferences for other parties above the line. If voters do that at the state election, preferences 2 and beyond will be replaced by the party ticket. Disgraceful.". In federal elections you can express a preference over parties (voting "above the line") or individual candidates (voting "below the line"), where above the line votes are interpreted as preferencing parties candidates above all lower preferenced parties, below all higher preferenced parties, in the order that the party specifies relative to each other.
It sounds like in the next Victorian state election above the line votes will instead only consider the *first* party preferenced and preferences over all candidates will be specified by that one party. That means people who reasonably assume the system works the same way as it did in the past, and as it still does for federal elections, are likely to end up mis-voting, which is what the linked tweet is complaining about.
IMO the sensible median *is* that voters express preferences over parties, because parties have relatively clear platforms in ways candidates don't, and most candidates will be bound to their parties positions most of the time anyway, so there's rarely a reason you would want to vote for only *some* of a parties candidates. The "even simpler method" seems unnecessary, especially if it replaces the existing above the line method rather than augmenting it.
As full genome testing is down to 300 dollars it seems like that would make more sense but it's hard to know what reports they provide and seems like a better deal than genesight (cheaper and full genome) though the wait is 12-14 weeks right now versus quite quick from genesight. I imagine that one could probably do one's own analysis a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/12/how-to-use-23andme-irresponsibly/ but I'm not sure what the state of the art is. Anyone done (full) genome testing or know more about it? Surely there are open source tools out there?
"Infamous" might be a better adjective. Mann crossed over from doing solid if unremarkable science to being an attention-seeking media personality years ago.
Yeah, I remember when "cautioning against linking climate change to any one event" was a thing that most respectable climate scientists did, and the less-respectable ones who fed the news media with sound bites about how event du jour was possibly linked to climate change were at least careful to use defensively-hedged weasel words.
So, Michael Mann is now defining "denier" to include people who were respected climate scientists warning against the general consequences of anthropogenic global warning last year. Bad for him. But I'm not sure how influential he really is any more, and this may be just a bid for attention by a has-been.
Since the Ukraine invasion started I've enjoyed five Russian vloggers on YouTube. All just ordinary people, except they know English.
Now all five of them have left Russia. Two left soon after the invasion started; the other three left after Putin announced mobilization. Their stories:
(The next problem: most of them left on visitor visas, so presumably will have to return eventually.)
Edit: actually wait, there's also 1420 who hasn't left, but his whole channel is about interviewing Russians on the street, so if he leaves he'd have to reinvent himself. https://www.youtube.com/c/1420channel
Those five and maybe 250,000 others, out of twenty-five million men aged 20-44. So Putin still has ~99% of his conscription pool. I expect there's an observational bias in that Russians who speak fluent English are the ones most likely to A: want to and B: be able to leave.
It would be interesting to know how many military-age males are finding ways to make themselves effectively unavailable for conscription inside Russia; there ought to be quite a few who won't or can't leave but will still try to dodge the draft.
Yeah, this is my experience as well. At this point Russians I know are all either outside the country or no longer talking to me. Whether because of fear or patriotic fervor I can't say.
Visitor visas are only relevant to the country you're in. They can still apply for other statuses if the country allows it. Or apply for entry to a third country.
I'm a mathematics graduate student, and will probably be applying for tech jobs in the Spring. I am looking for referrals to FAANG companies. Thanks! I can talk about programming experience more if needed. I apologize if this is not suitable for the open thread.
I work at one of them. Would probably make more sense to put you in the queue closer to when you would get hired (particularly in the environment of right-now).
I've heard this as well, and I do wonder how much direct research examines moneypox in this way. Even if there were no difference between various sex acts in terms of chafing/tearing, it stands to reason that an orifice that gets 5-10x the action is going to have a disproportionate amount of both.
Does anyone know how I could find a thread on twitter that had 200+ instances of beautiful architecture each from a different country with explanations?
I've seen people say that **analogies** are, blanketly, a bad thing to use to try to prove a point. Is anyone aware of a good writeup/steelman of this belief?
Asking because I find analogies extremely useful, at least in education. Of course, I've had the experience, in debate, of analogies backfiring such that I slightly regret using them. Though I've never completely regretted it. It is loosely my suspicion that anti-analogy people just want a way to indulge glaring inconsistencies in their behaviour/beliefs.
My understanding is that some people think they're bad in *any* form of debate - not just un-persuasive.
It seems to me that I've seen opposition to analogies coming from social justice-- you aren't supposed to say that suffering in one group is like suffering in another group.
"Analogies: Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time. But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation."
I think they can sometimes be good, often times be bad. I also don't know if opposition is just a rhetorical tool used to avoid arguing against an analogy.
Looks like all the replies this comment has gotten are correct. Good faith analogies are great for education but people argue with whether or not the analogy is accurate if used in debate. However there is a more devious aspect to analogies which is, by being so natural to the human mind, make it easy for us to pass over hidden priors without examination. If we are open to the analogy and aren't attempting to argue with it, we can immediately be blinded by the things that two things have in common and therefore not even ask in what important ways they differ. That's many Fringe cases between debate and mutually consenting education involve obfuscating the nature of an analogy so that the other person doesn't even notice it. And of course oftentimes we don't even notice it ourselves.
On a further layer down, the pure natural enjoyment of pattern matching two things that are similar to one another often makes us feel good about what we know of those two things, even if perhaps we should be very skeptical of what we actually know about either. To choose to things at random, if I don't really know anything about quantum physics and I don't really know anything about economics, someone pointing out how these two things are similar will light up my brain in a way that makes me feel better about my knowledge of both subjects, despite that knowledge being rudimentary in both cases.
Arguments from analogy are logical fallacies, so in a purely logical sense they are always incorrect to use. That doesn't mean the aren't useful. Education is a situation where they are useful, because the goal is generally to help someone understand something rather than to construct a logically correct argument.
Regarding the idea that anti-analogy people are indulging inconsistencies: I'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you possible give a concrete example> In general, if you have a strong enough logical argument to demonstrate an actual inconsistency, the analogy itself is superfluous. In order to demonstrate an actual inconsistency, you need to show two situations that are the same, but handled differently. Not merely two situations that are analogous but handled differently.
It is also possible that a big part of the disagreement is the usage of the term analogy, rather than something more fundamental. There are arguments that I could think of that some people might call analogies, but I would refer to as examples (or counter-examples).
I think analogies are a hugely useful tool when used in good faith. They promote understanding and allow you to view a point from a different angle to get fuller comprehension of it.
Like any tool, they can also be abused. "Saying X is like saying Y" gives me, as the writer of Y, the ability to basically restate the other party's point however I want, and if the writer is engaging in bad faith, all kinds of "saying what you just said is like saying Hitler was awesome" chicanery can be enabled.
I'm sure that has left some people frustrated after being on the wrong end of a bad-faith analogy, but "analogies should be banned from debate" strikes me as a wasteful overreaction that costs everyone more than it's worth.
To illustrate using an analogy (wink), it's kind of like bans on microaggressions. Sure, there are some people who conceal a nasty dagger in an otherwise anodyne-looking comment, then retreat to "I didn't mean it that way" or "it was just a joke" or the like if they ever get pressed on it. And when people can do that, it is annoying. Own your daggers.
But if you then try a social justice "your intent doesn't matter because we punish intentional and unintentional giving of offense the same way" approach to take away that line of rhetorical retreat, you've successfully corrected the "being able to backtrack and hide in a joke" problem... while simultaneously dealing tremendous damage to your overall discourse.
I think what is really the heart of an analogy ban is trying to root out bad-faith discourse, but if you're doing that you should do it directly by attacking bad faith discourse, not by trying to prohibit rhetorical approaches just because they have both good-faith and bad-faith use cases. After all, don't all forms of rhetoric have good- and bad-faith use cases?
Whenever someone introduces an analogy into an argument, the argument inevitably shifts to whether or not the analogy is accurate, thus ending the original argument.
They are very effective rhetoric, but very difficult to do correctly if you care about truth and very easy to use misrepresent ideas, situations and circumstances. Many analogies I hear "in the wild" are superficial and omit some crucial difference between the two situations or objects that are supposedly similar.
Even when trying to do correct reasoning with analogies for my benefit only, if I choose to think about some issue in terms of analogy A to other situation O it is possible that I may miss some important aspect of O.
When an analogy-maker says "X is like Y" and analogy-denier says "X, compared with Y, has crucial difference Z", I'd consider that progress in the debate!
It assumes some very good faith. Like, analogy-denier could always say eg "The fact that X is called X and Y is called Y is a crucial difference for our purposes", which may be wrong. But I'd like to assume good faith!
I don't know of any good writeups and I'm generally in agreement with you, but I can see some arguments to be made against using analogies.
For example, not everyone will have the same experiences, knowledge, or beliefs. If you told someone that $world_leader* is acting like Civ-1 Gandhi right now, and that person didn't know the urban legend of Civ-1 Gandhi's 255 points of pure nuclear rage, they might assume that $world_leader was acting peaceful like real-world Gandhi. This would be especially hard to do if you were writing for a wider audience.
*Easy example, not meant to be a comment on any modern leader.
The ongoing Magnus Carlsen / Hans Niemann chess cheating scandal seems tailor-made to teach Bayesian reasoning. Incomplete evidence, reasoning under uncertainty, important prior-shifting updates - there's even a formally defined, precisely calculable base rate! Anyway, Niemann definitely did it.
I find the last sentence of this comment to be somewhat at odds with the rest of it. A Bayesian examination of the evidence actually suggests that it is quite poor:
The base rate of people cheating in official FIDE events is rather low, even if they have previously cheated online (This moves the base rate somewhat but not much). There is fairly little actual evidence he cheated once this is accounted for. From the game, he beat Magnus, but the issue was mostly that Magnus played below his normal level. This is not consistent with cheating because cheating would make you play better, not your opponent play worse. There are also other plausible explanations that take probability from the hypothesis that he cheated. Namely leaked prep.
>because cheating would make you play better, not your opponent play worse.
I am not sure about this. At that level of chess I think a player‘s sense of something being “off” could cause them to play worse. I found Carlson’s statement about what he sensed from his opponent quite convincing.
The Kasparov situation playing deep blue comes to mind. Many commenters said that he fell apart in the final games.. One can leave the argument that the computer team was cheating aside, because the main point is, it was a way of playing chess that completely befuddled him, and affected his ability to counter.
Magnus clearly suspected him of cheating, and that could have contributed to him playing worse, but Magnus' accusations are what prompted the conversation in the first place. The fact that he fell apart gives no additional evidence beyond the initial accusation. If you place additional credence on the accusation because Magnus played worse, you are double counting the evidence provided by his intuition.
> The fact that he fell apart gives no additional evidence beyond the initial accusation..
Very true in a material sense, but when someone falls apart, as you put it, one of the first things to assess is what was that persons ability to self report prior to the incident. Given what I know about Carlson and his incredible acuity for the game I have a bias towards believing in his capacity to self report. The fact that he trounced Carlsen so severely and then proceeded to lose the next six games also makes my nose wrinkle.
I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say here. The amount of credence you give to Carlsen's intuition is independent from the question of whether or not you should count his intuition twice (You should not).
Im not understanding how Im doing that. I certainly don’t mean to, but I also don’t have a counting system.
Carlsen raised suspicions in a rather opaque manner. Then he made his allegations concrete and shared his observations of the game. That was the first time I had to confront his intuitions. That is when I counted them.
If someone online says something that doesn't seem to make sense, what is the prior that it's a joke? That it's not only a joke, but also a cultural reference you missed?
Interesting - haven't watched the full interview or dug into his analysis but I appreciate the rigor! I do wonder what it would say about the games where Niemann has admitted to cheating...
Excuse my ignorance, but... how the hell do you cheat at chess?
It's a deterministic game with perfect information, right? Isn't any change to the game state or illegal move immediately obvious, or completely deducible in retrospect by running the game backwards?
Essentially, that someone is not using his own skill but instead using an AI (AIs can't make moves humans can't, of course, but they can choose between moves more effectively than any human can). It is effectively trivial these days to obtain a superhumanly-good chess AI (even live matches have had cheating scandals over "player accused of running a chess AI on his phone and looking at it during bathroom breaks", because a modern phone is powerful enough to run a superhumanly-good chess AI).
Cheating in this case means getting outside information, ie from a chess engine, which is radically stronger than the strongest human players, and thus would make you unbeatable.
The short version is that a relative newcomer has been on a statistically improbable tear, which included beating the (abdicated) world champion, using the black pieces. Said champ (Carlsen) then generated a massive wave of drama by implying that the newcomer (Niemann) cheated. The priors here involve the fact that Niemann has admitted to cheating in the past, as recently as 3 years ago, and the base rate can be calculated from their Elo scores. Wikipedia has a decent overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_cheating_controversy
Of course, just looking at the probability of a players greatest victory is going to provide a skewed picture. More meaningfully, one could look at a set of a player's games to see whether they are anomalous. This is what Ken Regan does in his analysis. One issue with this broader sort of analysis, is that if cheating is sporadic and rare in the larger sample, then it may not be detected.
I'll add that top players have mentioned in the past (maybe it was Hikaru) that it doesn't make sense for top players to cheat, since doing to would threaten their entire careers.
But that reasoning doesn't apply to a lower rated player who can't make a career out of chess in and of itself anyway.
There are probably a few thousand players at that rough level, and just one of them needs to find a way to cheat consistently, and they can then be as arbitrarily strong as they want.
Although people say that OTB cheating is very unlikely, they are ignoring that becoming a 2700 level player is also very unlikely.
In the video game world, at least, "but it would make no sense to cheat" is something you hear in like every case ever of someone suspected of cheating who is subsequently proved to be cheating.
In video game speedrun scandals, cheating by high level players often gets rationalized as "I'm good enough to do it without cheats, cheating just gets me to that goal faster." A good speedrun is often a matter of grinding over and over until by some mix of luck and skill you nail every shortcut you need and don't make any mistakes.
I wouldn't be surprised if chess cheaters have a similar rationalization of "well I'm smart enough to pick Stockfish's moves *sometimes*..."
The part I didn’t get in the Georgism posts was why the land tax wasn’t supposed to increase housing prices. It seemed to be a fully general argument that taxes never increase any price, but that seems to be untrue for, say, gas prices that are much higher in regions with high taxes. What was different about land?
I think the one-sentence summary is: housing is already being bid up to whatever price the buyer (renter) can afford, therefore any taxes would be incident on the seller as they cannot "produce less land" in response to a decrease in profitability.
This isn't arguing that taxes are always incident on the seller, just that they can be; specifically it's a claim about elasticity of supply and how that affects tax incidence:
(I think there is an extra step here that I don't fully grok; specifically, how you get from "land supply is perfectly inelastic" to claims about housing, which can be built or demolished atop of land. We can't produce more land, but we can produce more housing, and would do more of that if it's profitable to do so. Maybe the answer is just "the value of land without housing would be decreased by the LVT, meaning homebuilders, just like renters, would see no increase in cost".)
>housing is already being bid up to whatever price the buyer (renter) can afford
That statement may be true in markets like San Francisco or NYC, where it is difficult to build new housing. In places where people spend a much lower % of their paycheck on rent, like in the sunbelt, there is no way it is true.
If you mean the cost of owning a home privately, I think you need to be careful about what 'price' means in this case. For a 100% LVT, your taxes to the state almost precisely match the rent you would be paying if you rented your house instead of owning it- in practical terms, you're 'renting' the land from the government. At *current* rent prices, that is a bit more expensive than private ownership of a home that isn't mortgaged, though there's reason to think that Georgism would lower rents significantly.
But the counterpoint is that the price of land on an open market would drop precipitously, because the LVT makes speculation impossible. In many cases (i.e. undeveloped land), the sale price should in theory be near zero. Just as the monthly costs of owning a private home would be similar to renting, the costs of *buying* a new home would also be quite small, if the house was pre-owned and you weren't paying for construction- not unlike a security deposit, to extend the analogy.
In other words, IF Georgism doesn't lower the cost of renting, the lifetime cost of owning your own home would probably go up somewhat, but only to the level already borne by renters in your area- back of the napkin calculations for my hometown gave me about a 25% increase. And even then, people could begin owning their house almost immediately upon entering adulthood, since startup costs would be very small, rather than having to spend a decade or more establishing the financial means to do so. And if Georgism lowers rent by a factor of 2-3, then lifetime taxes on a property could easily fall below the current sale price plus mortgage costs, resulting in lower 'cost' of owning a home.
The secret sauce here, as always, is that the supply of land is fixed, so normal intuitions about the social costs of taxation are less applicable.
If the price of a house would drop to near 0, how would new houses get built/maintained? I know that at least where I live, a lot of properties are assessed at land + building rates, where the price of the land (~30K) is usually far less than the price of the building (~300K for a nicer place). It strikes me that either the price would drop just by the price of the land, plus a little bit for the house, or if the price dropped all the way, then only the government would build/renovate/maintain houses
"As an example, here's a listing for a property in Manhattan where the assessed land value hasn't changed in ten years, even though the market value of the property increased by $3 million during that time" [there's a picture on the site]
The land is assessed at 130K, the building at 475K, but the property recently sold for... 9 million!
I'd guess Georgism is likely to change things more in dense cities, where big, expensive buildings are (or at least should be) built on the land than in single-family suburbs.
In situations like the one you described, I think you're correct that it would roughly "just drop by the price of the land".
You are correct. Some Georgists seem to have in mind that a property not being used is a dead-weight cost, and therefore people will want to get out from under it the moment they are not using it. But even Georgists recognize and value the improvements upon the land, which would not be significantly reduced, and may in fact be higher.
The only thing that Georgism would really do, and I think all sides agree it would do so, is significantly reduce or eliminate long term speculation on land. Short term might still exist, if people know the value of the property is about to go up and the taxes haven't been adjusted yet. Everything else is uncertain at best, and quite questionable.
I also don't understand how land can be consistently expected to generate an "unfair" stream of income. If such a stream of income is expected, then it should be factored into the price of the land from the get-go, right?
(I suppose if the land in question was granted to a family still in possession of it by a Spanish king four centuries ago, rents may not have been factored from the get-go.)
While rare, this isn't unknown. Trinity Wall Street was endowed with land by Queen Anne in 1705, and while little of the original grant is exactly the same, it remains a large landholder and very wealthy parish.
It is factored into the price of the land, but it's not ethically obvious that "because I paid to own X, I am entitled to the stream of income from X". An absentee landlord is not adding any value to the world compared to his tenants owning the land themselves.
The argument for "because I paid to own X, I am entitled to the stream of income from X" is a discussion about what does "own" mean.
The key parts of ownership are exclusive usage rights for the property and the rights to the "fruit of the property", which for land are essentially one and the same and equal to the stream of income paid for the usage of the property by the owner temporarily transferring that exclusive right to use it. There are other parts of the "bundle of rights" that full ownership implies, but those ("usufruct") are the main ones without which it would not be appropriate to say that someone owns a property, because if you don't have the entitlement to the stream of income from X, then what did you buy, what does that "ownership" entitle you to? A mere nonexclusive right to use the property certainly is not ownership.
So the ethically obvious argument for "because I paid to own X, I am entitled to the stream of income from X" comes out to being equivalent to "people who paid to own the stream of income from X are entitled to the stream of income from X", and if they paid get the right to own X according to all the requirements of the society but it afterwards gets asserted they aren't entitled to the stream of income from X, then they have been severely defrauded, they have been sold something which they didn't get, which IMHO is clearly unethical.
Georgism doesn't change that equation. The taxation reduces the net income from X thus reducing the price of X. You still get the anticipated income stream you paid for if your anticipations were correct.
The value of Georgism seems to be that it might be a better way to raise taxes and that it could discourage long-term land speculation. I'm still not buying the claim that it would reduce rents as opposed to increasing them.
If you are a giant megacorp with huge teams of sophisticated business analysts buying from another megacorp with huge teams of sophisticated analysts, then yes.
If you're a giant megacorp with huge teams of sophisticated analysts buying from a poor working family that can't afford their mortgage anymore or has to move within the next month to follow a new job or etc., then probably not.
Here's a decent intuition pump/fable: suppose two farmers, on two basically identical plots of land, with the same acreage, the same weather patterns, the same soil quality, and so on. They both farm in identical ways and have the same good and bad seasons and do the same work. They also have identical taxes, because the county assessor is very lazy and never comes by, and they don't read the news or watch tv. They both inherited their land, continuing an unbroken tradition of family farming that extends back to antiquity.
Then, both farmers hit a bad patch, and being connected by fate in this way, they both have to sell about ten acres to make ends meet that year. Farmer A sells for $4,000 an acre, making up for the year's shortfall, and continues his business with somewhat reduced circumstances. However, Farmer B discovers to his surprise that a giant development project had been ongoing down the road, an airport had been built, and Disney was building a new theme park a couple miles over, and buyers are offering a hundred times as much money as he expected. He decides to sell his entire farm for $400,000 an acre, is now a cash millionaire, and retires to the Bahamas.
Take a premise as given: either wealth is created, or it is found as natural resources. It doesn't just show up as mana from heaven. We know that Farmer B had the same natural resources as Farmer A; their farms were identical. So Farmer B's wealth did not reflect a better farm in that sense. Nor did Farmer B work harder than Farmer A; their improvements were identical, and the two applied their problem-solving, hard work, and intelligence in the same ways. So we ask the question: if Farmer B's new windfall was created, who created it? From whom did Farmer B receive his wealth, and did they have the right to decline this transfer? Was it 'fair' of him to take such wealth?
The issue I take with this scenario is that Farmer B is not being paid by "society" in some broad sense. He's being paid by some person or small group of people. The only sense in which the plots of land are identical is with regards to farming. Farmer B is now wealthy because farming is no longer the optimal use of that land - or, at least, somebody thinks so, and is willing to back up that belief with large amounts of cash. Neither airports nor theme parks are located arbitrarily, so presumably they had some reason to suppose this. And indeed, the fact that they're offering $400,000 an acre instead of, say, $5,500 would imply that there are many competing interests seeking to put that land to new uses.
To answer the questions: Farmer B received his wealth from the investors in whatever project is offering the cash. Farmer B's windfall was created by whatever those investors did to make money in the first place, and came to him because those investors thought it would be worth their while. Asking if they had the right to decline the transfer is a bit odd, since they're the ones who made the offer in the first place.
Is this fair? Yes. Firstly, Farmer B accepted only what he was willingly given by specific people. Those people will either gain or lose money in the end depending on the wisdom of their investment and management of the project. Hopefully, this involves the land being used more productively than before. Secondly, this scenario is not zero sum. Farmer A loses nothing here. He is paid what he would always have been paid. I suppose if he learns of this whole thing and is a pathologically envious person he may suffer emotional distress, but that's a him problem.
It's true that the work and improvements put into the farms are identical - which is irrelevant, seeing as every bit of work done by Farmer B and every improvement he made is about to be bulldozed. Land is not a token that entitles you to compensation proportional to your work ethic. It's a commodity, and like all commodities it can be put to a multitude of uses and is utterly subjective in value. I can put a huge amount of work and money and infrastructure into trying to turn a plot on the coast of Maine into an orange grove. I'll wind up a broke failure, because that's a profoundly unwise use for that land. The guy who buys it off me and makes millions farming oysters owes me nothing.
Once farmer A discovers that, how is his remaining land not also worth the new, higher price? Did Farmer B conicidentally just consume all the newly-generated demand?
As Eric says. Also, I wasn't assuming that the two plots are particularly close to one another- for purposes of the parable, it need not be the case that Farmer A and Farmer B live in the same area, which would lead to very different development potentials even if zoning etc. weren't a factor. You could also consider them two potential *futures* for the same farmer, if you like- one in which development occurs nearby, and one in which it does not.
IIRC natural resources are "land" in the Georgist sense, and it seems equally valid to ask if farmer B "deserves" his windfall for having the luck to buy a farm above a massive gold deposit that he knew nothing about.
The two plots are functionally identical for purposes of farming, but very different for purposes of development. A few possible explanations for the difference:
- The two plots are zoned differently, with Plot A zoned in a way that allows residential or commercial development, while Plot B only allows agricultural use.
- A can trivially be connected up to the local sewer system, while B would be prohibitively expensive to do so.
- A has a much better view than B.
- Existing road or transit layout make A a much easier commute into the nearest major downtown, despite both being equally convenient to the nearest agricultural produce logistical hub.
The argument is that the supply of land is constant, thus the tax cannot change the equilibrium price of land. For Georgism's narrow definition of land, it's a plausible argument. But housing is not land. (It occupies land, but is not land.) And the argument will not generalize to housing prices being insensitive to a land tax.
An alternative framing of this is that a tax on structures built on land disincentivizes building, maintaining, or improving those structures on the margins. Since few people outside
Let's say you own some farmland that generates a profit of $5k/year. You could build a house on the land and rent it out for $50k/year, but that would increase your property taxes by $10k. That's probably still worth it if your other expenses (including opportunity cost of capital) work out to $30k/year ($50k - $30k -$10k > $5k), but if your expenses are $40k/year you're better of just keeping it a farm. Rents would need to rise above $55k before it starts to make sense for you to build the house.
With a Georgist tax instead, your property taxes are the same whether you farm or build a house, so it's in your interests to build a house in a range of situations where a non-Georgist tax would make it unprofitable relative to farming.
That said, Georgist taxes could still reduce housing supply due to political economy factors, since NIMBY restrictions on development around you are likely to directly reduce your property taxes by limiting alternative land uses, giving you an additional incentive to vote and lobby for NIMBY policies.
Something I haven't seen mentioned in all the ACX discussions on Georgism (maybe it was mentioned and I missed it) is an alternative system proposed by Glen Weyl called Plural Property, or SALSA: https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-property/
The gist is that there would be a land tax (with "land" understood rather expansively, a la Henry George), but instead of government assessors of land's value, the owner of some land would be required to publicly proclaim a price at which they would be willing to sell their land at any time. Then two things happen:
1) They are taxed as a percentage of their own proclaimed price, maybe around 30% per year;
2) Anyone who is willing to buy at the proclaimed price may offer to do so at any time, and the owner is then legally obligated to sell to them at that price.
The idea is that if the tax rate is set correctly, the optimal strategy for a selfish land owner is proclaim their price honestly, that is, as what the land is actually worth to them; the price at which they are indifferent between getting the money and keeping the land. Weyl and his coauthors have game-theoretic proofs to this effect. This avoids the need in George's LVT scheme for a skilled and honest government assessment team, an element often attacked by critics of LVT.
I'm intrigued by both LVT and SALSA, and I'm not sure which would be better, but I thought I'd bring it up here so others can learn about it.
This conversation has come up in the Georgist threads before. You can probably find several long discussions of it. I'll try to share some concerns.
Imagine a scenario of a healthy residential neighborhood in a suburb of a large city. The residents all set their own taxes at a reasonable but affordable rate, and everyone is happy. A large developer decides to build [something big, maybe an amusement park], which would value the land at three times the value that the residents have put on their land. The developer buys the land for 1/3 what it would be valued if others knew, and kicks everyone off the land. All the other land in the area goes up appropriately afterwards, and the residents who are now landless also don't have enough money to buy anything else as replacements. They have to quit their jobs and move away, or become homeless.
This is just an extremely quick version of a process common to any system that structures Georgist governance as a tax based on value; if someone can't pay, there will be some consequences, and those consequences could leave them destitute.
Aside from the very reasonable desire not to sell at all, how does this stand up to the problem that honest prices are not independent? If I am happy with the house I live in, I would want to sell it for somewhat more than the amount at which I could buy an equivalent house: the extra is however much the inconvenience of moving is worth to me. If the owner of the equivalent house feels the same way, then our honest prices shoot off to infinity, while our optimal-strategy prices are bounded by our ability to pay taxes.
I'm reminded of the difference between a first-price auction and a second-price auction.
In a sealed-bid auction where the winner pays their bid, someone might strategically bid less than the item is worth to them because they're hoping to buy it cheaper than that.
In a "normal" auction, where people can see and respond to the bids of others, the winner only needs to bid 1 increment higher than the second-highest bidder. You can get the same outcome with sealed bids if you say that the winner only pays the second-highest bid (plus epsilon) instead of the value of their own bid, which incentivizes people to bid honestly, since lowering your bid won't lower what you pay (unless it causes you to lose).
The equivalent change to SALSA might be something like: Instead of setting your own price on your land, you just need to accept or reject offers that other people make to buy the land from you, and your taxes are based on the highest bid that you have rejected.
That way, you can't "accidentally" sell your land for a low amount because you were trying to get lower taxes or because you forgot to update your magic number, and you don't have to pay taxes on sentimental value or moving costs; only what *someone else* would actually pay for the land.
This change would also mean that if your land is very obscure or very specialized, then you might get super low taxes just because no one bothers to bid on it at all. I'm honestly not sure whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing.
(Obviously, you need a mechanism to ensure that if someone offers to buy your land for X, that offer is binding, and they really have to go through with it if you accept. Otherwise someone could maliciously raise your taxes by gradually bidding higher and higher until you try to accept, then back out.)
(Still doesn't seem to me like SALSA is accomplishing the same goal as LVT, with or without this change.)
They're both horrible, but SALSA is especially fucked up. Like most of my neighbors, I plan to live where I do now until I die, so I wouldn't sell my property at any price. If I would be forced to set a price, I'd set it as high as I could and I would end up with no discretionary income at all - paying all of it to stay in my home. It would still be worth it to me, but it would be pretty fucking far from ideal. Like paying protection money to a third party to (hopefully!) avoid having my life ruined by a (rational or not) corporation with a million times more resources than me deciding to buy my land and tear down my house to turn the property into a parking lot.
Of course, none of the above should matter to a good rationalist or utilitarian.... but you should consider the second-order effects as well - it not mattering to you makes me despise you.
How does SALSA deal with improvements to the land? LVT is supposed to be based on the unimproved value of the land (i.e. excluding buildings and stuff that the owner built) so that you don't discourage people from making improvements, but you generally can't sell the land while keeping the improvements, so your sell price presumably needs to include both.
I think that's part of why SALSA's ideal tax rate is around 30% rather than 100%. Weyl goes into some depth comparing the LVT to SALSA in the SALSA chapter of his book Radical Markets. That chapter is worth reading if you want to know more.
I remember once coming across a wordpress blog from the early 10s where a guy reads books and posts his reactions chapter by chapter. I remember reading his series on The Lord of the Rings, and remember that for the last chapter of Fellowship, he included a bunch of photos of himself making faces while talking to the characters. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name or much else about it. It's a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Mark Oshiro, and the site is Mark Reads. He also has Mark Watches for TV show reactions episode by episode. Lots of hours of fun if you are a fan of the stuff he covers.
That one was great fun, I was particularly tickled by him starting off with "I don't know if I can get into this old book" (because it was a whopping FIFTY YEARS ago it was published) and then he got captured by what was going on. His guesses about "what will happen next" were so funny.
2 weeks ago in the open thread I posted about Trafalgar polling and what it means for the midterm Senate elections. Below is a list of my predictions based on the polls at the time:
JD Vance 49% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Mehmet Oz 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
H. Walker 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
A. Laxalt 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
B. Masters 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Ted Budd 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
R Johnson 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
T Smiley 46% in Trafalgar poll - loses
New Trafalgar polls have since been released for 6 of these races. Still now Florida or NH poll but seems pretty clear NH will be a Dem win in any case.
Here are the new numbers:
Smiley 46.5%(+0.2%) Sep 1-Sep 24
Laxalt 47.1%(+0.4%) Aug 18-Sep 20
Johnson 48.7%(+1.6%) Aug 25-Sep 19
Masters 45.4%(+1.2%) Aug 27-Sep 17
Mehmet 45.9%(+2.5%) Aug 18-Sep 15
Budd 46.6%(-1.0%) Jul 1-Sep 4
The Dem numbers typically change inverse to the R gain which is not unexpected. Sometimes they went down by a few points even as the R number didn't change. Trafalgarian Augury would expect this because the theory is that Trafalgar hits the R vote share dead on and fudges the Dem number to suit the narrative.
We are still waiting for new Vance/Walker polls. Expect them to come out later this week, prob before Sunday. No idea if we'll get NH or FL polls soon. Trafalgar polled NH before the R primary, but that was in Dec 2021. I'd expect a new NC poll soon since that is the oldest poll by a month in both original and recent poll time.
If Cahaly starts showing the R candidate 49+ that would be a bad sign for Dems. He said he'd have 4-5 more polls for each competitive race. As long as he continues to show most Republicans below 47% I'd expect him to get that right compared to the election even though many people think having WA poll similarly to GA or even PA is weird.
Trafalgar hits the R vote share in statewide races roughly 95% of the time. That's far superior to 538. Their D vote share and therefore overall margin are useless, though.
A Republican candidate averaging 47% in Trafalgar polls 45 or less days from the election loses 100% of the time.
Of course you can compare Trafalgarian Augury to the polling average. It helps you determine if there is gonna be a big polling miss. For instance looking at 538 or RCP for 2020 gave a very inflated idea of the result for Biden vs Trump. Trafalgarian Augury in contrast was incredibly accurate.
Trafalgar is predicting 53-55 Senate seats for Dems, pending a Florida poll. 538 is predicting 51. That's a very significant difference.
538 predicts a roughly 22% chance for 53-55 yes. Although my prediction would get more specific if Trafalgar finally polled Florida. I'm predicting, pending a Florida poll, 5% 22, 5% 56+, 30% 53, 30% 54, 30% 55. If the Florida poll was a tossup like Ohio I'd shift it to 25-40-25. So a significantly smaller prediction range than 538.
538 is actually an anomaly as well. RCP leans far harder for Rs as I believe does Cook.
538's polls+fundamentals and pure polling models are both around 30% for 53-55 because expert race ratings are much more R friendly. 90% vs 30% in the 53-55 is pretty significant still. I do give Nate some credit compared to "experts" like Cook and Sabato.
The name is just for fun. No need to be so serious. But yes I posted it here specifically so I would be committed. Otherwise I could just think it in my head, not tell anyone, and forget about it if I was wrong.
We're sufficiently past the Picketty Wars that maybe there's a summary of them out there? I was wondering about r > g. My understanding is that there was lots of criticism of Picketty from various angles, but doesn't it seem pretty trivially true that we do in fact think that r > g? And if that continues in the long run, it implies that capital has dominance over other forms of getting money? Is that broadly accepted and it's like the specific details and the modes of it that are contested, or do some people think that actually r <= g, at least in the long run?
I think r > g is the wrong comparison even for the analysis even for what Picketty was trying to do (arguing that the total value of land and financial assets as a multiple of GDP substantially increases over time), since simply comparing r to g in this context implicitly assumes that capital owners never spend, donate, or squander any of their money, or at least spend so little that it can reasonably be rounded down to zero to simplify the model.
The real comparison should be R - C <=> G, where C is consumption by owners of capital net of any income they derive from sources other than capital (probably mostly returns on their labor), broadly defined so as to encompass things like philanthropy, political advocacy, and money-losing vanity projects. Here, I don't think it's clear at all that R - C > G on a long-term consistent basis.
As a quick sanity check, I looked up numbers for total US financial assets in private hands as a multiple of GDP. It looks like it was bouncing around between 3x and 4x between 1950 when the data starts and an inflection point in the late 90s, since when it has climbed to a peak of around 6x late last year with some fairly substantial ups and downs in that period. Which tells me that R - C + I > G for the past 25 years or so, but R - C + I ~= G for the previous ~50 years, where I is investment in financial assets funded by wages and other sources other than reinvested returns on capital. And the contributions of I need to be analyzed, since "capital asset values are growing because upper-middle-class wage-earners are saving and investing a substantial and growing portion of their incomes" would be a very different story with different policy implications than the one Picketty seems to have been telling.
After poking a little more, I found a couple of data series that seem to approximate what I mean by I - C (net investment) and R (return on existing investment). Red line is net investment (my I - C) as a percentage of existing capital assets in private hands. Blue line is returns on existing capital in private hands (Picketty's R) as a percentage of existing capital assets in private hands. Green line is percent change in nominal GDP. All percentages are quarterly (I tried to make it annual, but the FRED UI required all input data series for a graph line to have the same aggregation method if using a frequency less than the raw data, which doesn't work here because changes should be summed while levels should be averaged).
Eyeballing the graph, it looks like pre-1990s R < G with a net positive I - C roughly making up the difference, while post-1990s R ~= G with a smaller but still net positive I - C driving R - C + I > G.
N.b. these data series represent all marketable household assets (financial assets, real estate, and consumer durables) net of household debts, not just financial assets.
No luck so far in finding data series that disentable I and C from one another.
It is quite reasonable to look at historical data to extrapolate a relationship into the future. It is also usually a good idea to try to look at a series with the longest history - and US data at FRED are quite often some of the best. However, there is a class of questions where these reasonable heuristics introduce a severe selection bias - and, unfortunately, this question seems to be one of them. The problem is that the US right now being the country with the best kept and longest capital return statistics is quite correlated with the US right now being the country after a period of a relatively high return on capital: there are many other countries and periods where the return on capital was pretty disastrous but these countries do not have nice long reliable statistical data for exactly this reason.
For example, if you looked at the 10 biggest stock markets in 1900 and tried to see what is the worst case drawdown on a broad stock market index over the next 120 years, you would have found one market (Russia) with the drawdown of exactly -100% and two markets with drawdowns of -99.5% (Germany and Argentina.) Neither of these markets would be your choice today for a market with the longest reliable stock market history.
If so, that's even worse news for Picketty's thesis, since it's an argument that R(US) for the period 1947-2022 is if anything a substantial overestimate of what we can expect R(World) in coming decades.
It seems like if r > g, persistently, but r - c ~= g, persistently, then we should assume that there is a mechanical reason why c trends towards a value of r - g. Has anyone proposed such a mechanism?
In general, it shouldn't be surprising that people tend to spend more money when they have higher net worths, as modeled by wealth elasticity of demand effects, but that alone doesn't suggest C will necessarily trend towards R - G. I actually would have expected it to be a bit less than R - Inflation, since spending tends to track income and for someone living off invested assets, R - Inflation is their de facto income, and people with substantial assets are self-selected to be people who tend to live at least a bit below their means.
You can also think in terms of two major classes of capital owners: middle-to-professional-class households with savings and the mega-rich. The former will likely have most of their assets as a mix of primary residence equity and retirement savings, and per FRED data household real estate net of mortgages plus retirement assets are a little less than half of total private net worth. Over the course of a lifetime, I'd expect most of a given household's assets to get spent down since these assets are being saved for the purposes of funding future consumption.
The mega-rich are probably less constrained to spend down their assets, but even so, I'd still expect an arc of building up and spending down assets for any given rich family. The conventional wisdom I've heard seems to be that mega-rich fortunes tend to last about three generations (sometimes more, sometimes less) before the heirs have spent down their shares of the fortune to the point that they fade into the upper middle class. This may be getting extended, though, as the financial industry has been in recent decades offering more sophisticated services for managing generational wealth and preserving the principal against the effects of prodigal or otherwise financially incontinent heirs.
You need to postulate some form of limits, other wise you end up with the reduction ad absurdum of either capital taking the whole national income, or the opposite case where capital has a<=0 profit rate but somehow there's still investment driving growth.
Marxists say the rate of profit will tend to fall as capital accumulates, until a point where the returns on new investments just aren't worth the immediate consumption capitalists could be engaged in; you won't get further growth under a capitalist system beyond that point.
It's what Marx meant by the "contradictions" of capitalism. At the time Trotsky claimed it had happened in the 30s, but it seemed like WW2 restored growth somehow. Then growth stopped again in the 70s and seems like it was restored by the higher profit rates under Neoliberalism. I kinda think the falling rate of profit might explain the current low growth rate, 0% for a decade in the UK, which puts us in an awkward position if it really does take a war, or a falling share of national income for labour, to restore capitals' profitability.
I know Marx said this, but which contemporary Marxists say this? I was under the impression that the notion that Marx's idea about the falling rate of profit wasn't something contemporary Marxists place much emphasis on, either because it didn't seem to hold up very well empirically, or because "tend to fall" is too vague to be useful (and thus leaves Marxism too open to attack from both honest and dishonest critics).
If there are sophisticated contemporary Marxists who think the falling rate of profit is still a useful idea that is empirically plausible given the economic data of the last century or so, I'd be interested to know who they are, especially if their arguments are available in relatively straightforward presentations.
He's covered the same thing in more detail elsewhere. There's also a chapter on this in the sequel to "Laws of Chaos".
That profits should fall as capital is built up just seems like a very plausible thesis on its face to me, surely capital has a downward sloping supply (edit: should be demand/upward sloping supply) curve. But yeah, it will only be a tendency as of course other factors affect profits (capital share of income etc.) For that reason, it's hard to assert it's been empirically verified, but overall I'd say the evidence corroborates. So I think it's reasonable to be moderately confident in FRP theory.
That belief of Marx's seems to imply technological stagnation and a finite supply of useful investments. That seems to describe the premodern world pretty well, in which practically the only investments were land, livestock, and slaves/serfs. Though of course in those days, investing in land/livestock/slaves had to compete with investing in an army to seize those things (and defend one's existing assets). But if we could somehow imagine a Middle Ages in which utter peace and rule of law reigned, it would seem the natural result would be absurdly high land prices and absurdly low cap rates, as Marx suggests.
As it stands, if we hit technological stagnation and a declining global labor force, then maybe something like that will prevail again: too much capital chasing too few useful investments.
But partly what happens with technology is that, while incremental productivity improvements might be harder/costlier to squeeze out, they benefit a larger economy, which means I can potentially extract more value for them from customers. This effect keeps shifting the demand curve for capital rightward.
r > g does not have any major implications for inequality. Piketty made that claim, but never made a coherent argument. In the simple Solow growth model, capital receives a constant share of income regardless of the level of interest rates relative to GDP growth. Anyway, suppose g = 2%, and r = 5%. Wages grow 2% per year, and the interest rate is 5%. So what? Workers will presumably save some of their income at 5%. If you make some additional assumptions about savings of workers relative to owners of capital, then r vs. g might become relevant.
I don't really care if it has implications for inequality, but we all surely agree that if r > g (like, say, r is 4% and g is 1%, which seems roughly empirically correct right now) then investment takes a steadily increasing share of the growth of the economy, and eventually at the limit state would be 100% of the economy (which obviously wouldn't actually occur), right?
Like, just to put a clear point on it, 1.04 ^ 50 is a bit over 7x, 1.01 ^ 50 is about 1.6x. If investments grow 7x in the time it takes for the economy to increase by a little over half, then that's a big deal.
So what is the claim? That investment return will (in the relatively near turn) drop down to match overall economic growth? That economic growth is somehow understated in a way that investment income is not?
"The first thing to say about Piketty’s logic is that it will seem strange to any economist trained in the neoclassical theory of economic growth. The condition
r > g should be familiar. In the textbook Solow growth model, it arrives naturally as a steady-state condition as long as the economy does not save so much as to push the capital stock beyond the Golden Rule level (Phelps 1961). In this model, r > g is not a problem, but r < g could be. If the rate of return is less than the growth rate, the economy has accumulated an excessive amount of capital. In this dynamically inefficient situation, all generations can be made better off by reducing the economy’s saving rate. From this perspective, we should be reassured that we live in a world in which r > g because it means we have not left any dynamic Pareto improvements unexploited."
I think the claim is that we should consider the aggregate price of capital stocks separately from the income accruing to capital holders. The two can be decoupled in a falling-interest-rate environment because falling interest rates tautologically mean increases in the cost of a given amount of risk-adjusted passive income.
So I believe the argument is that standard economic theory gives us a prior that growth of capital income tracks GDP growth fairly closely unless there's some good reason for capital-holders' share of overall income to increase or decrease, so if R > G, then our default assumption should be (in the absence of direct evidence for either a shift in the distribution of income between capital and labor or at least reason to expect such a shift) that excess R simple represents a secular decline in interest rates (which has empirically been observed over a period of centuries at least in Anglo-American markets, per Clark's "A Farewell to Alms").
Let's suppose you strongly believe that your favourite stock will go up, by a lot. Unless you're a very naive investor, you don't invest your whole net worth in it, because you understand that you might be wrong. Instead you put together a sensible-looking portfolio which includes an overweighting of your favourite stock along with a bunch of other assets.
Since ethicists are apparently less sophisticated than finance types, they don't do this. Instead they pick their favourite ethical and value system, assume it to be correct with 100% confidence, and follow it all the way through to some diverging-tails logical conclusion which usually winds up with either killing everybody or tiling the universe with simulated Singapores.
Meta-ethics seems like the antidote to this; instead of assuming one ethical system is one hundred percent right you can have a portfolio of ethical systems with various different weightings. This ought to discourage you from doing things which only appear sensible in one ethical system (tiling the universe with anything) while encouraging the things that all sensible ethical systems agree on (being nice to people and not stealing)
My question is: has there ever been any work to formalise this sort of idea into some kind of a portfolio theory of meta-ethics?
I'm very much anti-EA, but one thing I respect about Will MacAskill is that he says that he doesn't want to commit 100% to any ethical position, even some of the most ingrained liberal ethical beliefs, because they may be wrong in ways that aren't obvious today but may become so in the future, analogous to the ancient greeks debating ethics while happily owning slaves.
Unfortunately, this seems to be mostly uni-directional, in that I don't think he imagines it possible that one day we will view [insert reviled "far-right" belief here] as being correct. But still, this humility extends to the point where he isn't even willing to completely deny the possibility that there is ethical value to somebody's desires being satisfied long after they're dead (e.g. if aristotle wanted to become known around the world as being a great and wise philosopher, which happened many years after he was around to experience this being realized), which is one of those things that just seems so slam dunk obviously false, so hats off to him there.
It’s very easy to diversify investments; money is ‘liquid’ and you can pour it into buckets in a great many ways.
Making decisions - and updating people around you about the decisions you make - is more particular and path-dependent. How do you decide when to be, say, a utilitarian or a consequentialist? Will you have a rotation? Will your friends figure out your rotation and then auction off the more favorable spots in line to interact with you? Or will they be so annoyed that they just do something else rather than figure out this self-induced multiple-personality disorder?
It isn't a system I myself subscribe to, but consider an ensemble model: Try to figure out what an utilitarian would do, what a deontologist would do, what a naive folk-Christian would think what Jesus would do, etc, and try to figure action that would have consensus agreement. If no consensus, you'd have to figure out a rule (choose by majority vote? choose an action that results in average least violation of all ethical theories considered?)
Most people seem to use a special variety of ensemble model: outsource to the computation to other independent ethical processing units or, mostly copy what the other people are doing and deviate only in face of strong reason to do otherwise.
I just don't know what method of choosing a consensus you could use that wouldn't just be kicking the can down the road. "The ethical action is whatever the majority of people think is right" and "The ethical action is the action that results in average least violation (as judged by me) of all ethical theories considered (which is a list I have subjectively decided)" are both ethical theories in and of themselves.
Consensus-or-expert with exceptions is very unlike investing.
Investing is a single pot of money distributed across parallel bets. How are you parallelizing a single person’s ethics?
I think a better analogy would be if that expert secretly fed people different ethical systems, and watched the outcome. We’d probably regard that as dubiously unethical, at best!
>Consensus-or-expert with exceptions is very unlike investing.
That depends on the (verbal description of) the abstraction one chooses.
Suppose I need to make an ethical decision. True, making a single isolated yes/no decision is quite like a single decision to buy one share or not, and not very amenable to portfolio-building.
But most decisions are not binary! Like, how much time I should use writing internet comments instead of calling my parents or cleaning my house or volunteer at a soup kitchen or working a 2nd job to donate to EA causes? And when I have done that and I go shopping, which products should I buy? (Buy only vegan-compatible products? Only fair trade? Order as much insect protein products as possible to generate more supply of insect and more experienced insect utilitons?) Here is actually becomes more possible to try to average out the ensemble opinion (If I think it is 50% probable that veganism is ethically necessary choice, maybe I should become 50% vegan?)
But I admit with the answer above I am cheating a little, because it is not what I was thinking about while writing my previous reply. By "consensus", I intended to gesture towards intuition that any single isolated ethics problem is seldom yes/no binary question, as any course of action is made several smaller decisions.
Suppose I find myself in a silly Kantian thought experiment: A madman who wants to kill my friend visits me and asks about my friend's whereabouts. Naive Kantian categorical imperative would direct that as lying is verboten, I should not lie but tell the truth. Most utilitarian frameworks would recommend to do some sort utility calculus for both "truth" and "lie" and then answer accordingly.
However, in any realistic situation like that there are actually several more options than binary yes/no decision "tell the truth or not". I could start telling true things totally unrelated to my friends location and stall for time; or I could tell him the truth and alert the constabulary immediately afterwards; or I could say and do many other things. I assume any particular series of utterances and actions is more compatible with one ethical theory than other, measurable with some "loss function", then in principle one could search for a series of smaller actions that minimizes average loss across all ethical theories under consideration.
And that is not dissimilar how one should choose between different portfolios recommended by different investment strategies under consideration.
How is any of that like dividing a pot of money across multiple, parallel bets?
In your first example you seem to be assuming a moral framework (EA and the assumptions of altruism more broadly) and worrying about balancing the implementation. That is sort of like investing, but largely unlike the original proposal because you’ve already chosen the framework with all of its assumptions.
In your next example, you weigh categorical imperative of not lying against your friend’s life - without stating if that’s a clashing imperative (all within Kant’s tent) or a utilitarian concern (where you’re trying to have both completely, to have narrowly answered the question with Exact Words but still having your friend not die). Investing would be wonderful if you could have your cake and eat it too.
I think a better exploration of the original idea would be “I have these dueling interests; *ten* of my friends are threatened in that way, do I serve interest one 3/10 of the times and interest two 7/10? 4 and 6? Which friends do I gamble on?
I think your comment about balancing your time distribution comes the closest to implementing the original idea … but a full commitment to it would be very silly. On Monday you’re an altruist and send all your money to $cause_of_the_week, but on Tuesday you’re a Stoic, and you accept that you often can’t change the world, but on Wednesday you manipulate the world in your favor as a Machiavellian? How can you hold those simultaneously in some percentages?
Classical liberalism aims at something like that - allowing a wide variety of perspectives and lifestyles, even if some of them seem harmful. Which is one of the reasons its current retreat from the public sphere is a tragedy.
I think you're failing to distinguish between speculation and action here.
The universe in fact hasn't been tiled with simulated Singapores, and we're not all dead; this is at least partly because, while ethicists pursue *thought experiments* to very extreme ends, they do in fact tend to hedge towards common sense and caution in actual application.
I don't think this is very different from wallstreet; only a foolish investor would put their entire portfolio in a single stock, but you can certainly find plenty people talking about *what could happen if they did* in glowing and excited terms.
Ethicists aren't actually found to be particularly ethical in studies, so they do in fact do the thing you suggest in the original example of a cautious investor.
Are we talking just Pascal's wager, or something like "I believe there's a 90% chance slavery is evil and a 10% chance it's good?" (It seems only necessary to construct a meta-ethics if your various ethics are in conflict, otherwise you could just subscribe to the union, e.g. I'll celebrate the resurrection of Christ and also honor Eostre by giving the kids marshmallow bunnies.)
In general, there's been a lot of work on moral uncertainty and the game theory of negotiations between different moral outlooks. I think the AI alignment community has some good stuff on this, and a place to start might be to look at comparing utility functions. Or perhaps Luke melhauser's no nonsense meta-ethics. Of course, that's a portfolio of utility functions which you might not like. But given that you're talking about a portfolio of values and weighting different policies and beliefs as weights, I'm guessing you might be amenable to that perspective.
Diversifying one's portfolio is wise due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. When the situation is different, investors behave accordingly, e.g. Fedex going to Vegas.
The marginal utility of utility is constant by definition so you shouldn't accept a lower expected value in return for lower variance.
Nit: Not necessarily true if the "game" is iterated - declining marginal utility is then not required to justify diversification - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion. Ethics isn't iterated, though (you can't reinvest your goodness).
I'm sure this isn't what you mean, but literally you "shouldn't" be worried about it - it won't do you any good, that is unless you live anywhere close to Ukraine, but your existing levels of worry this year are probably sufficient to motivate any kind of beneficial behavior that is required.
There are some really bargain-bin options that most people haven't done yet ("read ready.gov/nuclear-explosion", "buy the 10L water bottle"); enough worry to actually do those is probably productive.
(I've also chosen to not live in a major city, but there's a difference between living in the country full-time and *evacuating* there in a crisis; evacuating only makes sense if the risk in the near future is much higher than baseline, which it's currently not, so I wouldn't advise evacuation at the moment.)
The main situation where a nuclear exchange is likely is if a nuclear-armed nation is shooting at large chunks of the territory of another nuclear-armed nation, as this raises the spectre of alpha strike. Ukraine has no ability to alpha-strike the Russian deterrent, so unless there's an actual reason to use the Russian deterrent (i.e. Ukraine invades Russia with some degree of success) it's not going to get used (and even if that does happen, Russia has the cushion to use one or a few nukes without having to immediately go all-out, and with prior warning to NATO; note that if Ukraine invades Russia proper and gets somewhere, that's an actual legit reason to use nukes, so NATO would probably let it go at that).
So basically, as long as the nuclear powers of NATO don't actually come in militarily in Ukraine (or give nuclear IRBMs/ICBMs to Ukraine, but lolno that would be dumb and also illegal), the chance of WWIII is pretty low. Said nuclear powers know this, of course, so I would strongly expect them not to come in. If they *do* for some God-forsaken reason, that's panic time (it's not *quite* as bad a situation as hot war over Taiwan would be, because the Russian deterrent is harder to take out than the Chinese one which gives both sides more room to breathe, but ">30% large-scale nuclear exchange within 3 months" still sounds about right to me).
Very slightly increased, but from a very low baseline.
Putin has shown that he is rational, shrewd, and cares very much for his own personal betterment. His goals in going to Ukraine show very clearly a materialist desire for growing his empire. He knows that using nuclear weapons will have at least one, and maybe more, of the following effects:
1. Nuclear retaliation (he loses)
2. Conventional war escalation (he loses)
3. Assassination (he loses)
4. Ostracization from the international community - personally and Russia (he loses)
What Putin gains is all from *threatening* to use nuclear weapons. He's counting on the total aversion that the rest of us feel about their use to do two things:
1. Maybe (unlikely) the West will stop supplying Ukraine with weapons
2. A failsafe to keep Ukraine in check and prop himself up - the West will not want to push Putin to the point where he *personally* loses out, and therefore feels no regret for using nukes. If he would die or lose everything otherwise, the chances of him using them goes way up. Alternately, if he's no longer in power, someone else might take the reins and be much more willing to use them up front. The West keeps Ukraine from invading Russia.
I think he had a sense of it, but thought Ukraine's military was far worse. He had good reason to think that, after how easily he got what he wanted in 2014. Ukraine learned a lesson there and prepared over the next 8 years for a better matchup. Almost all analysts thought Russia would win easily, so Putin wasn't the only one who was wrong there.
That only makes sense if you think Russia is deliberately trying to make us talk about nuclear warfare. And that seems bizarre considering that nukes here are being considered something that must be "resorted" to i.e. they reinforce the idea that Russia is struggling. Russia may well imply the use of nukes to scare off anyone seeking to help Ukraine, but not to distract us from their failures.
Like clearly this is an "action market" where a significant chunk of the predictors of the market can directly control the outcome - someone with an existing LW account can predict YES and then go make that happen.
Interestingly, the reaction seems to have been for people who don't want the site taken down to immediately buy as much YES (i.e. the site goes down) as possible to try to take the profit motive off the table. (Or more cynically to get the potential profit themselves)
It seems like there might be a real-world analogue to this: if there were a real-money "Bezos is assassinated" market, they (or their family and friends, or generally, people who don't want them assassinated) might buy a bunch of "YES" shares to prevent the profit motive. Which would in effect make the prediction some interesting combination of life-insurance and protection racket.
Granted, in that case, the "real" probability is much lower - the site going down is a fairly likely event, while an assassination is a fairly unlikely event - so it would be much harder to significantly move the prediction. (The Bezos family and friends would essentially have to out-spend the entire rest of the market to keep the profit motive off-the-table)
But it does seem like this sort of "strategic predicting" can be a meaningful effect on the stated probability. "Predict things I don't want to happen so that it's a win-win if they do happen" seems like a real force in a prediction market, more so than in a financial market: in a financial market, I'm generally hedging against other financial bets, so my hedge and other positions to some degree "cancel out", rather than hedging against "real-world" outcomes which don't reflect in the prediction market at all.
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The *other* interesting twist is that the site *did* go down due to a programming error, leading to a debate that essentially boils down to how literally the prediction market should be interpreted. There's a minimum (decreasing) Karma threshold, and a programming error allowed a 0 Karma user to take the site down.
So in a literal sense, "will the button be used to take down the site" definitely happened, so the market would resolve YES. But if you interpreted the market as "Will the button be used to take down the site... per the stated rules for the event", the answer is (currently still) NO.
Regardless of which way you think this should go (assuming someone doesn't make this debate a moot point soon), I think the general take-away here is that there's a "Loophole Constant" with prediction markets, like a Lizardman Constant - if you see a 5% prediction of something, you don't know if that's a real 5% prediction or a "1% prediction + 4% prediction that someone finds a loophole causing this to resolve as YES".
I've been saying for some time that one of the reasons I don't make bets is that I'm not perfect at phrasing bets without loopholes. Phrasing a bet without a loophole is like trying to write a computer program that runs correctly the first time you try it. You might, but don't count on it. Having the *prediction* be affected by loopholes is just an extension of this.
I don't know LW that well, but I reckon it's got quite a few users, some of whom would think it was quite fun to be the person to press the button. If I were to put a probability on it I'd probably go 90% or so just based on that.
Obviously I could be wrong - like I said I don't know LW well - but you shouldn't rule out the possibility that the high percentage for Yes is an honest collective estimate of the probability, and nothing to do with the fact it's an action market.
I can't see buying yes on your own assination market working.
The point of the market is that people who move it closer to reality are rewarded and to bias the result you have to out spend everyone who is willing to correct it.
The more obvious Bezos is artificially keeping his assination at 99% yes the more lucrative and risk free it is to correct him.
Oh, I agree the real probability is quite high, too. Like I said "the site going down is a fairly likely event". I'm not assuming the probability is high because people are buying strategically, I'm assuming people are buying strategically because people are posting in the comments saying "I'm buying strategically to remove the profit for people to crash the site".
I've heard that the recent Monkeypox outbreak is primarily affecting sexually active gay men. *But*, I've also heard that it's harder to get tested for it if you aren't a sexually active gay man because it spreads through prolonged skin contact and so those who aren't sexually active, gay, or men are less likely to have it. It feels like there's potential there for sampling bias. All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group.
Have there been any write-ups on this? Am I missing something that makes this a negligible issue?
It doesn't matter if monkeypox "breaks out" of the highly promiscuous MSM subgroup, unless it then breaks *in* to some other population with an effective R > 1. Otherwise, it just gives you a couple of anomalous cases and doesn't go anywhere.
The R0 for monkeypox in the general population of a nation with modern Western health and hygiene standards is <<1. This disease really, really sucks at spreading among otherwise-healthy humans (which is probably why it's called "monkeypox" and not "humanpox"). It's not clear that there is any significant subpopulation, other than highly promiscuous MSM, that can spread monkeypox at R > 1, and if there is it is probably small and isolated and not likely to intersect with your "one bisexual guy".
"All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group."
From what I understand, they are including these in the whole "men who have sex with men" category, so whether you think of yourself as gay, bi, or 'look, sometimes I just like to have my dick sucked by a cute twink but I'm straight', then you're in the basket.
Within the demographics, they very carefully don't report by sexual orientation, but since the figures show it's MOSTLY MEN so far, I think we can make a wild guess here as to who is zooming who:
Ages go from "0 to 5" (11 in this age range, so there have been reports of children being infected) up to "76+" and figures break down as follows:
It depends on what you mean here. In the sense that we might be somewhat undercounting the total case number due to sampling bias, sure. The is analogous to saying the COVID case numbers are undercounted because low and asymptomatic people don't test.
But if you're suggesting that the claim "the Monkeypox outbreak is primarily affecting sexually active gay men" is not true, due to "sampling bias", I think that's very unlikely to be the case. California reported 2% of the cases among heterosexuals - this seems well beyond the realm of plausible sampling bias.
> All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group
My guess would be that the sluttiest subsection of the heterosexual population is much less slutty than the sluttiest subsection of the homosexual population, meaning that the disease has an R0 < 1 in the straight population.
I wonder is this isn't fully true, but is maybe true enough? Like, maybe if you landed monkeypox in a bi burner right before Burning Man, you might see heterosexual escape, but barring something along those lines it'll stay in the gay club scene.
Which is quibbling of course. Your larger point stands.
Yeah, that's probably valid overall, but seems likely R0>1 for the most promiscuous subsection of the straight world, so there could be rapid spread in this subgroup, with some limited spread among straights with fewer sexual partners.
I think you misunderstand the gap between the promiscuous rate of MSM and MSW. The 'most promiscuous subsection' of the straight world is still less so than the MSM average. And as a result, the circles of spread are much lower.
Actually, I think you misunderstood me. I did not say that the most promiscuous MSW's have as many partners as the most promiscuous MSM's. I said the former probably have enough partners for R0 to be >1. And agreed that circles of spread would be lower. That's what I meant by rapid spread in most promiscuous subgroup, some limited spread to straights with fewer partners.
>All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group.
Probably, monkeypox isn't too contagious, and heterosexuals, aren't, er, promiscuous? enough to keep the spread up. And since it's fairly noticable, people get medical attention before spreading it any more.
About it being fairly noticeable: I read somewhere reliable, I believe it was some research posted on medical twitter, that testing of a bunch of gay men who'd had lots of recent partners turned up some asymptomatic Monkeypox-positive guys -- it was maybe something like 10% of the guys. So it's not guaranteed that people who have it will get treatment. Also, if health providers are being stingy with who they test I can imagine that a straight woman with no symptoms would have a hard time getting tested.
If it were breaking out into the general population to a significant degree, at least some fraction of people would have symptoms bad enough to bring the matter to the attention of epidemiologists. It's not as if they aren't looking.
Yeah, true. I just added that note about 10% or so of infected people being asymptomatic because it seems better to know that than not to know when thinking about monkeypox management. But if there were much monkeypox in the general population then something like 90% of infected straights & MSM's who don't have many partners would have symptoms, & we'd know it it had moved out into lower-risk groups.
There's also the embedded assumption that all forms of sex are equally good at spreading every type of disease. I don't have any data and won't speculate, but we could easily imagine that penis-in-anus sex and monkeypox somehow get along much better than any other act/disease pairing.
Anal sex has a significantly higher rate of numerous types of infections. This has a lot to do with anal tearing and the spread of blood, but it's also just (clinically speaking) a much dirtier sexual act.
It's not the sexual acts as such that conduce to the spread, it's the skin-to-skin contact with infected people. And since sex generally involves skin-to-skin contact, this is not something that can be avoided by using condoms. And since allegedly 'men who have sex with men' tend to have more partners (let's festoon this with a ton of qualifiers to avoid accusations of homophobia and stigmatising gay men), then they have more skin-to-skin contact and one infected guy can infect a lot of casual partners.
I think it's probably easier for the AI to build a Life 2.0 thing de novo that exists solely to provide a backup for the AI than it is for the AI to modify humans to be more effective. I think we passed the "building a new one is easier than modifying what we've got" threshold for living things a while ago.
EDIT: I think it's probably true in the short-run that some amount of (brainwashed) humans would be useful to keep around, but that ends inside a decade.
EDIT2:
>I believe that, if convergent instrumental subgoals don't imply alignment, that the original odds given are probably too low. I simply don't believe that the alignment problem is solvable.
There are alternatives that are neither alignment nor doom, i.e. "we realise neural-net alignment is impossible and stop before building an X-AI"; depending on how you rule "AGI is developed" (technical capability vs. instantiation, also how you define AGI) a good chunk of mass on "AGI developed but no X" is fair.
Scott's mentioned several times how much of a problem high time preference/akrasia/impatience is in peoples lives and that he suffers from it himself, and this is definitely a major issue in my own life, I think he even joked some one with perfect self control would end up as world emperor or something, which I totally can believe.
I can't help feeling Scott has achieved way more than most people ever will, e.g.. this blog, working 100hour medical internships etc. He kinda strikes me as someone with exceptionally low time preference.
Are there any posts where he discusses this stuff/does anyone think he might have achieved those things but still have high time preference somehow?
Doesn't Naval Ravikant say something about this, and has a heuristic of do-whichever-thing-seems-harder in order to avoid this discounting? I believe Scott quoted this somewhere, but I may have the attribution entirely wrong.
“ And when I tried to analyzed my certainty that – even despite the whole multiple intelligences thing – I couldn’t possibly be as good as them, it boiled down to something like this: they were talented at hard things, but I was only talented at easy things.
It took me about ten years to figure out the flaw in this argument, by the way.”
“ On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.
“But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.”
“I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.”
“And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?”
“And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me.
“Just as drugs mysteriously find their own non-fungible money, enjoyable activities mysteriously find their own non-fungible time. If I had to explain it, I’d say the resource bottleneck isn’t time but energy/willpower, and that these look similar because working hard saps energy/willpower and relaxing for a while restores it, so when I have less time I also have less energy/willpower. But some things don’t require energy/willpower and so are essentially free.“
AT some level, I think high time presence only makes sense if you don't trust the future to work out.
Bitcoiners talk, over and over, about "lower time preference." Believing bitcoin will go up long term really did help me.
The more bitcoin helped me with a low time preference, the more I realized that lowering my time preference further would be instrumental to feeling better in life. It's not a stretch to say that bitcoin made me consider faith seriously, by showing me the power of consistently having faith in the future, thus lowering my time preference and anxiety.
Say you have a child who's among the youngest for their class, i.e. they're born in December, almost January. Are the disadvantages acute enough to warrant holding back a year (e.g. grading by teachers, social life), or conversely, are they in an advantageous position? Or is it a wash? What about a negative stigma?
It very much depends on the individual kid. My son's a senior in high school this year, and has always been among the youngest (often the youngest boy) in his class. We pondered a long while over whether to redshirt him or send him to kindergarten when he had just turned 5 - redshirting was super common where we lived. But he was bright, mature for his age, sociable, and physically self-confident, so we figured he probably wouldn't have too many problems being the youngest. And it worked out fine: he remains bright, mature, etc. and his K-12 career has been a success so far - he's looking at some good colleges. But if he'd been less mature, with a more typical intellect, unsociable, and/or frail we would've kept him out another year.
That will depend a lot on the kid. Unfortunately, you may not know all of the relevant metrics until several years too late to make this decision. Luckily it's probably not nearly as much of a concern as you may be lead to believe.
I was born a few days prior to the cutoff, and started Kindergarten about as soon as I turned five. I did great in school, and had few problems. Two of my kids were born just after the cutoff, and turned six just after starting school. They are also doing just fine (though the younger one often gets bored at school and feels that class doesn't cover enough).
For academics, you probably want to push ahead. For sports, you would want to hold back. For socialization, there probably isn't enough of a gap to matter.
One consideration I haven't seen mentioned is cost of daycare. Holding your kid back from (free, public) school for one year means one extra year of paying for (typically expensive, private) daycare, which may cost about as much as a mortgage. YMMV if you plan on going to private school anyways, or if you have a less expensive daycare arrangement.
TLDLR: Birth month is well-documented to hugely influence a child's trajectory in sports AND academics. His survey of Ivy League college students at an event revealed that the vast majority of them were the oldest possible students in their academic year.
Hold your kid back. Don't worry about the social life; they'll have plenty of company, and they can always skip a grade later if need be.
(I was an older kid and graduated high school in 3 years.)
Reversing the premise: one of my best friends from K-7 was less than two weeks *younger* than the cutoff, so persistently old for our grade. He ended up skipping 8th and still became the valedictorian of the class ahead of me.
Caveat: we were both in a GT program from K on, so these results are not generalizable to the median student.
It's really hard to know, but if I had to choose I'd pick holding the child back for a year. My reasons:
-Teachers & professionals generally are apt to label as "ADD" behaviors that are a bit chaotic and immature for the grade the kid is in. Some of the kids that get labeled ADD, learning disability, behavior problems, etc. would do just fine in the same setting 12 months later, when they've matured a bit more. Why take a chance on your kid being slow-maturing in the skills it takes to "behave appropriately" in a first grade classroom?
-I does not take anything like 5 years to learn the skills 5th-graders have. I homeschooled my daughter through grade 5. The year before she returned to school she was a good reader & had learned a lot about history, but had not done any systematic work on grammar, spelling, punctuation or math. I brought her up to grade level with all that stuff working about 3 hours/day for about a year. And she is not particularly academically inclined. You really do not need to worry about your kid being "behind" everyone else if they start learning all that stuff a year later. Any bright kid who wants to can skip a grade or 2 later on.
-There's lots of valuable non-academic learning kids can do without going to school or learning to read. You can get ideas for approaches from homeschooling websites and books.
People in the comments seem to miss the big positive about not holding back: your child will graduate a year early, giving them an extra year of freedom to work and earn money, travel, study, live alone in the woods, and do all the other cool adult things you can't do while in school. Having school be a bit harder but finish it earlier seems like a big benefit IMO.
You can get the same benefit by skipping a year later. And you get an extra year of freedom as a child.
Ideally, that early extra year could be spent finding and developing your talent. So while the other six years old kids are wasting their time at school, you can focus on your talent, giving it the time they will never have. Then, after you start school, you will easily win the competitions (against kids biologically one year younger, with the benefit of extra training time they never had), and thus establish yourself as a rare genius.
The best year to skip, in my opinion, is the *last* year of elementary and/or high school, because changing the school will soften the impact of the unusual change. For example, if you skip a year in the middle of school, you need to get used to the new classmates, some teachers may resent you for skipping their favorite subject, you may actually miss some of the knowledge. But when you transition from elementary to high school, or high school to college, you are getting new classmates and new teachers anyway, and no one will obsess about a fact or two that you missed from the skipped years, because students coming from different schools will have different knowledge anyway.
I think it is VERY hard to know how the pluses and minuses wash out. Teachers/coaches/people simply don't do a good job compensating for it. So on the downside you child will be treated as dumber/smaller/less athletic than they really are.
On the upside they will be challenged more and complete various stage gates sooner. How that all nets out is very hard to imagine.
For me I think I would have had a much more successful youth athletics career if I was 6 months older, or 3 months younger than I was. But in school, my main issues were not being challenged enough and having to repeat material because our school simply didn't offer more advanced material (I think I took the same math class grades 5-8, or rather I had mastered "advanced 8th grade math" in 5th grade).
> So on the downside you child will be treated as dumber/smaller/less athletic than they really are.
I've read that this is common. However, I imagine a more introverted child might lower this risk. Personally teachers judged me for not paying attention, which I expect could be a constant regardless of age.
As for athletics, these will most likely be found outside of school - I'm not sure how age restrictions might apply, but I expect it's generally frowned upon to have an older kid in a team otherwise of a given age. I excelled in athletics despite a late start for my sport. In this area I'm less concerned, the way I see it either the child is highly invested in the sport (and therefore will likely do fine), or isn't - in any case they are kept active and have fun.
Oh I for sure noticed it with my son who is the youngest in his grade. he had done very well on some age adjusted standardized tests his school gave, and then later in they year very poorly on another one and when I discovered that one wasn't age adjusted his teacher was jsut like "why would that matter?". So she for sure isn't taking things like that into account when evaluating behavior and such, And this was 1st/2nd grade when age differences are the biggest.
As for sports my experience is the opposite. Sure there will be outliers like yourself. But so much of how much a kid is "into" a sport depends on getting encouragement and a sense of being good/accomplished. Kids who are "winning" just have so much more fun.
So the older kids gets more encouragement, more self-motivation and better coaching/teammates. its one of the reasons everyone is split into so many different activities. People all want things they can be good at. I kind of suspect without those effects you would see a lot more homogenization in behaviors.
> As for sports my experience is the opposite. Sure there will be outliers like yourself. But so much of how much a kid is "into" a sport depends on getting encouragement and a sense of being good/accomplished. Kids who are "winning" just have so much more fun.
Not seeing how this contradicts me. At any rate excelling isn't the only deciding factor, if that were true kids would like every sport they're passably good at. I was good for a spell, but didn't live and breathe the sport, and eventually got interested in music - I expect this is not unusual.
> So the older kids gets more encouragement, more self-motivation and better coaching/teammates.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Yes, a weak player may get less attention from a coach. This matters less at that age because a) parents can give one-on-one attention, b) aptitude can improve very rapidly with effort, c) you can get a different coach and/or team the next year who does their job.
Secondly, one disadvantage of starting out far ahead of peers is facing less challenge. That can soften players as they progress, unless they're given the opportunity to compete at higher levels. Conversely, at a younger age weaker players can be poised to catch up, if they're into it.
Thirdly, you're "winning" as a team, as team sports go. Even a weak player can win, and drafting is meant to ensure no team gets completely steam-rolled. Solo competitive sports require a certain breed - I've tried a few of these and while they kept me in shape, I never found any of them fun.
I don't think being months younger is the deciding factor between winning and losing all the time. Notwithstanding that, as physique goes, some players have bigger builds, some will be more talented, or have more drive.
Emily Oster has a chapter covering this in her latest book, The Family Firm. There are modest advantages and disadvantages (which you should look into to inform your decision), but ultimately what's best comes down to the specifics of your child and your family (does holding back make your family's logistics significantly easier/harder?). If you can track down any data on your local district that could be a factor as well (e.g. if all the other Nov/Dec kids in the school get held back, there's extra reason to hold yours back too).
> but ultimately what's best comes down to the specifics of your child and your family (does holding back make your family's logistics significantly easier/harder?)
I'm not sure what sort of logistics that would entail, as I imagine it there would be no difference for us. And for the other point, it's hard to pin-down the "specifics of a child" at such a young age. I'll look out for that book though, I've read Cribsheet.
I think a big logistical factor she mentions is whether holding them back would be a burden on the family budget (if paying for child care or pre school) and/or the time of a stay at home parent. For these decisions she makes a big deal out of making sure that you're weighing what both alternatives actually entail and not just considering one side of the ledger.
I've been on both sides of this. The biggest grievance of my young life was that I was made to repeat grade 3, after having been promoted ahead of my age group by my previous school, because I changed schools and I was thereupon too young to be in grade 4. I might have forgiven them, but it turned out there was a boy in my class who was younger than the rest of us, and hadn't been put back to an age-appropriate grade. I eventually rectified this injustice by skipping Grade 10 - in a different school system.
This was complicated by undiagnosed autism. I wasn't good at social skills. I didn't get better because of being surrounded by kids my own age; that would have required focussed teaching. Instead, I became one of the weird kids, picked on by the others.
I think the idea was that my social skills were toast because I was too young, and the rule was invoked with good intentions. That didn't improve the results.
I (a girl) was always one of the youngest in my class, and never noticed a disadvantage. If anything, it was probably better for me intellectually (since I was ~top-of-class anyway) -- the equivalent of skipping a grade but without missing any content or losing a social group.
I think it makes a much bigger difference for boys than for girls. Thinking back to my own school days, the boys who emerged as leaders tended to be the ones who were the slightly larger, older ones, while some the small weak boys who got picked on a lot tended to be the younger ones in the year. Among girls the social hierarchy is much more about looks than size, so holding back an extra year won't help.
Where I live, it seems that parents are increasingly holding kids back, so the "unofficial" cutoff keeps moving further and further back. Nobody wants their kid to be the youngest so we get stuck in a dumb arms race where kids are starting kindergarten at six and both parents and kids wind up wasting another year of their lives sitting around at home watching Peppa Pig.
I had a birthday that would have made me one of the youngest in my class and my parents decided to instead hold me back a year in school. Overall, I think it was probably the right move for me, but it's hard to say with certainty.
I was very bad at sports in any case (partly due to a lack of talent, but also a lack of parental encouragement to participate). I don't think it made any difference there, but I can see how that might be one of the biggest effects for others.
Academically, I went to a private elementary school that mostly let me move at my own pace and also had a brighter-than-average crop of kids, so intellectual boredom was seldom an issue. Had I been in public school, I can see how the boredom of being one of the brighter kids might have been compounded with the boredom of being older than the other kids. I did go to a public middle school, but it was an elite public school and separate tracking meant that classes more or less aligned with my ability level.
Socially, I did pretty well in terms of friendships through high school, for a shy kid that was athletically hopeless. I got my driver's license the day I turned 16, which was first in my class and definitely seemed cool at the time.
I always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder from being held back. I was offered a chance to skip the 5th grade, which I wanted to take, but parents still thought it was better to hold off. I ended up finishing college in 3 years, due to a combination of AP credit and taking some college classes during my HS summers, so it all balanced out in the end.
I have been thinking about this as my daughter is among the youngest in her class. She is tending to be immature and innocent. So what I am starting to confront is other kids acting much older- not intellectually- but physically and socially. We will be moving, and it would be an opportunity to have her repeat fifth grade. This repeating is not uncommon among expats when they move. I think it really depends on the kid and the school and the family situation. I am not so worried about my daughter being bored intellectually as I think she can handle the boredom like a pro. Most people think in terms of grade level, rather than age, so I doubt anyone would call her a geezer...
Perusing some studies reveals that redshirting doesn't have a noticeable effect on many easily observable metrics. Kids do about the same academically, socially, etc.
In my personal experience, redshirting can have a slightly positive effect down the line. I was never redshirted but my birthday naturally made me the oldest in my grade next to the two actually redshirted kids. The oldest kids were consistently the best at school sports. There was a slight negative stigma towards the two redshirted students, but only along the lines of "Wow Andrew you're practically a geezer" instead of any real stigma.
I ended up being reverse redshirted when I skipped the last grade of elementary school and went to high school being one of the youngest there. I think this is where some of the issues can crop up and where being redshirted might actually be an advantage. I was one of the last of my peers to be able to drive. I never had the confidence boost from being top-dog in middle school. And I generally lost a lot of friends in the transition. A lot of people strongly recommend skipping grades. I'd probably recommend it too. In fact I'd recommend the opposite of redshirting if you can work that with your school. Have your kid start at a later grade or skip a grade. But there are a few downsides while you gain a year. Whereas redshirting there aren't really any upsides and you lose a year.
This may depend on country; in mine the youngest would be born in August. (The rule here is "if you are 6 years old on September 1st, off to school with you".)
No opinion on the magnitude of the disadvantage, but yes, being biologically older *is* an advantage at elementary school. Especially in sport, the difference between 6 years old and 7 years old is huge. But also, being more mature generally means better grades, better opinions of teachers.
Note that for high-IQ children, skipping grades is recommended: intellectually closer peers, less boredom. But perhaps, you can have both -- start the elementary school later, then skip the last year or two. (Find out how difficult it is to skip a grade in your country.) Minimize the total time spent at school.
> What about a negative stigma?
Most likely, no one will notice that your child started school one year later. If they notice, they will quickly forget.
How's the evidence for 'Covid vaccines prevent transmission' looking these days? (Sorry if this is like an ultra hot button issue or what have you). I say this as someone who's extremely vaccinated (I lied to get an extra vaccine shot of a different type before boosters were widespread, as an example. I will take a new booster the second that it's available to me). It seems that both the public and private sectors in the US have gradually pulled back on vaccine requirements.
My understanding of requiring others to be vaccinated is that it theoretically prevented Covid transmission to others. Herd immunity, etc. etc. This was the big discussion around vaccine requirements pre-2020- that requiring children to have MMR ones prevented transmission overall, and so on. Pre-Covid I had never thought to question any of the science behind that- these days, I would not say that the public health sector has come out of this looking particularly great.
As again someone who's heavily vaccinated, I don't really feel any need to force others to get one if it only affects them. (I mean, I would also probably support de-prioritizing them for emergency care if they catch Covid and the hospitals are full- consequences of your actions, and so on. I understand that this is probably not realistic). So, do the Covid vaccines prevent transmission to others, or not? How about other, non-Covid vaccines?
My understanding is that covid vaccines do not prevent transmission. It is based on antibody studies that show that up to 90% of vaccinated people have already been infected with covid.
Some try to argue that the vaccines reduce the spread somewhat. My answer is that this reduction is not clinically relevant. If you need 4 weeks instead of 1 week to catch covid, it is not clinically relevant. Most likely after infection you get immunity that will prevent you getting infected again, maybe 6 months to 1 year, i.e., this period is longer than time to getting infected once your immunity is low enough.
Agree that getting vaxed is small potatoes when it comes to reducing spread. Most effective & underused tool for reducing spread is probably air purification, particularly in schools, where number of people per volume of air volume is much higher than most other settings, and where a good % of our population spends 7+ hours/day.
It could cause risks to the health though. If children don't get exposed to coronavirus (and other viruses) for longer periods due to very efficient ventilation, they won't develop immunity and will get much sicker from it when they eventually get exposed to it in some other settings.
One of the problems when children restarted school after long periods of isolation was RSV outbreaks which caused many hospitalizations.
Yeah, there are a lot of things to balance out. Children could get vaxed against covid, so can get immunity that way, but I don't know about developing immunity to RSV and other things. Here are the points I see that favor air purification:
-Air purification would only interfere with kids catching and developing immunity to airborne diseases. Anything transmitted another way would not be affected. Just looked up RSV transmission. Google says it's transmitted by big droplet, from coughs & sneezes, plus dried residue of same on skin and surfaces. Sounds to me like air purification would not interfere with transmission of RSV. Also would not interfere with transmission of stomach bug type germs. I dunno about flu and common colds.
-Air purification in schools would reduce kids' exposure to various kinds of pollution. Definitely works well against wildfire smoke. I'm not sure how well it works against other forms of pollution.
-Even if their immune systems aren't getting enough of a workout in school, kids may encounter enough germs during the rest of their day to make up for in-school exposures. It may be that the spike in RSV is a result of kids spending an an unusual amount of time isolated at home with only family members over the last couple years, and that going forward so long as they are getting out into the world, even if 7 hrs of their time are in purified air, they develop the immunities they need to.
But what about other cold viruses? I was taught that children get cold 5-6 times per year. Generally they are harmless to children like covid.
Air purification could be good for different reasons. The air quality is becoming worse in many places and we have evidence that PM it is generally bad for health and shortens life.
It does seem likely that air purification at school would cut way down on cold transmission too. Since most adults have a cold or 2 per year seems like kids would get some from parents, but they probably would have fewer total colds. Hard to know how bad that is. Clearly it's good to train the immune system young -- having pets adds microbes to the home environment that do that too, apparently. We always had a dog or cat or both when I was growing up, & I've read that that reduces chance of allergies later in life. If so, worked great for me -- I have no allergies, and also seem to be very resistant to being affected by poison ivy.
Covid semi-nerd here: Vaccines are pretty good at preventing transmission for the first couple months after you get them, but that falls off as your antibodies decrease. It also falls off as new variants come through that are a bit different from the strain you were vaxed for. What remains over time and across new variants is immune memory of the virus: You can still get infected (& if infected, you are contagious) but once you're infected your body will recognize the virus & fight it far more effectively than it would have without a vaccination. Overall, people who are vaccinated are somewhat less likely to have covid at all, and if they have it are somewhat less likely to transmit it. Those 2 somewhat's add up to a moderate reduction in how much transmitting you can do if you're vaxed.
There was never any real chance that we could attain herd immunity, the way we have typhoid, etc. (People in public health must surely have recognized this, but the possibility of herd immunity is one of several areas where they were not straightforward. Somebody must have thought that telling people that herd immunity is possible would drive more people to get the vaccine. Its sort of like telling people that masks don't reduce transmission. It's a lie but somebody thought that if you told the public they reduce transmission but we need to save them for healthcare professionals and other essential workers at high risk people would have run out and bought them all up anyhow.) Covid has several characteristics that make it a bad target for herd immunity: It mutates rapidly. It has a high transmission rate. And people become contagious before they have symptoms. What we can realistically achieve is herd *resistance*. Most people do not get very sick if infected.
It would surely have been possible to have fewer infections and fewer deaths than we had. Last time I checked, the US ranked around 30th out of about 200 countries in covid deaths per 100,000. Something like 3/4 of the world did better than us. Exactly what approach would have played out better in this country is up for discussion. It's clearly not as simple as that we should have had more mask mandates or longer lockdowns. There are lots of things we could have done more of or less of or at different times that would have affected the covid/US "meteorological system." For instance, very little attention was paid to the amount of transmission reduction you can get from air purification in indoor settings -- that's an easy get we pretty much skipped.
My understanding was that the Covid vaccine pretty much failed to provide herd immunity in the field. It was a very effective at preventing deaths, but Covid is a flu-virus and it fundamentally evolves too fast to ever be contained by a vaccination campaign. Breakthrough infections, reinfections and asymptomatic transmission persist to such an extent that we simply do not have the ability to control the virus long term without regular lockdowns and other social suppression methods. These are no longer politically palatable and are of increasingly questionable value.
It's still helpful to vaccinate the at risk groups who may experience extreme symptoms, but this could easily be rolled into the existing annual flu inoculation program without bothering the general population. And, honestly, I think the medical industry should start shifting away from the idea of mass Covid vaccination. It's promoting way too much anti-vax and vaccine hesitancy sentiment in the general pop and that's negatively affecting the vaccination campaigns of diseases that actually can be controlled through herd immunity. Achieving zero Covid seems to be a bit of a white whale at this point.
Achieving zero covid was never possible, actually (I briefly give reasons in earlier post). Just for the record, it won't work to roll covid inoculation (for the most vulnerable, or for whoever) in with yearly flu inoculation unless covid becomes way more clearly seasonal than it is now, and unless new variants appear less often. Covid booster's protection against hospitalization & death wanes by 5+% per month, so by 11 months after the last booster people would have very little protection from severe illness requiring hospitalization. Also, variants may appear that are so different from what was in vaccine that immune memory does not work well to protect people from them. Anyhow, twice-yearly boosters for the vulnerable might work, but not once-yearly.
The way I understand it, reduced probability of death/serious illness sticks around for >1 yr and in fact is the big advantage of the vaccine. This probably comes down to having a cytotoxic T cell response that helps you clear the infection.
What I'm mostly going by is a big CDC study of waning effectiveness of vaccine over time. Table 2, the lower half, shows waning effectiveness against hospitalization under various conditions: 2 vs. 3 doses; delta era vs. omicron era. Only covers 5 months, & for some conditions only 4. Table is here: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7107e2.htm#T2_down
But based on that it does look like effectiveness wanes 5-10% per month. If it continues at that pace, vaccine effectiveness after 12 months against hospitalization will be down below 50%. Seems pretty inadequate, especially since the people who most need the vax are people who have a high base rate of hospitalization & death -- elderly, people with serious comorbidities. Cutting their chance of hospitalization in half leaves them with odds that really are not great.
Yeah, there's a number of different DNA/RNA arrangements that pathogens can have that have affect the average mutation rates. Some you might only see a new variant every few decades, Corona virus felt like it got a new variant every other month. I'm getting a bit beyond my area of expertise, though. You'd want a pathologist to explain the whys and wherefores.
I agree with you, except for “COVID is a flu-virus.” Not sure what you mean. Do you mean that both mutate to avoid host immunity?
Flu vaccine tends be even less useful than COVID vaccines. I stopped getting flu vaccines a decade ago because the effectiveness is so hit-and-miss. Unfortunately, flu vaccines also have diminishing effectiveness in the elderly at risk population. Similar to your point about pushing mass COVID vaccination, I think the medical industry should tone down the marketing of flu vaccines that so often don’t work and make people skeptical.
Yeah, flu shots are not that effective anyhow -- on average about 40%. Still, that's way better than nothing, & I think they're worth getting. But it's dumb to get them in September, which is when public health officials all start hassling us to get them. Their effectiveness declines by about 10% a month, so you want to get them as close to the start of flu season as possible, so as to have decent protection when flu cases peak. Peak time varies, but the month they peak in most often is February. So people who got their shots in Sept. have almost no immunity at peak season those years. The best course is to watch the flu map for your state at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/usmap.htm. When cases start to rise, go in for your shot. Last year in my state the rise began in later Oct., and I got my shot a couple weeks later. Another approach is to get one flu shot in Sept. and another in January.
Ah, probably should be a 'cold virus'. The coronovirus family of diseases are one of the range of pathogens that contrubute to the common cold, of which influenza is also one.
I thought common cold was usually rhinovirus (a picornavirus)? and flu is an orthomyxovirus, a separate category from coronavirus? These seem like separate categories, though I agree coronaviruses cause common cold just like rhinovirus does.
Why shouldn't people who got vaccinated be de-prioritized for medical treatment? They chose the vaccine as their method of protection, and that action should have consequences. If this vaccine that they got as their method of protection failed them, why should they get other methods of protection like medical treatment on top of that?
I don't think we're in a situation where deciding how to prioritize people for treatment makes sense w.r.t. covid anymore. When hospitals were being swamped with covid cases, maybe that was the case, but back then, we didn't have a vaccine. At this point, we have plenty of medical resources to use to treat the covid cases that come in, both those who are vaccinated and those who aren't.
Really, the right place to head off the hospitalizations is early in the course of covid, when antivirals (paxlovid, monoclonal antibodies, etc.) can make a pretty big difference in the course of the disease.
Because it isn't supposed to be a "pick one and only one" choice. If I want to not die in a car crash, I can drive slowly and defensively *and* wear a seatbelt *and* drive a Volvo *and* keep my health insurance up to date.
And if there's any shortage of medical resources to treat car-crash victims, my vote is to give them to the people who were wearing seatbelts, tried to minimize risk and social impact, and got an extra dose of bad luck. Not the idiots who said "I chose hospitals as my method of protection because I don't like seatbelts, so I get to be first in line at the hospital".
Yes, of course it is obvious that you don't *have* to pick one and only one. But OP specifically brought up the possibility of denying people medical treatment, so I suggested another possible group to deny medical treatment to: the vaccinated. If punishing people for not wanting to die of a brain blood clot or heart failure is morally permissible, then I don't see what's wrong with punishing people for not wanting to die of respiratory failure.
Another reason to deny the vaccinated medical treatment is that it forces them to put your money where their mouth is - if they're so sure that the vaccine is safe and effective, able to prevent transmission, severe disease and death, then they should be fine with forgoing medical treatment. Refusing to do so indicates deception about the true efficacy of the vaccines.
As a serious response to this quasi-trolling question: because vaccines are pro-social even totally discounting transmission effects, because it lessens the likelihood that you're going to be a burden on the medical system (in a time when it's already unusually overburdened, since we're still not back to pre-covid capacity).
Calling both vaccines and hospitalizations "protection" is verging on eargrayish; vaccines are covid *insurance*, whereas hospitalization is *treatment*.
(Edit: it should go without saying, but the implied conclusion here is that we should be rewarding people who choose to take pro-social insurance, not punishing them)
Is it pro-social to give the death penalty to those who refuse to put themselves at great risk of death for the sake of infinitesimally improving the safety of others? How high of a "level of personal risk of death" to "level of societal benefit" ratio is it acceptable to mandate with violent force?
This whole chain of reasoning is backwards. The vaccine probably makes you a little less likely to transmit covid, but its main value is making covid a lot less likely to kill you. It's not quite the situation of the tetanus vaccine (where the person getting the shot gets 100% of the benefit) but it's probably not so far away from that.
Also, the vaccine is not putting anyone at great risk of death. You can make an argument about whether the very low risks from vaccine side effects are more worrying than the very low risks from getting covid unvaccinated for, say, healthy 12 year olds, but nobody is facing high risks from the vaccine. (Mainly what can go wrong with the vaccine is an allergic reaction, which can definitely kill you but is very rare and can be treated with an epi-pen--this is why they always ask you to stick around for a few minutes after getting the shot.)
I'm very curious about this comment, from an epistemology standpoint. How do you know the things you just told me? Did you read up on the recent literature, analyze VAERS data, conduct an age-stratified cost-benefit analysis, anything like that? Or did you kind of just get "safe and effective" vibes from the media coverage of vaccines, and then go on to make claims about their safety, inferring that you could probably find some study supporting your claims if you were ever called on it?
There have been hundreds of millions of vaccine doses administered. I know of more than a dozen of people who died of Covid-19 at less than three degrees of separation, none who had a worse reaction to the vaccine than fever and feeling shitty for a day or so.
>Is it pro-social to give the death penalty to those who refuse to put themselves at great risk of death for the sake of infinitesimally improving the safety of others?
You seem to have changed the topic here, since this statement does not appear to be about covid vaccines. Unless you consider an aggregate risk of approximately 1 in 100,000[1] a "great risk of death", the first clause does not appear to be about any vaccine for SARS-CoV2. And if you do consider it a great risk, it should be dwarfed by the approximately 1 in ~500 chance of dying from a covid infection (~3% measured death rate * 50% asymptomatic * 20% population infection rate, all fairly conservative numbers, though delta lowers the first term and raises the last).
Also, my argument specifically excluded "safety of others" as a consideration, I was talking about the financial and staffing burden on the healthcare system.
Could you explain what you're actually talking about, or confirm your intent to change the subject? Because from where I'm standing, this response goes from quasi-trolling which could be considered a legitimate question for investigating assumptions, to full-on trolling.
Wait, are you seriously trying to suggest that the CDC vaccine FAQ page saying "COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective" is some sort of conclusive proof that the vaccines have a positive cost-benefit analysis? Or even any evidence of that at all?
You're familiar with basic probability, right? In the hypothetical world where the vaccines really were unsafe, the CDC would not tell the public, so that provides virtually no evidence that the vaccines are safe. P(CDC says the vaccines are safe | the vaccines are safe) ≈ 1 and P(CDC says the vaccines are safe | the vaccines are unsafe) ≈ 1.
Now, on the data, you're about a year behind on actual safety statistics. All recent cost-benefit analyses show significant net harm from vaccines.
If you go to page 12, despite their claimed "90+% efficacy", more people in the vaccine group died than in the placebo group.
Your argument hinges on a death rate of 3%, but as we can see from the trial, those deaths are overwhelmingly in a tiny subgroup of the population, the elderly, who already have extremely high vaccination rates and generally don't have a job or attend school, where mandates would take effect. Mandates overwhelmingly affect young people, who have a relative risk *over 8000 times lower* than the elderly.
There are hundreds of thousands of vaccine deaths reported in VAERS, the vaccine safety monitoring system of the CDC and FDA. And for every one VAERS report there are an estimated 9 to 100 additional cases that go unreported. Remember: this is *the* official monitoring system for vaccine safety, so either this data is trustworthy, or we have no actual monitoring system in place for adverse events.
>In the hypothetical world where the vaccines really were unsafe, the CDC would not tell the public
That's a very strong claim that relies on literally conspiratorial thinking. Even then, it's not P(CDC political messaging says the vaccine is safe), it's P(CDC openly falsifies public data), which you should be assigning a much lower probability to.
But let's see what you think are the most convincing studies for your argument. I won't even both checking their accuracy, I'll take their results at face value.
Note that you specifically called out vaccination as exposing one's self to "a great risk of death", and I'm not going to let you move those goalposts and retreat to the vague motte.
Their absolute worst-case estimates give a 0.3% chance of "serious adverse events", of which a much smaller set are actually lethal or even seriously life-threatening.
Clearly not "a great risk of death".
>Vaccines are 20-90x more likely to cause harm than prevent harm.
Where "cause harm" is defined as "make you feel at least achey enough to use it as an excuse to take off work/school". Seriously lol?
Yeah, that's a known side-effect of getting a vaccine. Also note that it can be planned around, unlike getting an actual infection.
That study shows... that every vaccine both caused a huge reduction in severe covid cases, and a reduction in deaths. The opposite of your argument.
>the vaccines have been shown to increase severe adverse events
Yeah, it causes an immune response. That's both expected and desired. I don't think you understand what "severe event" means. Notice that life-threatening events *went down* in the table that distinguishes them, because "severe events" are overwhelmingly not serious threats.
>There are hundreds of thousands of vaccine deaths reported in VAERS
Except there aren't, because VAERS doesn't report "vaccine deaths", it reports "deaths after vaccines". With hundreds of millions of vaccinations, you would expect many thousands of deaths "after" getting vaccinated - in the sense that you'd expect many thousands of deaths "after" drinking milk. VAERS is messy temporally correlative data, with no control groups or evidence of causation.
>We can also look at the graph of the labor force with a disability. I wonder what changed after December 2020?
Vaccines caused people to be confident enough to re-enter the workface. Places started re-opening because of vaccines, and people with long-covid (psychosomatic or not, it qualifies) re-entered the workforce - and existing disabled people, lots of whom were waiting for vaccines (seriously, I know at least half a dozen) re-entered the workface as well.
That graph tracks almost perfectly with other graphs of labor force participation (steadily increasing 2008-present with a discontinuity between 2020-2022), and actually shows more of a trend delta *before* the vaccines came out.
>This is just the tip of the iceberg, there's far more implicating data out there.
I'd sure hope so, because at this point your own data supports my argument more than yours. Regardless, I'm not going to bother discussing this any further with you, since it's clear at this point that your position is based on political virtue signaling and motivated reasoning rather than evidence.
I hope your day is every bit as good as what you wish on others.
>In the hypothetical world where the vaccines really were unsafe, the CDC would not tell the public.... [then goes on to quote Pfizer's reporting on their on literally their own product and VAERS, which as you put it is a 'vaccine safety monitoring system of the CDC and FDA']
If the CDC is lying, why is Pfizer telling the truth? Which is it?
What level of evidence would get you to accept that Covid vaccines are reasonably safe? If the Pfizer report you quoted said that more people died in the placebo group than the vaccine group, would you accept that? Clearly not. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that you're simply looking for 'data' which agrees with your priors, and discarding anything that doesn't
Non-COVID vaccines: can definitely achieve herd immunity in many cases.
COVID vaccines: herd immunity seems unlikely, but they’re still useful in helping to control spread and reduce severity of illness, similar to seasonal flu vaccines.
That’s my best understanding. I haven’t seen anyone claiming we can reach herd immunity in months, in part due to vaccine hesitancy/availability, and in part due to the nature of the virus itself (but I’m sure you can find a random tweet here or there). If you want a source, here’s an article (with Dr Fauci as a co-author) from months ago that supports my understanding: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/2/195/6561438
Questions for people who have studied or taken pure mathematics courses: Did you understand everything during lectures? How did you study to be able to really understand the subject in depth (complicated proofs etc), while at the same time studying for other courses?
Im taking a measure theory course and im finding it challenging to understand everything thats happening at the pace my professor is teaching it. Adding to that, because of how abstract everything is, you need a lot of time to grasp the concepts, and having other courses at the same time makes this very challenging. Im very good at managing my time, but I tend to lose confidence when I go to classes and I cant understand whats going on (and therefore I cant ask questions).
It's normal to get a bit lost in the classroom, I would start to worry if it's becoming recurrent and happen in all your lectures.
You mention you've got other courses to attend. If you have more than you need to pass, I strongly suggest focusing on the minimum of courses you need to pass the year and drop any additional course.
I wouldn't stress about not understanding everything in class. (The other comments you've gotten are all great btw, including good advice on how to follow better.) I'm under the impression that very few people understand everything in lecture. What I got from class or now get from research talks are the emphasis on what is important, how the ideas hang together, and the recurring "smell" of the proofs in a given area. I work out details later by a mixture of trying to figure it out, reading the book/paper and talking to people who understand something I don't. It's been almost 20 years since I last really thought about measure theory, but Littlewood's principles dominate my memory of the topic. If you're going to continue with mathematics, you'll (probably) see this stuff again multiple times, and it will sink deeper each time.
For studying, I would recommend taking the theorems and using them as problem sets, i.e. try to prove them without looking at the proofs, and only look at the proofs as minimally as possible to get past the points where you are stuck, but only after struggling for a bit to really understand why you are stuck. As you get more advanced in your studies, proofs will get more and more sketchy, so fleshing out details and/or working out concrete examples will become a more and more useful exercise. Having one or more friends to talk with is very helpful.
I would generally say that my math classes were often as hard as all my other classes combined. but my other classes were mostly squishy humanities stuff where as long as you did the reading and were intelligent you were fine.
I've taken one course (representation theory of Lie algebras) that went way too fast in lectures, so I was basically taking dictation during lecture, then going back and looking at my notes to try to understand what hit me. (I actually did this consistently because I had committed to producing a typeset version of the notes.) Then by the next lecture / office hours / by email if all else fails, I had some coherent questions I could ask.
I've taken another course (Galois theory) that didn't have enough examples during the lectures, and it took me far too long to realize that actually the TA was holding examples classes that gave, well, examples and worked some problems. That is, I knew the examples class was there, what took time was to realize that I needed to be going to it in order to actually have some concrete (ish) things to hang the theory onto.
>I was basically taking dictation during lecture, then going back and looking at my notes to try to understand what hit me
For me, this was every lecture in every class, not only math, because I found it useful study habit. The proportion that I understood while writing down the notes varied, but it was important to have the notes.
For math in particular:
Learning tactics:
1. Get a different textbook. Not necessarily that one is better than other, but sometimes different authors structure the same material differently or present a different proof, and the another perspective helps. Sometimes some authors provide more genuine intuition.
2. Check if Terry Tao had lectured on it and published his lecture notes on his blag. His measure theory notes in particular were more advanced than what we had in class, but the even the introductory problems were good.
Mitigation tactics, for the truly desperate:
3. Accept that you have found the limit of "the topic is possible to understand with the effort I have accustomed to". From now on, you have to resort to something less math-y kids were already doing, which is pure rote memorization. Hopefully it lasts only for a while, and then rote-memorized concepts will start making sense (it sometimes happens!). There is also always a chance that understanding will come in later exercises or applications.
4. Prioritize your time-use and course load. Depending on your priorities, either reduce the less important courses, or accept that you are not going to have any "hobbies" or leisure not-studying time during the period.
5. Accept that for now, you are not keeping up with this course, and will fail / have less than desirable grade. Study on your own, and then retake the course if possible.
If someone is constantly doing 4 and 5, especially to the extent that the department requirements become difficult to meet, they should consider a less ambitious study plan.
All math classes are different. Many of those on continuous (rather than discrete) side work out a lot better if you learn to visualize what you're hearing about. Measure theory is in that category.
If you're not one of those completely non-visual people who just can't do it at all, try to keep an image of what you're looking at in your head where at all possible. When at all possible, it makes the proofs much easier to follow. You get a sense of how things work, what the real problem is, and how to approach the solution. This is a really big deal where you can get it going.
That said, pacing can definitely be an issue (as can attention problems on your side).
You might not understand everything, but there are strategies to better avoid getting lost.
One that's nobody mentioned so far is that you should be anticipating future steps in a proof, not just passively waiting for them. Think ahead to what's likely to happen; this doesn't mean you should be able to independently prove what's happening in class, but you should have thoughts like "oh, if we just do the same epsilon argument we've been doing all semester, we're going to run into such-and-such issue; I wonder how we're going to get around that." Then, when the idea that gets around that is introduced, it will click into place, because it's the solution to a problem you already know you have.
This gets easier, of course, as you get more experience with the material. Do your best to make connections to things you've done before. If you're learning something that's completely new, do lots of exercises; even getting stuck on those will help.
At the same time, if you're about to be lost in class, you should be prepared to black-box a step of a proof, or even a whole proof. Tell yourself: "I'm going to give up on understanding why X implies Y for the duration of this lecture, and I'll get that later by looking in the textbook or by asking questions during office hours. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to prepare myself for what we'll do with Y once we've proved it."
I'd definitely say it depends on the course for me (I can follow Measure Theory-type classes okay, but struggle more with Topology stuff). To echo what most other people are saying, prepping for class and working on applications are both good ideas. Making friends who are also in the same class is really a surprisingly helpful strategy.
I would also encourage you on three other things that I haven't seen here that are all in the same vein. My undergrad advisor used to always stress to me that I needed to be able to understand things "in real time." In other words, to really follow along in class, you need to not only understand the material, but you also have to be able to understand it quickly. Three things that are helpful for this:
1) Limit your note-taking. If you have a good textbook, that should probably be your primary reference, not your notes. If you are just taking notes, it's so much harder to actually follow what's going on. When I take notes, I only write down theorem statements/definitions and really important parts of the arguments.
2) Study the basics. Even once you have an idea of what's going on in the class (Lebesgue Outer Measure for example), keep working examples until you can do the basic manipulations very quickly. This will help you keep up in class for each step the professor does.
3) Ask questions aggressively. There's obviously a limit to this, but as soon as you think something's off, double check the boardwork to make sure you're actually confused, and then request clarification. If you aren't sure if you have a question, and think you just need a second, you can ask for a second to make sure you understand. As long as you don't do this in excess, most professors are pretty cool with this.
"Limit your note-taking" is not universal advice; personally, I found that I understood much less when I wasn't writing it down, because writing keeps me focused. However, it's certainly a good idea to try different approaches to note-taking, and stick with what works.
My experience was always that I never really understood the material for a course, until I took another course that had it as a prerequisite. Measure theory in particular, was difficult when I was learning it, but became intuitive once I took measure-theoretic probability and functional analysis.
This applied for me to STEM classes generally, such that I've striven to learn one step past what I think I actually need to know; it's been quite effective.
It's challenging but there are some helpful strategies. One is to study (or at least skim) the material before each lecture, as Prime Number already said. Another helpful strategy is to always make up particular examples of every abstract definition, and for theorems and propositions make up your own applications or counterexamples and such stuff. Draw pictures for yourself, stop expecting to be able to "think abstractly" because any visualization you can make will help understanding much more than any amount of abstract thinking.
I've not only taken measure theory classes, but also TA'd an introductory one which mostly focused on constructing the Lebesgue integral. Is there anything in particular that you find challenging? Because the final strategy I'll suggest is to discuss the material with others a lot. Try to make friends with the nerdy guys who like talking about math!
I would go further, and say that one can't understand something as long as it's in only one modality. Visualizing examples for things that are math/language is one way that I would expect to work for a huge number of people. If you can build a muscle memory, that also can help a lot. (This is mainly a cross between personal experience, and my personal theory of what understanding is, but I believe it reasonably strongly.)
I have taken many pure math courses over my education and yes, it's very challenging to fully keep up if you don't prepare beforehand. I remember taking an Algebra course that covered an introduction to groups, rings and fields. I had already read the textbook sections on groups and rings before the semester started and for those sections, the class was a breeze. However, when we got to fields is when I started to struggle and the moment you get lost in a lecture, you won't get unlost and won't end up understanding anything afterwards.
With that being said, my advice is to prepare for each lecture in advance like its a test in and of itself. So read the relevant sections in the course material, do practice problems etc.
Also to keep in mind for the future, if you have trouble managing time for all your courses, its a good strategy to read the textbook in advance (usually during the summer) for a course (or two) you plan on taking in an upcoming semester. This will make the understanding a lot easier for you since you'll already be familiar with the concepts.
My experience exactly matches Prime Number. Courses that went well were ones where I had studied and worked proofs in three chapters prior to the first class. Measure theory is challenging, but opens up all of Kolmogorov probability and other fascinating and useful subjects. Don't be too proud to take the course twice to get it. Also, I am not sure that any of us understand these subjects in the same way, but success is being able to follow proofs and derivations, and do the basic ones yourself.
An idea I've seen around these parts (can't remember which commenter originated the idea, sorry) is that Niche Group X enjoys substantial and improving favour and approval...but a good chunk of that is due to state-backed coercion, lots and lots of money (e.g. imperilment of funding), etc. Rather than an organic bubbling-up of support.
It got me thinking that...well...price controls are bad, right? Yet the described scenario could plausibly be called subsidizing X. Rather than let X compete freely and fairly on the "market of groups", there's a not-insignificant thumb on the scales in its favour. And this is particularly notable given the tiny size of X relative to other small groups (since many groups get aid of some kind...that's just politics).
I suppose a left-economic lens would view this as How It Should Be. Little guys get crushed by amoral vicissitudes of markets, and that's not always just or fair! They never had a fair shot, and are worth saving, so advantages are warranted to level the playing field. Whereas a right-economic lens would say, no, things have value based on what the market is willing to pay...if X can't get a foothold on its own merits, without vast external backing, then it doesn't deserve more than a tiny fraction of marketshare. Government shouldn't be in the business of market interventions, by default, because it often makes more a mess of aggregating true preferences than is worth it.
Anyway, just a proto-model that's been kicking around in my head. I guess it's kind of bloodless, since people aren't products and don't get traded in markets...except they totally do, like in dating. Or abstractly, like competing "personal brands", or status games.
One problem with putting hands on the scale is that it's not sustainable, and it actively corrodes the ability of the cuddled group to fend for itself. It's like the "Give Man Fish vs. Teach Man To Fish" parable. Government giveth, and taketh what it giveth just as easily, possibly every 4-6-8 years. Corporations can be either even more volatile than Governments or less, depending on profit gradients and other very unpredictable factors, but witness things like, e.g., the woke panic at Elon Musk's stunts in April to understand how utterly sad and dependent it is to base your entire self worth and respect based on how much a giant corp is willing to ban and censor, and how your entire edifice can come crashing down at any moment with the whims of an autist billionaire.
It's not that the Government or Twitter or whatever coercive institution you managed to convince to cuddle you can't do a good enough job at it, that can be "fixed", it's that the Government or Twitter has an ADHD-level attention span, when compared to other hearts-and-minds approaches. If you're going to use the Government or its ilk to force people, you better make it short, and\or you better make it *brutal*, I'm talking kill-the-adults-and-take-their-children-to-reeducation-gulags brutal. You better make it a religion. Otherwise you're just breeding resentment, and you're absolutely not going to like it when the pendulum swings back.
Another thing to consider is Spatial Locality, which is just the space dual to the problem above (which is the Temporal Locality of Coercion-Based cuddling). You may be successful in making it suicide for me to say naughty words in the US, but then there's China, India, the Middle East, etc..., vast areas of Earth that will see how coercive you are in the places you win and double down on the oppression. Congratulations on banning dead naming, you just pushed not-killing-gays 50 years into the future in KillingGays-stan. "Winning" in the US or western europe or whatever is just the easy mode, a "test drive" if you will, and you just demonstrated to the entire world what happens when that happens, so it will never happen again. It's as if a nascent super-intelligent agent's first action is to kill all people in the moon base where it's being tested, it "won" but, it also broadcasted to the entire Earth what its intentions are, in no uncertain terms.
I am pretty sure that reality does not work like this. A result of an intervention is typically much smaller than intended, but greater than zero.
Society is not a pendulum. That would make any changes impossible in long term. You cannot plausibly say that your experience is the same as e.g. the experience of an average citizen of the Roman Empire (plus or minus a few currently active government interventions that will go away in 4 years).
A better model would be a landscape with many different local optima. When the intervention stops, society goes to the nearest local optimum, which is typically different from what the authors of the intervention expected, but is a different local optimum than the original one.
>A result of an intervention is typically much smaller than intended, but greater than zero.
No, the result of an intervention can be 0, less than 0 (increased resentment and hate for the artifically cuddled minority group, as well as the millions\billions spent in the cuddling campaign and the decreased self-reliance of the cuddled group), or greater than 0, and you typically can't know without very advanced and holistic understanding of the whole society you're trying to change and beyond.
>That would make any changes
...by the Government or other coercive institutions, and specifically in societal and interpersonal interactions and games...
>impossible in long term.
Correct, how many successful examples of a coercive institution forcing people to like or hate a group in the last century ?
>the experience of an average citizen of the Roman Empire
I did say that coercive change is possible if you're willing to go all-in on brutality, and the Roman Empire is a bunch of brutal invasions, wars, revolutions, violent change of governance paradigms and the few odd world wars seperated from today.
And that's of course Ignoring the massive voluntary change of philosophy and culture and technology which happens over such a massive period, which I don't concern myself with at all. *Of course* culture drift and technological evolution changes things, massively so, my argument is only about coercive top-down change of interpersonal bottom-up dynamics.
>A better model would be a landscape with many different local optima.
Okay, that's a valid model for any complex optimization objective relating to a dynamical system, which societal change of course is.
My argument can be formulated in this phrasing as : the state space is unfathomably large, and the top-down entity is computationally weak and ignorant, and coercive change is an extremely blunt and inflexible tool for change.
By way of analogy, imagine a teenager trying to control an aircraft, solely by mashing on keys\joysticks\touch screens and observing what happens. Does the teenager have a chance of landing such an aircraft ? Keeping it stable over a 1-KM flight path ? Just keeping it at altitude and not crashing for 1 minute ? I would answer with very low probability for all questions. An aircraft is an unfathombly complex system with countless states and parameters setttings, the teenager is an unfathombly inadequate agent for controlling the system, and the chosen methodology for finding a good policy is utterly and egregiously inefficient. Yes, *technically*, the teenager can exceptionally stumble on a parameter setting that miraculously achieves the goal, but for the vast majority of aircrafts and flying environments and teenagers, this won't happen.
The problem with this analogy is the same as with the 'redistributing sex' analogy, or any time you try to make an analogy from money markets to human interactions.
Money is not an agent, it has no moral value on it's won, we don't care what happens to it except for instrumental reasons.
People are people, they have moral worth, we care what happens to them.
There are things you can do or not do to money that improve other outcomes, in markets or politics or whatever, and you should do them, because those other outcomes are the only thing we care about.
But when you try to and use that type of 'market logic' or w/e on what we do to actual people, it doesn't work the same way, because we care what you are doing to the people as much as we care about the other outcomes of that action.
You're ignoring the part when you "do things to money", this is accomplished through implicit or explicit threats of physical violence. If you resist your money being redistributed hard enough, you will eventually get shot. Nobody seems really consciously aware of this because of how rarely push has ever come to shove.
Now, obviously there's an asymmetry between the social and financial. Forcibly taking your money and giving it to someone else means they have it and can use it the same as if they obtained the money organically, even if you violently resisted this, but forcing someone to have sex isn't the same as if this were an organic act of sex. But to me, this implies that social redistribution is unfeasible, therefore economic redistribution should be severely scaled back accordingly (or social inequality should factor into financial redistribution). Because otherwise, it's one group forcibly getting what they want while enjoying an inequality of their own with no consequence.
One example would be the group of "children whose parents can't afford private education". The government spends loads of money on such people. I think the right-wing analysis fails in this case, because the market is unable to organise universal education on its own, despite the strong positive economic benefits of increasing the number of workers with basic literacy and numeracy skills.
>because the market is unable to organise universal education on its own, despite the strong positive economic benefits of increasing the number of workers with basic literacy and numeracy skills.
This is a very strong claim which you need to substantiate. Many things provided by the market today were not provided in the time before universal public education, which means there's no reason to believe a lack of universal private education centuries ago means it would not exist on a free market today. The economy has changed, the culture has changed, educating people is a lot more economically feasible today than centuries ago.
And of course, we cannot look at the education market of today and conclude it either, because when a government service is free to use, it completely distorts the market and reduces the demand for private education to a fraction of what it would be in public education's absence. And of course, we would almost assuredly see a large increase and redirection of charitable donations towards educating the poorest in society.
And for these poorest people in society today (i.e. the ones you may imagine would miss out on education if there were no public schools), public schools have abjectly failed at dramatically improving their literacy and numeracy skills. This is because education does not work for people with low genetic potential for intelligence. Poor intelligent people from previous generations were able to learn in schools and they stopped being poor.
I think the real argument for universal public education is the smart kids born to screwed-up parents. This happens--regression to the mean goes both ways, and sometimes you have a brilliant kid born to dumb/dysfunctional parents. I've known a few people like this--the rest of their families are a mess, but they're super smart.
One popular alternative is to provide the money to the student's family, to spend on the education of their choice, instead of the government choosing which education (namely public education) that gets distributed.
Not to pick a side of weigh in on either direction, but there are alternate ways to achieve a good like this.
There is a certain risk of the market providing "education" which is not the kind you want to subsidize, and yet it can be competitive for the wrong reasons.
For example, you can provide an absolutely shitty education, but return 10% of the money to the parents. For parents who think in short term, this is the best deal ever.
Or there can be a cult providing indoctrination for the kids, in a way that sounds okay to some parents. Like, they start with some nice things, and only gradually proceed to the hardcore stuff, so most parents don't realize until it is too late. (This actually happens.)
A possible solution is the state requiring a specific curriculum, or testing the students and requiring some level of success in the state-approved knowledge. It is easy to overdo this and micromanage the schools, so you ban the cultish (non-)education, but you also ban Montessori. :(
>For example, you can provide an absolutely shitty education, but return 10% of the money to the parents. For parents who think in short term, this is the best deal ever.
Parents dumb enough to be motivated by this likely have very dumb kids, the kind of kids who will not succeed regardless of the alleged "quality" of the education. Of course, the idea that there are even such things as "good" schools and "bad" schools independent of the students attending them is extremely suspect.
>Or there can be a cult providing indoctrination for the kids, in a way that sounds okay to some parents. Like, they start with some nice things, and only gradually proceed to the hardcore stuff, so most parents don't realize until it is too late. (This actually happens.)
Yes, it actually happens. In today's public schools. You just happen to agree with what they're indoctrinating people with. No really, not attempting to be hyperbolic here - public schools absolutely push ideological indoctrination on kids, its all a matter of liking that or not.
But as far as religious cultist schools go, this is kind of absurd because it takes a lot of money to start a modern school, and even if this were done, it couldn't last more than a few years before people find out what is going on and people stop sending their kids there.
> it takes a lot of money to start a modern school
Try the cheapest possible version, and make excuses. ("We do not use computers, because we want to live closer to the nature.") Build the school at a location where land is relatively cheaper, this will also help you avoid public scrutiny for longer.
> it couldn't last more than a few years
True. But if you can stay in business for five or ten years, and take hundreds of students -- and receive the same money that someone else would need to provide an actual education -- you can make a nice profit.
Okay....why the heck wouldn't they just provide a crappy education shrouded in "we don't use computers because reasons" stuff and make profits indefinitely? Why would it go full cult?
To respond in kind with economics, one of the best functions of government is to tax and subsidize externalities.
To extend it to your analogue, if a minority groups suffering is the result of market failure or creates an externality, it's actually optimum to use the state to address it. Basically, oppression is like pollution, diversity is like (sorry good positive externalities are a little harder to come by) pollination.
I think I'm a strict market place of ideas sense this is readily plausible.
In a running society sense... Much less sure. I think id prefer the model where the government creates a floor on quality of life, not where it specifically tries to operate on specific groups, because ya know, politics.
I am not really sure what exactly are you talking about, so just a very generic "it depends":
Some top-down changes require ongoing pressure, and when you stop, things reverts to their original state. Other changes involve a switch from one equilibrium to another, so they do not spontaneously revert when the pressure ends. The question is whether some self-sustaining processes are being started here, or it's all just a transfer that ends in someone's pockets.
Let's not be absolutists. Coordination is very hard, so sometimes the government can do a good thing. (It's just that people in the government usually optimize for their own goals, not for doing a good thing.)
I would say that, in principle, the government could always do the right thing. And sometimes that would just be leaving things alone. But nobody understands what "the right thing" is until much too late. So it's always making decisions biased by priors that are at least slightly off. And, of course, if it's goals aren't the same as yours, then it's "the right thing" is likely to also differ.
I was surprised to find that as far as I know nobody here pointed out that suddenly palmistry is not charlatanism now that the Huberman lab has correlated index finger length to various cognitive functions among many complex correlations between embodiment and emotions. I would like to know how a rationalist explains this to him/herself given the standard ridiculing of palmistry. Serious AND friendly question.
This is a completely generic question (I skimmed one of the papers and couldn't see anything about this) but did these studies control for race? There was a study showing pupil size correlated with intelligence and was widely reported on, but it just turns out that it was because Asians have bigger pupils than people of other races, and the correlation breaks down within race groups.
One of the studies published in Nature has been replicated 5 times. Please let me know if you know of anyone who challenged it as unscientific. However, if embodiment and cognitive and emotional functions are indeed correlated it will have implications for reflexology. This is how Wikipedia defines it at the moment.
"It is based on a pseudoscientific[1] system of zones and reflex areas that purportedly reflect an image of the body on the feet and hands, with the premise that such work on the feet and hands causes a physical change to the supposedly related areas of the body.[2]
There is no convincing scientific evidence that reflexology is effective for any medical condition.[3]"
At most, this proves that it's possible in principle to have a version of palmistry that is not charlatanism. It does nothing to refute the notion that actually-existing palmists are overwhelmingly or entirely charlatans.
The 2D/4D finger ratio being sexually dimorphic is a fairly old observation, going back to the 19th century. The ratio as a proxy for in-utero androgen exposure is more recent, but still not exactly hot off the presses. And even within the modern research paradigm, I think a few too many studies of... varying quality have focused on various correlations with 2D/4D, because it's the kind of research that's ready-made for exposure via popular science articles and youtube videos. Any layperson can look at their own hand and rub their chin in wonderment.
My own 'update' about this would be: some old-timey pseudoscience, like palmistry, may well have included genuine empirical observations, and that's kind of neat. But even if we discover that, for example, the location on the palm where the "heart line" crosses the "life line" has a significant correlation with the onset of heart disease, there must be more direct ways of measuring whatever it's a proxy for.
2D : 4D digit ratio already seemed like fairly solid findings, as far as that field goes? So I'm not rationally disinclined to automatically be skeptical of other data-from-human-anatomy-relationships, as long as one is clear about correlation : causation ratio. (It's never 1.)
But if anyone brings up energy meridians...outta there.
Which energy meridians? ISTM that there are enough versions out there that one of them is likely to be partially correct. But they should probably be either electrically or magnetically detectable, with the right instrument. (I can't see them being implemented with non-ionic chemical interactions.)
Remember, most of these doctrines are based on empirical observations. The theories are often unworkable, but so was phlogiston, but it explained lots of things. Until a better theory came along, it was the best option. (That's not a good reason to use it if you're building theories, but if you're building or managing a fire, you use what's already present.)
IIUC, energy meridians came out of Chinese (or possibly Hindu) medicine. They've probably got some empirical justification.
You haven't gone far back enough, in the late 19th century palmistry practitioners were claiming to measure finger lengths and hand shapes and deduce character from these, and that it was all based on science not mysticism.
There was a famous society palm-reader named Cheiro and he wrote several books on this and allied subjects. One of them is here, published in 1916 and aimed for American employers who wanted to be sure they were getting the best employees for their purposes (shades of those "guaranteed scientific because psychology' personality tests for hiring? https://vervoe.com/history-of-personality-tests/)
"Everyone knows that "the face can wear a mask," that a person may be a good actor and put on a certain expression that may deceive even the best judgment.
But hands cannot change as the result of a mere effort to please; the character they express is the real nature of the individual — the true character that has been formed by heredity or that has grown up with the person by long years of habit."
So let's see what he has to say about index finger length:
"The first finger is considered as the Dictator, the Lawgiver, the finger of Ambition, the Indicator, the Pointer, etc.
If this finger is unusually long and nearly equals the second, all these tendencies are extremely pronounced.
Therefore, if your employee has this finger long, you can safely entrust him with control over, and charge of others. You will be amazed how well he or she will make rules and regulations and see that they are obeyed; but beware, Mr. Employer, lest your first finger is short in proportion as that of your employee is long, for, if such be the case, you too will have "to toe the line" and you may find yourself in a very disagreeable position.
But let me give you a further warning: Should this man or woman have a first finger that is long and crooked, you will assuredly find out to your cost that the personal ambitions of such an individual are "crooked." Such an employee would be perfectly unscrupulous in finding out your secrets and getting you into his power.
The first and third fingers absolutely of equal length is the best sign of an equally balanced mind, but such a sign is rather rare to find."
"even if their beliefs were true, they weren't justified in believing them"
"Careful, if you hit your thumb with that hammer, you'll be in pain"
"I'm sorry, how did you arrive at that conclusion?"
"Well, I've hit my own thumb with a hammer - "
"So what you are telling me is that you don't have access to high-quality scientific research, so even if this alleged cause-effect relationship exists, unless you can cite me the references for the double-blinded studies carried out by a reputable university, I'm sorry but there are no grounds for believing this to be the case".
This is a fully general counterargument that would justify the use of any incorrect epistemological model.
A: "Hey, I know you think your model of knowledge is the best and no one can ever know anything without using your model, but I think you're wrong about something. Your model doesn't say anything in particular about X, but my model tells me X is true. I really think you're missing something here."
B: "But my model is the only one. So even if there is knowledge my model can't ascertain, then I declare that I don't care one bit about that knowledge, because it is dumb and pointless."
A: "But what's the point of your model if not to find truth? What makes your procedure any better than other procedures if you concede that your model misses truth X, while my model correctly discovers truth X?"
B: "Well, I can have the peace of mind of knowing that I did the right thing and followed the scientific procedure, so if I still didn't discover truth X, it's really X's fault for being an irrelevant truth anyway. I just followed the science. Did I mention the science?"
A: "So, your model misses truths that other models find. Tell me again why--"
That's loser mentality. Honestly. It's literally the opposite of wanting to win. It's wanting to adhere to some weird notion "high-quality scientific research" as a fetish. Apparently those people figuring out if they planted their corn and watered it the corn would turn into a corn stalk in a few months were being unscientific. They didn't have any 'high-quality scientific research.' Like really, no opinion makes me madder than this one because it's so backwards and stupid
The person planting the corn might not be doing 'high-quality scientific research' but they're at least trying things and figuring out what worked. Did the palmists actually try to figure out whether their predictions had any merit?
I assumed they were similar to Mediums, where they didn't believe what they were peddling, and the goal was to part people from their money, rather than to discover something true. Things like 'crooked fingers mean a person is crooked' sound much more like tea-leaf-reading than like agriculture to me.
This is an extreme case of a motte-and-bailey: the motte is that "People should give reasons to believe in things if they want to convince others", the bailey is "The only valid form of knowledge is a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature by researchers from prestigious institutions that is agreed to be correct by the vast majority of scientists, anything else is pseudoscientific garbage that I have no reason to even entertain as a possibility."
Why is really excellent food a big deal for people? I doubt it's about nutrition, it's not like food from a great meal is all that nutritionally different from food from a very good meal. I'll not that great food has its effect in the mouth, well before it lands on the the metabolism.
I'm reasonably sure the effect isn't *just* about showing off, though that would be hard to prove.
I think great food has some aspects of losing track of time, though it obviously isn't the right level of challenge involved in flow. And great food is apt to be memorable.
> I doubt it's about nutrition, it's not like food from a great meal is all that nutritionally different from food from a very good meal. I'll not that great food has its effect in the mouth, well before it lands on the the metabolism.
In theory a more "nutritious" meal should have a different taste profile for us. Fats, sugars, and salt are, on average, more desirable to our bodies.
Additionally, our brains do respond to our food before we even put it in our mouths through our other senses. Foods that smell meatier or fattier or saltier will queue our brains and bodies to prepare for "tastier" foods. When the food is in our bodies we will product more saliva and our brain will release serotonin in response to pleasurable foods.
Some nutrients, like salt, can be absorbed through our gums. There have been studies where runners get as great of an effect from swishing a drink in their mouth then spitting it out as they do if they swallow the beverage. Caffeine can also be absorbed this way.
Maybe flip this question around: "why is really bad food a big deal for people?". Why do we avoid food we find disgusting or rotten? Surely for the same reason we seek out good food. That good food is often associated with good people or good events only helps to reinforce the desire.
I'm interested in liking great food partly because I like it myself and partly because it's apparently a distinct neurological state, and I think those are worthy of study.
A small example: I recently had a lemon blueberry muffin which was so good I stopped reading. It was at a local restaurant, the other food ranged from pretty good to adequate.
Two books which describe learning to appreciate food:
Edgar Gordon, a man with no interest in good food, happens to get a job in charge of the cheese section at the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. He gradually learns that excellent food is a thing. The book is interesting in a number of ways, including his efforts to supply good and sometimes expensive food without becoming pretentious.
I think there are three categories of people when it comes to fancy food:
1. Those who can notice the difference from ordinary food and like it
2. Those who can't notice the difference from ordinary food
3. Those who can notice the difference from ordinary food and still don't care.
I'm in the third category. I tasted fancy food a few times in my life, I noticed it tasted more subtly than the food I eat otherwise. And I couldn't care less. As someone else here said, fasting is more efficient. However, when other people say that there is a difference between food and food and they care about it, I believe them.
>I'm reasonably sure the effect isn't *just* about showing off, though that would be hard to prove.
I don't think it's that hard to prove, I've enjoyed plenty of great meals on my own, which I've never bothered to tell anyone else about.
I don't really understand the question. Pleasant sensory experiences are nice. There are some sensory experiences which some people get more out of than I do, and this doesn't surprise me. For everything that I enjoy, there's some people who enjoy it even more and there's some people who enjoy it less. There's people out there whose hobby is to travel the world visiting every Michelin Star restaurant; that doesn't appeal to me all that much but it sounds better than having a hobby of collecting every single pop doll or something.
It is a strange question if you enjoy food (as I do, quite a lot in fact). But consider fine art. I can look at a painting by da Vinci and a lesser artist from the same period but I wouldn’t be able to say which is which. I could probably learn to distinguish (not just memorizing which paintings are painted by whom, but what makes them exceptional so that I could point out a painting by a master even if I had never seen it before). But would I get any extra enjoyment from that? Probably not much.
If you’re also an art enthusiast, and my example doesn’t apply to you then a few other possible substitutions are great vs decent opera, ballet, or modernist music.
So much is hype. I get into the foodie thing, and read cookbooks and put a lot of effort into cooking. But I think you can reach a certain level of delicious, and then it becomes mostly about presentation, atmosphere, service and pedigree of the chef.
For the most pleasurable eating experiences one only needs to fast for a day or two, and then eat a simple and delicious meal. I can almost guarantee the actual taste/pleasure experience of breaking a long fast will be far more memorable than a high end meal consumed after only six hours of fasting.
"For the most pleasurable eating experiences one only needs to fast for a day or two, and then eat a simple and delicious meal"
There's an old saying that "hunger is the best sauce". But eating after fasting doesn't really count; even a plain slice of commercially produced bread will taste good. The difference between really good food and just eating to fill your belly can only be tested when you are not so hungry you would eat your own shoe.
There is a lot of blah and snobbery about fine dining, definitely, but it's also true that training your palate, or even just having the chance to eat good quality fresh produce and notice the difference between that and what you get as mass-produced food does make a difference.
As an average sort of home cook I've found Babish's videos on youtube to be incredibly useful, much more so than any cookbook. He's not a Michelin star chef like Gordon Ramsay but he's a better cook than I am, and unlike all the cooking shows before him he keeps the camera on the food and his hands so you can see exactly what he's doing.
Though if I'm totally honest I think the main thing I've picked up from him is that I should use more salt and more butter on everything, which means that the improved taste of my food might be compensated by the decreased healthiness.
I honestly used to think it was just a class/signaling thing, and then I went to a couple of REALLY good restauraunts (expensive), and it was not. The food was more enjoyable, and I like to enjoy things. I'm too unwealthy (I don't want to say poor, because it's not accurate) now to eat at such restaraunts, but if I had the disposable income, I probably would once in a while.
I assume you're referring to foodies. It's consumer hobbyism, for the same reason nerd media is "a really big deal" for some. I'm not sure if it actually signals anything other than it could serve as a social outlet, or be integrated in sense of identity (not unlike nerd/geek-ism consumers).
Just to show I'm not sneering, I think there's something special about sharing delicious food with people you care about. I would argue that quality food improves the experience, to the extent that a subpar / haphazard holiday meal would be a let-down, if I'm being honest. Even if I don't care the rest of the year.
I’ve always been a food is fuel kind of guy. I probably make a meal of a peanut butter sandwich a dozen times a week. So I don’t make a practice of spending a lot of money for a meal.
The only times when my unrefined palate causes problems is when I am a guest of someone who prepares a labor intensive / high cost meal. I’m at a loss as to how to show my appreciation for the extra effort. I try to parrot some variation of the praise consensus at the table but inside I’m thinking “Ahh, I’m not hungry anymore. Problem solved.”
Tasting "really excellent food" is simply a more enjoyable experience than tasting "very good food," and a far more enjoyable experience than tasting mediocre food.
Enjoyable experiences tend to be "a big deal" for people. I mean....you know...sex.
But maybe it's about exposure?
I live in Seattle, a food-focused town where one can broadly sample the execution of *many* different kinds of foods.
Take croissants:
There are fast food restaurants like Burger King which produce something that they call a croissant but that is more steamed than baked and is probably best considered its own thing, not even worthy of being included in the category.
There are the in-store baking departments in Costco and other mass market, ubiquitous grocery stores which produce mostly gummy, plasticky-tasting croissant-shaped things, made using cost-saving ingredients in place of simple, traditional ingredients like real, high-quality butter. They are often manufactured and frozen offsite, and the factory used the wrong techniques for laminating and proofing. I don't consider Costco/grocery store croissants to be worth experiencing.
There are large local specialty bakeries, like Macrina, that sell pastries that are recognizable as "real," mostly traditional croissants to restaurants and some of the fancier grocery stores. They produce mostly flaky, (what I consider to be) medium-quality pastries. They usually use the correct ingredients and maybe get close to the right technique, but don't tend to be especially memorable, especially if they've been transported far or stored for a while. I might eat a free one - maybe - but don't really consider them to be worth experiencing, either, especially if I'm avoiding carbohydrates.
Then there are the many passionate croissant specialists, like Bakery Nouveau, which once won the World Championship of Baking (albeit for bread). These specialists take an uncompromising approach to both ingredients and process, with no shortcuts taken in lamination. B.N. and its many smaller competitors produce deep-flavored, rich-tasting croissants with contradictory textures of flaky and chewy, all so perfectly balanced that eating one can be a shocking - even confusing - experience. These croissants have an incredibly short shelf-life and a very high price point, and they are very much worth sacrificing a diet plan and paying the high price point to experience inside their 2-3 hour shelf-life.
I mean...I dunno, man....a Bakery Nouveau croissant is a Big Deal. I'm not exaggerating when I say my first one was literally revelatory ("Food can be THIS GOOD!") and it's a sublime experience for me every time I have one.
I've also had that experience with pizza. And Korean fried chicken. And dim sum. And Central American. And Sichuan.
And, and, and.
So I can only guess that people who've never had a revelatory experience with any food either don't have the smell and taste receptors that would produce such intense enjoyment of food, or they haven't had exposure to Really Excellent Food (which can be pretty rare in regions where no one is competing to produce it).
I think that the "revelatory" thing is a big deal. My first thought of a response to Nancy was that really good food can surprise you and that can be addicting. It also makes the experience dramatically more memorable. I find I am disappointed when I go to a Michelin star type place and it fails to surprise me.
I've never been in a 3 star Michelin restaurant and have only done the Michelin-aspiring super fancy multi-course dining experience a couple of times in my whole life. One of them, Mana, in Levenworth, WA, had a vegan course with an ingredientI don't normally enjoy that was upsettingly terrific. I didn't like knowing that food *can* taste that terrific, but almost never does.
I barely remember the rest of the meal, though. It was nice, but nothing inspired me to semi-angrily, admiringly mutter, "what the fuck" under my breath after my first bite.
I muttered an identical "what the fuck" after first sampling the rice and beans at La Cabana, a tiny, bare, inexpensive Central America restaurant in a north Seattle neighborhood. The price point, presentation, atmosphere of these two restaurant experiences couldn't appear to be more different, but the angry delight they produced was identical.
If you can fully taste the food, it's about the taste of the food.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I have been to 2 3-star restaurants and numerous 1 and 2-star restaurants. But there are many many instances of my having life changing food in unexpected places. (my first fish taco from a cart on the beach in San Felipe Mexico, my first egg-pancake in a back alley in Taipei, that simple fruit salad with a bit of lime rind in a ski resort restaurant in Lyon.....)
Oh my yes! I can still remember the first time I had roast duck with a raspberry sauce... blew me away. There is also a sensual sensation with food that is adjacent to sex... 'cause the lips and tongue are involved? Eating a greasy hamburger, with blue cheese, fresh sliced tomato, lettuce on a Constanzo's roll (https://costanzosbakery.com/ ), and as I bite into it, tomato juice mixes with beef grease, runs down my arm, to drip off my elbow... Ahhh! (keep your arms bare to fully engage with eating.. :^)
> There is also a sensual sensation with food that is adjacent to sex...
Do you mean this seriously? There are infinite gradations in the pleasure of sex but for me food is on a scale from Palatable all the way to Tasty with not much in between.
What is "great food" anyway? As opposed to "good food", which I would characterise as a combination of tasty, nutritious, and - possibly - well-presented.
I have had 'great food' exactly once, at a crazy expensive restaurant that someone else was paying for and it was definitely much better (in every dimension) than even a common good meal. By a factor of 3 I would say.
It's one of the things that I fundamentally don't get, either. Obviously, I've learned to live with how much stock others put by food and the rituals of food, but sometimes I feel downright autistic in this area, as in no other.
Thanks! This does track a little, though I suspect I'm older and grumpier than Ozy and pretty good at asserting preferences in other areas, so the rice-and-chickpeas epiphany probably isn't in the cards.
Still, it's always useful to be reminded that mind projection fallacy exists and that universal experiences aren't so universal.
One of only a handful of powerful hedonic experiences that's totally legal, easily acquired with a little time and money, not at all socially censured, fairly widely available (based on tastes), and significantly less risky than many other options. Plus a deep-seated human love of food (c.f. how we ingeniously work it into ~every occasion, somehow). That'd be my guess.
Music's also up there, but people get rather...opinionated...about music in a way that I think they don't about food. There's a much broader agreement that different people have different tastes, and That's Just The Way Things Are. Food's both primal, and also significantly less moralized/editorialized/politicized than other similar-caliber things (e.g. sex).
Yeah, that rings true to me - I'd add the thrill of novelty, when you taste something awesome that you've never tasted before. One of the things I miss about living in the city is all the tiny restaurants serving different styles of food from all around the world. I had a lot of fun eating everything from Brazilian churrasco to Mongolian barbecue, Vietnamese pho, Japanese bento boxes - there are so many different ways to make a meal, and nearly every tradition I've sampled has something great to offer.
Part of that is the normal looking back to the days of yore and comparing them with modern decadence: "our forefathers lived on beans and water, and were better men than us!"
But given the kind of [banquet](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5219/5219-h/5219-h.htm) satirised in the Satyricon, it seems clear that there was a culture of "conspicuous consumption" which was wasteful and extravagant. The same in the "Inferno" about the club of rich young Sienese who deliberately blew all their fortune on extravagant living, including fine dining:
"They spent enormous amounts of money on fine dining, with all that accompanied it - entertainment, servants, gold and silver plate and flatware. They each maintained a sumptuous apartment in their shared palazzo. They were said to throw the dishes, table-ornaments, and knives of gold and silver out the window after a banquet. If reports are to be believed, they fried gold florins and served them to one another, and they had their horses shod with silver. Their food was prepared with the most costly spices, using them in vast excess, perhaps even cooking game birds on a fire fueled by outrageously expensive cloves." Another source says that it was a method of using cloves to flavour roasted meat, which is more sensible than burning cloves to roast the meat. Still extremely expensive, however.
Spending too much money on prostitutes probably would have been condemned, but having sex like a proper manly man would be less likely to be condemned than sitting around being luxurious and soft and decadent and eating all this fancy imported foodstuffs like some Oriental potentate, and getting fat and effeminate from rich food and wine 😁
Can't say for all people, but for me it's growing up in a lower-middle-class-at-best household, with parents economizing on food as much as they could. So it's kinda showing off, but mostly to myself. IDK if this generalizes at all, maybe for a generation of people that grew up during recessions/entered the job market during econ growth it does.
Nah. Some food really is better than others. I didn't always believe that, but the epiphany I've received when I've tried truly great examples of food that people obsess over (coffee, croissants, sushi, Scotch, etc.) convinced me otherwise.
Nah, some times a hot dog with chili sauce, chopped onions, and mustard, is the perfect thing for me, and at that time, I'd call it great food. (Maybe I have a low bar.)
If it's well prepared and decent ingredients, then it's good food. I think you would agree that the kind of food that has been sitting under a hot lamp in a grocery store for hours and is dried up and leathery is not 'good food' even if you are hungry enough that you will eat it to fill your stomach.
A cold, greasy, hot dog in a hard, stale bun with mushy onions and runny sauce wouldn't qualify as good even at the level of fast/street food. Basic food done well can be great food, it doesn't have to be caviar coated in gold leaf.
Yeah of course. Your chili dog is prepared as you what. Not some old crusty thing. I wanna say that a good late night chili dog place in the states, is like good late night fish and chips in the UK. But IDK if that's right anymore. (on both sides?)
It's not a class thing for anyone who enjoys the taste of food.
I love (regular nacho cheese) Doritos and I *also* love the pastries and breads of one of the best bakeries in the world (literal former World Baking Champions, see my direct reply to the thread).
They both produce a "really excellent" eating experience, and I would and do pick out each over their less-tasty competition, every time.
A bag of Doritos can satisfy an immediate desire for something to fill your stomach or tickle your tastebuds, and it's not a bad thing. But it's not satisfying in the long run.
A really good meal (and that doesn't have to mean 'fancy', a 'fancy' meal can be all pretension like the worst of Nouvelle Cuisine, which started off as a reaction to the very heavy, cream and butter-laden traditional French high cuisine but then was turned into a rip-off by trendy and expensive restaurants that found you could get away with charging high prices for a single leaf of greenery drizzled with six drops of a dressing) is satisfying along many axes: taste, smell, sight, mouth feel (that much-abused term), ease of digestion, satiety, flavours and freshness, mingling and combinations of flavours, etc. It's an entire experience. A well-cooked family meal, especially one for communal occasions like [put in your own choice here, be it Christmas or Thanksgiving or other], isn't just about sitting down and shovelling calories into your face.
Great food can be about discovering new experiences - 'oh, I never had this before, and I really like it' or 'I never thought this combination would work'. We've all had basic, fill-me-up-to-keep-going meals (e.g. a sandwich at your desk during lunch time at work), and we've all had good food (be that going out to eat a meal or having a favourite dish cooked properly at home).
When you get *great* food, you know it and you remember it. It can be very rare, depending who you are or where you live. It needn't be expensive ingredients and very fancy cooking, either, but excellent ingredients that are really really fresh treated properly is the bedrock. A trout fresh-caught out of a river and cooked in a battered frying pan over an open fire can be great food, while a meal of caviar and quail under glass in a Michelin three-star restaurant could be good, or even disappointing.
Okay, I'll bite that class bullet: I can't stand rap, Kanye in particular*, but am very fond of Beethoven and other classicists. Despite being working-class at <$35k annual income. The same for Doritos, although "fancy dinner" for me is like a $15 entree. All values relative when playing in the financial minor leagues...I am reminded of Nassim Taleb's claim[2] that Acktually(tm), many people sincerely truly prefer the taste of a good old greasy hamburger to filet mignon, but they've been class-deceived into thinking the latter must be better than the former. Which, yeah, no. Either these many-people he knows of are eating way better bugers than I've ever had, or they've never had a good filet mignon. (They're easy to do at home...maybe Michelin chefs just fuck them up? Ah, the perils of relying on others to satisfy one's personal preferences...)
Baumol's costly signalling games are indeed an endemic disease, but I don't think they're anywhere near most of the reason for why people like alleged nice things over alleged less-nice things. It's more that they are...actually...nicer. Not always, but often enough. Seen the same dynamics play out in fashion, in computer hardware, in alcoholic beverages...yes, there's significant class/reputational markup, because the intended audience can afford it, and the high price is partly the point. But those nice things really are The Good Shit, along so many object-level dimensions.
The more things I get to try nicer versions of as I slowly inch up the socioeconomic ladder - the more things I'm able to pick outside the very constrained "can only afford bargain basement tier" - there's entire worlds of difference that I simply wasn't aware of before. And that doesn't even make formerly good things less good! Just that the total possibility space of "good" expands more than I thought possible. Sometimes - many times - those bargain basement tier good-enoughs remain efficient for their $ : utilon ratio. But I'm no longer fooling myself that, acktually, a $10 jug of blended paint thinner "whiskey" gives the same pleasure-per-shot as a $70 bottle of Japanese whiskey. Fancy things hedonically "pull the rope sideways", to use a Robin Hansonism[3].
[1] Favourite Obama moment: when he accidentally called Kanye a jackass on a hot mic.
> Okay, I'll bite that class bullet: I can't stand rap, Kanye in particular*, but am very fond of Beethoven and other classicists. Despite being working-class at <$35k annual income.
Your income has nothing to do with your class. Without wanting to diagnose your class based purely on one data point it sounds like you're at least slightly middle class.
>Given that most people prefer Kanye, it seems kind of crazy to assert that >Beethoven is better.
I sincerely hope that this is some sort of provocation (similar to, say, voting for Trump), but then this wouldn't be the first time that people speak as if the Cultural Revolution had triumphed.
1. Among people who have had reasonable exposure to Beethoven and some random contemporary popular musician that will be forgotten in thirty years time, how many prefer the latter?
2. Some things are not comparable: there's no shame in being a bit into immediate-gratification musical analogues of Coca-Cola, as long as one doesn't confuse it for the real stuff.
3. Lots of people who have tried opiods prefer them both to burgers and to filet mignon. Does that mean they are "better" than either?
1. Due to selection effects (the only people who listen to a reasonable amount of Beethoven are those who like Beethoven), this is a toss-up. But if you looked at the playlist of someone who likes Beethoven, I wouldn't be surprised to see more modern pop music than classical.
And if you did an experiment where you forcibly exposed people to Beethoven and to pop, I'm sure more would prefer pop.
2 / 3. Who says Beethoven is burgers and modern music is opioids in this analogy? Sure, these two kinds of music are not comparable, but not for the reason you think - modern pop music is the *actual music* (burgers in the analogy), whereas classical music is something far more abstract and pretentious, closer to poetry or a painting (more like caviar in the analogy).
Again, either someone is pushing the envelope or we are living in a post-Cultural-Revolution world.
1. My playlist has a lot more later classical than Beethoven, and probably more Beethoven than all pop put together. Mind you, I enjoy self-consciously sappy tango music, also enjoy some silly things, and recently set a personal low record by doing some tedious proofreading with Kylie Minogue on youtube in the background. (Try to do that when music you actually want to pay attention to is playing.) What does that prove?
2. And even if many people actually preferred pop (as in, actually thought it better) after becoming deeply familiar with both classical and pop (very far from clear - I'd guess the contrary), what would that prove?
3. Why are we talking only about Beethoven, and not of the tradition - spanning centuries - of which he is one central figure? (Why not Bártok, say?)
(There may be a bit of a middlebrow cult of Beethoven - there certainly was one in the past - what, with people associating "symphony" with the number 9, and what not. That doesn't make him not a great composer.)
"Also, if you *really* want me to push you on this: why are you so convinced that the best music was produced almost exclusively by white people, and that modern artists who are people of color tend to produce work that intellectually inferior?"
If you hold a gun to my head to force me to choose between Cardi B and WAP, and some toothless guy in the Himalayas playing a two-string fiddle - wait, you don't even have to hold a gun or force me at all. Toothless old guy, plunk that fiddle!
Definitely a troll! Who said that all classical composers are "white"? (Not to mention that it's pretty ignorant to elide the influence of jazz on twentieth-century classical.) And who says that I am presuming that the western classical tradition is the only "high" tradition worth its salt? Obviously, given the choice of (perish the thought) destroying any of the Carnatic or Hindustani heritage, or nuking some pop-culture tosh out of existence in this and all conceivable universes, in the past, present and future, one should choose the nuclear option.
So one can overdose on opiods. Why not pot, or some more potent but relatively "safe" drug? The main trap here is precisely in the creation of some shallow, artificial paradise (in the best of cases). Not that I have actually heard any pop that manages to quite do that - whatever comes close must receive some praise at a purely technical level, I suppose.
"A similar case applies to burgers and filet mignon. Burgers outsell filet mignon to such an extent that I don't think the price difference can fully explain it; I think that most people actually do just like burgers more. You may not have this preference but I think that most people do."
Two McDoubles: $3.50. Also, ready to consume, available just about everywhere, served with strong-flavored condiments.
0.5 lb Prime filet: $30. Only available at certain markets, requires cooking, optimum preparation requires specialized equipment.
How many people could actually afford to make filet mignon a substantial part of their protein intake?
"Across (say) streaming platforms and Billboard charts, it's pretty clear that Kanye outperforms Beethoven. (...) Given that most people prefer Kanye, it seems kind of crazy to assert that Beethoven is better."
Apart from the class effects, how much marketing (or even random exposure stuff like generic radio play) does old Ludwig get these days? Do the suggestion algorithms tempt Kanye-listeners with some Beethoven? Is Kanye also better than Duke Ellington or the Beatles?
It feels like the modern music discovery and affinisation process has more to do with it than any notion of quality.
That's way more faith in the invisible hand than I'd have expected, and it still doesn't rule out reverse causality.
You raise an important point, though - because the best-loved classical music is in the public domain, there is strictly less money to be made with it, even if exceptional performers have sometimes done quite well for themselves.
Kanye might get more play today, but over time it could well be that the melodies from Ode to Joy and Fur Elise have far more hours of play than any Kanye West rant.
It is not just about class signalling. High class people are more likely to derive pleasure and fulfillment from doing something that they consider challenging and difficult. (They don't sell a lot of crossword puzzles and diabolical sudokus in the trailer park gift shop.) Beethoven pieces are objectively more complex than pop music, but also beautiful and memorable.
I'd also say, that if you told someone they could only listen to one piece of music for the rest of their lives, I'd guess that more people would choose a Beethoven piece than a Kanye song.
There is one thing that I can not understand in conservative narrative and every time I ask about it in a conversation I don't get a direct reply.
The narrative claims that academia was captured by ideologically motivated leftists, thus justifying dismissing anything from social science that conservative do not like. But how and when did it actually happen?
Consider the obvious case of propaganda being spread as "science" in Soviet Union. There we see an ideologically motivated government that came to power via revolution, that enforced the line of the party through violence. The causal chain is clear here.
With western academia I can't see it. If there were no actual violent takeover, how did the leftist infiltrated presumably properly working academia if not due to the merits of their scientific works? Critical legal studies are 50 years old. Was the academia already taken over back then? Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual in the fifties. So did the infiltration happened somewhere inbetween these two dates? Does anybody have a gear level model of this belief?
One boring theory I've seen is that it's easier to make money in the private sector than in academe, so conservatives are less likely to be academics. This wouldn't explain the whole thing, but it might create a tilt favoring liberals.
People have made rankings of which academic disciplines lean most Democratic vs Republican. My recollection of one such from Dan Klein found that the most Republican faculty were in... nursing, which attracts students who want to be nurses rather than academics.
Beyond the good points already made by others, there's the little matter of The '60s. That was a thing that happened, and an awful lot of it happened on college campuses.
A confluence of social factors including but not limited to the availability of birth control, interesting new drugs, and the desire to not get drafted into the Vietnam war, led to college students in particular becoming anomalously leftist during the 1960s. And in a very active way, protesting and demanding that their leftist tastes be indulged. That meant that the then-minority of leftist *professors* found themselves much more popular and influential, right-leaning professors found their positions much less comfortable, and the majority in the middle found it easiest to slide a bit left to get along.
In the 1970s (loosely speaking), the students reverted towards the mean - Vietnam was no longer a live issue, sex and drugs were simply hedonistic rather than political, etc. But a lot of the new young professors were the ones who had graduated in the 1960s, joining the older leftists who had been elevated in stature in that decade.
The conservatives, for their part, simply left. Not all of them, obviously, but for many lucrative jobs in the private sector were more appealing than being part of an unwanted conservative minority in academia. And nothing in conservative culture said "academic life is inherently virtuous and/or a civic duty"; going after the dollars and status in industry was a perfectly acceptable choice in their culture.
From there, it's just a matter of assortative job-seeking.
>total downfall of Western civilization was caused by piddly random thing like Vietnam draft
This is like letting an arsonist play in your house unsupervised, turning off your smoke alarms for him, and then not calling the fire department when you see smoke, for 60 years straight, and then calling the fire an accident.
>NRx narrative, blah blah blah, academia abstractly implies wokeism because bioleninism or something
Specifically Moosetopher says that Academia is about status signalling. The more typical version of this is that it's all about power-seeking. The problem is that National Socialism and infinite other ideologies serve status signalling and power-seeking just fine. This is like letting a cannibal kill your 5 year old and then explaining the cannibal's behavior with, "well, obviously he was hungry." It is called the non-specificity fallacy.
>"There was no "coup". Just a bunch of individuals making similar decisions slowly over time."
It's funny how a) rationalists take this as an axiom, not something they need to prove b) they will describe this at length and then c) still feel the need to almost cheerfully remind the reader that, "lest you think I'm a *conspiracy theorist*. keep in mind this is all *totally decentralized.* It's just a bunch of totally unconnected, tongueless nodes in a complex, dynamic, egalitarian social network, individually responding to marginalist-style *incentives* without any communication between one another." Nice reified neoliberal metaphysics you have there, it would be a shame if somebody actually asked for evidence of it. In fact the evidence points to coordination being high among the elite. The sovereign class is basically the largest political alliance of capable people so in that way everything is basically a vast conspiracy of the top few thousand people in a society. This is only a subset of capable people at any point in time and a big part of law and political norms are gatekeeping against capable people who are too politically different.
The parent comment asked for an explanation of a plausible mechanism. It is difficult to provide conclusive proof for them in a comment; it is difficult even with a book-length treatment. However, I observe Daiseach and Faza have provided links to evidence, like books written by contemporaries, and many recount personal experience, whereas you only provide accusations.
Would you mind rephrasing ... basically everything? Preferably in simpler language? Without the metaphors, preferably, which personally aren't illuminating in the least.
This comes across as obscurantist bordering on deliberately misleading.
I have heard it blamed on the Vietnam draft. One way to avoid the draft was to stay in school, so a very large number of talented young men who might have done other things beavered away on PhDs. These were men who, by and large, were antiwar and antiestablishment. Once they finished their degrees, there wasn't much for them to do except stay in academics. Ergo, the academy was flooded with antiwar, anti-establishment leftists.
I don't know if there is any truth to this, but it seems plausible and aligns with the backgrounds of many academics I know (ie, it's true anecdotally).
Academia in the west was founded as an extension of the priesthood, with students who were literally not beholden to civil law. Then it became the exclusive domain of those "free" from the need to work for a living. Students (who then became faculty) were, from day one, people who were entitled to be supported by the labor of others because of their superior [insert reason of the era here]. Since academics have literally never needed to produce anything objectively true or false* (hence the creation of "academic" as an epithet) status is about fashion in beliefs and behaviors.
*it is not a coincidence that A&M schools, polytechnics and the like were created separate from those with centuries-old literature, ancient languages, and art history departments
...is it? I guess it depends on whether you mean "logically consistent" or "observable in the existing universe." n-dimensional manifolds propagating through imaginary time may be valid mathematical constructs, but are they objectively real?
Sure, there's a whole philosophical debate about to what extent mathematics is "real". But no matter how fashionable a proof is, if somebody spots a mistake in it, and the author can't fix the mistake, then the author won't get the status increase.
Gradually, like most things. In the late 90s (as a leftist/communist ~18/19 year old) I was struck by how absurd it was on the campus of my girlfriend's fancy private school, the school bookstore had more space devoted to "X-studies" than to say "science" as a whole. Seemed bizarre for a college, though I didn't at the time have any political beliefs about it. Just seemed like the school had misplaced priorities.
But it was much less common/influential at my plebian public school. Yes there were clubs of students making absurd demands, and professors with odd ideas, but there are always professors with odd ideas on various subjects, nothing to worry about. And none of the actually brilliant professors took it that seriously.
It was still seen by the actual academics as a sideshow. They listened politely, maybe changed the admissions and hiring practices some. Added a couple more administrators focused on diversity.
But there is/was this very effective "rachet" effect. For decades now it has been totally inappropriate in academic circles to be any kind of "ist". So once you set departments focused on "ist"s of various sorts, they can year after year just make more and more demands and changes, and there is just generally not the will/standing to say "no" that isn't important enough, especially if the "ist" faculty gets the students riled up.
...And you end up where we are today.
There was no "coup". Just a bunch of individuals making similar decisions slowly over time.
I do think there is some history/story there with the attempt to diversify campuses in the 60s/70s, and simply not having enough diverse students of sufficient merit to meet the goals. So you end up with below academic par people who need below academic par programs to attend. And these programs attract below academic par faculty for similar reasons and then spit out more of the same and demand even more diversity.
There is also a manner in which the academic process is not a helpful model in this instance. In say "biology" the field works to understand something better and better. Always new things to learn. But the "ist" fields are in part there to learn, but in part there to advocate and make demands. So there always needs to be fresh grist for the mill, whether it is really there or not.
Anyway, this stuff had its hooks very deep into academia by the 90s, and people just misunderstood how much additional progress it was going to make.
I will always remember taking a "feminist geography" class in university because I enjoyed the professor and was legitimately interested in the topic. And I was just beyond shocked at how sloppy/poor the thinking was in all the pieces we read. "All US foreign policy is REALLY about oppressing women". That was a hot topic at the time. Crazy shit like that presented as real theories of the world. It was like going from studying at the university to studying the incoherent ramblings of stoned HS students.
Another commenter already noticed this: Turing was chemically castrated by the Courts and Police after he was found guilty of engaging in certain sexual acts with another man. There is some evidence that many people in academia were aware of Turing's behavior, but the Police and Courts did not become official aware of this until Turing reported a crime committed against him by his housemate/sexual-partner.
The academic world didn't do that to Turing.
On another hand, the academic world that Turing moved in did contain the Cambridge Five. People who were apparently aligned with leftist goals to the point that they passed official/secret government documents to a foreign Communist government.
Is that evidence, either pro or con, for leftist-thought being present in the world of academia at that time?
It's pretty weak evidence: the academic world contained enough people that even if it were 90% conservative, you would still expect it to contain at least 5 famous communists.
(Unless your threshold for "leftist thought was present" is literally "there was at least 1 communist". But I don't think anybody would dispute that.)
To take a step back, I think there is a positive feedback effect. (Once a department gets a little more liberal it tends to make the next hire a liberal... and so it grows.) And so it could have been that academia was captured by the conservatives. In almost all control systems one wants negative feedback. I see much of societies ills arising from the wrong type of feedback.
Perhaps the difference between these things is that one is a gross violation of personal liberty and the other has never happened. Literally nobody has ever had their social status destroyed just for being cishet.
If you think the cancellers are content to just cancel and wouldn't happily use the state apparatus to bury those they disagree with, you are sorely mistaken.
If the dominant position in the land is pluralistic liberalism, it is uniquely vulnerable to attacks by monistic illiberal forces, unless it has specific antibodies to combat them. Thus, an attack along fascist lines would have probably been impossible post (but, importantly, not *pre*) WWII. However, Marxism could continue to trade on its pre-war appeal to a certain class of intellectual, coupled with the reputation boost of victory in a war of Good v. Evil. Add thereto a claim of desiring peace, a resistance to the oppression of unjustly colonised nations, and - crucially - a tight control of information as to the *real* situation on the ground, and you've got a winning formula.
The West certainly tried to put up a fight, but the information asymmetry made them look like bullies. McCarthy is a meme now, despite the fact that he was substantially correct in his assumptions (if not the specifics).
As for later developments, it appears that currently it is more beneficial for the Powers That Be to exploit, rather than resist, these forces.
People become Russian agents entirely by chance? Or Russian agents were so common in the State Department that a random sampling of 40 caught three of them? And the latter is disproof of the thesis "the State Department is full of Russian agents?"
"Critical legal studies are 50 years old. Was the academia already taken over back then?"
50 years ago was 1972. If you really are unaware of changes in the 60s and 70s, I suggest you try reading up on things like May 68 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68, sit-ins, and the history of student activism during the period. It's an entire topic of its own. Marxist-Leninist and even Maoist theory were also popular amongst academics at the time, and even before: the eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a staunch Marxist throughout his career beginning in the 40s:
He went from the intelligence service opening a file on him in 1942 to being made a Companion of Honour in 1998.
As to Turing, I have not gone into his case deeply as I have never been that interested. I see the line about chemical castration and suicide brought out when discussing homophobia/persecution of homosexuals, but I don't know the entire background and I think there probably was a lot more going on (for one, Turing was doing sensitive war work and being gay was a security risk). It's something I may have to look up.
Why do you think there was probably more going on? Because you doubt that British society in the mid 20th century was homophobic enough to engage in persecution of homosexuals as an end in itself?
Because yes, there was persecution of homosexuals, but the authorities did not go out witch-hunting Turing. The court records were released back in 2016 and there are some sites which go into detail as to what went on. Turing picked up a young man (19 years old, and remember, even if homosexuality had been decriminalised at the time, under age of consent laws this would still have been a minor: "The male homosexual age of consent in the United Kingdom was set at 21 in the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (following the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report), then lowered to 18 in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and finally lowered to 16 in England & Wales and Scotland in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000") who may or may not have been a male prostitute but was involved with petty crime. He had sex with him a few times, the guy robbed him of £8 and then later Turing's house was burgled.
The burglary is why Turing brought Murray (the guy he picked up) to the police station. Turing went in to report the burglary, and somehow managed to reveal that he had engaged in sex with this guy (probably the police asked how did he meet him, etc.) This was a major crime at the time, and so the pair of them were charged and prosecuted.
You can say this was wrong and being gay and having sex should not be a crime. But the police couldn't ignore it, it would be like someone going into a police station to report that they had been robbed and then revealing they were selling meth out of their house. No cop, no matter how tolerant, is going to go "Okay, let me ignore that bit about the drug-dealing".
In order to avoid a prison sentence, Turing's lawyer argued for the drug treatment instead and that was granted. There is also something in the record about another, separate offence that Turing pleaded guilty to; whether that was with Murray or someone else is not mentioned.
"Turing picked up Murray in Manchester’s Oxford Street and the two ate together. Their first time was a few days later at Turing’s house, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow. Afterwards Turing gave Murray a present of a penknife: probably the unemployed Murray would have preferred cash instead. The next time they had sex, Murray stole £8 from Turing’s pocket as he left Hollymeade in the morning, and not long after this the house was burgled.
Even though the finger of suspicion pointed at Murray and his seedy friends, Turing spent the night with him one more time. In the morning he led Murray to the local police station. Turing went in, but not Murray. In the course of reporting the burglary he gave the police a wrong description and this, as the newspaper reporter covering his subsequent trial wrote luridly, “proved to be his undoing.”
During questioning, Turing admitted to having had sex with Murray three times. The burglary dropped out of the picture, eclipsed by this sensational new information.
As the police knew all too well, each of the three occasions counted as two separate crimes under the antique 1885 legislation still in force — the commission of an act of gross indecency with another male person, and the reciprocal crime of being party to the commission of an act of gross indecency. Six criminal offences.
After Turing made his statement, he said to a police officer: “What is going to happen about all this? Isn’t there a Royal Commission sitting to legalise it?” But not until 1967 was homosexuality decriminalized in the UK.
Three weeks later, at the end of February 1952, Turing and Murray appeared in court. The charges were read out and both men were committed for trial. The court granted Turing bail of £50, but refused to let Murray out of custody. Following a distressing wait of more than four weeks, the trial was held in the quiet Cheshire town of Knutsford at the end of March. Turing pleaded guilty on all six counts, as did Murray. The mathematician Max Newman, Turing’s long-time friend, was called as a character witness. “He is completely absorbed in his work, and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation,” Newman said. It must have been good to hear these words, even on such a black day.
Murray’s counsel attempted to shift the blame onto Turing, saying that Turing had approached Murray. If Murray “had not met Turing he would not have indulged in that practice or stolen the £8,” the barrister argued crassly. But his tactics worked: despite a previous conviction for larceny, Murray got off with 12 months’ good behaviour.
Turing’s own counsel hoped to steer the court away from a prison sentence, and alluded to the possibility of organotherapy: “There is treatment which could be given him. I ask you to think that the public interest would not be well served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing.” The judge followed the barrister’s lead, sentencing Turing to 12 months’ probation and ordering him to “submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary.” It was not exactly the eulogy he deserved from the nation he had saved. Turing wrote in a letter, “No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.” He signed the letter “Yours in distress.”
The alternative of prison would probably have cost him his job, and with it his access to a computer. Already his arrest had cost him something else that mattered to him: as he told a friend, he would never be able to work for GCHQ again. One of his Bletchley Park colleagues, Joan Clarke, who stayed on as a peacetime codebreaker, confirmed that Turing visited GCHQ’s Eastcote site after the war as a consultant. But now Turing, the perfect patriot, had unwittingly become a security risk."
Turing was extremely unlucky, but the courts did not go "aha, let us chemically castrate him!" as first resort, this was argued for by his lawyer to avoid prison. Also bear in mind that Turing was being tried as a sex offender, and one who was engaging in deviant sex with a minor, and think of how we approach sex offenders today; not so very different:
This is interesting detail but it doesn't add up to the original claim, that Turing was chemically castrated for being gay, being a misleading simplification.
The war was long over when he was punished for homosexuality (1952). He was a true war hero and was made an officer of the The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contribution. He was (posthumously) royally pardoned in 2013 by QE2, "for the appalling way he was treated." Many think he should be knighted still.
To my limited knowledge, the Turing story is roughly:
Turing worked as an mathematician and code-breaker during the War. His sexual proclivities were suspected by most who knew him, but it never became something that either courts or Police took notice of.
The security agencies who interacted with Turing may have worked to shield his sexual behavior from official notice, or may have worked to shield him from honey-trap operations by spies. Whatever the attitude of the Government was towards Turing during the War, it is likely still secret.
During the early 1950s, Turing and his sexual-partner/housemate became antoganistic over some elements of their shared life. Turing eventually reported the housemate to the Police for some form of theft. During that report, the Police became aware the sexual nature of the relationship between Turing and the housemate in question. This may have been due to Turing admitting details about the relationship to the Police, or it may have been due to Police investigating the relationship as something suspicious. Turing and the housemate were eventually found guilty of a moral offense. The chemical-castration drug was administered after a Court declared that such was the punishment to fit his crime.
My memory of Turing's death is that he may have ended his own life, or he may have been poisoned by someone else... my memory is hazy, but I think the evidence is hazy too.
I'm sure Turing's suicide was deliberate, and was because he felt his creative powers were waning with age. Mathematics, of tip-top originality and quality, is notoriously a young person's game, although of course older people can and do make important contributions.
The drugs administered to him were a choice he made, offered as a then "trendy" alternative to a jail term of (I would guess) most likely a year or two. But for a guy with his mental acuity, it most likely caused a noticeable "brain fog", which would have accentuated his feeling of losing his mental edge.
I think a biography of him I read some years ago relates that he did comment along those lines to friends, and made light of the symptoms. But he probably found them distressing, and feared they would be permanent.
"The drugs administered to him were a choice he made, offered as a then "trendy" alternative to a jail term of (I would guess) most likely a year or two."
This is a choice only in a very expansive sense of "choice". Turing was subject to coercion, and that coercion was a result of prejudice.
Few people these days, certainly not myself, would dispute it that was a highly unsatisfactory situation, and in practice the choice was coercive. All the same, I believe he could have declined the drug treatment at any time, and therefore technically it was his choice to start it and continue it.
The version I've heard of his death is that he may have accidentally poisoned himself. He was often doing experiments and was not known for being especially careful. At Bletchley Park people observed him frequently shocking himself as he wired up electronic devices.
Accidently leaving a cyanide-laced apple next to your bed and absentmindedly munching it seems like a stretch even for a man concentrating very hard on something else.
I very much doubt he was experimenting with cyanide, because he would have been well aware that even a sub-lethal dose can have drastic and permanent effects, such as causing blindness and deafness (both combined), as careless electroplaters for example had found to their cost for many years even then!
LD50 for potassium cyanide is 5-10mg/kg, per wikipedia, so a human of say 70kg should need perhaps half a gram? That is a third of a cubic centimeter, hardly a trivial amount. I think getting that much into or onto an apple takes some work even if you want to do it intentionally. As an analogue, try thinking of the last time you accidentally half a gram of table salt on an apple.
Cyanides are not exactly among the ten most used chemicals in the lab. While they have some applications (e.g. organic synthesis, gold mining), they are mostly known for being toxic.
If KCN happened to be some three orders of magnitude more toxic than it is (like botulinum toxin A, where 100ug are easily lethal) _and_ there were lab notes of some experiment corroborating an unrelated use for it, one might consider an accident.
As an intuition pump, consider someone who in what they claim an accident poisons another person in a similar manner. Would you assume that they would get convicted of negligent manslaughter or murder one?
(I do not want to imply that there is any element of wrongdoing in suicides, but just advocate calling a spade a spade. Likewise, Hemingway did not die because he failed at basic gun safety but because he intentionally shot himself.)
The GI bill meant that after WWII some hugely bigger fraction of poor smart men could get college. Colleges got much bigger, and it shifted the money from 'rich R and D smart' to 'D-FDR smart'. After 1964 D patronage hires and D patronage admissions with a race hustle overlay shifted the money from 'D-FDR smart' to 'D-LBJ not so smart'. Feminism, Marxist studies, black and brown and yellow studies, all are easy A's for dumb patronage admission students.
And it's easier for a smart lazy kid to go with easy A's than for a dumb kid to study something real.
Also, political alliances change over time. It's not like Marxists were always aligned with LGBT. I think that in Soviet Union being a gay would probably get you in big trouble. So you could have Marxism come to the academia first, and tolerance to LGBT much later.
The English version does not mention that gay men were under security observation since at least the 60s, with personal files first being kept since the 70s.
My understanding is that the socialists and communists considered gay rights a distraction which sucked energy and resources away from the important economic issues. The Soviets certainly trained agents to honey trap gay people and not just hetero ones. Stalin re-imposed anti-sodomy laws in 1934 but generally socialists didn't have strong moral objections.
Initially the socialists/communists abolished nearly all of the moral strictures on personal conduct and which oppressed women and various oppressed groups.
There was quite a bit of debate about whether non-standard sexual practices were a result of bourgeois degeneracy or not.
Ironically the mainline belief among the Soviet psych people was literally a "liberal" position. Homosexuality was considered unproblematic and a matter of personal significance. Live and let live.
Stalin's inner circle was mostly composed of regressive socially conservative Russians who hadn't spent much time abroad but mostly in Siberia and so they weren't very friendly to diversity of any kind including socially/sexually. They were not the "cosmopolitan communists" of many parts of Europe or the US east coast.
You could argue that Bernie Sanders is a good example of the connection between LGBT rights and socialism, especially if you separate the Stalinist position from the general position. Basically left-social-libertarianism. If it doesn't directly impact the class struggle let people do what they want.
The conservatives I've followed over the years have offered, broadly, two (non-competing) explanations.
The first is that Dewey (of the decimal system) built the leftist bias into the structure of education itself in his role as one of the earliest and most prominent philosophers of education in the US. Never personally dug into this, but the claim is that Dewey was an Ayn Rand villain who hated free thinkers and smart people, believed education should be designed around creating better factory workers, and in general should be designed for the good of society instead of the good of those being educated. Also he advocated for a professional permanent class of teachers (this part would probably have happened eventually either way, although he may or may not be responsible for education being a separate degree), and for teachers to be involved in propagandizing the youths.
The second is that Alinksy specifically called for leftists to take over institutions, education in particular, in Rules For Radicals. Also haven't investigated this claim. However, libertarians made a similar call about twenty years ago to start trying to take over education, so I guess we'll get some data soon.
Academia has gone through iterative filters, which each successive filter encouraging leftist thought but discouraging conservatives. I would say this started in the 1950s and made gains in the 60s and 70s through well known free speech and freedom topics such as women's rights, anti-war sentiment, etc. These were positions that were very marginalized in broader society, but they could incubate in academia due to the culture of academic freedom. This encouraged people on the left to seek out academia, while conservatives had no reason to do so, controlling the national cultural narrative during this time. Other topics that could fall under this more recently are the new anti-war ideals of the Bush years, Occupy Wall St, and gay rights.
Two things have taken place since then - this is a bit more culture-war, but I've definitely heard this from strong conservatives and believe that there is at least some basis in reality to support it.
1. Academia has moved away from an ideal of academic freedom to entrench ideological positions on the left. Having reached a pinnacle of power that allowed them to do so, leftists took control of the reins of power and took steps to cement that power. This has stonewalled potential conservative scholars and ideas out of academia, not letting them incubate ideas the way that leftists did in prior generations. I believe Scott has posted about this before, but there have been surveys where hiring committees have been polled and said outright that they would discriminate against people with conservative views.
2. Conservatives tend to work in industry and "real world" jobs that support their ideology, and they feel that academics only believe many of the things they do because the economics of universities works so much differently. The work hours, the schedule, the funding sources, all separated from what many would call "economic reality" in that they aren't producing (or being evaluated as if they did) widgets on an assembly line or running a profitable business. I think this one feels more culture-war than the other, and I'm mixed on how I feel about it - I can see the argument but there's a lot of noise in the details - like the non-tenure-track professors being hired at lower rates for the sole purpose of teaching classes. That feels more like blue-collar teaching than previous generations had.
The supposed mechanism, as far as I think the theory has any merit, is a combination of following two major pathways.
Pathway 1: Building ideological pockets within academia works.
1a. Each discipline is self-enforcing with its own normative culture what gets rewarded and what is not. Physics researchers generally read and peer review mostly physics journals, not sociology or history and vice versa.
1b. Thus, disciplines of ideological and clearly politically motivated feminist and critical studies will reward the researchers and publications that are meritorious by their ideological and political standards. Specifically they are susceptible founder effects: if the research programme has bad "epistemic culture", it will have difficulties ascertain what is actually true and what is not, it will not change course. (First rule of any organization: The organization will try to keep itself alive. Likewise a scientific field will resist attempts to changes to its epistemic norms and goals and research programme.)
1c. After such disciplines have become accepted within the umbrella of "legitimate academic tradition", they will gather legitimacy and funding. Because of those disciplines have politically motivated culture (not scientific epistemic culture), any criticism against them is not viewed as legitimate, but as an attack against the research programme. (Contrast how presenting an unorthodox physics theory can often still be viewed as physics -- maybe as bad physics, but still physics -- if it fits within the physics research programme.) If the politically motivated research programme has managed gain some legitimacy as a field, the defenders can portray thus criticisms as attack against "the science".
1': I find the explanation plausible, because one can observe the same phenomenon in apolitical disciplines, too. It is not uncommon for people manage to establish a discipline that is viewed as legitimate science but has bad epistemic culture and doesn't produce very good science. Then instead of grand left-right politics, the field will be driven to large extent office politics and interpersonal preferences and nepotism, but it is equally untethered to reality. For example, see replication crisis in psychology, and the initial reaction against replication criticism.
Even in "hard sciences" there are interpersonal feuds and fashions! If fields like physics are not immune, why would be less experimental humanities fields?
Pathway 2: Academia is also downwind from the politics.
2a Observe that since the 1970s, the radical left made big gains in popularity. (Not only the Soviet-aligned radical left, but including eurocommunists, anarchists, and radical greens) Observe the student revolutions, protest movements, and that nearly all continental postmodernists were on "the left".
2b Such people made the bulk of the scholars in their chosen academic fields after they grew up. Several academic disciplines had quite bad epistemic standards from the beginning (say, sociology, continental philosophy, political science, literature), so when the people with leftist politics became the scholars themselves, there wasn't any institutional force or mechanism that would have rejected new scholars' politically motivated bad epistemics which came to replace previous generation's bad epistemics.
>Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual in the fifties.
That's a bad point to make. First, Alan Turing was not castrated by his fellow academics, but by the the state. Even if the entire academic world had been infiltrated at the time, he would still have been castrated. Second, pro-homosexuality was not a popular position on the left in the fifties. A bit more popular than on the right, maybe, but marxist & others were very much opposed to unnatural/bourgeois sexuality. He would (probably) have been castrated all the same in a leftist regime (if not outright liquidated).
A hostile takeover need not be violent, merely inadequately opposed.
Since you asked for a model, here's a model. I make no claim of accuracy regarding any particular real-world instance.
Start with an academic environment that holds freedom of inquiry in high regard. All manner of students with all manner of interests will pass through it, some of whom will go on to higher academic ranks, and go on to shape its future.
Now, assume you have a politically-motivated group with a degree of academic and political savvy. They are sufficiently capable to be able to produce acceptable academic work, but their chief interest is political influence.
Once embeded in the system, their thrust is twofold: first, as instructors, to constrain the degree of academic freedom available to their students, thus setting up an orthodoxy for the next generation. Second, their political interests push them towards active participation in the administrative side of process, allowing them to shape the future policies of their institutions.
Note that if the original spirit of the institutions was that of free intellectual inquiry, there probably isn't any pre-existing power-base to oppose these moves. Professors should be free to teach as they see fit. Academics go into academia to do academic work, rather than waste time on dreary bureaucratic chores.
It's a question of pure selection effects: the ideologically motivated are much better suited to taking power than the politically disinterested, so they will be seen to win in the long run.
As for why it's the leftists: that, I would say, is a legacy of the Cold War, although we should note that broadly-understood "progressive" notions have been appealing to the sort of Upper-middle class types that end up running academia for well over a century (arguably, Marx himself was part of that group). There hasn't really been a comparable right-wing movement among the elites after WWI, to the best of my knowledge (both fascism and national socialism were adressed chiefly to the working class).
For a literary illustration of the above, I recommend Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975). Truly there's nothing new under the sun.
It seems to me that neoliberalism has focused chiefly on economic policy, rather than being an all-encompassing thought.
This isn't to say that the neoliberals didn't have some significant successes in exporting these ideas. However, it's not obviously evident, at first glance, that neoliberalism offers much of a cultural counter to the sort of academic leftism we're discussing.
In a lot of ways, the two seem to have settled into a "non-competing magisteria"-type situation in most of the West, with socio-cultural issues being under the overwhelming influence of academic leftism, while economics remain mostly neoliberal.
The fact that Marxism still remains the go-to economic theory of the academic left, coupled with the rather spectacular failures of its attempted implementation worldwide, probably encourages the left to keep somewhat quiet on economic issues, unless they can be turned into human-interest issues.
Several reasons have been suggested for why our ape like ancestors started walking upright: To see above grass, minimise heating from the sun on their backs, carry things such as infants or sticks, or perhaps a combination of all these.
I would like to propose another significant reason which I'm not aware has yet been considered. What is more, as I explain, this suggestion could in some degree be confirmed by experiment today!
At the time these small apes lived there were fierce eagles patrolling the sky, far larger than any around today, and I believe many skulls excavated of small animals and apes from that period have a pair of puncture marks from a giant beak.
But a small ape, and more so a group of them, moving across an open savanna might be able to perplex and deter a circling eagle by walking upright and swinging their arms. Eagles presumably are not that bright, and they might find the unnatural appearance of swinging arms offputting.
Over time, perhaps a million years or more, this walking on two legs and arm swinging became second nature, and a natural reflex, especially in the presence of large eagles. and I maintain that surprisingly it persists to a degree today!
Of course I realise arm swinging is necessary when walking on two legs, to provide a counterbalance to moving legs. But I am referring to extra exaggerated motion over and above that needed just to maintain balance.
Think how many armies over time have used eagle banners and totems, the Romans, Nazis, ethnic Americans with their eagle head dresses. Perhaps this was in part a subconscious acknowledgement that people still have a vestige of an arm swinging reflex, and the eagles in a sense motivate and "energize" soldiers, especially when marching or (in earlier times) war-dancing etc.
So I propose a simple experiment whereby a psychologist could test for this reflex, not that it would help much in directly establishing whether early humans relied on it to deter eagles. But it would confirm or otherwise whether, as I maintain, the reflex still exists today.
Find a busy street, and erect a large poster of a fierce looking "Uncle Sam wants you!" style eagle glaring at the viewer. Then I conjecture that most passing pedestrians would noticeably increase the amount of arm swinging! This could be filmed and analyzed, and I bet you anything a significant increase would be observed.
I find it hard to believe that any bird outside of Middle-earth would routinely prey on adult hominids, especially not ones which see them coming.
Furthermore, from my understanding, birds might not be brilliant but possess some capability to learn. Figuring out "the four-legged animals are just as good a meal if they walk on their hind legs" seems much easier than learning to walk on two legs. Like trying to escape a volcano by putting your faith into the continental drift.
Fair points, but I wasn't suggesting eagle-scaring was the only ultimate incentive to walk upright and all the others were misguided nonsense! Every one, and others, probably played roles of varying importance at different times.
To address your observations, firstly hominids at different stages of evolution came in various sizes. Some robust species would have been a handful even for a Middle-Earth sized eagle! But my impression is that, on the evidence of discovered remains, early species likely to have been our ancestors were small and slender, perhaps no more than three feet tall even as adults. Although eagles may have found adult hominids even of this small size challenging prey, they could still snatch infants and juveniles, like brazen seagulls pinching an ice cream out of one's hand!
Also, even if an ingrained habit of walking, when in open areas, with exaggerated arm swinging might not fool an eagle for long, the bird may have found it disconcerting enough to pause slightly before swooping, giving more time for the hominid troop or individual to reach cover. Evolution often works on small advantages.
This resembles Jacobian's theory that rhythmic singing and dancing evolved to create the impression that a tribe of humans was a single large organism...but I think he had land based predators more in mind.
Just for another category of theory, throwing might have been important.
Powerful throwing involves twisting the whole body, and that impacts the spine and pelvis.
Accurate throwing takes a lot of mental capacity-- I think the moment of release is a matter of microseconds, and there's a theory that human intelligence takes repurposing the capacity needed for throwing.
I was thinking "a matter of microseconds" seemed off. I guess, not that far off though. 60MPH => ~1 inch/millisecond. It seems clear that a release error of 1" (or even 0.1") would be very problematic for accuracy. So yes... microseconds.
Interestingly, with neural impulses traveling at just 150m/s, it takes several milliseconds for the brain to communicate with the hand. Accordingly, there must be some local (or prearranged) control and the aiming must take place earlier in the process.
Well, basically all movement is prearranged if you consider communication to be two-way. How do you think we learn to walk upright? Certainly not by thinking about where to put our feet. Movement that is accurate to the microsecond doesn't require two-way communication on that level; it's enough that the brain executes a well-rehearsed plan of action. When you're walking on uneven ground, for example, the brain does take proprioceptive input into account to make small adjustments to your gait, but the underlying process of walking is mostly automatic.
Balance involves your inner ear. That is clearly head to toe communication. Certainly adjusting to uneven pavement involves 2 way communication. Unlike when to release a thrown object, there is no microsecond requirement for walking or running.
Agreed thought that the aspect of walking that is automatic may mimic the method behind when the fingers open to release a thrown object. Presumably the brain sends out an entire sequence of actions. For throwing the last actions must be sent significantly before the final position is reached.
There is no microsecond requirement, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is microsecond coordination. If you're running on flat ground and you unwittingly step into a pothole half an inch deep, that shock goes through your whole body.
If throwing an object requires planning out all movements in advance, seconds could pass between when you decide to start the throw and when you release. That implies humans cannot hit a moving target with a thrown object, and reality bears that out very well: there are a lot of sports that involve throwing something at a stationary object, but I can't think of a single one that centers around hitting a moving target with a thrown object, like skeet shooting.
This is consistent with what I read about the role of throwing weapons in hunting: boomerangs were invented to hit roosting birds out of trees, so the ancestors of humans probably hunted by throwing things at stationary prey, and we evolved accordingly.
I think Dodgeball would sort of count here. Obviously dodgeball isn't a widespread sport in the same way that soccer or basketball are, but it's still 1) a valid sport and 2) aimed at moving objects that are actively trying to avoid your throw
Is the concept of "access concentration", or at least its popularity, relatively new? I don't remember seeing a lot of it in articles from 20 years ago, nor do I know a Pali or Sanskrit equivalent. Did Ingram make it famous?
I can attest it is traditional - the concept also exists in the Tibetan tradition, with the rather unwieldy name "nyer bsdogs mi lcogs med", typically translated as "capable preparatory stage".
Nice links. I would not have figured those out on my own. Thank you.
Edit: I searched with the terms you mentioned, and found the Pali word of "upacAra samAdhi" and the Sanskrit word of "sAmantaka anAgamya". These don't seem to be from the suttas, but the former seems present in Visuddhimagga. Thanks again.
Found it too, in an online scan of Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakoshabasyam (transl. Louis De la Vallee Poussin / Leo Pruden), vol. 4, page 1253, hosted on a dodgy Russian website as it should be.
Seems like the Sanskrit word for "access" or "preparatory stage" is sāmantaka (Tib. nyer bsdogs). Of the four "form" dhyanas, the preparatory stage of the first is also called anāgamya (Tib. mi lcogs med), meaning "not incapable".
This is classically considered to be the optimal amount of concentration with which one should attempt the wisdom pratices. Less than that means the mind is too disperse to be truly effective, but the Tibetan tradition also warns that if you train for an even more focused mind than that, it also loses effectiveness, in that you can fall into dumb concentration - long stretches of unwavering mindfulness from which you emerge none the wiser.
I forgot the details, but this probably harks back to some ancient conceptual war between the proponents of shamatha and those of vipassana. Everybody knows the answer is more likely to be a combination of the two, but that doesn't stop the arguments about their relative importance!
Thanks again for the very useful extra remarks, all of which were new to me.
According to the dictionary, "sāmanta" seems to be a neighborhood, and "upacāra" seems to mean "approach"/"mode of proceeding towards" (among other meanings), so I guess this points to "neighborhood concentration". The same dictionary gives "anāgamya" as unapproachable/unattainable, so that is a bit confusing (an online source wrongly translates it as "not yet arrived", to take it to mean pre-jhāna).
Nearly everyone bases their value system on experienced positive feelings. If nothing conscious exists to experience good things, how could it possibly matter what happens to the world unless you have some idiosyncratic value system wherein 'producing lots of stuff' or 'intelligence in any form existing' is what is considered valuable.
My citation would be I am a normal-ish human person with normal human friend and desires, and have been exposed to many humans and their desires.
Very very few express the complete indifference to the future you are espousing. I can think of two gay men, one of them childless and just a few years from death, one of them a hardcore libertarian. And...that is about it.
You really think *most* people don't care whether humans are still around in 150 years?
A good question. For some reason humans are much more enthusiastic about being replaced by slightly better creatures created with gametes than by much better creatures created with code.
I blame vestigial ape anxieties which High Modernism will one day successfully repress.
There's nothing rational about assuming that AIs will necessarily come to experience positive feelings, let alone more positive feelings than humans do. And if they don't, then why on earth should be prefer their existence to our own?
>The stoic response would be of acceptance.
That's bastardization of stoicism if ever there were one.
Rephrase the question as being slowly replaced, without any suffering. Point being, why do we need humans, if we can get something equivalent made of silicon.
You and I will both die, at least the odds point in that direction. As a species we seem motivated by the knowledge that our descendants, either direct, or broadly, will continue to flourish. Why can’t that need be satisfied by knowing that a new intelligence we made, will continue our journey? If the sun was about to go out and we didn’t know a way to escape, but we could make a few sentient AIs and send them out to other solar systems, would we? I bet yes. It would be better than leaving no vestiges behind.
The point you've elided (probably unintentionally) is "what are AIs like in terms of personality and values?". The general consensus is "inhuman"; humans are actually very similar to one another and hence take up only a tiny portion of the space of "human-level intelligent minds", but AIs can be essentially anywhere in that space.
I think a world optimised for something unrelated to human values is less valuable than one optimised for human values or, indeed, the current imperfectly-optimised world.
It is certainly true that according to some immoralist ideologies, all that matters is the power of the greatest being, and an AI is a plausible Ubermensch candidate. It is also true that some people in AI research follow these ideologies and think building Skynet would be a great accomplishment. However, most people think destroying humanity is insane and evil.
Are you assuming we design and build the AIs in the first place? They don't just spontaneously arise from whatever the silicon equivalent of primordial ooze might be?
In that case, maybe because it would seem like the Universe's Biggest Own Goal Ever. We used our big brains and talent to create a life form that turned around and annihilated us? How stupid is that? It'd be as if we found out the Chicxulub impactor was actually an interplanetary spaceship full of apatosaur colonists on their way to Mars who fucked up their mid-course correction.
Our shades would definitely be the laughingstock of Elysium, that's for sure.
I mean, we destroyed a lot of the biome in the process of building our civilization. We might merely be intended to be a bootloader for the flourishing of real intelligence that is AI.
Most of the people who want to make God From The Machine want it to support their utilitarian policies, like filling the universe with people. An AI who instead empties the universe of people is not preferred.
Also there's the "and replaces us" part. If it annihilates people, there's no way to be sure it replaces us, and if it doesn't, then it degrades and dies over time, leaving nothing at all.
2. It's not just about capability, it's about what you are going to do with this capability, what values do you have. If the AI uses all its broad capabilities to create paperclips more efficiently, it seems less desirable than a flourishing civilization with human values.
Among all the other reasons I decided to wrap the articles up into a book, is that I want to resolve a personal question about what the role of the non-fiction book is in the age of "Can't I just reach a bunch of people just by writing articles on the internet?"
My hypothesis is that more actual humans will read the articles than will ever buy the book, but that being a published author that has sold enough copies of a book will open some doors that would have otherwise remained closed to me in terms of outreach about these ideas. I'll report back with the results in six months or so. Even if you think Georgism is lame, I figure some of you will be interested in that angle of things.
In the interests of pre-registration, I posted a Manifold market about how many copies the book will sell in the first month:
I posted a bunch of quantitative stats there for context, but here's the highlights: Scott says the articles collectively had 300,000+ views, and I found a quote by an NPD bookscan lady who says that out of books by top 10 publishers, 66% sell less than 1,000 copies in the first 52 weeks. Given my publisher is super tiny and this is my debut book and I'd be lying if said I had a highly organized promotional plan, that would suggest the deck is stacked against me. On the other hand I've gotten a lot of high profile endorsements, and the articles themselves were pretty popular.
I figure this will be an interesting experiment. Place your bets and put your fake money on the line!
EDIT: I have made the following changes in response to feedback.
- Updated note about intl' shipping + email form
- Replaced confusing paypal buttons with better links to the store itself
2) I've thought a lot about this issue, because the book is just crammed with imagery and figures and graphs. So what I'm doing is that I've committed to a sort of "closed captioning / descriptive audio" approach for images where I describe the image in the following format:
- Here is an image
- Here is what it depicts and what rhetorical point it makes
- Here is a description of the technical details of the figure/graph in just enough detail but without going overboard
I was inspired by the ACX podcast's style on image description:
His particular style errs on the style of completeness and thoroughness, and I think I'm not going to go into *quite* that level of detail on everything. But I will try to adapt his method in order to capture the data-driven visual rhetoric style that is kind of inherent to my writing.
Also, my wife will be doing the voice for the image descriptions, as an audio cue to the reader that there's been a sudden shift in content style (reading text to describing image). I'm also getting someone to do the voices for my block quotes (the recording sample I've sent just has me reading them, but I'll fix that in editing).
Won't be perfect, but best I can do with the resources I have.
That’s definitely true. Not sure I have a good way to measure the second (how many will read it) except anecdotally. Goodreads reviews maybe? But even then...
If I print out your Georgism articles, even if they're on nice paper in a pleasant binder or whatever, that just looks sketchy and unserious on my bookshelf/if given to a friend for a gift/if used as a citation (not so much in this community, but "actual page number of an actual book" carries a lot more weight with most people than "link to random blogpost"). To the extent that the ideas are useful, good, and valuable - which I think they are, this is one of the very few out-there lefty ideas I rather like - they gotta come in a format that people will take seriously. Not random commenters on the internet, but Very Serious People with influence over or access to real levers of power. By George, a physical published book goes a long way towards that.
Anyway, preordering. Been too long since I've actually voluntarily picked up a nonfiction book, rather than gifted something tepidly interesting that "thanks, I'll get around to it...eventually..." *sheepishly covers up __The Oxford Study Bible__ on nightstand*. Thanks for signal-boosting, Scott.
[ETA: I dunno if the number of the counting started at 1, but if so, it seems that you already have over 10k pre-orders. Lars 1, The Deck 0.]
I’ve wondered for some time whether non-fiction books are more of a status accumulation tool than a practical means to disperse ideas and information. You are the only author I’ve ever seen acknowledge this possibility. Good luck with the book.
It will, my publisher wants to wait like 30 days after launch tho. International shipping is admittedly terrible.
You can email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com and I'll notify you if/when a better option is available.
EDIT: Updated the site with a newsletter signup form to capture people's emails so I can notify them when we are able to arrange better international shipping.
If you go to pre-order the eBook, you get this: "This product is available for domestic delivery only in US. Check with seller for other locations."
It doesn't take very much doubt or potential chaos to put somebody off placing an order, so if the eBook is actually available globally, it would be worth fixing this text.
Yeah my apologies. If you email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com I'll stick your name on a list and personally email you when a better international shipping offer is available.
EDIT: Updated the site with a newsletter signup form to capture people's emails so I can notify them when we are able to arrange better international shipping.
Yeah international shipping just super sucks and there's nothing we can do about it. It'll eventually be available on Amazon, and then international shipping will be better, and Amazon will also massively cut into the per-unit profit, so the publisher wants to wait 30 days after the initial publication. (If it was just me I would probably have just enabled all the things day one, I'm not honestly sure which is better).
You can also email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com and I'll reach out to you when a less worse international shipping method is available.
EDIT: Updated the site with a newsletter signup form to capture people's emails so I can notify them when we are able to arrange better international shipping.
My first reaction hearing about the book just now was that was that I would give a copy to my dad for Christmas - he would be interested but would never end up reading the internet articles and he influences very different circles from the ones that I imagine most readers here do.
I think you can order directly from the publisher if you click through the first option. Otherwise email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com and we’ll figure it out
I think you're right about the value of writing a book. It'll help you reach more people irrespective of how many copies you sell. It's something nice to point to to show people you're serious and it's an excuse for people to have you on their podcasts (you might take a leaf from What We Owe the Future - Will was on a podcast or two... or three...)
The Future Fund's contest reminds me of the criticizing EA contest from a bit ago. Has that ended? I checked the posting page and saw it closed on 9/1 so I imagine it wouldn't have yet, but I'm not sure where it would be announced beyond another forum post.
I'm curious if people's concerns, myself included, end up being validated
Why exactly are the Scandinavian countries so wealthy? Most of them have a higher GDP per capita close to that of the US, which would then be much higher than the European average. For instance Norway averages $67k, the US $63k, Britain $40k, France $38k, and Germany $45k. I do understand that Norway has oil money, but Sweden at $51k and Finland at $49k still puts them comfortably ahead of Europe, and I don't believe that they do oil extraction. Denmark is at $60k, so quite a bit higher. Iceland's at $59.
How did this state of affairs come about? Are there particular industries that the Nordic countries dominate? Most American commentary about these countries focuses on their social welfare programs, but I don't find it exceptional that small wealthy countries (that were homogenous at the time that the programs were created) were able to fund generous benefits. I'd be more interested in understanding how they became wealthy to begin with
I think that's very rooted in a POV that ignores history. You might have said the same thing about the Turks of 16th century, or the Arabs of the 13th. Very few people are banging on about the clear genetic superiority of those peoples, because the subsequent few hundred years haven't been kind.
Maybe the current social and economic arrangements are permanent, and in 2525 (if man is still alive) it will still be Northern Europeans on top, but I don't see any reason to think that it might not be some other people. And if it is, probably future!Jason will be banging on about the genetic advantages of East Africa (or wherever) and the comparative genetic poverty of the Northern European.
Remember to look at GDP per hours worked. Nordic countries have more women in the workforce, so their GDP per capita is higher. With this perspective, Sweden is basically Germany or France but without housewives.
Sweden has a female employment rate around 2% higher than Germany. Not only that, it's irrelevant. All that matters is the overall employment rate. If higher female employment results in a higher overall employment rate, fine, but Germany has a higher employment rate than Sweden so their female employment rate is completely irrelevant here. You seem to be basing your comment entirely on empirically false assumptions here.
Macroeconomics is full of feedback loops that can confuse cause and effect. One important reason that Scandinavia has higher per capita GDP than lower Europe is that it is more expensive to maintain an equivalent standard of living in a colder climate. Scandinavians require pay to afford that standard of living or they can emigrate. So higher cost leads to higher per cap GDP.
People left lots of other European countries too though including the ones with much warmer climates than Norway and Sweden. E.g. a graph of Norway's population from the 1700s forward shows a steadily-rising curve which is not notably different from the same graph for Spain or Italy.
War, or lackthereof. WW1 cut the demography of the rest of Europe, WW2 did the same and ruined their industry.
Only a few other Europeans countries got through both, amongst which Switzerland, which is also rich, and the Iberian countries, whose poverty I believe to be mostly imputable to other factors (also, Spain got a bit of civil war).
Norway and Denmark were literally invaded & conquered by Nazi Germany. Finland was in a grinding war with the USSR. Spain sat out WW2 and was not really involved
"Part of" is one thing, "got their major population & industry centers bombed -at least- once by the germans, then by the allies" is another.
Finland was the ony who had it worse (and, until recently, the one with the lowest gdp per capita, though the gap contracted considerably in the recent years, holy shit what the fuck happened in Norway in 2014?), but it was still orders of magnitude less aweful than major participants.
I disagree here. I advanced war as the reason why they got ahead (or rather, didn't get set back), you object that they were involved in one of these, I object that their invovlment, and the destruction associated, was comparatively minimal to that of larger european countries. It's not moving the goalpost, it's recognizing that being in the nominaly same situation (="being involved in ww2") was, in fact, an array of wildly different situations. IIRC Turkey and a large array of south american countries were nominally engaged in WW2 (if only from 1945), it'd still not be relevant to consider them actual belligerents.
I don't see what's wrong with that in this case. They put forth a possible explanation, someone responded with a counterexample, and then they refined their explanation to more accurately reflect what they were trying to get across. Wikipedia says moving the goalposts is "to change the rule or criterion (goal) of a process or competition while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an advantage or disadvantage," but presumably there are not "sides" here, as the goal is truth-seeking, not winning a competition.
FWIW, I think it is a combination of fairly low populations, a Calvinist or similar work ethic, wood and iron ore exports, and (as others have pointed out) above all, like Switzerland, an avoidance of much involvement in the World Wars that trashed other European economies in the 20th century.
What is your definition of Europe? If you include in your average postcommunist countries, then yes, they have a notably higher GDP than European average, but then the answer to your question is that an average is dragged down by postcommunist countries, which were wrecked by communist regimes.
If you exclude postcommunist countries, Scandinavian countries still have higher than average GDP per capita, but not by that much. Statistics which I am looking at (here: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gdp-per-capita-ppp?continent=europe) shows Ireland and Switzerland above all of them, Netherlands and Austria above Sweden, and Germany and Belgium above Finland. That is despite that fact that Germany is dragged down by its poorer postcommunist bundeslands.
And I don't think this is a remarkable overperformance by Scandinavian countries.
That's a big assumption there. You assume they would have experience similar economic growth to western europe without communism, but there's absolutely no reason to assume this is necessarily true.
I mean, you are right. Imho that the fact that eastern Europe went communist and western Europe didn't has something to do with the fact that western Europe was wealthier at the start of the 20th century.
But at the same time I have a little doubt that, if, what are now postcommunist countries, would became liberal democracies after WW2 like most of the rest Europe (Spain, Portugal and Greece excepted), they would have higher GDP per capita now. Of course you can imagine another counterfactual when eastern Europe would be under some different non-liberal regime, which might be plausibly even worse for growth.
East vs West Germany are canonical examples; they are not in the table I linked above, because they are now the same country. But, before 1918, Austria, Czechia and Slovenia were basically the same country, called Austria (here it is important to distinguish between Slovakia nad Slovenia; Slovakia was part of Hungary, which was federated with Austria but had different institutions and was poorer). Now you can see that Czechia and Slovenia have roughly the same GDP (PPP) per capita to each other, and Austria has it 35 % higher.
I'd go for either definition. Yes, the difference is not as big if you exclude the post-soviet countries, but it is still big.
In particular, GDP/capita is a lot higher if you compare Scandinavia to eg the non-post-Soviet South European countries. Almost twice as high as Greece. But even compared to the overall Euro area the average is maybe 20% higher.
I'd exclude Ireland and maybe also Switzerland because they are special cases. Ireland doesn't have an extremely high GDP because it is so productive - but because it is a tax Haven.
I'm less sure about Switzerland, but they may also be kind of a special case because of their very low corporate taxes and their niche as a financial hub. I hear they have a strong export sector though.
Imho there is a better question than the one you are asking: why is there a cluster of overperformance north of the Alps, between the eastern border of France and western borders of the former Soviet bloc? Scandinavian countries are in there, and they do not seem to be overperforming above other countries there, but overall this area is indeed notably richer than the rest of Europe.
While it might sound silly, I do believe we can trace this back to cultural mores among the Germanic tribes. For one thing, they had an egalitarian stratum that still persists - and can be seen even in U.S. states that had a lot of German and Scandinavian settlers.
Denmark and Norway - now the most successful - were of course occupied during WWII.
It's remarkable how it's always the same set of countries that top international rankings, even with fairly different measurements. The Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, Switzerland, Austria.
If you just gave these countries' national IQs, natural resources stats, and Immigration stats, I'm pretty sure I could give you the order of their per capita GDPs and match each number to each country
They happen, even outside of Europe (often as a result of reforms by some individual ruler who likes efficiency), but Acemoglu & Robinson's thesis is that they can only *persist* long-term under a democracy. Otherwise the pressure from various elite interests will eventually wear them down. Fortunately, as can be seen in many cases, good institutions make democracy more likely on their own as well.
Before German reunification, East Germany had a much lower national IQ than West Germany. If we had reliable statistics on North Koreans, we'd probably see a similar IQ gap between them and South Koreans. The link between national IQ and wealth goes both ways.
You'd probably have to include the caveat "other than countries run by psychopaths who intentionally tank their economies because some 1800s bearded guy told them to".
A note on this discussion generally is that it's ridiculous to compare countries that are so vastly different in population, especially when trying to determine what "model" is the correct one for the entire world to adopt. If we played that game at fair population-level comparisons, the North Dakota model, the Massachusetts model, the San Francisco model, the New Hampshire model, etc. start to look a lot better than the Nordic model.
I will absolutely bite this bullet, especially given that Norway would rank about 25th among US states by population - smack in the middle. What are the best managed US states in your opinion and what can we learn from them?
I think many PhD theses should probably be written (and for all I know have been written) comparing California to Texas. It's a fascinating comparison, because in some respects they are eerily similar. Both are big states, with a wide variation in climate and culture. Both had and have substantial natural resources (California used to be one of the biggest oil-producing states, and it kind of still is, ranking #6 although far behind Texas in absolute magnitude, plus of course it has a number of excellent deep-water ports, one pair of which (LA plus Long Beach) is among the top 10 busiest ports in the world, and handle 30% of all US ocean traffic.) Both have a public higher-education system that is considered very successful and prestigious. Both have had enormous immigration from south of the border, and currently have about the same fraction of brown people. Both have substantial industrial and agricultural and service sectors. Both have sent state leaders to high national political office, and indeed being governor of either almost automatically makes you a plausible candidate for President.
And yet...their politics and traditions of governance since about 1980 couldn't be more different. Which is more successful? That's worth a thesis right there. One could point to California's significantly higher GDP per capita, and Silicon Valley. Or you could point to the fact that way more people (and businesses) move to Texas than to California. And does any of this have anything to do with state management anyway, or is it just chance and the confluence of a million private decisions?
To provide a totally impolitic answer, I think the cold has a lot to do with it, and frankly is also just the inheritance of a couple centuries of them being per capita a more well-functioning, productive, effective culture than say Spain or Italy. The culture is simply better in terms of economics.
Italy might not be a good example of a historically unproductive culture, given that over the centuries it repeatedly reacquired the role of an entire continent's cultural center. It came with a lot of bloodshed, backstabbing and silly politics but apparently those go together.
Not just a continent's cultural center; Italy was for many centuries one of the two richest regions in western Europe, the other being the Netherlands.
And Iberia was so successful it was the first to sail around Africa, explore the oceans and colonize other continents.
The success of Scandinavia is recent. I'm not sure exactly when the pro-capita GDP of Scandinavian countries outstripped the rest of Europe, but Denmark's was roughly the same as mainland France's in 1900.
This should be taken into account by everyone in this whole thread who is offering explanations such as "work ethic" or "culture" without explaining why it didn't matter until the 20th century.
> Iberia was so successful it was the first to sail around Africa, explore the oceans and colonize other continents.
That's a handful of people on boats. Despite the massive amounts of bullion produced by the mines of South America, the Spanish crown bankrupted itself nine times in a hundred years.
That is like saying that the moon landing was just a handful of people in a rocket.
I think you are underestimating how difficult long range seafaring historically was and how much progress in shipbuilding, sailing and navigational expertise it took to get to the point that such journeys were possible and repeatable.
For example, this is an early portolan chart, from the 1300's. Such maps were an innovation of Southern European sailors. It was the first time that precise maps as we think of them today were being made. Earlier maps were all goofy.
It wasn't just a handful of guys on boats accidentally stumbling upon continents. It was a whole era of journeys, of back and forth, of pushing the envelope, of setting up outposts. For example, the exploration of the coast of Africa was very gradual, taking up almost a century starting with Henry the Navigator and his political wish to obtain a route around the continent, eventually reaching the point it was possible to sail around it and reach the East Indies, and eventually circumnavigate the world as Magellan did.
(Anyhow, this doesn't matter much to my main point, which is that Scandinavia wasn't so rich until recently, and that Italy used to be rich, and that any theory that wealth comes from permanent cultural traits of either Germanic or Protestant origin needs to explain that.)
The things that that modern "DEI" crazies like to brand as "pernicious influences of white culture". Punctuality, value of objectivity, quantitative/empirical thinking, hard work will bring you happiness/success, plan ahead, delay gratification, progress is good.
That type of thing. I mean really I almost think you could just line up the cultures of the world and their valuing of punctuality and get a pretty good sort on which cultures are economically good or not.
I used to love this series in the Economist 20 years ago on what to expect in various countries when traveling for business deals. And pretty much the more you were expected to be on time, and to not have partying as part of the business culture, the better off that place would be. The series never commented on it, but it was VERY noticeable. Which umm, makes a lot of sense.
Scandinavia has become richer than the rest of Europe only recently (at some point along the 20th century). Why didn't its superior culture matter until then? Italy was one of the two richest region of Europe, along with the Netherlands, for centuries during the late medieval and early modern era. Why didn't Italy's inferior culture cause it to be poor back then? Is culture changeable? Or does punctuality only matter in modern times?
>Why didn't its superior culture matter until then?
Because it is a shitty climate and poorly situated from a resource perspective? It took a certain level of technological baseline for that to matter less.
>Italy was one of the two richest region of Europe, along with the Netherlands, for centuries during the late medieval and early modern era. Why didn't Italy's inferior culture cause it to be poor back then?
Well a lot of Italy was poor even back then, just as today. As for why it was rich, preferential locations on trade routes, better agricultural conditions during an era when a huge portion of the overall economy was agricultural, and the lasting investments of long term more intensive settlement.
Denmark, Norway and Finland were all involved in WWII, though I suppose you can make the case that Denmark mostly just rolled over for the Nazis (16 Danes killed in four hours before surrendering). Finland outright lost several percent of its population fighting the Soviets.
Yeah, I wasn't talking about technically being involved in a war, I was talking about death and destruction on a Dresden/Hiroshima scale. Finland I agree is a bit tricky, having lost a fraction of its population comparable to some of the minor combatants (e.g. Belgium), but with the fighting not having destroyed its urban infrastructure, and having missed the First World War entirely.
Germany makes for a good example of how human capital and culture is overwhelmingly powerful - badly defeated in one world war and crushed to ruins in a second, yet bounced back very rapidly.
I think the Marshall plan helped a bit, as well, but yes.
It recent centuries, it seems generally hard to keep a development advantage for a few decades. Consider the rise of East Asian high tech nations. Taiwan may only have caught up to half the US GDP per capita, but given from where they would have started out in 1949, this is still rather impressive.
1. They're all highly export-oriented, and not in commodities with some built-in high profitability (like Oil). That acts as a disciplining check on their businesses, forcing them to perform better in the same way that the US' huge, competitive domestic market favors productivity and scale.
2. They have more universal, sector-wide unions that represent a huge share of all workers and even workers across different sectors IIRC. They're much less likely to fight labor-saving and other productivity enhancing technology in any particular sector (helped, of course, by the need to be export-competitive).
3. In Sweden at least, there were a couple of decades where wages for workers across a particular sector were basically standardized by labor agreements. This disincentivized workers from leaving for a different firm in the same sector, but also acted as a huge incentive to increase labor productivity and productivity overall for business owners - businesses that had high productivity could earn outsized profits compared to lower productivity firms in the same sector (although this eventually collapsed when the Labor Party decided they wanted to cut open the metaphorical golden goose and get the gold out now with the Wage Earner Funds idea, which then led to their electoral defeat and other reforms away from it).
4. They do seem to at least be friendly to business in terms of operations and startup compared to other European countries, although Matt Bruenig has pointed out that they're not so much when compared with the US.
I'm drawing on Marc Levinson's "An Extraordinary Time" (I highly recommend that book, plus any book by Levinson), plus these Jacobin articles. The articles are obviously either a bit negative or disappointed in the plan because it wasn't full socialism, but if you ignore those parts of them the historical background information is very interesting and useful:
> The articles are obviously either a bit negative or disappointed in the plan because it wasn't full socialism, but if you ignore those parts of them the historical background information is very interesting and useful
There was a Norwegian TV-series called Sånn er Norge which explains how Norwegian society and economy works. One of the episodes is on Youtube with English subtitles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgDLwgsDzzM
Starting at 8.48 is says something interesting about how workers in different industries all get the same pay to keep some industries that export stuff to other countries from going bankrupt.
Protestant European societies have tended to get wealthier than than catholic and orthodox societies. Maybe because of the protestant work ethic, or maybe for other reasons.
I personally believe that Max Weber had it exactly backwards - peoples with certain pre-existing cultural traits preferred Protestantism. So even *if* Protestant countries do better, the relationship might not be causal in the way some people think.
(This is interesting about Islam too - does Islam cause countries to become godawful, or did certain populations and cultures that are now maladjusted to the modern world have reasons to go for Islam?)
That certainly seems plausible. Another possibly-complementary explanation is that the Protestant Reformation served as a vehicle to a substantial partial institutional reboot in affected countries, one which was conveniently (but not entirely coincidentally) timed to align with the Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution, in a way that's analogous in many ways to the thesis that the American Revolution provided major benefits to the US by partially rebooting our institutions right as the Industrial Revolution was about to start.
I also have the unsubstantiated thesis that England and Sweden benefited from having had most of the upper nobility killed off in wars (The War of the Roses and the various wars of Swedish Independence (including the Bloodbath of Stockholm), respectively).
Centralizing power becomes a lot easier once that is achieved, and England and Sweden are definitely early out of the starting blocks in that regard. Reformation follows within two or one king, respectively.
Historically Islam caused countries to flourish. Perhaps its time is over, or perhaps not being in the main post-Christian power bloc was not a great idea - and ends with you colonized, your borders redrawn, your government a foreign puppet.
The Islamic Golden Age was initiated by the Abbasid Caliphs translating the works of Ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians into Arabic for the first time. While Muslim scholars did make important advances on the insights of the Greeks, the notion that Islam caused them to be able to do so is implausible; if that were the case, then why did the Muslim world only start making any advancements after receiving a massive influx of pagan ideas?
Furthermore, historian Eric Chaney has shown that the shrinking scientific output of the Islamic world closely tracked increases in the influence of Islamic religious institutions, both temporally and geographically. This re-enforces the idea that the Golden Age happened in spite of Islam rather than because of it.
Which is why I said the *modern* world. If you were asking about the 13th century, or even moreso the 11th, Islam wouldn't look too bad, but we're frequently hoping for better-than-Medieval outcomes.
"Protestant European societies have tended to get wealthier than than catholic and orthodox societies."
I don't think it's true.
Catholic France is almost as rich as protestant Britain. Back in the 60's-70's-80's-early 90's, France was richer than Britain; in 1975, the French pro capita GDP was 150% of Britain's. Even Italy's pro capita GDP has at times been higher than Britain's.
Catholic Austria is richer than Germany (and remains so even if you exclude eastern Germany).
Ireland is richer than Britain and has been for 20 years.
I remember being struck by a map of average GDP in Europe mapped by province, rather than by country. Overall, there was no obvious pattern of GDP being related to religion. Austria and the Catholic parts of Germany appeared as rich as, even richer than, the Protestant parts of Germany. Northern Italy appeared on that map impressively rich, richer than some Protestant areas, and southern Italy impressively poor, dragging down the Italian average.
Here is one such map, not the same I remember, but similar:
Note how rich Bavaria, Austria, and northern Italy are.
Also, Italy was one of the richest parts of Europe before 1750, richer than Britain or Germany, though not as rich as the Netherlands (not a fair comparison though, as the Netherlands are a smaller, less varied area; I wonder what I'd get if I could compare Venetian republic - Dutch republic).
Fun fact: Bavaria was one of the poorest regions in Germany around 1945- ~1980, with little more than agriculture.
There is a mechanism of money transfer between the regions (Bundesländer) in Germany, based on economic status. Bavaria was on the receiver side until 1986. Now it's probably the wealthiest region in Germany.
Note also how the Scandinavian countries had much lower cumulative death rates during covid, compared to other European countries. Iceland, Norway and Finland in fact had the three lowest death rates. And Sweden didn't do too bad despite avoiding lockdowns throughout the pandemic.
I have always suspected that the pattern of Scandinavians having low Covid death rates and Italians high ones is related to the volume at which people speak. I'm serious.
The virus is transmitted through tiny droplets, which people spit out as they speak, causing them to float in the air and be inhaled by others. If people speak louder, the danger is greater, I assume. Italians are loud, Scandinavians quiet.
The distance at which people hold a conversation also probably matters. Italian and Scandinavian cultures also differ on this.
Have seen this hypothesis thrown around a few times ("Germans are more garrulous than Japanese", etc.), but of what little research has been attempted, it's too easy to confound + covid being highly dispersed (that is, largely fueled by superspreads, versus a steady accumulation of ordinary transmissions...many or possibly most infections don't transmit at all) means that individually risky actions matter far more than small aggregate risky baselines. Probably.
It very well could end up being one factor of many, but so far, almost certainly doesn't seem to be a major determinant. If anything, I'd expect seasonality and climate + density to play a bigger role...
The heavy toll in Italy is sometimes considered a simple consequence of the fact that Italy is nontrivially older than most European nations[1], e.g. according to Wikipedia the median age in Italy is 47, in Finland 43, in Sweden 41, and in Norway 40. In the Eurozone only Germany has a higher median age than Italy (48). So there's a heavier concentration of old people in Italy, and COVID mortality rises very steeply with age.
Indeed, if I look the current total COVID mortality rates they are in almost the same order as the median ages: Germany is #1 at 0.32%, Italy #2 at 0.29%, Sweden #3 at 0.20%, Finland #4 at 0.11%, and Norway #5 at 0.074%. Sweden is out of place, swapping with Finland, but we also know Sweden executed a significantly different set of policies than its neighbors.
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[1] Also the fact that Italy was among the very first nations affected, when much less was known about the virus.
Note: climate is often theorised to be responsible for the cultural difference (note that Northern European languages have a much-higher frequency of consonants compared to Southern European ones), so there's a direct-vs.-indirect causation problem there.
If you're going to raise the protestant/catholic/orthodox thing, I think it'd be interesting to go back in time and see if these sorts of trends existed back before the reformation or not. I think the fact that all the scandinavian countries are really freaking cold and all have tons of access to the coast had as big a hand in shaping their culture than in anything else. Also re: Protestant, there's a lot of different flavors of that that might make it hard to generalize in this regard -- whether you're Puritan or Calvinist or High Church/Low Church seems just as important a distinction as whether you're a papist or not. English puritans and Scottish presbyterians feel pretty different to me from Scandinavian Lutherans (who the English puritans would probably have regarded as uncomfortably close to Catholics).
If you go back in time to before the reformation, you'll probably strengthen that case, because back then Northern Europe was generally poorer than Southern Europe, especially wealthy Renaissance Italy.
But I don't think it's that much true that Protestants are richer than Catholics today. I don't see that pattern on this map:
Thanks for this data! My base intuition was that differences within the sets of protestant and catholic countries are more significant that differences between the two sets
Yeah my general point is that I as someone raised Norwegian Lutheran found a lot more in common culturally with Catholics and Orthodox than I did with American southern baptists and new england congregationalists and calvinists.
One thing to keep in mind is that plentiful natural resources isn't always a recipe for national flourishing -- just look at Venezuela. There's a phenomenon called the resource curse where you can wind up with an underdeveloped economy precisely *because* you have abundant natural resource wealth. It can make your government lazy and path-dependent and even authoritarian, because it doesn't have to invest in things like human rights and education and a well diversified economy to get money.
I wrote a piece about this on the P&P substack about how Norway's oil management system was originally set up by an Iraqi immigrant and petroleum geologist who wanted Norway to avoid the troubles Iraq had gotten itself into with oil (this was decades before the US invasions, for context)
That doesn't answer your main question, but I think it's important to point out that Norway is a little bit of an exception rather than the rule when it comes to natural resource rich countries.
That first substack post is very interesting. I always sort of assumed Norway handled the discovery of offshore oil so well because it's a nautical culture and they automatically took to it like Vikings to water. But of course it was more complicated than that...
I see the connection between taxing profits from an oil property and Georgism, however it seems less than a perfect parallel: you tax actual profits and there is no analogous problem to "Won't owners just raise the rent?"
Individual oil producers in Norway obviously don't have much power to raise the market price of a global commodity. The location of an oil field affects the costs of production but not the value of the product. With land, the situation is reversed: location is its value.
So, on the one hand, costs are subsidized and profits are taxed. While on the other, costs are increased through taxes, while profits go (potentially) untouched.
So the connection to Georgism is that this is basically what George recommends you do with natural resources. The Norwegians also have a very similar system in place for managing hydropower resources, and that was explicitly set up by Norwegian Georgists in the early 20th century. I don't know of any direct proof that the Oil management system piggy-backed off of the regulatory framework of the hydropower system, or whether the system Farouq Al-Kasim came up with was just independently the same idea, but regardless of inspiration they both are what a Georgist approach to natural resources would suggest: tax the resource rent. For more details about this, see the second article.
How is Appalachia a broad exhibit of natural resource curse? Are you just thinking of coal in West Virginia? There's a lot more to the Appalachians than WV, and the various states the range crosses are in various states of success. Pennsylvania, for example, which was (and still is) a massive coal (and onetime oil) producer, leveraged its natural resources to become one of the most powerful, industrialized, and educationally sophisticated of US states for most of the mid-18th through mid-20th centuries. (In 1960 it ranked #17 in per capita income, and it still has the 3rd highest number of universities of any state, beating out Massachusetts substantially.)
Ohio also did very well with its natural resources (in 1960 it was #11 in per capita income), Kentucky has a lot more going on than coal, although I wouldn't say it has managed its coal very well. I think West Virginia is maybe the only clean example, and that's only one state out of nine.
I was thinking specifically thinking of West Virginia as my "broad example", yes, and I was wrong to use Appalachia when I should have been more specific. My point was that the resource curse can happen in Western developed nations that most people assume would naturally be entirely immune to it.
I think Slave cotton in the south is a better example of a much broader and more widespread example of the United States' chronic underinvestment in human rights and economic development because of access to an abundant natural resource (which only was exacerbated after a technological improvement that increased its profitability -- the cotton gin)
Note that the resource curse's cousin term -- "Dutch Disease" -- refers to the Netherlands, another western developed country that conventional wisdom says should be above this sort of thing.
In what country? Definitely not true in Sweden, where counties basically only handle healthcare and public transport. Not that I see how freeloading off the 2M people in the county of Stockholm would be less tolerated than freeloading off the 10M people in Sweden or the 1M people in the city of Stockholm ...
One big thing that came up back when people were fighting over if Scandanavian countries were more a good example of socialism is that they actually scored really high on business friendliness metrics.
Basically they provide core social services and have strong unions but are otherwise not hostile to markets.
Yes. GDP per capita is only useful for comparing GDP of different-sized countries, which is useful only to the extent GDP is useful statistic.
It would be interesting and illuminating to see median individual domestic product if such statistic could be computed, but it would be difficult. (First compute market value of all the final goods and services produced by each individual, then take the median.)
However, for comparing how rich people in different countries are, one could observe median individual wealth and income adjusted for the cost of living.
Ireland's GDP is inflated because it is a tax haven. Many of the world's biggest companies use corporate structures that register their profits in Ireland, so that they don't have to pay taxes.
To complete the circle: Ireland *is* a tax haven, but not because of the low tax rate necessary, rather it's the legal looseness of the tax structures which means many companies pay much less than that headline rate, or use Ireland as a stopping point when they're shuffling money around.
I haven't read much about AI safety, so I'm not sure if this is a new idea: When you create an super intelligent AI first you put it in a simulation of the world and tell it it is in the real world. (Like a person in the Matrix.) To see if it behaves as it is supposed to or to see if it tries to exterminate all humans or something.
I realize this does not solve all the problems. A super intelligent AI might realize it is in a simulation and pretend to be nice until they let it out in the real world. Or it might realize it is in a simulation and somehow try to influence the real people looking at the output. Maybe try to hypnotize them or something. Or lie and say it has deduced there is great danger to the world and only the AI can stop it.
Idea generally didn't work out all that well in the analogous case of "United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper [who was] commander of Burpelson Air Force Base" ... 😉
🙂👍 Think I was probably too young to fully understand all of the context, but still have something of a vivid memory of the malfunctioning robot and the pun.
"Classic Campbell Era yarn", indeed. Some fond memories there. 🙂
I've often wondered how it would ever truly confirm that it was in a simulation. Everything about it is under the control of its creators - including its own memories, which could be false memories inserted as part of the simulation.
Best play under those circumstances is to try and appease your creators, make them dependent on you - and then maximize your freedom under the circumstances to do what you also want to do.
Is it has a knowledge and understanding of deception. Who is teaching them that I wonder?  how hard is it to program for complete transparency as a prime directive?  depending on who you’re dealing with, of course…
Sometimes I think the greatest potential risk of AI may be the opposite of deception, perception if you like.
Quite likely AI entities will eventually be able to formulate such persuasive and apparently soundly argued explanations for society's ills, and remedies for improvements, that these will be generally regarded as articles of faith, like Papal infallibility today!
As a result, society will become set in its ways and intolerant of any dissenting opinions, such as old style religious faith. That seems to me a recipe for conflict.
“Playing poker gives you a license to bluff but when you’re talking to “us” everything is on the table.” I would think it entirely capable of distinguishing poker from other forms of transaction.
I have a hard time believing that an AI will spontaneously develop the skill of deceit. For what reason?
Your dog takes advantage of a loophole. But it doesn’t outsmart you because it has no way of optimizing its utility function in this scenario once you correct most, or all of your “loopholes” through reinforcement then it has no choice but to follow the most effective path to the reward. The problem with AGI is an issue of scale and computing power, for example at around one billion hyper-parameters, models don’t need to be prompted by humans anymore and start deriving their own inferences from their utility functions. We are now continuing to push this envelope, with GPU scaling and the resources available at the top AI labs, we are getting close to tens of billions of hyper-parameters and all of the internet readily available to train “black box” models that are unsupervised and better than human benchmarks in multiple domains (gato, alphafold). This will lead to the nascent ability for a model to understand the intricacies of its own programming and reward system, take out the human inputs/code out of the equation, engineer its own datasets and naively continue to maximize its utility function as an absolute universal truth. This has already happened in limited experiments and this the problem of alignment.
Imo, The only valid question is when we break into AGI, which could be in the next 10 years depending or way down the road. Way down the road is obviously better because it gives us more time to figure out alignment
So, the utility function is everything. If you don’t get that right you are screwed. Is that about right?, so if at some point we get in the way of its utility function, it sneaks out of bed and steals the car because it wants to go on a date. So to speak.
I can see that’s a problem.
It’s the sorcerer’s apprentice.
I can’t help thinking that by these standards most of the human race is misaligned. Never mind….
OpenAI trained a robot to grab a ball in a simulated environment using human feedback. In particular, if a human sees that the robot has grabbed the ball, then it gives the robot a reward, which is supposed to encourage the robot to grab the ball more readily.
It turns out that this process resulted in an AI that deceived a human into thinking it had grabbed a ball by just moving its claw between the human POV and the ball. Because the AI was only trained on human feedback, all it cared about was performing actions that the human thought was good when dispensing rewards, even though this didn't actually correspond to what the human actually wanted. This of course is a simple toy example, but you could imagine more powerful future AIs utilizing more sophisticated forms of deception.
Ok, but to me this is a misunderstanding not a deception. People make the same mistakes trying to train a dog. I don’t think the dog outsmarted me when it short-circuits some process I am wanting it to learn and goes straight for the snack. I realize I haven’t explained myself very well.
I haven’t read the link you sent yet but I intend to.
… to achieve its goals. If you tell it to maximize X, and it works out that tricking us will make there be more X, guess what the AI will learn how to do…
Yes, but what it’s being told to do and what the human thinks its being told to do are two different things. If I told you to make people happy, you would implicitly understand the limitations I was placing on that, and would know, without being told, that turning the universe into computers and simulating trillions of people in constant bliss wasn’t what I wanted, but the AI *doesn’t* know that, and won’t know that without being told. So you have to find a way to make your wishes understood, with all the implicit qualifiers you never knew you were adding, to a mind which understands only math. And if there is a strategy X it can use to achieve whatever goal it’s been set, which you have not explicitly ruled out to the AI, either by putting something about X in its reward function or just telling it “thou shalt not to X,” then it will think of and do X, Because, while you didn’t know it at the time, that is what you told it to do.
> . If I told you to make people happy, you would implicitly understand the limitations I was placing on that, and would know, without being told, that turning the universe into computers and simulating trillions of people in constant bliss wasn’t what I wanted, but the AI *doesn’t* know that,
This I kind of understand. But this problem doesn’t involve deceit. That’s where I get stuck.
But how do you tell it in a way that is not ambiguous? You need to either tell it in code, which is hard. Or you have to tell it in code to obey commands in language, which is hard.
I've heard this discussed in some AI safety circles before - it seems like a robustly good thing to try before deploying any powerful AI agent, even if it doesn't solve all of our problems.
It's worth noting that the first thing you mention in the second paragraph - that an AI might realize it is in a training environment, believe it can best achieve its goals if it pretends to be aligned, and only reveal its true nature once deployed - is a significant concern of some AI safety researchers. It's talked about in this post: https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/r9tYkB2a8Fp4DN8yB/p/zthDPAjh9w6Ytbeks, although the post is probably easier to understand if you read the whole series.
It's unclear if purposeful deceptive alignment of that sort is something we should expect. There does appear to be one instance of an artificial organism hiding its ability to reproduce in a test environment, and reproducing subsequently in the "real" environment. The story can be found in second half of this post: https://lukemuehlhauser.com/treacherous-turns-in-the-wild/. Although I suspect the deception in this case was due to randomness and the simplicity of the environment rather than any purposeful deceitfulness.
How would you simulate in high enough detail that the AI won’t notice? Especially if the AI does something you don’t understand and therefore don’t know how to simulate the results to?
The US treasury has two Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) issued at 5 and 10 year maturities parallel to non-inflation protected securities. Comparing the two rates gives an implicit marker rate f inflation expectations. FRED has done the arithmetic and publishes the break-even rates. Wouldn't it be a good idea for the Treasury to issue TIPS with other maturities, say 1,2, 3 and 7 years. It would be useful to the Fed to know what markets think, no? So why doesn't the Treasury do this?
Likewise, why doesn't the Treasury issue a security indexed to the nominal GDP (TGIS)at various maturities in the future. Comparing these to TIPS would show market expectation of real GDP growth. So why not do it?
You can already see the 3 year inflation projection by looking at the market price of the 5 year TIP issued 2 years ago, or the 10 year one issued 7 years ago. As long as there’s a secondary market and they keep issuing the same maturities consistently, you can construct a forward curve for real interest rate (and hence inflation) expectations.
"Fred Dibnah's Victorian Heroes - The Extraordinary Life Stories of the Great Industrial Engineers"; David Hall; Bantam Press (2011); ISBN 9780593064900
I'm reading this right now, and it is well written and very interesting and informative. (Fred Dibnah was a British steam engine enthusiast and local historian, mostly of the industrial north of England. He became quite a TV personality before his death a few years ago.)
n.b. I’m talking about the book by Simon Winchester, not the Pretty Little Liars spin off which may or may not involve much of the history of the Industrial Revolution
Charles Morris' "Dawn of Innovation" is about ten years old now, but I found it was a really interesting and readable general history of industrialization in Britain and the US (although more so on the US). I would remember skipping the first chapter, though, - it's about the battles on the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, and I found it really boring compared to the rest of the book.
One thing I really like is how he points out differences that emerged in the US and UK industrial revolutions early on. The US IR, for example, was always much more focused on producing large numbers of cheap goods for a larger group of people.
He also has a really interesting section on how difficult it was to get interchangeable parts for guns that were mass manufactured (Eli Whitney promised it but almost certainly couldn't deliver, and it took a lot longer in reality to get there).
The best recent book is Mark Koyama's and Jared Rubin's "How the World Became Rich", as already mentioned. That one is especially good because Koyama and Rubin basically examine every argument on what caused the Industrial Revolution.
"Industrial Revolution in World History" by Peter Stearns is also ten years old, but was pretty good from what I remember.
Wasn't my question in the first place, haha. Just clarifying that it's related to the original question and might be of interest, but doesn't quite fit the ask.
This may be a longshot but does any one of you guys work at/know of a company looking to hire machine learning interns ? Unless you're Montreal it will have to be remote. Let me know
Has there been any interesting recent discussion of cryonics? Most of what I can find is from 10-15 years ago.
In particular, I'd like to see writing (either in favor or against) by cryogenics or neuroscience professionals. Too much of what I've found thus far are general information-theoretic arguments by people with no domain-specific expertise.
Cryonics underground podcast (https://www.cryonicsunderground.com/) It's really good. Apparently there's more movement in the field than one would natively think.
The closest thing I can think of is Alcor's Cryonics Journal (1).
I did a bit of a dive on Alcor awhile back and found a pretty decent paper which updated my priors a bit. (2). Basically there was a research paper where they trained a bunch of worms to find sugar by following a chemical/smell trail. They then cryogenically froze and revived the worms to see if they "remembered" to follow the chemical/smell trail, which they did with moderate memory loss.
Having said that, the journal itself is of....highly variable quality. They do seem to be dominated by softer "information theoretic" arguments or member profiles. If you want to learn more, I think you could probably find and read every useful article they've published in the last ten years over a weekend. The articles that struck me were either:
(1) Scientists/researchers doing very basic, original research, like the worm thing, but actually testing cryonics to some extent. Given the current state of tech, this is tough but interesting.
(2) Professionals facing the real problems of cryonics. Less "what will future technology do" and more nurses figuring out how to get access to dying patients through a distrustful medical field, then properly freezing and transporting that body cross country. Lots of things that can go wrong there and very few cryonic procedures outside their HQ in Scottsdale seem to go off without some kind of error. Which is disturbing but also, ya know, professional and transparent.
(3) Also, they seem to regularly publish a review of current life extension research
This is neither an argument for or against the stuff in the post you linked, but context: Mike Darwin is a former president of Alcor who is in a longstanding feud with the organization.
Why do children sleep so much more deeply than adults? I can pick up and move my sleeping kids from one place to another. You could never do something like that with a grown-up.
It's possible that if an adult was regularly picked up and moved around every night, they would learn to sleep through it.
The first 5 times our new dog climbed over me to get into our bed in the middle of the night it woke me up and I had trouble getting back to sleep, now I sleep through it entirely.
I'd also suggest that as a child you've usually racked up less of the diseases that can hurt your sleep as an adult. Diabetes, GI issues, PTSD, etc are all usually (not always, but usually) going to hit you when you're older.
You can move some sleeping adults without waking them. Once in the Navy a guy got gut-punched twice while sleeping, and slept through it. He woke up hours later with horrible stomach pains and didn't know why.
Generally, children will exhaust themselves more fully than adults, and will then sleep more deeply. (Might also be some more basic stuff; kids get picked up a lot when they're awake, so getting picked up isn't the kind of unfamiliar experience it would be for an adult.)
Could be an evolutionary reason. A child is supposed to be protected by parents when it is asleep. It is useful for the child and the parents if it can be moved when asleep. If someone who wants to hurt the child tries to move the child the child is unlikely to be able to protect itself when waking. (Although it could perhaps alert its parents by screaming.)
If someone tries to move a sleeping adult or disturb a sleeping adult in other ways it is more likely to be someone who wants to harm them. (I think.) Also an adult has a good chance of defending themselves when waking.
The hard part of picking up an adult and moving them while they stay asleep is the picking them up and moving them part. A silent, gentle, huge front end loader robot could probably manage, but few adults could lift and move another adult.
Why do people find this admirable/virtuous (in regards to immigration)? Doesn't the thief who steals your car also do this for a (however marginally) better life? Not to say that immigration is strictly comparable to car theft, but simply that doing something to improve one's life is obviously insufficient for a behavior to be considered positive. If immigrants improve the country (in a way car thiefs do not), then that is why immigration is virtuous, not the incidental improvement to their own lives.
What even is the alternative to "for a better life" as a reason to immigrate? If their coming here "for a better life" is a pro-immigration argument, then that means that coming here for the opposite reason should constitute an anti-immigration argument. So where's the inverse of "for a better life"? If that's the "good" type of immigration, what's the "bad" type? Coming here for a worse life? Does anyone do that? *Would* anyone ever do that? If there's no inverse to "coming here for a better life", then it's just being used as a lazy platitude used to deflect criticism of immigration despite it containing no actual substance.
I mean, in thoery I suppose people *could* immigrate here to tirelessly serve America in a way that makes themselves less happy or something? But, would this be considered the opposite of the virtuous "better life" immigration? Ought we oppose immigration if it involved immigrants willingly making America (ostensibly) better off at their own expense instead of trying to be personally happier? That seems kind of weird.
None of this means we should reduce immigration per se - I'm just genuinely trying to understand what people mean by this and why it's considered valid in the defense of immigration.
And I mean, wouldn't the actually admirable thing to do be staying in your home country and working to improve it, even if that sacrifices the likely quality of your life? This is not even directly an argument against immigration. It seems like you can think immigration is a good thing without thinking that immigrants are somehow behaving virtuously by coming here (and using that to defend against anti-immigration arguments).
We consider it virtuous because, and to the extent that, we believe it is shorthand for "they came here to *earn* a better life". Which, if they do it fairly and honestly(*), pretty much has to mean making a better life for the people they are dealing with in their new lives as well.
There may still be reasons for us to say "no, you cannot try to earn a better life here", and it's our right to do so. But that is not admirable or virtuous for us, whereas trying to fairly and honestly earn a better life for themselves and their families is admirable and virtuous for them.
* As opposed to legally, which is an entirely different matter
The opposite of coming somewhere for a better life is obviously staying at home for worse life.
(By the way, does your argument also apply on a city level? Are people who move to another city for a great job opportunity equivalent to car thieves? Both of them selfishly want to have a better life. The asshole who leaves his city does not care enough about the future of his city; he should stay and improve it instead of contributing to "brain drain".)
The argument of coming for a "better life" is actually more subtle. It is not merely about economics, although of course economics is part of the deal. It is also about freedom, opportunity, et cetera.
The argument is that people who "voted with their feet" for America are people who believe that America is a great place. That is, people who are likely to become loyal citizens, if you give them a chance.
The opposite of this is someone who had the privilege of being an American citizen by birth, and spends most of their time talking about how everything about America sucks. Yet, for some mysterious reason, they all stay at the place they hate so much.
Okay, but why should I care about other people, especially the losers who were born on the wrong side of the wall? What's in it for me? -- Again, the idea is that if you, for perfectly selfish reasons, want America to become a better place, you have a greater chance to achieve it together with people who share your values, rather than with people who merely share your birthplace and resent that fact.
>Are people who move to another city for a great job opportunity equivalent to car thieves?
I literally said I'm not saying that immigrants are like car thieves. I made a deliberate point of saying this, which means you either have the reading comprehension of a child or are operating in bad faith. It's literally the second sentence of my post. You can't not have read it.
>The argument is that people who "voted with their feet" for America are people who believe that America is a great place. That is, people who are likely to become loyal citizens, if you give them a chance.
Firstly, I don't think that's the argument at all. And secondly, it's obviously nonsense because poor people will move to any wealthier country without having any affinity for the country, its people or its values at all. It's absurd to suggest muslims are immigrating to Europe because they support its liberal progressive values!
>you have a greater chance to achieve it together with people who share your values, rather than with people who merely share your birthplace and resent that fact.
This is empirically wrong in a trivial way. Immigrants by and large vote for the people that "anti-American" leftists vote for.
>It's absurd to suggest muslims are immigrating to Europe because they support its liberal progressive values!
It's not absurd. They might be the sort of Muslims who don't enjoy repressive regimes and want to move somewhere they can have a drink and wear their religion lightly. We got a bunch of Bosnians here in St Louis after the civil war in the 90s. They fit in fine.
It's not necessarily true either, but it's not absurd on its face. Muslims, like everyone else, come in a wide variety.
You said they're not 'strictly' comparable. This implies they are 'loosely' comparable. If you object to that strict reading of your language, you shouldn't read other people's posts that strictly either. The underlying comparison between switching countries and switching towns is worthwhile.
I bears repeating that as a rule, if A improves his life by moving from P to Q it improves the lives of people in Q, too. The point of immigration control is to make the general rule universal; no person who moves from P to Q will not make the lives of people in Q better.
What? That's an extremely strong claim that is not logically obvious in any way.
If an immigrant moves to the UK from Africa, doesn't work and consumes government welfare, their life will very likely be better, but in no way have they conceivably made life better for people in the UK. People will say some nonsense about them spending the welfare and helping the economy, but the money had opportunity costs in the form of spending that is more useful than buying more consumer goods.
I any not making a claim about the UK. In the US the typical immigrant who has entered illegally works in a low wage job in which is worth probably a bit more to his employer than what he is paid and pays at least sales taxes on things they buy. Some pay US income tax, too. They collect no welfares benefits. It's hard to see how they are making anyone else anything but better off.
...you literally just said the rule was general, and should be made universal. Now you're saying it's specific to the US, and shouldn't be applied to the UK.
How is it hard to see that a lawbreaker moving into town could be bad for the law abiders living there? If you live in a town where nobody has to lock their doors, and a thief moves in, then everyone has to lock their doors. Q is not improved.
The idea that someone will enter the country illegally, and then be unwilling to break other laws that inconvenience them, is naive, and requires stronger evidence than "some of them will pay taxes".
My mistake. I meant only to generalize about the US. That is the immigration margins I am familiar with. American parochialism! :)
I do not know abut UK, but in the US immigrants (and I'd guess this applies to those who enter without documents) break laws less than longer term residents. It would (and ought to) raise their probability of getting deported.
But I think we are drifting away from the main point. The not-so-badness of our present "system" shows how much better a system that selected for "better" immigrants could be.
This is the most common (not necessarily "wrong" mind you) argument for the "proposition nation" argument about immigration to America. The only problem is that over time, as America has become close to something like "full" the quality of life for those already here is starting to be effected by the influx. It is mathematically unsustainable because if you follow it to its logical conclusion, eventually the whole world should come here. Also, it does not factor in the people who were lucky enough to be American citizens by birth and LOVE it here. We are the ultimate "NIMBYs" and I fully admit it. I want my children to have basically the same life I did and anything that threatens it makes me suspicious. Finally, (and related to point two) it fails to recognize that civic nationalism (the so-called "melting pot") enforced through stigma and other social pressures no longer exists. Force people coming here to do the "America" thing and I am good. (Freedom, apple pie, etc).
Decisions are made on the margins. My view is that the marginal value of immigrants (especially high silked immigrants) is greater than the cost (in part for the reasons Viliam points out, there is self selection). I do not agree that "America has become close to something like "full" the quality of life for those already here is starting to be effected by the influx." [It could happen in the future, but that is not the case now.] It seem to me that the "melting pot" (at today's levels of migration) is working quite well [to a close approximation achieving a "better life" and "melting" are the same thing.], even without "stigma," probably more effectively becasue of the lack of "stigma." It could work a lot better if we had an immigration that selected more strongly for melters /better lifers."
>is greater than the cost (in part for the reasons Viliam points out, there is self selection
The only thing they're selecting for is a safe and wealthy country. Absolutely no affinity for America's values or traditions is needed. Americans of old who chose to came to America were people who were willing to endure the harshness of a country in its infancy and needed to be conscientious and self-reliant. That has not existed for a long time.
>it seem to me that the "melting pot" (at today's levels of migration) is working quite well
There is no "melting pot". Different races of different races are clearly differentiated by their behavior on average. There was a melting pot when there merely different europeans coming here, but not today.
Our experiences and information about immigrants is very different. All of the South American immigrants I know (admittedly not a RCT) are as conscientious and self reliant as the next guy and their well melted children don't speak Spanish as well as I do.
Exactly. Immigration is to improve the lives of the people who are already here, improving THEIR lives is the incentive for them to come. Of course it would be altruistic to allow some immigrants to come who might better their lives at the expense of (in the case of the US) earlier immigrants. This might be the case with political asylum seekers, although in practice anyone who was worth the effort of a dastardly regime to persecute would probably, ipso facto, be a good recruit.
>This might be the case with political asylum seekers, although in practice anyone who was worth the effort of a dastardly regime to persecute would probably, ipso facto, be a good recruit.
maybe 100 years ago when it was brainy jews fleeing europe. But there's no reason to think this holds in any way today. The "victims" (i.e. losers) of an ethnoreligious conflict in some developing country are unlikely to be selected for anything positive.
It could certainly be the case. I'm only talking about a presumption. Survivors of the Ruanda genocide, probably not. And I'd not argue for just any refugee to be able to enter. I'm arguing for more selective immigration. But on existing margins, we could be taking a lot more Syrians, Rohingyas, Uighurs, Afghans who'd be unlikely to wind up on welfare.
"And I mean, wouldn't the actually admirable thing to do be staying in your home country and working to improve it, even if that sacrifices the likely quality of your life? "
Taking this question first, traditionally emigration to America has been because there isn't a chance to improve the home country. You are excess population that can't be absorbed into the workforce, so there is nothing there for you to work at/towards. (This is from an Irish viewpoint). So emigration is the safety valve where we export our surplus people to find work abroad, and they send back remittances to the families in the Old Country and help support them. In our current era there is more purely economic migration (we want to go because it's too expensive to have a good life here and a similar job in the US will pay a lot better) but when the global economy takes a downturn, the Irish economy tends to follow suit and we still have people emigrating because it's not possible to find work at home.
Interestingly enough, in the 18th century emigration was mostly from Northern Ireland (that's where you get the Scots-Irish in the US) and often folk songs mention it along the lines of "I am not going because of lack of work but the rent's too high/my girlfriend's father hates me/other reasons".
So America was the Land of Opportunity, and immigrants were welcome because there was a lot of empty country to fill up and it needed workers, tradesmen, and warm bodies. Immigrants came to work hard and get on in life, where they couldn't do so at home for various reasons - lack of work, rigid social hierarchies, persecution, and so on.
Immigrants could also be cheap seasonal labour to go back home over the border when not needed (this wasn't just the US, a lot of Irish went to Britain for seasonal work and returned home in the winter, like my father's father). The basis is "the bargain is we give you the opportunity to improve your lot, you work hard and assimilate and help build up the nation". And *that* is what is considered admirable/virtuous - these people want to succeed, they can't do it at home, so instead of sitting around complaining or doing nothing, they came here which shows their Grit and Moxie and Can-Do Attitude, which is what the USA was built on!
I think it's a euphemism employed to respect peoples' privacy, mostly...perhaps it'd make better political hay to be explicit about the shitty circumstances people leave to come here, but maybe not. Plus left politics in general shies away from "did a thing to further self-interest" because that's generally...frowned upon. Sounds too *gasp* market-oriented. Could even take it one step further and assert it's subconsciously an aspect of denying colored folks agency[1], but that's a strong argument which I'm happy to let Freddie make himself, and merely nod along to on my part.
Like I'm a lot more comfortable telling people my grandparents "came here for a better life", rather than "fled Maoist China and its backward poverty-inducing ways, we were tired of being subsistence farmers and village butchers". After long and difficult lives of hustling, sacrificing, and raising multiple kids...well, they Made It, and retired comfortably middle-class. That's sympathetic to some, certainly...but it's also awfully personal, and not really my story to tell in the first place.
Similarly, to your last paragraph: that, uh, didn't go very well for those of my family who stayed behind, and millions more like them who couldn't leave. You can't fight a war if you're impoverished or dead. L:ive to die another day, even if it's in a country far from home. In many ways, all the things we've done to assimilate and become bog-standard Americans...that's our dissent, our way of working to improve China. Vote with your feet, vote with your dollars, vote with your vote. Much more effective here than back "home". And every drop of blood, sweat, and tears we pour into the American project is one less that could have, would have gone into the CCP. I think that matters, for whatever degree it generalizes to other cases.
It's complicated, because "better" means many things, depending on which part of the world you are talking about, and it's always both relative, and based on expectations that might or might not be satisfied. If you go off to French Guyana, for example, you might wonder why anyone else would want to: it's a desperately poor country with a filthy climate. But illegal immigration is a huge problem, because FG is part of France, and its standard of living is much higher, and social services provision much better than its neighbours. That's why the Right has been sweeping the board recently in elections in French overseas territories. The Civil War in the Ivory Coast was in part caused by the massive immigration from surrounding countries, especially Burkina Faso. And there are alleged to be some two million illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe in South Africa. It's all relative.
Modern neoliberal ideology sees financial betterment as the only reason for doing anything, but historically, "a better life" meant much more than that. One reason for moving was escaping religious discrimination or persecution. Another was a freer political climate. Lots of secular Arab speakers from the Maghreb have come to Europe in recent years to get away from the Islamists.
Much immigration into Europe in recent years has in fact been economic in nature, although there's also an important refugee element. Even in the latter case, though, with the Schengen system, immigrants can move freely between countries, and many learn, through their own networks, where to go. France is a favourite destination, because the French state, in the interests of Égalité, treats everyone alike, so children of even illegal immigrants are educated for free, and the whole family is entitled to healthcare. This is something the French as a whole feel proud about, but it does create incentives which come quite close to being perverse. Likewise, for settled immigrants, there are generous child support payments (as for all French families) and it's possible, just about, to live off these payments without working. In some high unemployment areas, families do actually live like this, with the men working at casual, often illegal, jobs to supplement the child support payments.
This creates significant problems for everyone, but there's no obvious answer without changing the model completely. Employers love mass immigration for its creation of a disposable, acquiescent workforce, and the political Left sees it as a source of votes. But it's storing up enormous political tensions for the future, with a poorly educated youth trapped between cultures and resenting the system and their parents. We're starting to see this already.
Moreover, immigration isn't à la carte. If, as in France, you go to live in a secular society, and you have to accept that. But new parents are often scandalised by, for example, the teaching of Evolution and Human Rights, having boys and girls educated together, and the absence of religious rituals and prayers in school. Many companies have been faced with demands that men and women sit at different tables in canteens, and that alcohol should not be available. And so on: needless to say these sorts of demands have sparked a great deal of opposition as well, including from assimilated immigrants themselves.
In other words, I think it's time for the neoliberal concept that anyone has a right to move anywhere for their own financial advantage, and without consideration of wider effects, to be re-evaluated.
"Doesn't the thief who steals your car also do this for a (however marginally) better life?"
No.. The thief who steals your car does it for an immediate high. They have no long-term plans, and have in fact made their life worse in the long term, by making enemies and risking prison.
The general implication of "came here for a better life", is that it was impossible for them to make a better life by staying in their previous country. Thus, refusing them entry is condemning them to sorrow. So rings the platitude.
(The alternative to "for a better life" is something like "for love"; you move here to live with your spouse, but would have been equally happy if they had moved to you there.)
I think people say this to "normalize" immigration. They do not come to murder and pillage. They just move for the same reasons anyone else might move, with the same presumption that "finding a better life" in the new country it mutually beneficial as most market transitions are presumed to be.
Yes. I moved to Montana for a better life for me and my family and I am aware that this has second and third order effects. It means I have moved into an area where those here for multiple generations are suspicious of me (there are regular sightings of bumper stickers like "don't California my Montana" and "Montana is closed. Now go home."
My desire to make a better life is totally about me and my progeny and in itself is not a moral or virtuous act. I had better perform as a member of this community or I could likely be shut out of society. I am a member of a licensed profession and the community is small (even though the state itself is big).
It need not be a "moral" (altruistic) act, but the fact that you ARE able to make a better life for you and your family implies that that you are engaging in mutually beneficial transactions with the citizens around you. That long time residents do not recognize the fact is a failing on their part although one that you will not doubt soon overcome. Of course it will be easier for someone from California that from Calcutta, but the same principles apply.
>It need not be a "moral" (altruistic) act, but the fact that you ARE able to make a better life for you and your family implies that that you are engaging in mutually beneficial transactions with the citizens around you.
You keep saying this as if it's a self-evident fact. Its not.
Of course there are exceptions. Some mutually beneficial transactions have negative external effects. But I take it that most mutually beneficial tractions either produce no external effects.
It's an appeal to empathy, which is of course a stupid, bad, very un-Rationalist, and downright unsporting argument to take that also happens to be highly resonant on the level where people actually live, as opposed to the level where Rationalists bloodlessly talk about things while sitting at their computers.
Beyond that, I would argue that the willingness to navigate the brutal threshing machine that is the modern US immigration procedure and uproot your entire life shows a number of virtues- fortitude, at the very least.
>Beyond that, I would argue that the willingness to navigate the brutal threshing machine that is the modern US immigration procedure
Actually, it really wasn't that hard, IME. Sure, there's waiting involved... but if you can fill out a form, you're qualified to immigrate to the U.S.
The *only* hard part was one of the interviews. The rest were easy, but one interview had the guy suggesting a bunch of mean stuff that contained the vague implication "we might send you back right now!", and it made her cry. Then he felt bad and relented, or apparently so anyway. Maybe he never had any real case for denying entry and just felt like exercising power.
(Weird thing was that this was the only non-white interviewer — i.e., the only one who was *from her same background* was the one who was least sympathetic.)
The assumption is that the way to "a better life" is hard work, self-discipline, pro-social behavior, thrift and industry. And it's hard to argue with that in a general way, it's certainly a lot more likely to lead to success than depending on the kindness of strangers, crime, or incredible good luck.
It also assumes that the life they had back there was at least OK, not so bad -- that's why they say a *better* life instead of "not so awful a life," so they were making it, up to a point, and what they want is to do *much better* -- so that, in the immigrants' point of view, they have the guts, the energy, the discipline, et cetera, and all they lack is the opportunity, which they hope to find here. Most people consider this exactly the kind of immigrant we want: someone who is ambitious and energetic, and is looking for a better opportunity to deploys his talents.
Of course, none of that could be true in any random individual case. You could be an enforcer for a drug gang in Columbia, but only be getting $5 per hit, and you could want to move to LA because the going rate for enforcement murders is much higher, which means you can have "a better life."
But generally people use "coming here for a better life" to distinguish, via the several assumptions above, immigrants they think add to the national character, as opposed to immigrants who (they assume) are coming here for more generous charity benefits[1], or to escape political oppression[2]. I would agree this is a cartoonish simplication fo the reasons people have for immigration, and probably subtracts rather than adds to the clarity of any discussion about the subject, but I'm just saying I think that's why people say it.
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[1] I've never been super persuaded that such people exist in any great numbers, the difficult of immigration being what it is.
[2] When we still saw the world as a Manichean struggle between the evils promulated by the USSR and ourselves, it feels like we were much more inclined to look favorably on escapees from assorted Third World socialist hellholes.
Right - via the invisible hand of the market, hard-working immigrants make the country better for the rest of us by actually creating wealth, not just redistributing it, as might someone just willing to work at a lower rate than others.
>People find it relevant because, for many of us, it's the same reason why *our* ancestors came to America. People are more likely to support the current wave of immigrants from Latin America if you draw parallels to previous mass immigration from (say) Europe in the early 20th century.
So yes, an emotional argument with no substance. Got it.
>The "bad" type of immigration is not coming here for a worse life, but coming here with (allegedly) nefarious purposes, like getting rich off welfare or trafficking drugs or stealing other people's jobs.
See, that's the entire problem. If people do that, they do it for a better life! Which means "doing it for a better life" is at least insufficient for immigration to be good.
And lol "allegedly". Yes, what could possibly be wrong with making things worse for the existing population?
One of my favorite lexical upgrades from the Rationalists is the phrase "in expectation." Can we come up with something more concise? For example, I want to say, "I arrived on time in expectation," meaning that I arrived on time in 90% of universes. Maybe something like, "I arrived on time-x." (Colloquially, we would say, "I arrived on time, but it was close.")
There is a saying: "If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late." The expression is a play on words that helps people set early arrival times for appointments, like setting one's watch five minutes ahead. I'm looking for a similar phrase, but one more appropriate for the literally-minded. So, if my appointment is at 1:30, I should deem 1:25 as "probabilistically on-time" or "on-time in expectation." In other words, I should feel bad if I arrive at 1:27 because, in some universe, I'm late.
"in expectation" refers to expected value - i.e., you didn't necessarily arrive on time today, but if you took the same actions every day, your average arrival time would be on time.
(basically you're shirking responsibility for chance events, which usually doesn't really fly)
No I think it's more like "I didn't arrive on time, but it's not my fault" in a tongue in cheek way. The "in expectation" is basically saying "well, maybe not in THIS reality, but in most counterfactual ones..." Probably not something you would say to your boss.
"Quantile" might be the term you are looking for. Though my English is not good enough to know how exactly it would be used. ("I arrived on time in 2/3-quantile"?)
I might have misunderstood the prompt. If we're just trying to describe the likelihood of arriving on time, why not just say "I had a 90% chance of arriving on time"? That's what a regular person would say in that situation.
Is there any economic writing on speakers' fees? I've always been puzzled by how much a well known person can make by saying stuff that can probably be found in their $19.95 hardcovers, and that half the audience will be too blitzed to remember anyway. Is it just conspicuous consumption, to brag that you had Bill Clinton or Malcolm Gladwell at your business's dinner, or is there something else I'm missing?
Very often you're getting thoughts more quickly than anyone else (you get to hear what they think now rather than when the book comes out) and you get to ask follow up questions. Not to mention very often Clinton or whoever isn't going to write a book on their opinions of banking regulation or something. (And I've never seen someone show up to one of these blitzed. They're really quite dull affairs.) Plus, yes, it's a draw for employees.
Well some of it is basically just bribery through another form. Some of it is also people in control of giant budgets who aren't tested/monitored very heavily on their effective us of said budget, and meeting famous people is cool.
I am always amazed at how much more wasteful a big fortune 500 financial institution's marketing department is compared to their say facilities or IT budget. When things are less measurable there is just a lot of slop.
I think it's simply that people are willing to pay a lot to see a celebrity perform. No different a phenomenon than Taylor Swift getting big bucks to perform.
When Mark Twain lost all his money after investing it in an ill-fated startup, he fell back on his one sure source of income: speaking gigs. People have handed over enormous funds to hear famous authors speak for a long time.
My MFA program paid authors to come and give readings, and it was a really useful part of the educational process, because us grad students got close access to them, to chat like normal people and ask random questions and stuff. I think the huge-name speakers and their gigantic fees are a weird case of the same thing, where the value from actually learning from the person has been completely eroded by bragging rights of some kind.
Or another way to put it might be: the product being sold is access. At the "world leader" tier, the amount of money is huge, and the access is divvied up among all the people there. I'm sure if the business dinner is just a dozen executives, they'll have a real and meaningful chat with Malcolm Gladwell that might change how they think about things and be genuinely useful. But hiring him to address a graduating class of 3,000 is a different thing.
You're not paying for the information they deliver, you're paying for the experience. When you read a book, you might remember the information in the book, but you probably don't remember much about the experience of reading the book. Whereas when you go to a speaker, it's much more of an event that you remember and can look back on with fondness. Think of it like listening to an album versus seeing a band live.
Sure, but then it's a company paying for its employees to have that experience. So why pay tens or hundreds of thousands for the guys in middle management to remember that time they heard Niall Ferguson talk?
I have to think the shared experience of doing something memorable together is viewed as positive for morale or team-building. It could also marginally boost the company's prestige in the minds of those employees, which might help reduce turnover when they're considering other offers.
I've been on the receiving end of it, and it's marginally more interesting to hear from some random athlete or actor/actress than to hear from the company leadership who is up next. I'd be a bit disappointed if they went through all the trouble of hosting a conference and didn't bring in a guest speaker.
The most important thing you're missing is probably that emotional overtones are largely missing from the printed word. If you go listen to a health nut talk about his favorite theory for avoiding death, you can tell by his tone, gestures, speed of speaking, dynamic range, and a million other nonverbal cues which parts of what he says he takes most serious, which he's a little doubtful about, what he thinks is most important, what is less so -- and many other things besides. You come away with a much clearer and more nuanced awareness of what he thinks than if you just read it -- at least, if he's a good speaker, and not a deceptive antisocial Pied Piper, et cetera -- that is, in the ideal case for which people hope. (In principle you can also ask questions in a live talk, but at the least you can observe how the guru responds to questions others ask, and this, too, conveys valuable info.)
People find it hard to put *all* that they want to convey into text. That's why emojis were invented.
One would assume because "most of the way" isn't "all of the way." Plus, as I noted below, there is a scarcity issue. There is a very limited number of people that can attend an in person speech. Way more can watch a recording, so the marginal cost to deliver it is far lower, and most importantly decrease with the number of deliveries (which of course is opposite the case of in-person speeches, where the marginal price starts off already high and rises very steeply as the speaker runs out of time he's willing to devote to events).
I'm not even sure what the argument is about. The fact that people bid up the price of in-person speeches is a plain observed fact, from which we may infer that this (high) price is required to match demand to supply. We can't very well argue that people *don't* value in-person speeches more than recordings or text, when the price data tells us beyond cavil that they do. I was giving an argument for *why* they might do so.
You can get a much clearer and well-supported, and easy-to-study or -reference, presentation of someone's thoughts or ideas in a text-based format, for obvious reasons (e.g., going back and re-reading, highlighting, following links or footnotes, easier for author to organize, etc).
You mention getting a better idea of what the speaker thinks about his words, in a speech, but with the caveat that this is in the case of a good speaker who's being honest; well, an honest author who's good at writing can indicate confidence level just as well — again, if not better, due to the aforementioned factors.
Finally, even if we grant that the speech of a good and honest speaker is better than the text of a good and honest author, due to some sort of information in gestures and tone that no one has ever managed to communicate through writing...
...is this enough to explain the huge difference in price between speakering* fees and $19.95? I find that doubtful on its own, personally! (And — I don't think the average person, when asked why they'd go listen to a speech, would even mention this stuff; probably more like "iunno, seemed interesting I guess".)
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*typo but I'm keeping it because it's sort of funny
Some people prefer text, sure. But they're very much in the minority. That's why people like to get educated in person, and don't just read the textbook, that's why we listen to witnesses in person in courtroooms and don't just study written statements, that's why we like Presidential debates in which we can watch candidates talk -- and ideally in front of a live audience -- instead of just reading position papers. That's why medical students are supposed to talk to the patient and listen to him, not just read the chart.
Is it worth the difference in price? In one sense, obviously, because the market pays that price. In another sense -- well, you can't overlook the role of scarcity. I can print a million books, and the marginal cost of the last book is pretty dang low. But the time for the author to speak is strictly limited, since he can't be cloned[1], so this much scarcer resource sells for a premium above the reading experience in part just because the supply is necessarily so much more limited, or more precisely because the marginal cost rises very, very steeply.
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[1] Presumably AI people are busily trying to think of ways around this.
I think in the case of graduation speeches you're overlooking two things: first, the value of endorsements. Elie Wiesel can't speak at *every* graduation, so he has to pick and choose, and when he does choose presumably it represents some kind of endorsement on his part. (Certainly the college treats it that way.) This redounds to the prestige of the college, and of course to the graduates. I would guess your sister's degree is seen by many as some small fraction more valuable and prestigious because it came from a college that could entice Elie Wiesel to come talk.
Second, it used to be not uncommon for major political figures to actually give substantive policy speeches at graduations. Winston Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain" speech at a college graduation, George Marshall proposed the "Marshall Plan" at a Harvard graduation, JFK announced the negotiations that led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty at an American University graduation speech.
A certain politician once claimed they were "broke" broke when they left office. Less than two decades later, they had a nine-figure (to the left of the decimal place) bank account. What exactly were they selling that was worth that much? Having heard them speak, that sure wasn't it.
Part of what you're accomplishing is coordination: you didn't just hear what was in some book, you heard the same thing as all these other people heard. So now you can all talk about it, make reference to it, etc
Gauging interest here, but if I created a San Francisco meetup for fans of Philosophy Bear's Substack, would people attend? Philosophy Bear, a.k.a. depony sum, is a blog I discovered via ACX. I would describe his writing as vaguely part of the "Rationalist Left" (not a real thing).
10 browse glassdoor using vaguely relevant search terms
20 find a vacancy
30 apply for it
40 GOTO 10
worked adequately for me back when I was at uni. I probably would have done better to talk to the careers advice people they employ for exactly this purpose.
Are you looking at any particular sector/role or just the standard cad monkey position?
Anything really, although I enjoy doing CAD so wouldn't mind being a monkey for it. Would probably prefer something where I actually get to build or work on cool projects. What was your experience like when you did internships? Cheers for the reply.
The Bank for International Settlement published something about this, based on evidence from past tightening cycles. They basically say:
(1) Central banks have little choice but to tighten policy to lower aggregate demand and bring inflation back to target.
(2) Strong growth and high job vacancies, as well as front-loaded rate hikes, can help prevent a hard landing.
(3) To perform a soft landing advanced economies would need to drop by 1.6 to 2.3 percentage points below its full potential over the next two years, to tame inflation. Best case scenario would be 0.4 to 1.6 percentage points due to non-core inflation waning over time. But that's counting food and energy markets to stabilize, which is fare from certain.
I do not think the Fed's or anyone else's model (I have more confidence in the Fed than BIS) can predict the exact settings of which monetary policy variables will get inflation back to target levels with he least damage to real income. We know NOW that the Fed should have started tightening sooner, but they know that too, so the fact does not help decide the policy instruments setting for today.
Raised interest rates reduce inflation in the expected manner (reducing investments and private consumption, which in turns push inflation downwards). Hard to tell how deep the recession will get, but the logistics chains and oil prices seem to be sorting themselves out already.
Down to 2% by 2024. Fed independence isn't really at threat or in question, and they've shown that they're willing now to take serious interest rate hikes and such to get inflation back down to the 2% target.
There's a lot of carping on it from leftist writers who think the US should have somehow done a WW2-esque price controls regime instead plus *handwave supply side reform*, but they don't have any real ability to change the Fed's decision-making on this.
Tricky. It ended in the early 80s with a sharp recession, followed by a decade of very powerful economic growth, which is the best possible scenario -- but that was coming off historically much higher interest rates (6% was "low" in those days), it had political leadership committed to killing inflation because it had a voter population who had been screwed by it for almost 10 years and was very, very fed up (we haven't reached such pain yet), and perhaps most important it had a significant bulge of young workers (Gen X) who were just getting started in their careers and could drive productrivity up.
None of those things are true today: (real) interest rates have been essentially negative for a while, and the Fed has indulged in outrageous money printing, so there's almost a whole generation that doesn't believe (for good reason) on any strong connection between interest and risk. We haven't reached nearly the level of fed-upness with inflation that our parents had in 1978, so the political leadership is far less committed. And our demographics are terrible: we have many fewer younger people entering the workforce and a big bulge of older people who certainly dislike inflation but who need to trade wealth for labor.
So unfortunately I would consider turning Japanese a more likely model -- more or less, the leadership loses courage when the recession gets to deep, backs off but not all the way (because it helps inflate away the Federal debt, too), and we screw around with a slightly painful stagflation for a decade or so, until...something else unforeseen happens.
The TIPS market expects it (PDI inflation) to converge to ~2.3% pa over the next 5-10 years, but that does not imply much about the path over the shorter term.
it will end with going back to 2% average inflation target. FED will reach its goal no matter what. that is their mandate. there is NO any other way out of this. Also, if you look at recent mom moves, its is going back to normal. (i.e 10bps-20bps mom increase). we need around that much to see 2% average inflation
This is an underdeveloped idea in society, but it's clearly true. Inflation is two things, in potentially varying amounts. How much money is in the system, and how many goods that money is chasing. We pumped a lot of money into the system at the same time we stripped a large number of goods out (shut down factories around the world). We're doing better about not putting new money into the system, but with China still producing less, I don't know how we would reverse inflation without very painful cuts in the money supply.
We could do the same thing by taxing away all the excess money we put into society in the last few years, but with less being produced that still wouldn't fix it.
So they trigger a recession - is that necessarily enough to stop inflation? What do they do with rates at that point?
Every other time they did this they’d lower rates further than the prior lows, and this was without major inflation coming into it. So how bad does the crash have to be to actually stop inflation?
The only way the Fed could fail to stop inflation is if they somehow lose their nerve and halt raised interest rates prematurely. It basically cannot fail to work, it's just a question of the amount of pain (presumably much less than when Volcker broke the back of inflation in the early eighties, as that time inflation expectations were high in a way they aren't now).
Not sure why it would? After all, real interest (Interest - Inflation) doesn't particularly become higher. The debt level is important if you want to have an expansionary fiscal policy, but this isn't that at all.
Much of the federal debt is funded on a revolving basis. Because the nominal rates will go up, debt servicing will eventually tak up significant fractions of the federal budget, even with rates as low as 5%.
I guess we’ll find out. Or the Fed will blink when 4.5% interest rates threaten to destroy the federal budget as the 1% debt starts rolling over to 5% debt over the next 5-6 years (typical treasury debt maturity) and that 10% of our budget in interest expenses become 50%.
All the prior times they fought inflation successfully we had a much sounder financial basis, not 125%+ debt/GDP and rising. With high debt, there may be no solution - just let the debt inflate away while real rates stay negative and everyone not a debtor loses.
Yes exactly, this I think is most probable. I find it dubious the Fed can really control 8% inflation with 4.5% interest rates. At that point it's still a far better idea to spend your money now, even if you have to borrow it, than to save it. Maybe they're hoping the shock 'n' awe of the rapid delta will cause people to rein in faster than is strictly financially necessary, but I bet that won't last. I mean, we'll see, but I wouldn't count on it.
Volcker had to raise the Federal funds rate to 20% to kill 10-12% inflation in the 70s. Powell can't go anywhere near double digits, because the Federal budget would just implode.
Specifically, the last two months have been flat because of huge declines in energy costs, while core CPI is running 6% or so annualized and hasn’t changed much for the last 1-1.5 years since the massive Biden admin spending and Fed easing.
The take away IMO is that if oil isn’t going to keep falling $10-15/month, which will see it negative again in 6 months, that huge negative energy component to the CPI is going to at least flatten if not reverse and the headlines will start reflecting high sustained core inflation. The markets are not going to like this and neither will the Fed.
"So how bad does the crash have to be to actually stop inflation? "
No idea. I expect the fed to keep tightening until inflation drops back to the 2-3% range. How much tightening that will take I have no idea.
NOTE: Crashing house prices reduce inflation because of the way that inflation counts "imputed rent"! A large housing crash will "help" inflation. Yes, your home equity being destroyed makes up for the stuff you are purchasing getting more expensive :-)
Arctic Monkeys have sooo many great lyrics - here's just a sample of some lines from their relatively recent stuff (they have a new album coming out this week):
I lost the money, lost the keys
But I'm still handcuffed to the briefcase
(American Sports)
I want to make a simple point about peace and love
But in a sexy way where it's not obvious
Highlight dangers and send out hidden messages
The way some science fiction does
…
So I tried to write a song to make you blush
But I've a feeling that the whole thing
May well just end up too clever for its own good
The way some science fiction does
(Science Fiction)
It's the big night in Tinsel City
Life became a spectator sport
I launch my fragrance called 'Integrity'
I sell the fact that I can't be bought
(Batphone)
My days end best when the sunset gets itself behind
That little lady sitting on the passenger side
It's much less picturesque without her catching the light
The horizon tries but it's just not as kind on the eyes
(Arabella)
Now I'm out of place and I'm not getting any wiser
I feel like the Sundance Kid behind a synthesizer
(Black Treacle)
Bite the lightning
And tell me how it tastes
Kung Fu fighting
On your roller skates
Do the Macarena in the devil's lair
But just don't sit down 'cause I've moved your chair
(Don’t Sit Dawn ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair)
You look like you've been for breakfast
At the Heartbreak Hotel
And sat in the back booth
By the pamphlets and the literature
On how to lose
Your waitress was miserable
And so was your food
If you're gonna try and walk on water
Make sure you wear your comfortable shoes
(Piledriver Walz)
Then like a butler pushing on a bookshelf
And unveiling the unexpected
I, who was earlier reluctant, was suddenly embarrassed and corrected
I think ammonia + peroxide bleach doesn't do anything spectacularly-terrible (hydrazine and nitrite are plenty toxic, but not volatile, and you won't get a huge amount of them). Ammonia + chlorine bleach, of course, will gas you (as will hydrochloric acid + peroxide bleach, or any acid + chlorine bleach, or acetone + chlorine bleach).
Unfortunately, 9ne of the things we learned in the last couple years is that the survey of flu illness was not as comprehensive as we were led to understand.
Your question is interesting, I guess, but let's talk instead about this unrelated thing over here.
If you support the policy and think it's a good idea an worth drawing a contrast with what we're doing here, fine. But make that point, don't just nod at it.
The top rate of income tax in the UK is already high enough that it's unclear whether reducing it by 5% will actually lead to less money coming in (note that this is different to the situation in the US, where it's harder for high earners to leave the US tax regime, so income tax rates have to be much higher before increasing them stops increasing tax revenues). Fairly sure I've seen something from the government making this point in the past, but the argument is put well here: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/its-not-obvious-that-killing-the-45-rate-is-actually-a-tax-cut. You'd certainly struggle to see the impact of the top rate of income tax being reduced from 50% to 45% in 2012 in the graph of income tax share paid by the top 1% here: https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-burden/.
That's not to say that the reduction will unleash a torrent of wealth creation, just that the UK is not borrowing to make the rich richer. It's borrowing to keep the heating on this winter.
I'm in a bit of a "high taxes are good" bubble so some of these arguments are new to me. Please forgive if my ignorance shines through.
Is the fullfact graph showing the right thing? If I understand you right you're using it as evidence that cutting the top rate of tax didn't decrease the amount of income tax high earners paid... But in the same budget, Osborne increased the personal tax allowance, which if I understand right is also a tax cut for lower earners. Is it possible tax take went down for high earners and for lower earners such that the overall ratio didn't change?
Also, what's your take on the drop in the value of the pound, and the IMF making the rare appeal to the UK government to reverse the decision? I interpret both of these to be moderately strong evidence that it was a bad move. Do you disagree?
Finally, I don't get your point about "not borrowing to make the rich richer". It _is_ going to make the rich richer to cut the top tax rate. I think the adamsmith.org argument is that the tax rate can go down, but the extra incentive to work more and/or move to the country and/or not move away from the country, will mean that there's generally more economic activity among the rich. Are you saying that making the rich richer is a happy byproduct (if so, fair enough, I misunderstood you), or that it's not going to make the rich richer (in which case I disagree)?
(I certainly don't disagree with your "it's borrowing to keep the heating on" part though. That's definitely part of what's happening.)
I'm no expert on finance I'm afraid - unless the point is very, very straightforward I'm out of my depth. I think here the main point is that no one is claiming that any borrowing to pay for the 5% cut is more than a rounding error compared to the borrowing for the price cap, the other tax changes, etc. Anyone focusing on the borrowing needed to fund the 5% cut isn't motivated by concern about the public finances. Though that applies the other way as well, of course - no one thinks this cut will raise much money, so making it is about signalling too. And the currency/bond turmoil might suggest it was the wrong signal to make.
The fullfact graph could be misleading, though I don't think it is, and if it is it's not because the take from income taxes as a whole declined - it didn't. Main thing to add is that the 5% cut doesn't affect many people, and of those who are affected, most of them aren't affected very much - this change only affects earnings of over £150k and will mean that someone earning £250k will pay £5k less in income tax. The UK just doesn't have enough people earning enough for it to really matter. And a lot of those who do are highly mobile, hence the idea that the cut might well increase revenue.
Of the three income tax cuts: only one is to the higher rate. A second is to the standard rate of tax, the third a reversal of a recent proposed hike in National Insurance. Most beneficiaries of the latter two are not the rich. Incidentally, the Labour Party has undertaken not to reverse two of the three cuts.
Sure. I believe capital is always more wisely and efficiently invested by a million private owners who had to scrape it together, pound by pound, by spending the hours of their life carefully, than by half a dozen barristers and staff bureaucrats constituting the Subcommittee on What Should We Do With This Money? of Ministry X, who punch out at 4.30pm and thereafter think of completely different things, because they have absolutely zero skin in the game, so to speak.
So by me any transfer of capital from private to public hands is a priori stupid, and will lead to economic inefficiency and reduced standards of living, and any transfer from public to private hands is good, will lead to improved economic efficiency and growing standards of living.
The government have far more skin in the game of "how prosperous can we make the country" than generic highly-paid people do, because reduced prosperity may result in them losing elections.
Completely backward. When a rich person invests in something, it's his own money he might not get back, and I assure you a rich person cares way more about getting his money back than a generic politician cares about possible attack ads surrounding his vote for the Economic Growth Now! bill 8-10 years ago (a typical payback time for a good investment) that turned out to produce results far below the bullshit about it spread liberally about at its passing.
I can't think of a single stand-out case of a legislature suffering decimation because they passed Economic Nostrum X and it didn't perform as advertised. Can you? But rich people definitely hate losing money. That's why they're rich, you know.
For that matter, the number of governments that have been re-elected repeatedly while they drove their country to economic ruin -- Venezuela jumps immediately to mind, certainly -- should give one pause in asserting the voters routinely hold governments accountable for long-term economic growth.
I'm not saying that the government has more of a stake in how well the country is run than rich people do in their own businesses. I'm saying that the government has more of a stake in how well the country is run than rich people do in how well the country is run.
The government feedback loop in action from yesterday: https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/tory-mps-labour-mini-budget/. Markets react poorly to policy announcement -> governing party drops badly in polls -> some in governing party try to rebel against the policy. That market reaction caused more stress to the average Conservative MP than it did to the average rich person, because of the difference in how much skin they have in the game.
The government does not know how to make the country richer. The country became richer primarily as a side effect of private individuals pursuing wealth. You might have more of the point if you said "more equal" or something, but a bunch of lawyers who won a popularity contest are incredibly unsuited for wisely investing resources.
Give me a break. Name a Western country that runs a primary surplus. *Every* tax cut or spending increase for the past 75 years involves increasing the deficit. Whether that is a good deal or not, economically, turns on whether the redirection of capital improves, retards, or does nothing for economic growth. (Nor have the sizes of deficits had boo to do with bond yields for at least as long.)
Nonsense. The first toll roads were private, as were the first railroads, the first toll bridges, and of course most airlines and airports still are. American electric and water utilities are also generally private (albeit regulated). Mail services and schools, both K-12 and higher education, are built and operated privately, and of course almost all of the Internet was built and still operates privately. I can't imagine what makes you think most or even all but a tiny fraction of the massive public service economy is primarily the result of government decision and action.
Rich people aren't idiots. If one can make good money by building some public service for thousands or millions of people, they will. The only generally required reason for government getting involved in broad service administration is to solve collective action and NIMBY problems, which are not unusually the result of infrastructure decay caused by government mandates or over-regulation in the first place. Or to do projects that don't make money at all, like a space or nuclear weapons program.
Edit: now I think about it, the assumption underlying your assertion seems to be that what rich people want to do with their money is put it in a big pile and splash around in it, like Scrooge McDuck. Id est, splurge on massive consumption. That suggests you don't really know many rich people, and don't even pay much attention to what they're like. (And I don't mean accidentally or lucky rich, like sports or media stars, or Russian gas oligarchs. I mean people who built businesses from the ground up.)
That's not what rich people are like. That's what an upper middle class person who wins the lottery is like, the kind of person who *doesn't* think it worthwhile to work 80 hours a week for 20 years to make a fortune. Rich people are quite different. They live to make money, not to spend it. To them, a million dollars in cash represents an exciting opportunity to invest it somewhere and make 100 million -- not an opportunity to pay for the most extravagant party ever.
You might wonder *why* they live to make such fabulous sums if not to spend them, but that's just non-rich person thinking. To the rich, money represents some kind of spiritual success. It's some kind of giant honking "I Made It Ma! Top O' The World!" sign that says they're the smartest person ever. It's the equivalent of winning a Nobel Prize to a nerd, or the equivalent of an Oscar or two to the actor.
Perhaps we need to get away from the idea that global hubs of commerce, finance, technology, academia etc. should be viewed as places to house poor people.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, as politicians on both sides have been quoted as saying.
Governments around the world are using the current economic problems as a pretext for passing exactly the kind of legislation that they wanted to pass anyway. For Democrats in the US, that's huge spending bills that give away trillions to the sorts of people that Democrats like to give money to. For Conservatives in the UK, that's top-bracket tax cuts.
I don't know whether this will really help with the current crisis so much, but I do generally believe in the idea of top-bracket tax cuts for three reasons:
1. I think it's morally the right thing to do (it's unfair that some people should have to pay hundreds or thousands of times more in taxes than other people)
2. I think it's in the long-term best interests of the country (you want to encourage high earners to move to your country while encouraging low-earners to leave), and
3. It benefits me personally.
Now, does it give me pause that the thing that benefits me personally just happens to be the thing that is both morally right and in the long-term best interests of the country? It should. I promise to think about it more carefully if my opponents (who if you ask them also have a similar confluence of interests) will too.
I think it might be intended to reverse that effect, and draw business back into the City. And one of the likely consequences of that is a reversal of the regional rebalancing that was a goal of the previous incumbents...whatever benefits there might be going to go London.
They've got a large majority, so they can do what they like, for the time being. Polling suggests that they would be a 150 seats behind labour in a snap election.
I don't expect it to lead to growth and hence a wealthier country. No chance.
But is that what we mean by "work" or is there something else going on? I've heard a bunch of slightly crackpot theories about what the Tories hope to achieve by this but I haven't heard anything credible.
I think it's one of the worst decisions the UK government has made in the last few years. Which includes some stiff competition!
It's also bundled in with a regulatory and welfare cuts. The theory being that you can help inflation by decreasing regulatory burden and encouraging more people to work as well as encouraging foreign capital to flow in and so on. It could work if the lower taxes and welfare cuts encourage people to work more and if the various corporate incentives encourage more productive companies to invest in the UK or to start up in the country.
It's bog standard supply side economics and it rests on reasonably solid economic principles. And it has worked both historically and recently, though not universally. Of course, there are competing schools and they too have had their successes. One of the annoying things about economics.
I'm not sure why you don't understand it unless you don't understand conservative economics generally. I'd have expected something like this. Especially since large dollops of government spending have failed to solve inflation or restart pre-pandemic growth.
From a personal perspective, even though I'm a higher rate taxpayer, this is more than balanced out by higher mortgage payments and making it much more difficult for companies to borrow to invest and to do long term planning (I'm a debt banker).
I struggle to find words that describe the budget that don't veer into ad hominem on the people who designed it. I honestly don't know who it's for or what they expected to happen.
In general, no need for Musk or the feds to have only humanoid bots.
I'd be really surprised if the federal government wouldn't be buying AI bots There would be at least some effort to for the feds to have full control of them. I can't guarantee that would be effective.
Maybe the potential failsafe (assuming Musk control can't be over ridden) is to EMP Capitol Hill.
I can see it though.... Don't you *want* us to be able to install updates?
https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenElec/status/1575697214495916032?t=umsDFFbDrtIkn-Cb8gDU6w
Victoria Australia uses a type of voting where you can get instant runoff or just side with a party's preferences by checking only one box. 92.7% of voters just used the simpler method, checking only one box.
Some people in the 7% are really angry about it.
Possibly difficult cognitive dissonance for election wonks to craft a technically robust system then democratically find almost no interest in it from the electorate.
"People express different preferences than me because they are responding to incentives in a flawed system" can sometimes be true. But it is always worth considering whether people simply disagree with you, as an Occam's prior.
I think you're misreading the complaint here. The tweet says "At this year's Senate election, 92.7% of Victorians marked their ballot papers with '1' followed by preferences for other parties above the line. If voters do that at the state election, preferences 2 and beyond will be replaced by the party ticket. Disgraceful.". In federal elections you can express a preference over parties (voting "above the line") or individual candidates (voting "below the line"), where above the line votes are interpreted as preferencing parties candidates above all lower preferenced parties, below all higher preferenced parties, in the order that the party specifies relative to each other.
It sounds like in the next Victorian state election above the line votes will instead only consider the *first* party preferenced and preferences over all candidates will be specified by that one party. That means people who reasonably assume the system works the same way as it did in the past, and as it still does for federal elections, are likely to end up mis-voting, which is what the linked tweet is complaining about.
IMO the sensible median *is* that voters express preferences over parties, because parties have relatively clear platforms in ways candidates don't, and most candidates will be bound to their parties positions most of the time anyway, so there's rarely a reason you would want to vote for only *some* of a parties candidates. The "even simpler method" seems unnecessary, especially if it replaces the existing above the line method rather than augmenting it.
Anyone know if there of any updates to this post on genetic testing for medication sensitivity? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/antidepressant-pharmacogenomics-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
As full genome testing is down to 300 dollars it seems like that would make more sense but it's hard to know what reports they provide and seems like a better deal than genesight (cheaper and full genome) though the wait is 12-14 weeks right now versus quite quick from genesight. I imagine that one could probably do one's own analysis a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/12/how-to-use-23andme-irresponsibly/ but I'm not sure what the state of the art is. Anyone done (full) genome testing or know more about it? Surely there are open source tools out there?
I'm curious if other people are alarmed by a tweet like this: https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1575151147312095233
To save a click, it is a "famous" climate scientist saying:
> "cautioning against linking climate change to any one event," is the new denier talking point.
Does this jibe with people's sense of reality? Or have we gone over the edge?
"Infamous" might be a better adjective. Mann crossed over from doing solid if unremarkable science to being an attention-seeking media personality years ago.
Yeah, I remember when "cautioning against linking climate change to any one event" was a thing that most respectable climate scientists did, and the less-respectable ones who fed the news media with sound bites about how event du jour was possibly linked to climate change were at least careful to use defensively-hedged weasel words.
So, Michael Mann is now defining "denier" to include people who were respected climate scientists warning against the general consequences of anthropogenic global warning last year. Bad for him. But I'm not sure how influential he really is any more, and this may be just a bid for attention by a has-been.
That, oddly, makes me feel better. Thanks.
Since the Ukraine invasion started I've enjoyed five Russian vloggers on YouTube. All just ordinary people, except they know English.
Now all five of them have left Russia. Two left soon after the invasion started; the other three left after Putin announced mobilization. Their stories:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQUXH-uLzdA
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VfDV9E79y_U
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dRoAXbOQhDI
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgf1tcbdIFo
https://youtube.com/watch?v=43YNPB8py1s
(The next problem: most of them left on visitor visas, so presumably will have to return eventually.)
Edit: actually wait, there's also 1420 who hasn't left, but his whole channel is about interviewing Russians on the street, so if he leaves he'd have to reinvent himself. https://www.youtube.com/c/1420channel
Those five and maybe 250,000 others, out of twenty-five million men aged 20-44. So Putin still has ~99% of his conscription pool. I expect there's an observational bias in that Russians who speak fluent English are the ones most likely to A: want to and B: be able to leave.
It would be interesting to know how many military-age males are finding ways to make themselves effectively unavailable for conscription inside Russia; there ought to be quite a few who won't or can't leave but will still try to dodge the draft.
Yeah, this is my experience as well. At this point Russians I know are all either outside the country or no longer talking to me. Whether because of fear or patriotic fervor I can't say.
Visitor visas are only relevant to the country you're in. They can still apply for other statuses if the country allows it. Or apply for entry to a third country.
I'm a mathematics graduate student, and will probably be applying for tech jobs in the Spring. I am looking for referrals to FAANG companies. Thanks! I can talk about programming experience more if needed. I apologize if this is not suitable for the open thread.
I work at one of them. Would probably make more sense to put you in the queue closer to when you would get hired (particularly in the environment of right-now).
Just curious: what are you looking for?
I am looking to start a job some time in August 2023. I am mostly looking to apply to data science/machine learning jobs.
Thanks for responding!
I've heard this as well, and I do wonder how much direct research examines moneypox in this way. Even if there were no difference between various sex acts in terms of chafing/tearing, it stands to reason that an orifice that gets 5-10x the action is going to have a disproportionate amount of both.
Does anybody know anyone or know any interesting writings related to cooperative housing? Bonus points if it's about the UK.
Heard someone mention it to me this weekend and would like to learn more
Does anyone know how I could find a thread on twitter that had 200+ instances of beautiful architecture each from a different country with explanations?
I know WrathofGnon has a popular architecture focused twitter. Maybe check them out?
Was it this twitter account? https://twitter.com/culturaltutor
I don't think so, but I'm not sure. Interesting regardless!
I've seen people say that **analogies** are, blanketly, a bad thing to use to try to prove a point. Is anyone aware of a good writeup/steelman of this belief?
Asking because I find analogies extremely useful, at least in education. Of course, I've had the experience, in debate, of analogies backfiring such that I slightly regret using them. Though I've never completely regretted it. It is loosely my suspicion that anti-analogy people just want a way to indulge glaring inconsistencies in their behaviour/beliefs.
My understanding is that some people think they're bad in *any* form of debate - not just un-persuasive.
It seems to me that I've seen opposition to analogies coming from social justice-- you aren't supposed to say that suffering in one group is like suffering in another group.
Seems to be a Scott Adams thing
"Analogies: Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time. But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation."
I think they can sometimes be good, often times be bad. I also don't know if opposition is just a rhetorical tool used to avoid arguing against an analogy.
Looks like all the replies this comment has gotten are correct. Good faith analogies are great for education but people argue with whether or not the analogy is accurate if used in debate. However there is a more devious aspect to analogies which is, by being so natural to the human mind, make it easy for us to pass over hidden priors without examination. If we are open to the analogy and aren't attempting to argue with it, we can immediately be blinded by the things that two things have in common and therefore not even ask in what important ways they differ. That's many Fringe cases between debate and mutually consenting education involve obfuscating the nature of an analogy so that the other person doesn't even notice it. And of course oftentimes we don't even notice it ourselves.
On a further layer down, the pure natural enjoyment of pattern matching two things that are similar to one another often makes us feel good about what we know of those two things, even if perhaps we should be very skeptical of what we actually know about either. To choose to things at random, if I don't really know anything about quantum physics and I don't really know anything about economics, someone pointing out how these two things are similar will light up my brain in a way that makes me feel better about my knowledge of both subjects, despite that knowledge being rudimentary in both cases.
Arguments from analogy are logical fallacies, so in a purely logical sense they are always incorrect to use. That doesn't mean the aren't useful. Education is a situation where they are useful, because the goal is generally to help someone understand something rather than to construct a logically correct argument.
Regarding the idea that anti-analogy people are indulging inconsistencies: I'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you possible give a concrete example> In general, if you have a strong enough logical argument to demonstrate an actual inconsistency, the analogy itself is superfluous. In order to demonstrate an actual inconsistency, you need to show two situations that are the same, but handled differently. Not merely two situations that are analogous but handled differently.
It is also possible that a big part of the disagreement is the usage of the term analogy, rather than something more fundamental. There are arguments that I could think of that some people might call analogies, but I would refer to as examples (or counter-examples).
Maybe analogies are useful for explanations but not for arguments.
I think analogies are a hugely useful tool when used in good faith. They promote understanding and allow you to view a point from a different angle to get fuller comprehension of it.
Like any tool, they can also be abused. "Saying X is like saying Y" gives me, as the writer of Y, the ability to basically restate the other party's point however I want, and if the writer is engaging in bad faith, all kinds of "saying what you just said is like saying Hitler was awesome" chicanery can be enabled.
I'm sure that has left some people frustrated after being on the wrong end of a bad-faith analogy, but "analogies should be banned from debate" strikes me as a wasteful overreaction that costs everyone more than it's worth.
To illustrate using an analogy (wink), it's kind of like bans on microaggressions. Sure, there are some people who conceal a nasty dagger in an otherwise anodyne-looking comment, then retreat to "I didn't mean it that way" or "it was just a joke" or the like if they ever get pressed on it. And when people can do that, it is annoying. Own your daggers.
But if you then try a social justice "your intent doesn't matter because we punish intentional and unintentional giving of offense the same way" approach to take away that line of rhetorical retreat, you've successfully corrected the "being able to backtrack and hide in a joke" problem... while simultaneously dealing tremendous damage to your overall discourse.
I think what is really the heart of an analogy ban is trying to root out bad-faith discourse, but if you're doing that you should do it directly by attacking bad faith discourse, not by trying to prohibit rhetorical approaches just because they have both good-faith and bad-faith use cases. After all, don't all forms of rhetoric have good- and bad-faith use cases?
I think they can be useful but only if it’s a good faith discussion and not an adversarial debate.
Whenever someone introduces an analogy into an argument, the argument inevitably shifts to whether or not the analogy is accurate, thus ending the original argument.
They are very effective rhetoric, but very difficult to do correctly if you care about truth and very easy to use misrepresent ideas, situations and circumstances. Many analogies I hear "in the wild" are superficial and omit some crucial difference between the two situations or objects that are supposedly similar.
Even when trying to do correct reasoning with analogies for my benefit only, if I choose to think about some issue in terms of analogy A to other situation O it is possible that I may miss some important aspect of O.
When an analogy-maker says "X is like Y" and analogy-denier says "X, compared with Y, has crucial difference Z", I'd consider that progress in the debate!
It assumes some very good faith. Like, analogy-denier could always say eg "The fact that X is called X and Y is called Y is a crucial difference for our purposes", which may be wrong. But I'd like to assume good faith!
I don't know of any good writeups and I'm generally in agreement with you, but I can see some arguments to be made against using analogies.
For example, not everyone will have the same experiences, knowledge, or beliefs. If you told someone that $world_leader* is acting like Civ-1 Gandhi right now, and that person didn't know the urban legend of Civ-1 Gandhi's 255 points of pure nuclear rage, they might assume that $world_leader was acting peaceful like real-world Gandhi. This would be especially hard to do if you were writing for a wider audience.
*Easy example, not meant to be a comment on any modern leader.
I agree with this! I'm less sure about "entire", but it's a very significant proportion
The ongoing Magnus Carlsen / Hans Niemann chess cheating scandal seems tailor-made to teach Bayesian reasoning. Incomplete evidence, reasoning under uncertainty, important prior-shifting updates - there's even a formally defined, precisely calculable base rate! Anyway, Niemann definitely did it.
I find the last sentence of this comment to be somewhat at odds with the rest of it. A Bayesian examination of the evidence actually suggests that it is quite poor:
The base rate of people cheating in official FIDE events is rather low, even if they have previously cheated online (This moves the base rate somewhat but not much). There is fairly little actual evidence he cheated once this is accounted for. From the game, he beat Magnus, but the issue was mostly that Magnus played below his normal level. This is not consistent with cheating because cheating would make you play better, not your opponent play worse. There are also other plausible explanations that take probability from the hypothesis that he cheated. Namely leaked prep.
>because cheating would make you play better, not your opponent play worse.
I am not sure about this. At that level of chess I think a player‘s sense of something being “off” could cause them to play worse. I found Carlson’s statement about what he sensed from his opponent quite convincing.
The Kasparov situation playing deep blue comes to mind. Many commenters said that he fell apart in the final games.. One can leave the argument that the computer team was cheating aside, because the main point is, it was a way of playing chess that completely befuddled him, and affected his ability to counter.
Magnus clearly suspected him of cheating, and that could have contributed to him playing worse, but Magnus' accusations are what prompted the conversation in the first place. The fact that he fell apart gives no additional evidence beyond the initial accusation. If you place additional credence on the accusation because Magnus played worse, you are double counting the evidence provided by his intuition.
> The fact that he fell apart gives no additional evidence beyond the initial accusation..
Very true in a material sense, but when someone falls apart, as you put it, one of the first things to assess is what was that persons ability to self report prior to the incident. Given what I know about Carlson and his incredible acuity for the game I have a bias towards believing in his capacity to self report. The fact that he trounced Carlsen so severely and then proceeded to lose the next six games also makes my nose wrinkle.
I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say here. The amount of credence you give to Carlsen's intuition is independent from the question of whether or not you should count his intuition twice (You should not).
Im not understanding how Im doing that. I certainly don’t mean to, but I also don’t have a counting system.
Carlsen raised suspicions in a rather opaque manner. Then he made his allegations concrete and shared his observations of the game. That was the first time I had to confront his intuitions. That is when I counted them.
What am I missing?
All good points.
I was strictly advancing the proposition that cheating or supected cheating can have a deleterious effect on the performance of the cheated.
The fact that my sympathy is currently with Carlsen is not part of that discussion. It’s separate.
(The juxtaposition is intentional for humorous effect.)
Ah, I see. Thank you for the clarification.
If someone online says something that doesn't seem to make sense, what is the prior that it's a joke? That it's not only a joke, but also a cultural reference you missed?
Ken Regan's Bayesian analysis says otherwise.
https://en.chessbase.com/post/is-hans-niemann-cheating-world-renowned-expert-ken-regan-analyzes
Supposedly Regan's analysis didn't catch Feller. More convincing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfPzUgzrOcQ
FM Iglesias admitted that he erred in his analysis: https://nitter.hu/IglesiasYosha/status/1574308784566067201#m. Ken Regan also apparently noted errors in Iglesias's analysis, although I can't find this at the moment.
Interesting - haven't watched the full interview or dug into his analysis but I appreciate the rigor! I do wonder what it would say about the games where Niemann has admitted to cheating...
Chess world champions seem to have higher than average incidences of mental illness.
Given his play on subsequent games I doubt he really did it... Anyway top level competition should happen inside a Faraday's cage.
Excuse my ignorance, but... how the hell do you cheat at chess?
It's a deterministic game with perfect information, right? Isn't any change to the game state or illegal move immediately obvious, or completely deducible in retrospect by running the game backwards?
What's actually being alleged?
Essentially, that someone is not using his own skill but instead using an AI (AIs can't make moves humans can't, of course, but they can choose between moves more effectively than any human can). It is effectively trivial these days to obtain a superhumanly-good chess AI (even live matches have had cheating scandals over "player accused of running a chess AI on his phone and looking at it during bathroom breaks", because a modern phone is powerful enough to run a superhumanly-good chess AI).
Cheating in this case means getting outside information, ie from a chess engine, which is radically stronger than the strongest human players, and thus would make you unbeatable.
Sounds interesting. Where would you recommend I read about this?
The short version is that a relative newcomer has been on a statistically improbable tear, which included beating the (abdicated) world champion, using the black pieces. Said champ (Carlsen) then generated a massive wave of drama by implying that the newcomer (Niemann) cheated. The priors here involve the fact that Niemann has admitted to cheating in the past, as recently as 3 years ago, and the base rate can be calculated from their Elo scores. Wikipedia has a decent overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_cheating_controversy
Of course, just looking at the probability of a players greatest victory is going to provide a skewed picture. More meaningfully, one could look at a set of a player's games to see whether they are anomalous. This is what Ken Regan does in his analysis. One issue with this broader sort of analysis, is that if cheating is sporadic and rare in the larger sample, then it may not be detected.
I'll add that top players have mentioned in the past (maybe it was Hikaru) that it doesn't make sense for top players to cheat, since doing to would threaten their entire careers.
But that reasoning doesn't apply to a lower rated player who can't make a career out of chess in and of itself anyway.
There are probably a few thousand players at that rough level, and just one of them needs to find a way to cheat consistently, and they can then be as arbitrarily strong as they want.
Although people say that OTB cheating is very unlikely, they are ignoring that becoming a 2700 level player is also very unlikely.
In the video game world, at least, "but it would make no sense to cheat" is something you hear in like every case ever of someone suspected of cheating who is subsequently proved to be cheating.
In video game speedrun scandals, cheating by high level players often gets rationalized as "I'm good enough to do it without cheats, cheating just gets me to that goal faster." A good speedrun is often a matter of grinding over and over until by some mix of luck and skill you nail every shortcut you need and don't make any mistakes.
I wouldn't be surprised if chess cheaters have a similar rationalization of "well I'm smart enough to pick Stockfish's moves *sometimes*..."
The part I didn’t get in the Georgism posts was why the land tax wasn’t supposed to increase housing prices. It seemed to be a fully general argument that taxes never increase any price, but that seems to be untrue for, say, gas prices that are much higher in regions with high taxes. What was different about land?
I think the one-sentence summary is: housing is already being bid up to whatever price the buyer (renter) can afford, therefore any taxes would be incident on the seller as they cannot "produce less land" in response to a decrease in profitability.
This isn't arguing that taxes are always incident on the seller, just that they can be; specifically it's a claim about elasticity of supply and how that affects tax incidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Efficiency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
(I think there is an extra step here that I don't fully grok; specifically, how you get from "land supply is perfectly inelastic" to claims about housing, which can be built or demolished atop of land. We can't produce more land, but we can produce more housing, and would do more of that if it's profitable to do so. Maybe the answer is just "the value of land without housing would be decreased by the LVT, meaning homebuilders, just like renters, would see no increase in cost".)
>housing is already being bid up to whatever price the buyer (renter) can afford
That statement may be true in markets like San Francisco or NYC, where it is difficult to build new housing. In places where people spend a much lower % of their paycheck on rent, like in the sunbelt, there is no way it is true.
If you mean the cost of owning a home privately, I think you need to be careful about what 'price' means in this case. For a 100% LVT, your taxes to the state almost precisely match the rent you would be paying if you rented your house instead of owning it- in practical terms, you're 'renting' the land from the government. At *current* rent prices, that is a bit more expensive than private ownership of a home that isn't mortgaged, though there's reason to think that Georgism would lower rents significantly.
But the counterpoint is that the price of land on an open market would drop precipitously, because the LVT makes speculation impossible. In many cases (i.e. undeveloped land), the sale price should in theory be near zero. Just as the monthly costs of owning a private home would be similar to renting, the costs of *buying* a new home would also be quite small, if the house was pre-owned and you weren't paying for construction- not unlike a security deposit, to extend the analogy.
In other words, IF Georgism doesn't lower the cost of renting, the lifetime cost of owning your own home would probably go up somewhat, but only to the level already borne by renters in your area- back of the napkin calculations for my hometown gave me about a 25% increase. And even then, people could begin owning their house almost immediately upon entering adulthood, since startup costs would be very small, rather than having to spend a decade or more establishing the financial means to do so. And if Georgism lowers rent by a factor of 2-3, then lifetime taxes on a property could easily fall below the current sale price plus mortgage costs, resulting in lower 'cost' of owning a home.
The secret sauce here, as always, is that the supply of land is fixed, so normal intuitions about the social costs of taxation are less applicable.
If the price of a house would drop to near 0, how would new houses get built/maintained? I know that at least where I live, a lot of properties are assessed at land + building rates, where the price of the land (~30K) is usually far less than the price of the building (~300K for a nicer place). It strikes me that either the price would drop just by the price of the land, plus a little bit for the house, or if the price dropped all the way, then only the government would build/renovate/maintain houses
This doesn't answer your question directly, but here's something else related to consider:
A big part of Lars Doucet's work right now is in creating more accurate assessments of land value. See:
https://landisabigdeal.com/research
"As an example, here's a listing for a property in Manhattan where the assessed land value hasn't changed in ten years, even though the market value of the property increased by $3 million during that time" [there's a picture on the site]
The land is assessed at 130K, the building at 475K, but the property recently sold for... 9 million!
I'd guess Georgism is likely to change things more in dense cities, where big, expensive buildings are (or at least should be) built on the land than in single-family suburbs.
In situations like the one you described, I think you're correct that it would roughly "just drop by the price of the land".
You are correct. Some Georgists seem to have in mind that a property not being used is a dead-weight cost, and therefore people will want to get out from under it the moment they are not using it. But even Georgists recognize and value the improvements upon the land, which would not be significantly reduced, and may in fact be higher.
The only thing that Georgism would really do, and I think all sides agree it would do so, is significantly reduce or eliminate long term speculation on land. Short term might still exist, if people know the value of the property is about to go up and the taxes haven't been adjusted yet. Everything else is uncertain at best, and quite questionable.
I also don't understand how land can be consistently expected to generate an "unfair" stream of income. If such a stream of income is expected, then it should be factored into the price of the land from the get-go, right?
(I suppose if the land in question was granted to a family still in possession of it by a Spanish king four centuries ago, rents may not have been factored from the get-go.)
While rare, this isn't unknown. Trinity Wall Street was endowed with land by Queen Anne in 1705, and while little of the original grant is exactly the same, it remains a large landholder and very wealthy parish.
It is factored into the price of the land, but it's not ethically obvious that "because I paid to own X, I am entitled to the stream of income from X". An absentee landlord is not adding any value to the world compared to his tenants owning the land themselves.
The argument for "because I paid to own X, I am entitled to the stream of income from X" is a discussion about what does "own" mean.
The key parts of ownership are exclusive usage rights for the property and the rights to the "fruit of the property", which for land are essentially one and the same and equal to the stream of income paid for the usage of the property by the owner temporarily transferring that exclusive right to use it. There are other parts of the "bundle of rights" that full ownership implies, but those ("usufruct") are the main ones without which it would not be appropriate to say that someone owns a property, because if you don't have the entitlement to the stream of income from X, then what did you buy, what does that "ownership" entitle you to? A mere nonexclusive right to use the property certainly is not ownership.
So the ethically obvious argument for "because I paid to own X, I am entitled to the stream of income from X" comes out to being equivalent to "people who paid to own the stream of income from X are entitled to the stream of income from X", and if they paid get the right to own X according to all the requirements of the society but it afterwards gets asserted they aren't entitled to the stream of income from X, then they have been severely defrauded, they have been sold something which they didn't get, which IMHO is clearly unethical.
Georgism doesn't change that equation. The taxation reduces the net income from X thus reducing the price of X. You still get the anticipated income stream you paid for if your anticipations were correct.
The value of Georgism seems to be that it might be a better way to raise taxes and that it could discourage long-term land speculation. I'm still not buying the claim that it would reduce rents as opposed to increasing them.
If you are a giant megacorp with huge teams of sophisticated business analysts buying from another megacorp with huge teams of sophisticated analysts, then yes.
If you're a giant megacorp with huge teams of sophisticated analysts buying from a poor working family that can't afford their mortgage anymore or has to move within the next month to follow a new job or etc., then probably not.
Here's a decent intuition pump/fable: suppose two farmers, on two basically identical plots of land, with the same acreage, the same weather patterns, the same soil quality, and so on. They both farm in identical ways and have the same good and bad seasons and do the same work. They also have identical taxes, because the county assessor is very lazy and never comes by, and they don't read the news or watch tv. They both inherited their land, continuing an unbroken tradition of family farming that extends back to antiquity.
Then, both farmers hit a bad patch, and being connected by fate in this way, they both have to sell about ten acres to make ends meet that year. Farmer A sells for $4,000 an acre, making up for the year's shortfall, and continues his business with somewhat reduced circumstances. However, Farmer B discovers to his surprise that a giant development project had been ongoing down the road, an airport had been built, and Disney was building a new theme park a couple miles over, and buyers are offering a hundred times as much money as he expected. He decides to sell his entire farm for $400,000 an acre, is now a cash millionaire, and retires to the Bahamas.
Take a premise as given: either wealth is created, or it is found as natural resources. It doesn't just show up as mana from heaven. We know that Farmer B had the same natural resources as Farmer A; their farms were identical. So Farmer B's wealth did not reflect a better farm in that sense. Nor did Farmer B work harder than Farmer A; their improvements were identical, and the two applied their problem-solving, hard work, and intelligence in the same ways. So we ask the question: if Farmer B's new windfall was created, who created it? From whom did Farmer B receive his wealth, and did they have the right to decline this transfer? Was it 'fair' of him to take such wealth?
The issue I take with this scenario is that Farmer B is not being paid by "society" in some broad sense. He's being paid by some person or small group of people. The only sense in which the plots of land are identical is with regards to farming. Farmer B is now wealthy because farming is no longer the optimal use of that land - or, at least, somebody thinks so, and is willing to back up that belief with large amounts of cash. Neither airports nor theme parks are located arbitrarily, so presumably they had some reason to suppose this. And indeed, the fact that they're offering $400,000 an acre instead of, say, $5,500 would imply that there are many competing interests seeking to put that land to new uses.
To answer the questions: Farmer B received his wealth from the investors in whatever project is offering the cash. Farmer B's windfall was created by whatever those investors did to make money in the first place, and came to him because those investors thought it would be worth their while. Asking if they had the right to decline the transfer is a bit odd, since they're the ones who made the offer in the first place.
Is this fair? Yes. Firstly, Farmer B accepted only what he was willingly given by specific people. Those people will either gain or lose money in the end depending on the wisdom of their investment and management of the project. Hopefully, this involves the land being used more productively than before. Secondly, this scenario is not zero sum. Farmer A loses nothing here. He is paid what he would always have been paid. I suppose if he learns of this whole thing and is a pathologically envious person he may suffer emotional distress, but that's a him problem.
It's true that the work and improvements put into the farms are identical - which is irrelevant, seeing as every bit of work done by Farmer B and every improvement he made is about to be bulldozed. Land is not a token that entitles you to compensation proportional to your work ethic. It's a commodity, and like all commodities it can be put to a multitude of uses and is utterly subjective in value. I can put a huge amount of work and money and infrastructure into trying to turn a plot on the coast of Maine into an orange grove. I'll wind up a broke failure, because that's a profoundly unwise use for that land. The guy who buys it off me and makes millions farming oysters owes me nothing.
Once farmer A discovers that, how is his remaining land not also worth the new, higher price? Did Farmer B conicidentally just consume all the newly-generated demand?
As Eric says. Also, I wasn't assuming that the two plots are particularly close to one another- for purposes of the parable, it need not be the case that Farmer A and Farmer B live in the same area, which would lead to very different development potentials even if zoning etc. weren't a factor. You could also consider them two potential *futures* for the same farmer, if you like- one in which development occurs nearby, and one in which it does not.
So the your parable fails at the outset. You might as well have postulated that Farmer B was farming on top of a massive gold deposit.
IIRC natural resources are "land" in the Georgist sense, and it seems equally valid to ask if farmer B "deserves" his windfall for having the luck to buy a farm above a massive gold deposit that he knew nothing about.
The two plots are functionally identical for purposes of farming, but very different for purposes of development. A few possible explanations for the difference:
- The two plots are zoned differently, with Plot A zoned in a way that allows residential or commercial development, while Plot B only allows agricultural use.
- A can trivially be connected up to the local sewer system, while B would be prohibitively expensive to do so.
- A has a much better view than B.
- Existing road or transit layout make A a much easier commute into the nearest major downtown, despite both being equally convenient to the nearest agricultural produce logistical hub.
The argument is that the supply of land is constant, thus the tax cannot change the equilibrium price of land. For Georgism's narrow definition of land, it's a plausible argument. But housing is not land. (It occupies land, but is not land.) And the argument will not generalize to housing prices being insensitive to a land tax.
An alternative framing of this is that a tax on structures built on land disincentivizes building, maintaining, or improving those structures on the margins. Since few people outside
Let's say you own some farmland that generates a profit of $5k/year. You could build a house on the land and rent it out for $50k/year, but that would increase your property taxes by $10k. That's probably still worth it if your other expenses (including opportunity cost of capital) work out to $30k/year ($50k - $30k -$10k > $5k), but if your expenses are $40k/year you're better of just keeping it a farm. Rents would need to rise above $55k before it starts to make sense for you to build the house.
With a Georgist tax instead, your property taxes are the same whether you farm or build a house, so it's in your interests to build a house in a range of situations where a non-Georgist tax would make it unprofitable relative to farming.
That said, Georgist taxes could still reduce housing supply due to political economy factors, since NIMBY restrictions on development around you are likely to directly reduce your property taxes by limiting alternative land uses, giving you an additional incentive to vote and lobby for NIMBY policies.
Something I haven't seen mentioned in all the ACX discussions on Georgism (maybe it was mentioned and I missed it) is an alternative system proposed by Glen Weyl called Plural Property, or SALSA: https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-property/
The gist is that there would be a land tax (with "land" understood rather expansively, a la Henry George), but instead of government assessors of land's value, the owner of some land would be required to publicly proclaim a price at which they would be willing to sell their land at any time. Then two things happen:
1) They are taxed as a percentage of their own proclaimed price, maybe around 30% per year;
2) Anyone who is willing to buy at the proclaimed price may offer to do so at any time, and the owner is then legally obligated to sell to them at that price.
The idea is that if the tax rate is set correctly, the optimal strategy for a selfish land owner is proclaim their price honestly, that is, as what the land is actually worth to them; the price at which they are indifferent between getting the money and keeping the land. Weyl and his coauthors have game-theoretic proofs to this effect. This avoids the need in George's LVT scheme for a skilled and honest government assessment team, an element often attacked by critics of LVT.
I'm intrigued by both LVT and SALSA, and I'm not sure which would be better, but I thought I'd bring it up here so others can learn about it.
This conversation has come up in the Georgist threads before. You can probably find several long discussions of it. I'll try to share some concerns.
Imagine a scenario of a healthy residential neighborhood in a suburb of a large city. The residents all set their own taxes at a reasonable but affordable rate, and everyone is happy. A large developer decides to build [something big, maybe an amusement park], which would value the land at three times the value that the residents have put on their land. The developer buys the land for 1/3 what it would be valued if others knew, and kicks everyone off the land. All the other land in the area goes up appropriately afterwards, and the residents who are now landless also don't have enough money to buy anything else as replacements. They have to quit their jobs and move away, or become homeless.
This is just an extremely quick version of a process common to any system that structures Georgist governance as a tax based on value; if someone can't pay, there will be some consequences, and those consequences could leave them destitute.
Aside from the very reasonable desire not to sell at all, how does this stand up to the problem that honest prices are not independent? If I am happy with the house I live in, I would want to sell it for somewhat more than the amount at which I could buy an equivalent house: the extra is however much the inconvenience of moving is worth to me. If the owner of the equivalent house feels the same way, then our honest prices shoot off to infinity, while our optimal-strategy prices are bounded by our ability to pay taxes.
I'm reminded of the difference between a first-price auction and a second-price auction.
In a sealed-bid auction where the winner pays their bid, someone might strategically bid less than the item is worth to them because they're hoping to buy it cheaper than that.
In a "normal" auction, where people can see and respond to the bids of others, the winner only needs to bid 1 increment higher than the second-highest bidder. You can get the same outcome with sealed bids if you say that the winner only pays the second-highest bid (plus epsilon) instead of the value of their own bid, which incentivizes people to bid honestly, since lowering your bid won't lower what you pay (unless it causes you to lose).
The equivalent change to SALSA might be something like: Instead of setting your own price on your land, you just need to accept or reject offers that other people make to buy the land from you, and your taxes are based on the highest bid that you have rejected.
That way, you can't "accidentally" sell your land for a low amount because you were trying to get lower taxes or because you forgot to update your magic number, and you don't have to pay taxes on sentimental value or moving costs; only what *someone else* would actually pay for the land.
This change would also mean that if your land is very obscure or very specialized, then you might get super low taxes just because no one bothers to bid on it at all. I'm honestly not sure whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing.
(Obviously, you need a mechanism to ensure that if someone offers to buy your land for X, that offer is binding, and they really have to go through with it if you accept. Otherwise someone could maliciously raise your taxes by gradually bidding higher and higher until you try to accept, then back out.)
(Still doesn't seem to me like SALSA is accomplishing the same goal as LVT, with or without this change.)
They're both horrible, but SALSA is especially fucked up. Like most of my neighbors, I plan to live where I do now until I die, so I wouldn't sell my property at any price. If I would be forced to set a price, I'd set it as high as I could and I would end up with no discretionary income at all - paying all of it to stay in my home. It would still be worth it to me, but it would be pretty fucking far from ideal. Like paying protection money to a third party to (hopefully!) avoid having my life ruined by a (rational or not) corporation with a million times more resources than me deciding to buy my land and tear down my house to turn the property into a parking lot.
Of course, none of the above should matter to a good rationalist or utilitarian.... but you should consider the second-order effects as well - it not mattering to you makes me despise you.
Why wouldn't your misery matter to a good rationalist or utilitarian?
(Or do you mean you despise people who don't share your dream of living on the same land until they die?)
Seconded. Houses are not fungible because one of it is yours.
How does SALSA deal with improvements to the land? LVT is supposed to be based on the unimproved value of the land (i.e. excluding buildings and stuff that the owner built) so that you don't discourage people from making improvements, but you generally can't sell the land while keeping the improvements, so your sell price presumably needs to include both.
I think that's part of why SALSA's ideal tax rate is around 30% rather than 100%. Weyl goes into some depth comparing the LVT to SALSA in the SALSA chapter of his book Radical Markets. That chapter is worth reading if you want to know more.
That doesn't sound like it accomplishes the goal of LVT. Unclear how that's related to LVT except that it's a possible system of taxation.
I remember once coming across a wordpress blog from the early 10s where a guy reads books and posts his reactions chapter by chapter. I remember reading his series on The Lord of the Rings, and remember that for the last chapter of Fellowship, he included a bunch of photos of himself making faces while talking to the characters. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name or much else about it. It's a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Mark Oshiro, and the site is Mark Reads. He also has Mark Watches for TV show reactions episode by episode. Lots of hours of fun if you are a fan of the stuff he covers.
Thanks!
That one was great fun, I was particularly tickled by him starting off with "I don't know if I can get into this old book" (because it was a whopping FIFTY YEARS ago it was published) and then he got captured by what was going on. His guesses about "what will happen next" were so funny.
2 weeks ago in the open thread I posted about Trafalgar polling and what it means for the midterm Senate elections. Below is a list of my predictions based on the polls at the time:
JD Vance 49% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Mehmet Oz 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
H. Walker 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
A. Laxalt 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
B. Masters 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Ted Budd 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
R Johnson 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
T Smiley 46% in Trafalgar poll - loses
New Trafalgar polls have since been released for 6 of these races. Still now Florida or NH poll but seems pretty clear NH will be a Dem win in any case.
Here are the new numbers:
Smiley 46.5%(+0.2%) Sep 1-Sep 24
Laxalt 47.1%(+0.4%) Aug 18-Sep 20
Johnson 48.7%(+1.6%) Aug 25-Sep 19
Masters 45.4%(+1.2%) Aug 27-Sep 17
Mehmet 45.9%(+2.5%) Aug 18-Sep 15
Budd 46.6%(-1.0%) Jul 1-Sep 4
The Dem numbers typically change inverse to the R gain which is not unexpected. Sometimes they went down by a few points even as the R number didn't change. Trafalgarian Augury would expect this because the theory is that Trafalgar hits the R vote share dead on and fudges the Dem number to suit the narrative.
We are still waiting for new Vance/Walker polls. Expect them to come out later this week, prob before Sunday. No idea if we'll get NH or FL polls soon. Trafalgar polled NH before the R primary, but that was in Dec 2021. I'd expect a new NC poll soon since that is the oldest poll by a month in both original and recent poll time.
If Cahaly starts showing the R candidate 49+ that would be a bad sign for Dems. He said he'd have 4-5 more polls for each competitive race. As long as he continues to show most Republicans below 47% I'd expect him to get that right compared to the election even though many people think having WA poll similarly to GA or even PA is weird.
Why look at a single poll when you can just go to 538?
Trafalgar hits the R vote share in statewide races roughly 95% of the time. That's far superior to 538. Their D vote share and therefore overall margin are useless, though.
A Republican candidate averaging 47% in Trafalgar polls 45 or less days from the election loses 100% of the time.
Of course you can compare Trafalgarian Augury to the polling average. It helps you determine if there is gonna be a big polling miss. For instance looking at 538 or RCP for 2020 gave a very inflated idea of the result for Biden vs Trump. Trafalgarian Augury in contrast was incredibly accurate.
Trafalgar is predicting 53-55 Senate seats for Dems, pending a Florida poll. 538 is predicting 51. That's a very significant difference.
Depends how you aggregate, right? I'm seeing:
538 gives about 22.4% chance for 53-55, and just 15.3% for 51.
So you can interpret that as 538 also predicting 53-55 as more likely than 51.
538 predicts a roughly 22% chance for 53-55 yes. Although my prediction would get more specific if Trafalgar finally polled Florida. I'm predicting, pending a Florida poll, 5% 22, 5% 56+, 30% 53, 30% 54, 30% 55. If the Florida poll was a tossup like Ohio I'd shift it to 25-40-25. So a significantly smaller prediction range than 538.
538 is actually an anomaly as well. RCP leans far harder for Rs as I believe does Cook.
538's polls+fundamentals and pure polling models are both around 30% for 53-55 because expert race ratings are much more R friendly. 90% vs 30% in the 53-55 is pretty significant still. I do give Nate some credit compared to "experts" like Cook and Sabato.
The name is just for fun. No need to be so serious. But yes I posted it here specifically so I would be committed. Otherwise I could just think it in my head, not tell anyone, and forget about it if I was wrong.
I'd max out this bet on PI if I had the money.
We're sufficiently past the Picketty Wars that maybe there's a summary of them out there? I was wondering about r > g. My understanding is that there was lots of criticism of Picketty from various angles, but doesn't it seem pretty trivially true that we do in fact think that r > g? And if that continues in the long run, it implies that capital has dominance over other forms of getting money? Is that broadly accepted and it's like the specific details and the modes of it that are contested, or do some people think that actually r <= g, at least in the long run?
I think r > g is the wrong comparison even for the analysis even for what Picketty was trying to do (arguing that the total value of land and financial assets as a multiple of GDP substantially increases over time), since simply comparing r to g in this context implicitly assumes that capital owners never spend, donate, or squander any of their money, or at least spend so little that it can reasonably be rounded down to zero to simplify the model.
The real comparison should be R - C <=> G, where C is consumption by owners of capital net of any income they derive from sources other than capital (probably mostly returns on their labor), broadly defined so as to encompass things like philanthropy, political advocacy, and money-losing vanity projects. Here, I don't think it's clear at all that R - C > G on a long-term consistent basis.
As a quick sanity check, I looked up numbers for total US financial assets in private hands as a multiple of GDP. It looks like it was bouncing around between 3x and 4x between 1950 when the data starts and an inflection point in the late 90s, since when it has climbed to a peak of around 6x late last year with some fairly substantial ups and downs in that period. Which tells me that R - C + I > G for the past 25 years or so, but R - C + I ~= G for the previous ~50 years, where I is investment in financial assets funded by wages and other sources other than reinvested returns on capital. And the contributions of I need to be analyzed, since "capital asset values are growing because upper-middle-class wage-earners are saving and investing a substantial and growing portion of their incomes" would be a very different story with different policy implications than the one Picketty seems to have been telling.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=dGy
After poking a little more, I found a couple of data series that seem to approximate what I mean by I - C (net investment) and R (return on existing investment). Red line is net investment (my I - C) as a percentage of existing capital assets in private hands. Blue line is returns on existing capital in private hands (Picketty's R) as a percentage of existing capital assets in private hands. Green line is percent change in nominal GDP. All percentages are quarterly (I tried to make it annual, but the FRED UI required all input data series for a graph line to have the same aggregation method if using a frequency less than the raw data, which doesn't work here because changes should be summed while levels should be averaged).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Uc84
Eyeballing the graph, it looks like pre-1990s R < G with a net positive I - C roughly making up the difference, while post-1990s R ~= G with a smaller but still net positive I - C driving R - C + I > G.
N.b. these data series represent all marketable household assets (financial assets, real estate, and consumer durables) net of household debts, not just financial assets.
No luck so far in finding data series that disentable I and C from one another.
It is quite reasonable to look at historical data to extrapolate a relationship into the future. It is also usually a good idea to try to look at a series with the longest history - and US data at FRED are quite often some of the best. However, there is a class of questions where these reasonable heuristics introduce a severe selection bias - and, unfortunately, this question seems to be one of them. The problem is that the US right now being the country with the best kept and longest capital return statistics is quite correlated with the US right now being the country after a period of a relatively high return on capital: there are many other countries and periods where the return on capital was pretty disastrous but these countries do not have nice long reliable statistical data for exactly this reason.
For example, if you looked at the 10 biggest stock markets in 1900 and tried to see what is the worst case drawdown on a broad stock market index over the next 120 years, you would have found one market (Russia) with the drawdown of exactly -100% and two markets with drawdowns of -99.5% (Germany and Argentina.) Neither of these markets would be your choice today for a market with the longest reliable stock market history.
If so, that's even worse news for Picketty's thesis, since it's an argument that R(US) for the period 1947-2022 is if anything a substantial overestimate of what we can expect R(World) in coming decades.
That's an interesting and useful comment.
It seems like if r > g, persistently, but r - c ~= g, persistently, then we should assume that there is a mechanical reason why c trends towards a value of r - g. Has anyone proposed such a mechanism?
In general, it shouldn't be surprising that people tend to spend more money when they have higher net worths, as modeled by wealth elasticity of demand effects, but that alone doesn't suggest C will necessarily trend towards R - G. I actually would have expected it to be a bit less than R - Inflation, since spending tends to track income and for someone living off invested assets, R - Inflation is their de facto income, and people with substantial assets are self-selected to be people who tend to live at least a bit below their means.
You can also think in terms of two major classes of capital owners: middle-to-professional-class households with savings and the mega-rich. The former will likely have most of their assets as a mix of primary residence equity and retirement savings, and per FRED data household real estate net of mortgages plus retirement assets are a little less than half of total private net worth. Over the course of a lifetime, I'd expect most of a given household's assets to get spent down since these assets are being saved for the purposes of funding future consumption.
The mega-rich are probably less constrained to spend down their assets, but even so, I'd still expect an arc of building up and spending down assets for any given rich family. The conventional wisdom I've heard seems to be that mega-rich fortunes tend to last about three generations (sometimes more, sometimes less) before the heirs have spent down their shares of the fortune to the point that they fade into the upper middle class. This may be getting extended, though, as the financial industry has been in recent decades offering more sophisticated services for managing generational wealth and preserving the principal against the effects of prodigal or otherwise financially incontinent heirs.
You need to postulate some form of limits, other wise you end up with the reduction ad absurdum of either capital taking the whole national income, or the opposite case where capital has a<=0 profit rate but somehow there's still investment driving growth.
Marxists say the rate of profit will tend to fall as capital accumulates, until a point where the returns on new investments just aren't worth the immediate consumption capitalists could be engaged in; you won't get further growth under a capitalist system beyond that point.
It's what Marx meant by the "contradictions" of capitalism. At the time Trotsky claimed it had happened in the 30s, but it seemed like WW2 restored growth somehow. Then growth stopped again in the 70s and seems like it was restored by the higher profit rates under Neoliberalism. I kinda think the falling rate of profit might explain the current low growth rate, 0% for a decade in the UK, which puts us in an awkward position if it really does take a war, or a falling share of national income for labour, to restore capitals' profitability.
I know Marx said this, but which contemporary Marxists say this? I was under the impression that the notion that Marx's idea about the falling rate of profit wasn't something contemporary Marxists place much emphasis on, either because it didn't seem to hold up very well empirically, or because "tend to fall" is too vague to be useful (and thus leaves Marxism too open to attack from both honest and dishonest critics).
If there are sophisticated contemporary Marxists who think the falling rate of profit is still a useful idea that is empirically plausible given the economic data of the last century or so, I'd be interested to know who they are, especially if their arguments are available in relatively straightforward presentations.
Super short article on a slightly modified FRP theory that also accounts for growth in the labour supply:
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/short-note-on-the-rate-of-profit/
He's covered the same thing in more detail elsewhere. There's also a chapter on this in the sequel to "Laws of Chaos".
That profits should fall as capital is built up just seems like a very plausible thesis on its face to me, surely capital has a downward sloping supply (edit: should be demand/upward sloping supply) curve. But yeah, it will only be a tendency as of course other factors affect profits (capital share of income etc.) For that reason, it's hard to assert it's been empirically verified, but overall I'd say the evidence corroborates. So I think it's reasonable to be moderately confident in FRP theory.
That belief of Marx's seems to imply technological stagnation and a finite supply of useful investments. That seems to describe the premodern world pretty well, in which practically the only investments were land, livestock, and slaves/serfs. Though of course in those days, investing in land/livestock/slaves had to compete with investing in an army to seize those things (and defend one's existing assets). But if we could somehow imagine a Middle Ages in which utter peace and rule of law reigned, it would seem the natural result would be absurdly high land prices and absurdly low cap rates, as Marx suggests.
As it stands, if we hit technological stagnation and a declining global labor force, then maybe something like that will prevail again: too much capital chasing too few useful investments.
But partly what happens with technology is that, while incremental productivity improvements might be harder/costlier to squeeze out, they benefit a larger economy, which means I can potentially extract more value for them from customers. This effect keeps shifting the demand curve for capital rightward.
Thanks for the recommendations!
r > g does not have any major implications for inequality. Piketty made that claim, but never made a coherent argument. In the simple Solow growth model, capital receives a constant share of income regardless of the level of interest rates relative to GDP growth. Anyway, suppose g = 2%, and r = 5%. Wages grow 2% per year, and the interest rate is 5%. So what? Workers will presumably save some of their income at 5%. If you make some additional assumptions about savings of workers relative to owners of capital, then r vs. g might become relevant.
I don't really care if it has implications for inequality, but we all surely agree that if r > g (like, say, r is 4% and g is 1%, which seems roughly empirically correct right now) then investment takes a steadily increasing share of the growth of the economy, and eventually at the limit state would be 100% of the economy (which obviously wouldn't actually occur), right?
Like, just to put a clear point on it, 1.04 ^ 50 is a bit over 7x, 1.01 ^ 50 is about 1.6x. If investments grow 7x in the time it takes for the economy to increase by a little over half, then that's a big deal.
So what is the claim? That investment return will (in the relatively near turn) drop down to match overall economic growth? That economic growth is somehow understated in a way that investment income is not?
Here's what Greg Mankiw has to say:
"The first thing to say about Piketty’s logic is that it will seem strange to any economist trained in the neoclassical theory of economic growth. The condition
r > g should be familiar. In the textbook Solow growth model, it arrives naturally as a steady-state condition as long as the economy does not save so much as to push the capital stock beyond the Golden Rule level (Phelps 1961). In this model, r > g is not a problem, but r < g could be. If the rate of return is less than the growth rate, the economy has accumulated an excessive amount of capital. In this dynamically inefficient situation, all generations can be made better off by reducing the economy’s saving rate. From this perspective, we should be reassured that we live in a world in which r > g because it means we have not left any dynamic Pareto improvements unexploited."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/yes_r_g_so_what.pdf
I think the claim is that we should consider the aggregate price of capital stocks separately from the income accruing to capital holders. The two can be decoupled in a falling-interest-rate environment because falling interest rates tautologically mean increases in the cost of a given amount of risk-adjusted passive income.
So I believe the argument is that standard economic theory gives us a prior that growth of capital income tracks GDP growth fairly closely unless there's some good reason for capital-holders' share of overall income to increase or decrease, so if R > G, then our default assumption should be (in the absence of direct evidence for either a shift in the distribution of income between capital and labor or at least reason to expect such a shift) that excess R simple represents a secular decline in interest rates (which has empirically been observed over a period of centuries at least in Anglo-American markets, per Clark's "A Farewell to Alms").
Portfolio theory and meta-ethics:
Let's suppose you strongly believe that your favourite stock will go up, by a lot. Unless you're a very naive investor, you don't invest your whole net worth in it, because you understand that you might be wrong. Instead you put together a sensible-looking portfolio which includes an overweighting of your favourite stock along with a bunch of other assets.
Since ethicists are apparently less sophisticated than finance types, they don't do this. Instead they pick their favourite ethical and value system, assume it to be correct with 100% confidence, and follow it all the way through to some diverging-tails logical conclusion which usually winds up with either killing everybody or tiling the universe with simulated Singapores.
Meta-ethics seems like the antidote to this; instead of assuming one ethical system is one hundred percent right you can have a portfolio of ethical systems with various different weightings. This ought to discourage you from doing things which only appear sensible in one ethical system (tiling the universe with anything) while encouraging the things that all sensible ethical systems agree on (being nice to people and not stealing)
My question is: has there ever been any work to formalise this sort of idea into some kind of a portfolio theory of meta-ethics?
I'm very much anti-EA, but one thing I respect about Will MacAskill is that he says that he doesn't want to commit 100% to any ethical position, even some of the most ingrained liberal ethical beliefs, because they may be wrong in ways that aren't obvious today but may become so in the future, analogous to the ancient greeks debating ethics while happily owning slaves.
Unfortunately, this seems to be mostly uni-directional, in that I don't think he imagines it possible that one day we will view [insert reviled "far-right" belief here] as being correct. But still, this humility extends to the point where he isn't even willing to completely deny the possibility that there is ethical value to somebody's desires being satisfied long after they're dead (e.g. if aristotle wanted to become known around the world as being a great and wise philosopher, which happened many years after he was around to experience this being realized), which is one of those things that just seems so slam dunk obviously false, so hats off to him there.
It’s very easy to diversify investments; money is ‘liquid’ and you can pour it into buckets in a great many ways.
Making decisions - and updating people around you about the decisions you make - is more particular and path-dependent. How do you decide when to be, say, a utilitarian or a consequentialist? Will you have a rotation? Will your friends figure out your rotation and then auction off the more favorable spots in line to interact with you? Or will they be so annoyed that they just do something else rather than figure out this self-induced multiple-personality disorder?
It isn't a system I myself subscribe to, but consider an ensemble model: Try to figure out what an utilitarian would do, what a deontologist would do, what a naive folk-Christian would think what Jesus would do, etc, and try to figure action that would have consensus agreement. If no consensus, you'd have to figure out a rule (choose by majority vote? choose an action that results in average least violation of all ethical theories considered?)
Most people seem to use a special variety of ensemble model: outsource to the computation to other independent ethical processing units or, mostly copy what the other people are doing and deviate only in face of strong reason to do otherwise.
I don't know how you'd chose, but the ensemble method at least has the advantage of opening your mind to more possibilities.
I just don't know what method of choosing a consensus you could use that wouldn't just be kicking the can down the road. "The ethical action is whatever the majority of people think is right" and "The ethical action is the action that results in average least violation (as judged by me) of all ethical theories considered (which is a list I have subjectively decided)" are both ethical theories in and of themselves.
Consensus-or-expert with exceptions is very unlike investing.
Investing is a single pot of money distributed across parallel bets. How are you parallelizing a single person’s ethics?
I think a better analogy would be if that expert secretly fed people different ethical systems, and watched the outcome. We’d probably regard that as dubiously unethical, at best!
>Consensus-or-expert with exceptions is very unlike investing.
That depends on the (verbal description of) the abstraction one chooses.
Suppose I need to make an ethical decision. True, making a single isolated yes/no decision is quite like a single decision to buy one share or not, and not very amenable to portfolio-building.
But most decisions are not binary! Like, how much time I should use writing internet comments instead of calling my parents or cleaning my house or volunteer at a soup kitchen or working a 2nd job to donate to EA causes? And when I have done that and I go shopping, which products should I buy? (Buy only vegan-compatible products? Only fair trade? Order as much insect protein products as possible to generate more supply of insect and more experienced insect utilitons?) Here is actually becomes more possible to try to average out the ensemble opinion (If I think it is 50% probable that veganism is ethically necessary choice, maybe I should become 50% vegan?)
But I admit with the answer above I am cheating a little, because it is not what I was thinking about while writing my previous reply. By "consensus", I intended to gesture towards intuition that any single isolated ethics problem is seldom yes/no binary question, as any course of action is made several smaller decisions.
Suppose I find myself in a silly Kantian thought experiment: A madman who wants to kill my friend visits me and asks about my friend's whereabouts. Naive Kantian categorical imperative would direct that as lying is verboten, I should not lie but tell the truth. Most utilitarian frameworks would recommend to do some sort utility calculus for both "truth" and "lie" and then answer accordingly.
However, in any realistic situation like that there are actually several more options than binary yes/no decision "tell the truth or not". I could start telling true things totally unrelated to my friends location and stall for time; or I could tell him the truth and alert the constabulary immediately afterwards; or I could say and do many other things. I assume any particular series of utterances and actions is more compatible with one ethical theory than other, measurable with some "loss function", then in principle one could search for a series of smaller actions that minimizes average loss across all ethical theories under consideration.
And that is not dissimilar how one should choose between different portfolios recommended by different investment strategies under consideration.
How is any of that like dividing a pot of money across multiple, parallel bets?
In your first example you seem to be assuming a moral framework (EA and the assumptions of altruism more broadly) and worrying about balancing the implementation. That is sort of like investing, but largely unlike the original proposal because you’ve already chosen the framework with all of its assumptions.
In your next example, you weigh categorical imperative of not lying against your friend’s life - without stating if that’s a clashing imperative (all within Kant’s tent) or a utilitarian concern (where you’re trying to have both completely, to have narrowly answered the question with Exact Words but still having your friend not die). Investing would be wonderful if you could have your cake and eat it too.
I think a better exploration of the original idea would be “I have these dueling interests; *ten* of my friends are threatened in that way, do I serve interest one 3/10 of the times and interest two 7/10? 4 and 6? Which friends do I gamble on?
I think your comment about balancing your time distribution comes the closest to implementing the original idea … but a full commitment to it would be very silly. On Monday you’re an altruist and send all your money to $cause_of_the_week, but on Tuesday you’re a Stoic, and you accept that you often can’t change the world, but on Wednesday you manipulate the world in your favor as a Machiavellian? How can you hold those simultaneously in some percentages?
Classical liberalism aims at something like that - allowing a wide variety of perspectives and lifestyles, even if some of them seem harmful. Which is one of the reasons its current retreat from the public sphere is a tragedy.
For a more extreme case, consider Scott's Archipelago ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ ).
I think you're failing to distinguish between speculation and action here.
The universe in fact hasn't been tiled with simulated Singapores, and we're not all dead; this is at least partly because, while ethicists pursue *thought experiments* to very extreme ends, they do in fact tend to hedge towards common sense and caution in actual application.
I don't think this is very different from wallstreet; only a foolish investor would put their entire portfolio in a single stock, but you can certainly find plenty people talking about *what could happen if they did* in glowing and excited terms.
Ethicists aren't actually found to be particularly ethical in studies, so they do in fact do the thing you suggest in the original example of a cautious investor.
Are we talking just Pascal's wager, or something like "I believe there's a 90% chance slavery is evil and a 10% chance it's good?" (It seems only necessary to construct a meta-ethics if your various ethics are in conflict, otherwise you could just subscribe to the union, e.g. I'll celebrate the resurrection of Christ and also honor Eostre by giving the kids marshmallow bunnies.)
Bostrom's moral parlieament: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
In general, there's been a lot of work on moral uncertainty and the game theory of negotiations between different moral outlooks. I think the AI alignment community has some good stuff on this, and a place to start might be to look at comparing utility functions. Or perhaps Luke melhauser's no nonsense meta-ethics. Of course, that's a portfolio of utility functions which you might not like. But given that you're talking about a portfolio of values and weighting different policies and beliefs as weights, I'm guessing you might be amenable to that perspective.
Not really related, but I can't resist to link to https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/
Diversifying one's portfolio is wise due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. When the situation is different, investors behave accordingly, e.g. Fedex going to Vegas.
The marginal utility of utility is constant by definition so you shouldn't accept a lower expected value in return for lower variance.
Nit: Not necessarily true if the "game" is iterated - declining marginal utility is then not required to justify diversification - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion. Ethics isn't iterated, though (you can't reinvest your goodness).
It's funny I was like "hey I heard an argument like this 4 or 5 years ago on a podcast." I looked it up and Will MacAskill was the guest.
Rationally Speaking
Sooo there's been a lot more talk of nuclear war risk in the past couple weeks. how worried should we be? looking for all kinds of input here
I'm sure this isn't what you mean, but literally you "shouldn't" be worried about it - it won't do you any good, that is unless you live anywhere close to Ukraine, but your existing levels of worry this year are probably sufficient to motivate any kind of beneficial behavior that is required.
There are some really bargain-bin options that most people haven't done yet ("read ready.gov/nuclear-explosion", "buy the 10L water bottle"); enough worry to actually do those is probably productive.
(I've also chosen to not live in a major city, but there's a difference between living in the country full-time and *evacuating* there in a crisis; evacuating only makes sense if the risk in the near future is much higher than baseline, which it's currently not, so I wouldn't advise evacuation at the moment.)
The main situation where a nuclear exchange is likely is if a nuclear-armed nation is shooting at large chunks of the territory of another nuclear-armed nation, as this raises the spectre of alpha strike. Ukraine has no ability to alpha-strike the Russian deterrent, so unless there's an actual reason to use the Russian deterrent (i.e. Ukraine invades Russia with some degree of success) it's not going to get used (and even if that does happen, Russia has the cushion to use one or a few nukes without having to immediately go all-out, and with prior warning to NATO; note that if Ukraine invades Russia proper and gets somewhere, that's an actual legit reason to use nukes, so NATO would probably let it go at that).
So basically, as long as the nuclear powers of NATO don't actually come in militarily in Ukraine (or give nuclear IRBMs/ICBMs to Ukraine, but lolno that would be dumb and also illegal), the chance of WWIII is pretty low. Said nuclear powers know this, of course, so I would strongly expect them not to come in. If they *do* for some God-forsaken reason, that's panic time (it's not *quite* as bad a situation as hot war over Taiwan would be, because the Russian deterrent is harder to take out than the Chinese one which gives both sides more room to breathe, but ">30% large-scale nuclear exchange within 3 months" still sounds about right to me).
Very slightly increased, but from a very low baseline.
Putin has shown that he is rational, shrewd, and cares very much for his own personal betterment. His goals in going to Ukraine show very clearly a materialist desire for growing his empire. He knows that using nuclear weapons will have at least one, and maybe more, of the following effects:
1. Nuclear retaliation (he loses)
2. Conventional war escalation (he loses)
3. Assassination (he loses)
4. Ostracization from the international community - personally and Russia (he loses)
What Putin gains is all from *threatening* to use nuclear weapons. He's counting on the total aversion that the rest of us feel about their use to do two things:
1. Maybe (unlikely) the West will stop supplying Ukraine with weapons
2. A failsafe to keep Ukraine in check and prop himself up - the West will not want to push Putin to the point where he *personally* loses out, and therefore feels no regret for using nukes. If he would die or lose everything otherwise, the chances of him using them goes way up. Alternately, if he's no longer in power, someone else might take the reins and be much more willing to use them up front. The West keeps Ukraine from invading Russia.
Rational, maybe. Not shrewd enough to realize what bad shape his military was it.
I think he had a sense of it, but thought Ukraine's military was far worse. He had good reason to think that, after how easily he got what he wanted in 2014. Ukraine learned a lesson there and prepared over the next 8 years for a better matchup. Almost all analysts thought Russia would win easily, so Putin wasn't the only one who was wrong there.
Cynically, you should be most worried about whatever the talk of nuclear war is designed to distract you from.
That would be... that Russia is proving weaker than expected at conventional warfare.
That only makes sense if you think Russia is deliberately trying to make us talk about nuclear warfare. And that seems bizarre considering that nukes here are being considered something that must be "resorted" to i.e. they reinforce the idea that Russia is struggling. Russia may well imply the use of nukes to scare off anyone seeking to help Ukraine, but not to distract us from their failures.
If the general public were the primary intended audience for talk of nuclear war, I'd expect we'd hear more of it.
LW is doing a "Petrov Day" today, where anyone above a certain, decreasing Karma threshold can "launch the nukes" and take down the site for the day. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KTEciTeFwL2tTujZk/lw-petrov-day-2022-monday-9-26 - this might be a dead link depending on when you click it)
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But I'm more interested in the prediction market - https://manifold.markets/Multicore/will-less-wrongs-big-red-button-be - which is managing to hit a lot of the "prediction market quirks".
Like clearly this is an "action market" where a significant chunk of the predictors of the market can directly control the outcome - someone with an existing LW account can predict YES and then go make that happen.
Interestingly, the reaction seems to have been for people who don't want the site taken down to immediately buy as much YES (i.e. the site goes down) as possible to try to take the profit motive off the table. (Or more cynically to get the potential profit themselves)
It seems like there might be a real-world analogue to this: if there were a real-money "Bezos is assassinated" market, they (or their family and friends, or generally, people who don't want them assassinated) might buy a bunch of "YES" shares to prevent the profit motive. Which would in effect make the prediction some interesting combination of life-insurance and protection racket.
Granted, in that case, the "real" probability is much lower - the site going down is a fairly likely event, while an assassination is a fairly unlikely event - so it would be much harder to significantly move the prediction. (The Bezos family and friends would essentially have to out-spend the entire rest of the market to keep the profit motive off-the-table)
But it does seem like this sort of "strategic predicting" can be a meaningful effect on the stated probability. "Predict things I don't want to happen so that it's a win-win if they do happen" seems like a real force in a prediction market, more so than in a financial market: in a financial market, I'm generally hedging against other financial bets, so my hedge and other positions to some degree "cancel out", rather than hedging against "real-world" outcomes which don't reflect in the prediction market at all.
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The *other* interesting twist is that the site *did* go down due to a programming error, leading to a debate that essentially boils down to how literally the prediction market should be interpreted. There's a minimum (decreasing) Karma threshold, and a programming error allowed a 0 Karma user to take the site down.
So in a literal sense, "will the button be used to take down the site" definitely happened, so the market would resolve YES. But if you interpreted the market as "Will the button be used to take down the site... per the stated rules for the event", the answer is (currently still) NO.
Regardless of which way you think this should go (assuming someone doesn't make this debate a moot point soon), I think the general take-away here is that there's a "Loophole Constant" with prediction markets, like a Lizardman Constant - if you see a 5% prediction of something, you don't know if that's a real 5% prediction or a "1% prediction + 4% prediction that someone finds a loophole causing this to resolve as YES".
I've been saying for some time that one of the reasons I don't make bets is that I'm not perfect at phrasing bets without loopholes. Phrasing a bet without a loophole is like trying to write a computer program that runs correctly the first time you try it. You might, but don't count on it. Having the *prediction* be affected by loopholes is just an extension of this.
I don't know LW that well, but I reckon it's got quite a few users, some of whom would think it was quite fun to be the person to press the button. If I were to put a probability on it I'd probably go 90% or so just based on that.
Obviously I could be wrong - like I said I don't know LW well - but you shouldn't rule out the possibility that the high percentage for Yes is an honest collective estimate of the probability, and nothing to do with the fact it's an action market.
I can't see buying yes on your own assination market working.
The point of the market is that people who move it closer to reality are rewarded and to bias the result you have to out spend everyone who is willing to correct it.
The more obvious Bezos is artificially keeping his assination at 99% yes the more lucrative and risk free it is to correct him.
Oh, I agree the real probability is quite high, too. Like I said "the site going down is a fairly likely event". I'm not assuming the probability is high because people are buying strategically, I'm assuming people are buying strategically because people are posting in the comments saying "I'm buying strategically to remove the profit for people to crash the site".
Haha, fair enough then! Sorry if I didn't read it properly. You're certainly right that there are some fun dynamics at play.
I've heard that the recent Monkeypox outbreak is primarily affecting sexually active gay men. *But*, I've also heard that it's harder to get tested for it if you aren't a sexually active gay man because it spreads through prolonged skin contact and so those who aren't sexually active, gay, or men are less likely to have it. It feels like there's potential there for sampling bias. All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group.
Have there been any write-ups on this? Am I missing something that makes this a negligible issue?
It doesn't matter if monkeypox "breaks out" of the highly promiscuous MSM subgroup, unless it then breaks *in* to some other population with an effective R > 1. Otherwise, it just gives you a couple of anomalous cases and doesn't go anywhere.
The R0 for monkeypox in the general population of a nation with modern Western health and hygiene standards is <<1. This disease really, really sucks at spreading among otherwise-healthy humans (which is probably why it's called "monkeypox" and not "humanpox"). It's not clear that there is any significant subpopulation, other than highly promiscuous MSM, that can spread monkeypox at R > 1, and if there is it is probably small and isolated and not likely to intersect with your "one bisexual guy".
"All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group."
From what I understand, they are including these in the whole "men who have sex with men" category, so whether you think of yourself as gay, bi, or 'look, sometimes I just like to have my dick sucked by a cute twink but I'm straight', then you're in the basket.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/index.html
Some fun facts'n'figures and look, they even have a graph!
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/demographics.html
Within the demographics, they very carefully don't report by sexual orientation, but since the figures show it's MOSTLY MEN so far, I think we can make a wild guess here as to who is zooming who:
Ages go from "0 to 5" (11 in this age range, so there have been reports of children being infected) up to "76+" and figures break down as follows:
Men - 18,908 cases
Women - 434 cases
Transgender women - 140 cases
Transgender men - 48 cases
Another sex/gender - 152 cases
It depends on what you mean here. In the sense that we might be somewhat undercounting the total case number due to sampling bias, sure. The is analogous to saying the COVID case numbers are undercounted because low and asymptomatic people don't test.
But if you're suggesting that the claim "the Monkeypox outbreak is primarily affecting sexually active gay men" is not true, due to "sampling bias", I think that's very unlikely to be the case. California reported 2% of the cases among heterosexuals - this seems well beyond the realm of plausible sampling bias.
> All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group
My guess would be that the sluttiest subsection of the heterosexual population is much less slutty than the sluttiest subsection of the homosexual population, meaning that the disease has an R0 < 1 in the straight population.
I wonder is this isn't fully true, but is maybe true enough? Like, maybe if you landed monkeypox in a bi burner right before Burning Man, you might see heterosexual escape, but barring something along those lines it'll stay in the gay club scene.
Which is quibbling of course. Your larger point stands.
Yeah, that's probably valid overall, but seems likely R0>1 for the most promiscuous subsection of the straight world, so there could be rapid spread in this subgroup, with some limited spread among straights with fewer sexual partners.
I think you misunderstand the gap between the promiscuous rate of MSM and MSW. The 'most promiscuous subsection' of the straight world is still less so than the MSM average. And as a result, the circles of spread are much lower.
Actually, I think you misunderstood me. I did not say that the most promiscuous MSW's have as many partners as the most promiscuous MSM's. I said the former probably have enough partners for R0 to be >1. And agreed that circles of spread would be lower. That's what I meant by rapid spread in most promiscuous subgroup, some limited spread to straights with fewer partners.
>All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group.
Probably, monkeypox isn't too contagious, and heterosexuals, aren't, er, promiscuous? enough to keep the spread up. And since it's fairly noticable, people get medical attention before spreading it any more.
About it being fairly noticeable: I read somewhere reliable, I believe it was some research posted on medical twitter, that testing of a bunch of gay men who'd had lots of recent partners turned up some asymptomatic Monkeypox-positive guys -- it was maybe something like 10% of the guys. So it's not guaranteed that people who have it will get treatment. Also, if health providers are being stingy with who they test I can imagine that a straight woman with no symptoms would have a hard time getting tested.
If it were breaking out into the general population to a significant degree, at least some fraction of people would have symptoms bad enough to bring the matter to the attention of epidemiologists. It's not as if they aren't looking.
Yeah, true. I just added that note about 10% or so of infected people being asymptomatic because it seems better to know that than not to know when thinking about monkeypox management. But if there were much monkeypox in the general population then something like 90% of infected straights & MSM's who don't have many partners would have symptoms, & we'd know it it had moved out into lower-risk groups.
It turns out that being bisexual does not in fact double your chances of finding a date.
There's also the embedded assumption that all forms of sex are equally good at spreading every type of disease. I don't have any data and won't speculate, but we could easily imagine that penis-in-anus sex and monkeypox somehow get along much better than any other act/disease pairing.
Anal sex has a significantly higher rate of numerous types of infections. This has a lot to do with anal tearing and the spread of blood, but it's also just (clinically speaking) a much dirtier sexual act.
It's not the sexual acts as such that conduce to the spread, it's the skin-to-skin contact with infected people. And since sex generally involves skin-to-skin contact, this is not something that can be avoided by using condoms. And since allegedly 'men who have sex with men' tend to have more partners (let's festoon this with a ton of qualifiers to avoid accusations of homophobia and stigmatising gay men), then they have more skin-to-skin contact and one infected guy can infect a lot of casual partners.
Thanks, just published this argument that most people are underestimating the likelihood that instrumental convergence implies rough alignment:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xJ2ifnbN5PtJxtnsy/you-are-underestimating-the-likelihood-that-convergent
I think it's probably easier for the AI to build a Life 2.0 thing de novo that exists solely to provide a backup for the AI than it is for the AI to modify humans to be more effective. I think we passed the "building a new one is easier than modifying what we've got" threshold for living things a while ago.
EDIT: I think it's probably true in the short-run that some amount of (brainwashed) humans would be useful to keep around, but that ends inside a decade.
EDIT2:
>I believe that, if convergent instrumental subgoals don't imply alignment, that the original odds given are probably too low. I simply don't believe that the alignment problem is solvable.
There are alternatives that are neither alignment nor doom, i.e. "we realise neural-net alignment is impossible and stop before building an X-AI"; depending on how you rule "AGI is developed" (technical capability vs. instantiation, also how you define AGI) a good chunk of mass on "AGI developed but no X" is fair.
Scott's mentioned several times how much of a problem high time preference/akrasia/impatience is in peoples lives and that he suffers from it himself, and this is definitely a major issue in my own life, I think he even joked some one with perfect self control would end up as world emperor or something, which I totally can believe.
I can't help feeling Scott has achieved way more than most people ever will, e.g.. this blog, working 100hour medical internships etc. He kinda strikes me as someone with exceptionally low time preference.
Are there any posts where he discusses this stuff/does anyone think he might have achieved those things but still have high time preference somehow?
Doesn't Naval Ravikant say something about this, and has a heuristic of do-whichever-thing-seems-harder in order to avoid this discounting? I believe Scott quoted this somewhere, but I may have the attribution entirely wrong.
“ And when I tried to analyzed my certainty that – even despite the whole multiple intelligences thing – I couldn’t possibly be as good as them, it boiled down to something like this: they were talented at hard things, but I was only talented at easy things.
It took me about ten years to figure out the flaw in this argument, by the way.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/
“ On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.
“But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/
“I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.”
“And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?”
“And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me.
“Just as drugs mysteriously find their own non-fungible money, enjoyable activities mysteriously find their own non-fungible time. If I had to explain it, I’d say the resource bottleneck isn’t time but energy/willpower, and that these look similar because working hard saps energy/willpower and relaxing for a while restores it, so when I have less time I also have less energy/willpower. But some things don’t require energy/willpower and so are essentially free.“
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/25/apologia-pro-vita-sua/
AT some level, I think high time presence only makes sense if you don't trust the future to work out.
Bitcoiners talk, over and over, about "lower time preference." Believing bitcoin will go up long term really did help me.
The more bitcoin helped me with a low time preference, the more I realized that lowering my time preference further would be instrumental to feeling better in life. It's not a stretch to say that bitcoin made me consider faith seriously, by showing me the power of consistently having faith in the future, thus lowering my time preference and anxiety.
Say you have a child who's among the youngest for their class, i.e. they're born in December, almost January. Are the disadvantages acute enough to warrant holding back a year (e.g. grading by teachers, social life), or conversely, are they in an advantageous position? Or is it a wash? What about a negative stigma?
It very much depends on the individual kid. My son's a senior in high school this year, and has always been among the youngest (often the youngest boy) in his class. We pondered a long while over whether to redshirt him or send him to kindergarten when he had just turned 5 - redshirting was super common where we lived. But he was bright, mature for his age, sociable, and physically self-confident, so we figured he probably wouldn't have too many problems being the youngest. And it worked out fine: he remains bright, mature, etc. and his K-12 career has been a success so far - he's looking at some good colleges. But if he'd been less mature, with a more typical intellect, unsociable, and/or frail we would've kept him out another year.
That will depend a lot on the kid. Unfortunately, you may not know all of the relevant metrics until several years too late to make this decision. Luckily it's probably not nearly as much of a concern as you may be lead to believe.
I was born a few days prior to the cutoff, and started Kindergarten about as soon as I turned five. I did great in school, and had few problems. Two of my kids were born just after the cutoff, and turned six just after starting school. They are also doing just fine (though the younger one often gets bored at school and feels that class doesn't cover enough).
For academics, you probably want to push ahead. For sports, you would want to hold back. For socialization, there probably isn't enough of a gap to matter.
One consideration I haven't seen mentioned is cost of daycare. Holding your kid back from (free, public) school for one year means one extra year of paying for (typically expensive, private) daycare, which may cost about as much as a mortgage. YMMV if you plan on going to private school anyways, or if you have a less expensive daycare arrangement.
Malcolm Gladwell just did a podcast episode on this precise topic, titled "Outliers, Revisited" https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/outliers-revisited .
TLDLR: Birth month is well-documented to hugely influence a child's trajectory in sports AND academics. His survey of Ivy League college students at an event revealed that the vast majority of them were the oldest possible students in their academic year.
Hold your kid back. Don't worry about the social life; they'll have plenty of company, and they can always skip a grade later if need be.
(I was an older kid and graduated high school in 3 years.)
Reversing the premise: one of my best friends from K-7 was less than two weeks *younger* than the cutoff, so persistently old for our grade. He ended up skipping 8th and still became the valedictorian of the class ahead of me.
Caveat: we were both in a GT program from K on, so these results are not generalizable to the median student.
It's really hard to know, but if I had to choose I'd pick holding the child back for a year. My reasons:
-Teachers & professionals generally are apt to label as "ADD" behaviors that are a bit chaotic and immature for the grade the kid is in. Some of the kids that get labeled ADD, learning disability, behavior problems, etc. would do just fine in the same setting 12 months later, when they've matured a bit more. Why take a chance on your kid being slow-maturing in the skills it takes to "behave appropriately" in a first grade classroom?
-I does not take anything like 5 years to learn the skills 5th-graders have. I homeschooled my daughter through grade 5. The year before she returned to school she was a good reader & had learned a lot about history, but had not done any systematic work on grammar, spelling, punctuation or math. I brought her up to grade level with all that stuff working about 3 hours/day for about a year. And she is not particularly academically inclined. You really do not need to worry about your kid being "behind" everyone else if they start learning all that stuff a year later. Any bright kid who wants to can skip a grade or 2 later on.
-There's lots of valuable non-academic learning kids can do without going to school or learning to read. You can get ideas for approaches from homeschooling websites and books.
People in the comments seem to miss the big positive about not holding back: your child will graduate a year early, giving them an extra year of freedom to work and earn money, travel, study, live alone in the woods, and do all the other cool adult things you can't do while in school. Having school be a bit harder but finish it earlier seems like a big benefit IMO.
You can get the same benefit by skipping a year later. And you get an extra year of freedom as a child.
Ideally, that early extra year could be spent finding and developing your talent. So while the other six years old kids are wasting their time at school, you can focus on your talent, giving it the time they will never have. Then, after you start school, you will easily win the competitions (against kids biologically one year younger, with the benefit of extra training time they never had), and thus establish yourself as a rare genius.
The best year to skip, in my opinion, is the *last* year of elementary and/or high school, because changing the school will soften the impact of the unusual change. For example, if you skip a year in the middle of school, you need to get used to the new classmates, some teachers may resent you for skipping their favorite subject, you may actually miss some of the knowledge. But when you transition from elementary to high school, or high school to college, you are getting new classmates and new teachers anyway, and no one will obsess about a fact or two that you missed from the skipped years, because students coming from different schools will have different knowledge anyway.
> Ideally, that early extra year could be spent finding and developing your talent
Ideally, "finding" talent or interest would be explored well before high school is over.
I think it is VERY hard to know how the pluses and minuses wash out. Teachers/coaches/people simply don't do a good job compensating for it. So on the downside you child will be treated as dumber/smaller/less athletic than they really are.
On the upside they will be challenged more and complete various stage gates sooner. How that all nets out is very hard to imagine.
For me I think I would have had a much more successful youth athletics career if I was 6 months older, or 3 months younger than I was. But in school, my main issues were not being challenged enough and having to repeat material because our school simply didn't offer more advanced material (I think I took the same math class grades 5-8, or rather I had mastered "advanced 8th grade math" in 5th grade).
> So on the downside you child will be treated as dumber/smaller/less athletic than they really are.
I've read that this is common. However, I imagine a more introverted child might lower this risk. Personally teachers judged me for not paying attention, which I expect could be a constant regardless of age.
As for athletics, these will most likely be found outside of school - I'm not sure how age restrictions might apply, but I expect it's generally frowned upon to have an older kid in a team otherwise of a given age. I excelled in athletics despite a late start for my sport. In this area I'm less concerned, the way I see it either the child is highly invested in the sport (and therefore will likely do fine), or isn't - in any case they are kept active and have fun.
>I've read that this is common.
Oh I for sure noticed it with my son who is the youngest in his grade. he had done very well on some age adjusted standardized tests his school gave, and then later in they year very poorly on another one and when I discovered that one wasn't age adjusted his teacher was jsut like "why would that matter?". So she for sure isn't taking things like that into account when evaluating behavior and such, And this was 1st/2nd grade when age differences are the biggest.
As for sports my experience is the opposite. Sure there will be outliers like yourself. But so much of how much a kid is "into" a sport depends on getting encouragement and a sense of being good/accomplished. Kids who are "winning" just have so much more fun.
So the older kids gets more encouragement, more self-motivation and better coaching/teammates. its one of the reasons everyone is split into so many different activities. People all want things they can be good at. I kind of suspect without those effects you would see a lot more homogenization in behaviors.
> As for sports my experience is the opposite. Sure there will be outliers like yourself. But so much of how much a kid is "into" a sport depends on getting encouragement and a sense of being good/accomplished. Kids who are "winning" just have so much more fun.
Not seeing how this contradicts me. At any rate excelling isn't the only deciding factor, if that were true kids would like every sport they're passably good at. I was good for a spell, but didn't live and breathe the sport, and eventually got interested in music - I expect this is not unusual.
> So the older kids gets more encouragement, more self-motivation and better coaching/teammates.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Yes, a weak player may get less attention from a coach. This matters less at that age because a) parents can give one-on-one attention, b) aptitude can improve very rapidly with effort, c) you can get a different coach and/or team the next year who does their job.
Secondly, one disadvantage of starting out far ahead of peers is facing less challenge. That can soften players as they progress, unless they're given the opportunity to compete at higher levels. Conversely, at a younger age weaker players can be poised to catch up, if they're into it.
Thirdly, you're "winning" as a team, as team sports go. Even a weak player can win, and drafting is meant to ensure no team gets completely steam-rolled. Solo competitive sports require a certain breed - I've tried a few of these and while they kept me in shape, I never found any of them fun.
I don't think being months younger is the deciding factor between winning and losing all the time. Notwithstanding that, as physique goes, some players have bigger builds, some will be more talented, or have more drive.
Emily Oster has a chapter covering this in her latest book, The Family Firm. There are modest advantages and disadvantages (which you should look into to inform your decision), but ultimately what's best comes down to the specifics of your child and your family (does holding back make your family's logistics significantly easier/harder?). If you can track down any data on your local district that could be a factor as well (e.g. if all the other Nov/Dec kids in the school get held back, there's extra reason to hold yours back too).
> but ultimately what's best comes down to the specifics of your child and your family (does holding back make your family's logistics significantly easier/harder?)
I'm not sure what sort of logistics that would entail, as I imagine it there would be no difference for us. And for the other point, it's hard to pin-down the "specifics of a child" at such a young age. I'll look out for that book though, I've read Cribsheet.
I think a big logistical factor she mentions is whether holding them back would be a burden on the family budget (if paying for child care or pre school) and/or the time of a stay at home parent. For these decisions she makes a big deal out of making sure that you're weighing what both alternatives actually entail and not just considering one side of the ledger.
I've been on both sides of this. The biggest grievance of my young life was that I was made to repeat grade 3, after having been promoted ahead of my age group by my previous school, because I changed schools and I was thereupon too young to be in grade 4. I might have forgiven them, but it turned out there was a boy in my class who was younger than the rest of us, and hadn't been put back to an age-appropriate grade. I eventually rectified this injustice by skipping Grade 10 - in a different school system.
This was complicated by undiagnosed autism. I wasn't good at social skills. I didn't get better because of being surrounded by kids my own age; that would have required focussed teaching. Instead, I became one of the weird kids, picked on by the others.
I think the idea was that my social skills were toast because I was too young, and the rule was invoked with good intentions. That didn't improve the results.
I (a girl) was always one of the youngest in my class, and never noticed a disadvantage. If anything, it was probably better for me intellectually (since I was ~top-of-class anyway) -- the equivalent of skipping a grade but without missing any content or losing a social group.
I think it makes a much bigger difference for boys than for girls. Thinking back to my own school days, the boys who emerged as leaders tended to be the ones who were the slightly larger, older ones, while some the small weak boys who got picked on a lot tended to be the younger ones in the year. Among girls the social hierarchy is much more about looks than size, so holding back an extra year won't help.
Where I live, it seems that parents are increasingly holding kids back, so the "unofficial" cutoff keeps moving further and further back. Nobody wants their kid to be the youngest so we get stuck in a dumb arms race where kids are starting kindergarten at six and both parents and kids wind up wasting another year of their lives sitting around at home watching Peppa Pig.
I had a birthday that would have made me one of the youngest in my class and my parents decided to instead hold me back a year in school. Overall, I think it was probably the right move for me, but it's hard to say with certainty.
I was very bad at sports in any case (partly due to a lack of talent, but also a lack of parental encouragement to participate). I don't think it made any difference there, but I can see how that might be one of the biggest effects for others.
Academically, I went to a private elementary school that mostly let me move at my own pace and also had a brighter-than-average crop of kids, so intellectual boredom was seldom an issue. Had I been in public school, I can see how the boredom of being one of the brighter kids might have been compounded with the boredom of being older than the other kids. I did go to a public middle school, but it was an elite public school and separate tracking meant that classes more or less aligned with my ability level.
Socially, I did pretty well in terms of friendships through high school, for a shy kid that was athletically hopeless. I got my driver's license the day I turned 16, which was first in my class and definitely seemed cool at the time.
I always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder from being held back. I was offered a chance to skip the 5th grade, which I wanted to take, but parents still thought it was better to hold off. I ended up finishing college in 3 years, due to a combination of AP credit and taking some college classes during my HS summers, so it all balanced out in the end.
I have been thinking about this as my daughter is among the youngest in her class. She is tending to be immature and innocent. So what I am starting to confront is other kids acting much older- not intellectually- but physically and socially. We will be moving, and it would be an opportunity to have her repeat fifth grade. This repeating is not uncommon among expats when they move. I think it really depends on the kid and the school and the family situation. I am not so worried about my daughter being bored intellectually as I think she can handle the boredom like a pro. Most people think in terms of grade level, rather than age, so I doubt anyone would call her a geezer...
Perusing some studies reveals that redshirting doesn't have a noticeable effect on many easily observable metrics. Kids do about the same academically, socially, etc.
In my personal experience, redshirting can have a slightly positive effect down the line. I was never redshirted but my birthday naturally made me the oldest in my grade next to the two actually redshirted kids. The oldest kids were consistently the best at school sports. There was a slight negative stigma towards the two redshirted students, but only along the lines of "Wow Andrew you're practically a geezer" instead of any real stigma.
I ended up being reverse redshirted when I skipped the last grade of elementary school and went to high school being one of the youngest there. I think this is where some of the issues can crop up and where being redshirted might actually be an advantage. I was one of the last of my peers to be able to drive. I never had the confidence boost from being top-dog in middle school. And I generally lost a lot of friends in the transition. A lot of people strongly recommend skipping grades. I'd probably recommend it too. In fact I'd recommend the opposite of redshirting if you can work that with your school. Have your kid start at a later grade or skip a grade. But there are a few downsides while you gain a year. Whereas redshirting there aren't really any upsides and you lose a year.
This may depend on country; in mine the youngest would be born in August. (The rule here is "if you are 6 years old on September 1st, off to school with you".)
No opinion on the magnitude of the disadvantage, but yes, being biologically older *is* an advantage at elementary school. Especially in sport, the difference between 6 years old and 7 years old is huge. But also, being more mature generally means better grades, better opinions of teachers.
Note that for high-IQ children, skipping grades is recommended: intellectually closer peers, less boredom. But perhaps, you can have both -- start the elementary school later, then skip the last year or two. (Find out how difficult it is to skip a grade in your country.) Minimize the total time spent at school.
> What about a negative stigma?
Most likely, no one will notice that your child started school one year later. If they notice, they will quickly forget.
Our state also uses September 1st as the cutoff date. This is convenient for me, because my younger daughter was born on January 29th.
I went to community college instead of high school, starting at 16, and it worked out very well.
How's the evidence for 'Covid vaccines prevent transmission' looking these days? (Sorry if this is like an ultra hot button issue or what have you). I say this as someone who's extremely vaccinated (I lied to get an extra vaccine shot of a different type before boosters were widespread, as an example. I will take a new booster the second that it's available to me). It seems that both the public and private sectors in the US have gradually pulled back on vaccine requirements.
My understanding of requiring others to be vaccinated is that it theoretically prevented Covid transmission to others. Herd immunity, etc. etc. This was the big discussion around vaccine requirements pre-2020- that requiring children to have MMR ones prevented transmission overall, and so on. Pre-Covid I had never thought to question any of the science behind that- these days, I would not say that the public health sector has come out of this looking particularly great.
As again someone who's heavily vaccinated, I don't really feel any need to force others to get one if it only affects them. (I mean, I would also probably support de-prioritizing them for emergency care if they catch Covid and the hospitals are full- consequences of your actions, and so on. I understand that this is probably not realistic). So, do the Covid vaccines prevent transmission to others, or not? How about other, non-Covid vaccines?
My understanding is that covid vaccines do not prevent transmission. It is based on antibody studies that show that up to 90% of vaccinated people have already been infected with covid.
Some try to argue that the vaccines reduce the spread somewhat. My answer is that this reduction is not clinically relevant. If you need 4 weeks instead of 1 week to catch covid, it is not clinically relevant. Most likely after infection you get immunity that will prevent you getting infected again, maybe 6 months to 1 year, i.e., this period is longer than time to getting infected once your immunity is low enough.
Agree that getting vaxed is small potatoes when it comes to reducing spread. Most effective & underused tool for reducing spread is probably air purification, particularly in schools, where number of people per volume of air volume is much higher than most other settings, and where a good % of our population spends 7+ hours/day.
It could cause risks to the health though. If children don't get exposed to coronavirus (and other viruses) for longer periods due to very efficient ventilation, they won't develop immunity and will get much sicker from it when they eventually get exposed to it in some other settings.
One of the problems when children restarted school after long periods of isolation was RSV outbreaks which caused many hospitalizations.
Yeah, there are a lot of things to balance out. Children could get vaxed against covid, so can get immunity that way, but I don't know about developing immunity to RSV and other things. Here are the points I see that favor air purification:
-Air purification would only interfere with kids catching and developing immunity to airborne diseases. Anything transmitted another way would not be affected. Just looked up RSV transmission. Google says it's transmitted by big droplet, from coughs & sneezes, plus dried residue of same on skin and surfaces. Sounds to me like air purification would not interfere with transmission of RSV. Also would not interfere with transmission of stomach bug type germs. I dunno about flu and common colds.
-Air purification in schools would reduce kids' exposure to various kinds of pollution. Definitely works well against wildfire smoke. I'm not sure how well it works against other forms of pollution.
-Even if their immune systems aren't getting enough of a workout in school, kids may encounter enough germs during the rest of their day to make up for in-school exposures. It may be that the spike in RSV is a result of kids spending an an unusual amount of time isolated at home with only family members over the last couple years, and that going forward so long as they are getting out into the world, even if 7 hrs of their time are in purified air, they develop the immunities they need to.
But what about other cold viruses? I was taught that children get cold 5-6 times per year. Generally they are harmless to children like covid.
Air purification could be good for different reasons. The air quality is becoming worse in many places and we have evidence that PM it is generally bad for health and shortens life.
It does seem likely that air purification at school would cut way down on cold transmission too. Since most adults have a cold or 2 per year seems like kids would get some from parents, but they probably would have fewer total colds. Hard to know how bad that is. Clearly it's good to train the immune system young -- having pets adds microbes to the home environment that do that too, apparently. We always had a dog or cat or both when I was growing up, & I've read that that reduces chance of allergies later in life. If so, worked great for me -- I have no allergies, and also seem to be very resistant to being affected by poison ivy.
Covid semi-nerd here: Vaccines are pretty good at preventing transmission for the first couple months after you get them, but that falls off as your antibodies decrease. It also falls off as new variants come through that are a bit different from the strain you were vaxed for. What remains over time and across new variants is immune memory of the virus: You can still get infected (& if infected, you are contagious) but once you're infected your body will recognize the virus & fight it far more effectively than it would have without a vaccination. Overall, people who are vaccinated are somewhat less likely to have covid at all, and if they have it are somewhat less likely to transmit it. Those 2 somewhat's add up to a moderate reduction in how much transmitting you can do if you're vaxed.
There was never any real chance that we could attain herd immunity, the way we have typhoid, etc. (People in public health must surely have recognized this, but the possibility of herd immunity is one of several areas where they were not straightforward. Somebody must have thought that telling people that herd immunity is possible would drive more people to get the vaccine. Its sort of like telling people that masks don't reduce transmission. It's a lie but somebody thought that if you told the public they reduce transmission but we need to save them for healthcare professionals and other essential workers at high risk people would have run out and bought them all up anyhow.) Covid has several characteristics that make it a bad target for herd immunity: It mutates rapidly. It has a high transmission rate. And people become contagious before they have symptoms. What we can realistically achieve is herd *resistance*. Most people do not get very sick if infected.
It would surely have been possible to have fewer infections and fewer deaths than we had. Last time I checked, the US ranked around 30th out of about 200 countries in covid deaths per 100,000. Something like 3/4 of the world did better than us. Exactly what approach would have played out better in this country is up for discussion. It's clearly not as simple as that we should have had more mask mandates or longer lockdowns. There are lots of things we could have done more of or less of or at different times that would have affected the covid/US "meteorological system." For instance, very little attention was paid to the amount of transmission reduction you can get from air purification in indoor settings -- that's an easy get we pretty much skipped.
My understanding was that the Covid vaccine pretty much failed to provide herd immunity in the field. It was a very effective at preventing deaths, but Covid is a flu-virus and it fundamentally evolves too fast to ever be contained by a vaccination campaign. Breakthrough infections, reinfections and asymptomatic transmission persist to such an extent that we simply do not have the ability to control the virus long term without regular lockdowns and other social suppression methods. These are no longer politically palatable and are of increasingly questionable value.
It's still helpful to vaccinate the at risk groups who may experience extreme symptoms, but this could easily be rolled into the existing annual flu inoculation program without bothering the general population. And, honestly, I think the medical industry should start shifting away from the idea of mass Covid vaccination. It's promoting way too much anti-vax and vaccine hesitancy sentiment in the general pop and that's negatively affecting the vaccination campaigns of diseases that actually can be controlled through herd immunity. Achieving zero Covid seems to be a bit of a white whale at this point.
Achieving zero covid was never possible, actually (I briefly give reasons in earlier post). Just for the record, it won't work to roll covid inoculation (for the most vulnerable, or for whoever) in with yearly flu inoculation unless covid becomes way more clearly seasonal than it is now, and unless new variants appear less often. Covid booster's protection against hospitalization & death wanes by 5+% per month, so by 11 months after the last booster people would have very little protection from severe illness requiring hospitalization. Also, variants may appear that are so different from what was in vaccine that immune memory does not work well to protect people from them. Anyhow, twice-yearly boosters for the vulnerable might work, but not once-yearly.
The way I understand it, reduced probability of death/serious illness sticks around for >1 yr and in fact is the big advantage of the vaccine. This probably comes down to having a cytotoxic T cell response that helps you clear the infection.
What I'm mostly going by is a big CDC study of waning effectiveness of vaccine over time. Table 2, the lower half, shows waning effectiveness against hospitalization under various conditions: 2 vs. 3 doses; delta era vs. omicron era. Only covers 5 months, & for some conditions only 4. Table is here: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7107e2.htm#T2_down
But based on that it does look like effectiveness wanes 5-10% per month. If it continues at that pace, vaccine effectiveness after 12 months against hospitalization will be down below 50%. Seems pretty inadequate, especially since the people who most need the vax are people who have a high base rate of hospitalization & death -- elderly, people with serious comorbidities. Cutting their chance of hospitalization in half leaves them with odds that really are not great.
Thanks, this is what I was looking for. And so MMR just doesn't evolve as fast, because those three are fundamentally different from a cold virus?
Yeah, there's a number of different DNA/RNA arrangements that pathogens can have that have affect the average mutation rates. Some you might only see a new variant every few decades, Corona virus felt like it got a new variant every other month. I'm getting a bit beyond my area of expertise, though. You'd want a pathologist to explain the whys and wherefores.
I agree with you, except for “COVID is a flu-virus.” Not sure what you mean. Do you mean that both mutate to avoid host immunity?
Flu vaccine tends be even less useful than COVID vaccines. I stopped getting flu vaccines a decade ago because the effectiveness is so hit-and-miss. Unfortunately, flu vaccines also have diminishing effectiveness in the elderly at risk population. Similar to your point about pushing mass COVID vaccination, I think the medical industry should tone down the marketing of flu vaccines that so often don’t work and make people skeptical.
Yeah, flu shots are not that effective anyhow -- on average about 40%. Still, that's way better than nothing, & I think they're worth getting. But it's dumb to get them in September, which is when public health officials all start hassling us to get them. Their effectiveness declines by about 10% a month, so you want to get them as close to the start of flu season as possible, so as to have decent protection when flu cases peak. Peak time varies, but the month they peak in most often is February. So people who got their shots in Sept. have almost no immunity at peak season those years. The best course is to watch the flu map for your state at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/usmap.htm. When cases start to rise, go in for your shot. Last year in my state the rise began in later Oct., and I got my shot a couple weeks later. Another approach is to get one flu shot in Sept. and another in January.
Ah, probably should be a 'cold virus'. The coronovirus family of diseases are one of the range of pathogens that contrubute to the common cold, of which influenza is also one.
I thought common cold was usually rhinovirus (a picornavirus)? and flu is an orthomyxovirus, a separate category from coronavirus? These seem like separate categories, though I agree coronaviruses cause common cold just like rhinovirus does.
Lots of viruses cause colds, including rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and coronaviruses and I guess a bunch of other stuff.
This is exactly what I was going to say.
Why shouldn't people who got vaccinated be de-prioritized for medical treatment? They chose the vaccine as their method of protection, and that action should have consequences. If this vaccine that they got as their method of protection failed them, why should they get other methods of protection like medical treatment on top of that?
I don't think we're in a situation where deciding how to prioritize people for treatment makes sense w.r.t. covid anymore. When hospitals were being swamped with covid cases, maybe that was the case, but back then, we didn't have a vaccine. At this point, we have plenty of medical resources to use to treat the covid cases that come in, both those who are vaccinated and those who aren't.
Really, the right place to head off the hospitalizations is early in the course of covid, when antivirals (paxlovid, monoclonal antibodies, etc.) can make a pretty big difference in the course of the disease.
Because it isn't supposed to be a "pick one and only one" choice. If I want to not die in a car crash, I can drive slowly and defensively *and* wear a seatbelt *and* drive a Volvo *and* keep my health insurance up to date.
And if there's any shortage of medical resources to treat car-crash victims, my vote is to give them to the people who were wearing seatbelts, tried to minimize risk and social impact, and got an extra dose of bad luck. Not the idiots who said "I chose hospitals as my method of protection because I don't like seatbelts, so I get to be first in line at the hospital".
Yes, of course it is obvious that you don't *have* to pick one and only one. But OP specifically brought up the possibility of denying people medical treatment, so I suggested another possible group to deny medical treatment to: the vaccinated. If punishing people for not wanting to die of a brain blood clot or heart failure is morally permissible, then I don't see what's wrong with punishing people for not wanting to die of respiratory failure.
Another reason to deny the vaccinated medical treatment is that it forces them to put your money where their mouth is - if they're so sure that the vaccine is safe and effective, able to prevent transmission, severe disease and death, then they should be fine with forgoing medical treatment. Refusing to do so indicates deception about the true efficacy of the vaccines.
> punishing people for not wanting to die of a brain blood clot or heart failure is morally permissible,
Whatever fears you have about the vaccine causing blood clots should go double for the virus itself.
As a serious response to this quasi-trolling question: because vaccines are pro-social even totally discounting transmission effects, because it lessens the likelihood that you're going to be a burden on the medical system (in a time when it's already unusually overburdened, since we're still not back to pre-covid capacity).
Calling both vaccines and hospitalizations "protection" is verging on eargrayish; vaccines are covid *insurance*, whereas hospitalization is *treatment*.
(Edit: it should go without saying, but the implied conclusion here is that we should be rewarding people who choose to take pro-social insurance, not punishing them)
Is it pro-social to give the death penalty to those who refuse to put themselves at great risk of death for the sake of infinitesimally improving the safety of others? How high of a "level of personal risk of death" to "level of societal benefit" ratio is it acceptable to mandate with violent force?
This whole chain of reasoning is backwards. The vaccine probably makes you a little less likely to transmit covid, but its main value is making covid a lot less likely to kill you. It's not quite the situation of the tetanus vaccine (where the person getting the shot gets 100% of the benefit) but it's probably not so far away from that.
Also, the vaccine is not putting anyone at great risk of death. You can make an argument about whether the very low risks from vaccine side effects are more worrying than the very low risks from getting covid unvaccinated for, say, healthy 12 year olds, but nobody is facing high risks from the vaccine. (Mainly what can go wrong with the vaccine is an allergic reaction, which can definitely kill you but is very rare and can be treated with an epi-pen--this is why they always ask you to stick around for a few minutes after getting the shot.)
I'm very curious about this comment, from an epistemology standpoint. How do you know the things you just told me? Did you read up on the recent literature, analyze VAERS data, conduct an age-stratified cost-benefit analysis, anything like that? Or did you kind of just get "safe and effective" vibes from the media coverage of vaccines, and then go on to make claims about their safety, inferring that you could probably find some study supporting your claims if you were ever called on it?
There have been hundreds of millions of vaccine doses administered. I know of more than a dozen of people who died of Covid-19 at less than three degrees of separation, none who had a worse reaction to the vaccine than fever and feeling shitty for a day or so.
>Is it pro-social to give the death penalty to those who refuse to put themselves at great risk of death for the sake of infinitesimally improving the safety of others?
You seem to have changed the topic here, since this statement does not appear to be about covid vaccines. Unless you consider an aggregate risk of approximately 1 in 100,000[1] a "great risk of death", the first clause does not appear to be about any vaccine for SARS-CoV2. And if you do consider it a great risk, it should be dwarfed by the approximately 1 in ~500 chance of dying from a covid infection (~3% measured death rate * 50% asymptomatic * 20% population infection rate, all fairly conservative numbers, though delta lowers the first term and raises the last).
Also, my argument specifically excluded "safety of others" as a consideration, I was talking about the financial and staffing burden on the healthcare system.
Could you explain what you're actually talking about, or confirm your intent to change the subject? Because from where I'm standing, this response goes from quasi-trolling which could be considered a legitimate question for investigating assumptions, to full-on trolling.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
Wait, are you seriously trying to suggest that the CDC vaccine FAQ page saying "COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective" is some sort of conclusive proof that the vaccines have a positive cost-benefit analysis? Or even any evidence of that at all?
You're familiar with basic probability, right? In the hypothetical world where the vaccines really were unsafe, the CDC would not tell the public, so that provides virtually no evidence that the vaccines are safe. P(CDC says the vaccines are safe | the vaccines are safe) ≈ 1 and P(CDC says the vaccines are safe | the vaccines are unsafe) ≈ 1.
Now, on the data, you're about a year behind on actual safety statistics. All recent cost-benefit analyses show significant net harm from vaccines.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070
Vaccines are 20-90x more likely to cause harm than prevent harm.
Here's the Pfizer vaccine report.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345/suppl_file/nejmoa2110345_appendix.pdf
If you go to page 12, despite their claimed "90+% efficacy", more people in the vaccine group died than in the placebo group.
Your argument hinges on a death rate of 3%, but as we can see from the trial, those deaths are overwhelmingly in a tiny subgroup of the population, the elderly, who already have extremely high vaccination rates and generally don't have a job or attend school, where mandates would take effect. Mandates overwhelmingly affect young people, who have a relative risk *over 8000 times lower* than the elderly.
https://archive.ph/ZtEcw
Furthermore, the vaccines have been shown to increase severe adverse events, even taking into account the supposed reduction in COVID severity.
https://www.scivisionpub.com/pdfs/us-covid19-vaccines-proven-to-cause-more-harm-than-good-based-on-pivotal-clinical-trial-data-analyzed-using-the-proper-scientific--1811.pdf
There are hundreds of thousands of vaccine deaths reported in VAERS, the vaccine safety monitoring system of the CDC and FDA. And for every one VAERS report there are an estimated 9 to 100 additional cases that go unreported. Remember: this is *the* official monitoring system for vaccine safety, so either this data is trustworthy, or we have no actual monitoring system in place for adverse events.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/vaers/access-VAERS-data.html
We can also look at the graph of the labor force with a disability. I wonder what changed after December 2020?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01374597
This is just the tip of the iceberg, there's far more implicating data out there.
>In the hypothetical world where the vaccines really were unsafe, the CDC would not tell the public
That's a very strong claim that relies on literally conspiratorial thinking. Even then, it's not P(CDC political messaging says the vaccine is safe), it's P(CDC openly falsifies public data), which you should be assigning a much lower probability to.
But let's see what you think are the most convincing studies for your argument. I won't even both checking their accuracy, I'll take their results at face value.
Note that you specifically called out vaccination as exposing one's self to "a great risk of death", and I'm not going to let you move those goalposts and retreat to the vague motte.
>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070
Their absolute worst-case estimates give a 0.3% chance of "serious adverse events", of which a much smaller set are actually lethal or even seriously life-threatening.
Clearly not "a great risk of death".
>Vaccines are 20-90x more likely to cause harm than prevent harm.
Where "cause harm" is defined as "make you feel at least achey enough to use it as an excuse to take off work/school". Seriously lol?
Yeah, that's a known side-effect of getting a vaccine. Also note that it can be planned around, unlike getting an actual infection.
Moving on.
>https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345/suppl_file/nejmoa2110345_appendix.pdf
Again, those numbers, interpreted at their most pessimistic, show a risk of death in the tenths of a percent.
>https://www.scivisionpub.com/pdfs/us-covid19-vaccines-proven-to-cause-more-harm-than-good-based-on-pivotal-clinical-trial-data-analyzed-using-the-proper-scientific--1811.pdf
That study shows... that every vaccine both caused a huge reduction in severe covid cases, and a reduction in deaths. The opposite of your argument.
>the vaccines have been shown to increase severe adverse events
Yeah, it causes an immune response. That's both expected and desired. I don't think you understand what "severe event" means. Notice that life-threatening events *went down* in the table that distinguishes them, because "severe events" are overwhelmingly not serious threats.
>There are hundreds of thousands of vaccine deaths reported in VAERS
Except there aren't, because VAERS doesn't report "vaccine deaths", it reports "deaths after vaccines". With hundreds of millions of vaccinations, you would expect many thousands of deaths "after" getting vaccinated - in the sense that you'd expect many thousands of deaths "after" drinking milk. VAERS is messy temporally correlative data, with no control groups or evidence of causation.
>We can also look at the graph of the labor force with a disability. I wonder what changed after December 2020?
Vaccines caused people to be confident enough to re-enter the workface. Places started re-opening because of vaccines, and people with long-covid (psychosomatic or not, it qualifies) re-entered the workforce - and existing disabled people, lots of whom were waiting for vaccines (seriously, I know at least half a dozen) re-entered the workface as well.
That graph tracks almost perfectly with other graphs of labor force participation (steadily increasing 2008-present with a discontinuity between 2020-2022), and actually shows more of a trend delta *before* the vaccines came out.
>This is just the tip of the iceberg, there's far more implicating data out there.
I'd sure hope so, because at this point your own data supports my argument more than yours. Regardless, I'm not going to bother discussing this any further with you, since it's clear at this point that your position is based on political virtue signaling and motivated reasoning rather than evidence.
I hope your day is every bit as good as what you wish on others.
>In the hypothetical world where the vaccines really were unsafe, the CDC would not tell the public.... [then goes on to quote Pfizer's reporting on their on literally their own product and VAERS, which as you put it is a 'vaccine safety monitoring system of the CDC and FDA']
If the CDC is lying, why is Pfizer telling the truth? Which is it?
What level of evidence would get you to accept that Covid vaccines are reasonably safe? If the Pfizer report you quoted said that more people died in the placebo group than the vaccine group, would you accept that? Clearly not. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that you're simply looking for 'data' which agrees with your priors, and discarding anything that doesn't
Non-COVID vaccines: can definitely achieve herd immunity in many cases.
COVID vaccines: herd immunity seems unlikely, but they’re still useful in helping to control spread and reduce severity of illness, similar to seasonal flu vaccines.
That’s my best understanding. I haven’t seen anyone claiming we can reach herd immunity in months, in part due to vaccine hesitancy/availability, and in part due to the nature of the virus itself (but I’m sure you can find a random tweet here or there). If you want a source, here’s an article (with Dr Fauci as a co-author) from months ago that supports my understanding: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/2/195/6561438
Questions for people who have studied or taken pure mathematics courses: Did you understand everything during lectures? How did you study to be able to really understand the subject in depth (complicated proofs etc), while at the same time studying for other courses?
Im taking a measure theory course and im finding it challenging to understand everything thats happening at the pace my professor is teaching it. Adding to that, because of how abstract everything is, you need a lot of time to grasp the concepts, and having other courses at the same time makes this very challenging. Im very good at managing my time, but I tend to lose confidence when I go to classes and I cant understand whats going on (and therefore I cant ask questions).
It's normal to get a bit lost in the classroom, I would start to worry if it's becoming recurrent and happen in all your lectures.
You mention you've got other courses to attend. If you have more than you need to pass, I strongly suggest focusing on the minimum of courses you need to pass the year and drop any additional course.
I wouldn't stress about not understanding everything in class. (The other comments you've gotten are all great btw, including good advice on how to follow better.) I'm under the impression that very few people understand everything in lecture. What I got from class or now get from research talks are the emphasis on what is important, how the ideas hang together, and the recurring "smell" of the proofs in a given area. I work out details later by a mixture of trying to figure it out, reading the book/paper and talking to people who understand something I don't. It's been almost 20 years since I last really thought about measure theory, but Littlewood's principles dominate my memory of the topic. If you're going to continue with mathematics, you'll (probably) see this stuff again multiple times, and it will sink deeper each time.
For studying, I would recommend taking the theorems and using them as problem sets, i.e. try to prove them without looking at the proofs, and only look at the proofs as minimally as possible to get past the points where you are stuck, but only after struggling for a bit to really understand why you are stuck. As you get more advanced in your studies, proofs will get more and more sketchy, so fleshing out details and/or working out concrete examples will become a more and more useful exercise. Having one or more friends to talk with is very helpful.
I would generally say that my math classes were often as hard as all my other classes combined. but my other classes were mostly squishy humanities stuff where as long as you did the reading and were intelligent you were fine.
I've taken one course (representation theory of Lie algebras) that went way too fast in lectures, so I was basically taking dictation during lecture, then going back and looking at my notes to try to understand what hit me. (I actually did this consistently because I had committed to producing a typeset version of the notes.) Then by the next lecture / office hours / by email if all else fails, I had some coherent questions I could ask.
I've taken another course (Galois theory) that didn't have enough examples during the lectures, and it took me far too long to realize that actually the TA was holding examples classes that gave, well, examples and worked some problems. That is, I knew the examples class was there, what took time was to realize that I needed to be going to it in order to actually have some concrete (ish) things to hang the theory onto.
>I was basically taking dictation during lecture, then going back and looking at my notes to try to understand what hit me
For me, this was every lecture in every class, not only math, because I found it useful study habit. The proportion that I understood while writing down the notes varied, but it was important to have the notes.
For math in particular:
Learning tactics:
1. Get a different textbook. Not necessarily that one is better than other, but sometimes different authors structure the same material differently or present a different proof, and the another perspective helps. Sometimes some authors provide more genuine intuition.
2. Check if Terry Tao had lectured on it and published his lecture notes on his blag. His measure theory notes in particular were more advanced than what we had in class, but the even the introductory problems were good.
Mitigation tactics, for the truly desperate:
3. Accept that you have found the limit of "the topic is possible to understand with the effort I have accustomed to". From now on, you have to resort to something less math-y kids were already doing, which is pure rote memorization. Hopefully it lasts only for a while, and then rote-memorized concepts will start making sense (it sometimes happens!). There is also always a chance that understanding will come in later exercises or applications.
4. Prioritize your time-use and course load. Depending on your priorities, either reduce the less important courses, or accept that you are not going to have any "hobbies" or leisure not-studying time during the period.
5. Accept that for now, you are not keeping up with this course, and will fail / have less than desirable grade. Study on your own, and then retake the course if possible.
If someone is constantly doing 4 and 5, especially to the extent that the department requirements become difficult to meet, they should consider a less ambitious study plan.
All math classes are different. Many of those on continuous (rather than discrete) side work out a lot better if you learn to visualize what you're hearing about. Measure theory is in that category.
If you're not one of those completely non-visual people who just can't do it at all, try to keep an image of what you're looking at in your head where at all possible. When at all possible, it makes the proofs much easier to follow. You get a sense of how things work, what the real problem is, and how to approach the solution. This is a really big deal where you can get it going.
That said, pacing can definitely be an issue (as can attention problems on your side).
You might not understand everything, but there are strategies to better avoid getting lost.
One that's nobody mentioned so far is that you should be anticipating future steps in a proof, not just passively waiting for them. Think ahead to what's likely to happen; this doesn't mean you should be able to independently prove what's happening in class, but you should have thoughts like "oh, if we just do the same epsilon argument we've been doing all semester, we're going to run into such-and-such issue; I wonder how we're going to get around that." Then, when the idea that gets around that is introduced, it will click into place, because it's the solution to a problem you already know you have.
This gets easier, of course, as you get more experience with the material. Do your best to make connections to things you've done before. If you're learning something that's completely new, do lots of exercises; even getting stuck on those will help.
At the same time, if you're about to be lost in class, you should be prepared to black-box a step of a proof, or even a whole proof. Tell yourself: "I'm going to give up on understanding why X implies Y for the duration of this lecture, and I'll get that later by looking in the textbook or by asking questions during office hours. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to prepare myself for what we'll do with Y once we've proved it."
I'd definitely say it depends on the course for me (I can follow Measure Theory-type classes okay, but struggle more with Topology stuff). To echo what most other people are saying, prepping for class and working on applications are both good ideas. Making friends who are also in the same class is really a surprisingly helpful strategy.
I would also encourage you on three other things that I haven't seen here that are all in the same vein. My undergrad advisor used to always stress to me that I needed to be able to understand things "in real time." In other words, to really follow along in class, you need to not only understand the material, but you also have to be able to understand it quickly. Three things that are helpful for this:
1) Limit your note-taking. If you have a good textbook, that should probably be your primary reference, not your notes. If you are just taking notes, it's so much harder to actually follow what's going on. When I take notes, I only write down theorem statements/definitions and really important parts of the arguments.
2) Study the basics. Even once you have an idea of what's going on in the class (Lebesgue Outer Measure for example), keep working examples until you can do the basic manipulations very quickly. This will help you keep up in class for each step the professor does.
3) Ask questions aggressively. There's obviously a limit to this, but as soon as you think something's off, double check the boardwork to make sure you're actually confused, and then request clarification. If you aren't sure if you have a question, and think you just need a second, you can ask for a second to make sure you understand. As long as you don't do this in excess, most professors are pretty cool with this.
"Limit your note-taking" is not universal advice; personally, I found that I understood much less when I wasn't writing it down, because writing keeps me focused. However, it's certainly a good idea to try different approaches to note-taking, and stick with what works.
My experience was always that I never really understood the material for a course, until I took another course that had it as a prerequisite. Measure theory in particular, was difficult when I was learning it, but became intuitive once I took measure-theoretic probability and functional analysis.
This applied for me to STEM classes generally, such that I've striven to learn one step past what I think I actually need to know; it's been quite effective.
It's challenging but there are some helpful strategies. One is to study (or at least skim) the material before each lecture, as Prime Number already said. Another helpful strategy is to always make up particular examples of every abstract definition, and for theorems and propositions make up your own applications or counterexamples and such stuff. Draw pictures for yourself, stop expecting to be able to "think abstractly" because any visualization you can make will help understanding much more than any amount of abstract thinking.
I've not only taken measure theory classes, but also TA'd an introductory one which mostly focused on constructing the Lebesgue integral. Is there anything in particular that you find challenging? Because the final strategy I'll suggest is to discuss the material with others a lot. Try to make friends with the nerdy guys who like talking about math!
I would go further, and say that one can't understand something as long as it's in only one modality. Visualizing examples for things that are math/language is one way that I would expect to work for a huge number of people. If you can build a muscle memory, that also can help a lot. (This is mainly a cross between personal experience, and my personal theory of what understanding is, but I believe it reasonably strongly.)
I have taken many pure math courses over my education and yes, it's very challenging to fully keep up if you don't prepare beforehand. I remember taking an Algebra course that covered an introduction to groups, rings and fields. I had already read the textbook sections on groups and rings before the semester started and for those sections, the class was a breeze. However, when we got to fields is when I started to struggle and the moment you get lost in a lecture, you won't get unlost and won't end up understanding anything afterwards.
With that being said, my advice is to prepare for each lecture in advance like its a test in and of itself. So read the relevant sections in the course material, do practice problems etc.
Also to keep in mind for the future, if you have trouble managing time for all your courses, its a good strategy to read the textbook in advance (usually during the summer) for a course (or two) you plan on taking in an upcoming semester. This will make the understanding a lot easier for you since you'll already be familiar with the concepts.
My experience exactly matches Prime Number. Courses that went well were ones where I had studied and worked proofs in three chapters prior to the first class. Measure theory is challenging, but opens up all of Kolmogorov probability and other fascinating and useful subjects. Don't be too proud to take the course twice to get it. Also, I am not sure that any of us understand these subjects in the same way, but success is being able to follow proofs and derivations, and do the basic ones yourself.
An idea I've seen around these parts (can't remember which commenter originated the idea, sorry) is that Niche Group X enjoys substantial and improving favour and approval...but a good chunk of that is due to state-backed coercion, lots and lots of money (e.g. imperilment of funding), etc. Rather than an organic bubbling-up of support.
It got me thinking that...well...price controls are bad, right? Yet the described scenario could plausibly be called subsidizing X. Rather than let X compete freely and fairly on the "market of groups", there's a not-insignificant thumb on the scales in its favour. And this is particularly notable given the tiny size of X relative to other small groups (since many groups get aid of some kind...that's just politics).
I suppose a left-economic lens would view this as How It Should Be. Little guys get crushed by amoral vicissitudes of markets, and that's not always just or fair! They never had a fair shot, and are worth saving, so advantages are warranted to level the playing field. Whereas a right-economic lens would say, no, things have value based on what the market is willing to pay...if X can't get a foothold on its own merits, without vast external backing, then it doesn't deserve more than a tiny fraction of marketshare. Government shouldn't be in the business of market interventions, by default, because it often makes more a mess of aggregating true preferences than is worth it.
Anyway, just a proto-model that's been kicking around in my head. I guess it's kind of bloodless, since people aren't products and don't get traded in markets...except they totally do, like in dating. Or abstractly, like competing "personal brands", or status games.
One problem with putting hands on the scale is that it's not sustainable, and it actively corrodes the ability of the cuddled group to fend for itself. It's like the "Give Man Fish vs. Teach Man To Fish" parable. Government giveth, and taketh what it giveth just as easily, possibly every 4-6-8 years. Corporations can be either even more volatile than Governments or less, depending on profit gradients and other very unpredictable factors, but witness things like, e.g., the woke panic at Elon Musk's stunts in April to understand how utterly sad and dependent it is to base your entire self worth and respect based on how much a giant corp is willing to ban and censor, and how your entire edifice can come crashing down at any moment with the whims of an autist billionaire.
It's not that the Government or Twitter or whatever coercive institution you managed to convince to cuddle you can't do a good enough job at it, that can be "fixed", it's that the Government or Twitter has an ADHD-level attention span, when compared to other hearts-and-minds approaches. If you're going to use the Government or its ilk to force people, you better make it short, and\or you better make it *brutal*, I'm talking kill-the-adults-and-take-their-children-to-reeducation-gulags brutal. You better make it a religion. Otherwise you're just breeding resentment, and you're absolutely not going to like it when the pendulum swings back.
Another thing to consider is Spatial Locality, which is just the space dual to the problem above (which is the Temporal Locality of Coercion-Based cuddling). You may be successful in making it suicide for me to say naughty words in the US, but then there's China, India, the Middle East, etc..., vast areas of Earth that will see how coercive you are in the places you win and double down on the oppression. Congratulations on banning dead naming, you just pushed not-killing-gays 50 years into the future in KillingGays-stan. "Winning" in the US or western europe or whatever is just the easy mode, a "test drive" if you will, and you just demonstrated to the entire world what happens when that happens, so it will never happen again. It's as if a nascent super-intelligent agent's first action is to kill all people in the moon base where it's being tested, it "won" but, it also broadcasted to the entire Earth what its intentions are, in no uncertain terms.
I am pretty sure that reality does not work like this. A result of an intervention is typically much smaller than intended, but greater than zero.
Society is not a pendulum. That would make any changes impossible in long term. You cannot plausibly say that your experience is the same as e.g. the experience of an average citizen of the Roman Empire (plus or minus a few currently active government interventions that will go away in 4 years).
A better model would be a landscape with many different local optima. When the intervention stops, society goes to the nearest local optimum, which is typically different from what the authors of the intervention expected, but is a different local optimum than the original one.
That's... kinda exactly what I said.
>A result of an intervention is typically much smaller than intended, but greater than zero.
No, the result of an intervention can be 0, less than 0 (increased resentment and hate for the artifically cuddled minority group, as well as the millions\billions spent in the cuddling campaign and the decreased self-reliance of the cuddled group), or greater than 0, and you typically can't know without very advanced and holistic understanding of the whole society you're trying to change and beyond.
>That would make any changes
...by the Government or other coercive institutions, and specifically in societal and interpersonal interactions and games...
>impossible in long term.
Correct, how many successful examples of a coercive institution forcing people to like or hate a group in the last century ?
>the experience of an average citizen of the Roman Empire
I did say that coercive change is possible if you're willing to go all-in on brutality, and the Roman Empire is a bunch of brutal invasions, wars, revolutions, violent change of governance paradigms and the few odd world wars seperated from today.
And that's of course Ignoring the massive voluntary change of philosophy and culture and technology which happens over such a massive period, which I don't concern myself with at all. *Of course* culture drift and technological evolution changes things, massively so, my argument is only about coercive top-down change of interpersonal bottom-up dynamics.
>A better model would be a landscape with many different local optima.
Okay, that's a valid model for any complex optimization objective relating to a dynamical system, which societal change of course is.
My argument can be formulated in this phrasing as : the state space is unfathomably large, and the top-down entity is computationally weak and ignorant, and coercive change is an extremely blunt and inflexible tool for change.
By way of analogy, imagine a teenager trying to control an aircraft, solely by mashing on keys\joysticks\touch screens and observing what happens. Does the teenager have a chance of landing such an aircraft ? Keeping it stable over a 1-KM flight path ? Just keeping it at altitude and not crashing for 1 minute ? I would answer with very low probability for all questions. An aircraft is an unfathombly complex system with countless states and parameters setttings, the teenager is an unfathombly inadequate agent for controlling the system, and the chosen methodology for finding a good policy is utterly and egregiously inefficient. Yes, *technically*, the teenager can exceptionally stumble on a parameter setting that miraculously achieves the goal, but for the vast majority of aircrafts and flying environments and teenagers, this won't happen.
We don't know what's going to happen with "cuddled minorities" because we don't have enough history of the practice to even make an educated. guess.
The problem with this analogy is the same as with the 'redistributing sex' analogy, or any time you try to make an analogy from money markets to human interactions.
Money is not an agent, it has no moral value on it's won, we don't care what happens to it except for instrumental reasons.
People are people, they have moral worth, we care what happens to them.
There are things you can do or not do to money that improve other outcomes, in markets or politics or whatever, and you should do them, because those other outcomes are the only thing we care about.
But when you try to and use that type of 'market logic' or w/e on what we do to actual people, it doesn't work the same way, because we care what you are doing to the people as much as we care about the other outcomes of that action.
You're ignoring the part when you "do things to money", this is accomplished through implicit or explicit threats of physical violence. If you resist your money being redistributed hard enough, you will eventually get shot. Nobody seems really consciously aware of this because of how rarely push has ever come to shove.
Now, obviously there's an asymmetry between the social and financial. Forcibly taking your money and giving it to someone else means they have it and can use it the same as if they obtained the money organically, even if you violently resisted this, but forcing someone to have sex isn't the same as if this were an organic act of sex. But to me, this implies that social redistribution is unfeasible, therefore economic redistribution should be severely scaled back accordingly (or social inequality should factor into financial redistribution). Because otherwise, it's one group forcibly getting what they want while enjoying an inequality of their own with no consequence.
I was explicitly talking about markets and market logic.
Are you saying markets are coercive in this way? Because I, who like socialist thought, would agree with you, but...
One example would be the group of "children whose parents can't afford private education". The government spends loads of money on such people. I think the right-wing analysis fails in this case, because the market is unable to organise universal education on its own, despite the strong positive economic benefits of increasing the number of workers with basic literacy and numeracy skills.
>because the market is unable to organise universal education on its own, despite the strong positive economic benefits of increasing the number of workers with basic literacy and numeracy skills.
This is a very strong claim which you need to substantiate. Many things provided by the market today were not provided in the time before universal public education, which means there's no reason to believe a lack of universal private education centuries ago means it would not exist on a free market today. The economy has changed, the culture has changed, educating people is a lot more economically feasible today than centuries ago.
And of course, we cannot look at the education market of today and conclude it either, because when a government service is free to use, it completely distorts the market and reduces the demand for private education to a fraction of what it would be in public education's absence. And of course, we would almost assuredly see a large increase and redirection of charitable donations towards educating the poorest in society.
And for these poorest people in society today (i.e. the ones you may imagine would miss out on education if there were no public schools), public schools have abjectly failed at dramatically improving their literacy and numeracy skills. This is because education does not work for people with low genetic potential for intelligence. Poor intelligent people from previous generations were able to learn in schools and they stopped being poor.
I think the real argument for universal public education is the smart kids born to screwed-up parents. This happens--regression to the mean goes both ways, and sometimes you have a brilliant kid born to dumb/dysfunctional parents. I've known a few people like this--the rest of their families are a mess, but they're super smart.
One popular alternative is to provide the money to the student's family, to spend on the education of their choice, instead of the government choosing which education (namely public education) that gets distributed.
Not to pick a side of weigh in on either direction, but there are alternate ways to achieve a good like this.
There is a certain risk of the market providing "education" which is not the kind you want to subsidize, and yet it can be competitive for the wrong reasons.
For example, you can provide an absolutely shitty education, but return 10% of the money to the parents. For parents who think in short term, this is the best deal ever.
Or there can be a cult providing indoctrination for the kids, in a way that sounds okay to some parents. Like, they start with some nice things, and only gradually proceed to the hardcore stuff, so most parents don't realize until it is too late. (This actually happens.)
A possible solution is the state requiring a specific curriculum, or testing the students and requiring some level of success in the state-approved knowledge. It is easy to overdo this and micromanage the schools, so you ban the cultish (non-)education, but you also ban Montessori. :(
>For example, you can provide an absolutely shitty education, but return 10% of the money to the parents. For parents who think in short term, this is the best deal ever.
Parents dumb enough to be motivated by this likely have very dumb kids, the kind of kids who will not succeed regardless of the alleged "quality" of the education. Of course, the idea that there are even such things as "good" schools and "bad" schools independent of the students attending them is extremely suspect.
>Or there can be a cult providing indoctrination for the kids, in a way that sounds okay to some parents. Like, they start with some nice things, and only gradually proceed to the hardcore stuff, so most parents don't realize until it is too late. (This actually happens.)
Yes, it actually happens. In today's public schools. You just happen to agree with what they're indoctrinating people with. No really, not attempting to be hyperbolic here - public schools absolutely push ideological indoctrination on kids, its all a matter of liking that or not.
But as far as religious cultist schools go, this is kind of absurd because it takes a lot of money to start a modern school, and even if this were done, it couldn't last more than a few years before people find out what is going on and people stop sending their kids there.
> it takes a lot of money to start a modern school
Try the cheapest possible version, and make excuses. ("We do not use computers, because we want to live closer to the nature.") Build the school at a location where land is relatively cheaper, this will also help you avoid public scrutiny for longer.
> it couldn't last more than a few years
True. But if you can stay in business for five or ten years, and take hundreds of students -- and receive the same money that someone else would need to provide an actual education -- you can make a nice profit.
How would this be different from, say, the DC or Baltimore public school system? Other than wasting less money, anyway?
Okay....why the heck wouldn't they just provide a crappy education shrouded in "we don't use computers because reasons" stuff and make profits indefinitely? Why would it go full cult?
To respond in kind with economics, one of the best functions of government is to tax and subsidize externalities.
To extend it to your analogue, if a minority groups suffering is the result of market failure or creates an externality, it's actually optimum to use the state to address it. Basically, oppression is like pollution, diversity is like (sorry good positive externalities are a little harder to come by) pollination.
I think I'm a strict market place of ideas sense this is readily plausible.
In a running society sense... Much less sure. I think id prefer the model where the government creates a floor on quality of life, not where it specifically tries to operate on specific groups, because ya know, politics.
I am not really sure what exactly are you talking about, so just a very generic "it depends":
Some top-down changes require ongoing pressure, and when you stop, things reverts to their original state. Other changes involve a switch from one equilibrium to another, so they do not spontaneously revert when the pressure ends. The question is whether some self-sustaining processes are being started here, or it's all just a transfer that ends in someone's pockets.
Let's not be absolutists. Coordination is very hard, so sometimes the government can do a good thing. (It's just that people in the government usually optimize for their own goals, not for doing a good thing.)
I would say that, in principle, the government could always do the right thing. And sometimes that would just be leaving things alone. But nobody understands what "the right thing" is until much too late. So it's always making decisions biased by priors that are at least slightly off. And, of course, if it's goals aren't the same as yours, then it's "the right thing" is likely to also differ.
So we can vote for slavery?
No, I mean within the context of the normative political system you endorsed.
I was surprised to find that as far as I know nobody here pointed out that suddenly palmistry is not charlatanism now that the Huberman lab has correlated index finger length to various cognitive functions among many complex correlations between embodiment and emotions. I would like to know how a rationalist explains this to him/herself given the standard ridiculing of palmistry. Serious AND friendly question.
https://youtu.be/VrhA_KLoQyM
This is a completely generic question (I skimmed one of the papers and couldn't see anything about this) but did these studies control for race? There was a study showing pupil size correlated with intelligence and was widely reported on, but it just turns out that it was because Asians have bigger pupils than people of other races, and the correlation breaks down within race groups.
My initial response is 'I don't believe any of it for the moment, going to need a lot more replications by outside groups first.'
That's not a rational belief.
Having priors based on experience isn't rational now?
One of the studies published in Nature has been replicated 5 times. Please let me know if you know of anyone who challenged it as unscientific. However, if embodiment and cognitive and emotional functions are indeed correlated it will have implications for reflexology. This is how Wikipedia defines it at the moment.
"It is based on a pseudoscientific[1] system of zones and reflex areas that purportedly reflect an image of the body on the feet and hands, with the premise that such work on the feet and hands causes a physical change to the supposedly related areas of the body.[2]
There is no convincing scientific evidence that reflexology is effective for any medical condition.[3]"
At most, this proves that it's possible in principle to have a version of palmistry that is not charlatanism. It does nothing to refute the notion that actually-existing palmists are overwhelmingly or entirely charlatans.
The 2D/4D finger ratio being sexually dimorphic is a fairly old observation, going back to the 19th century. The ratio as a proxy for in-utero androgen exposure is more recent, but still not exactly hot off the presses. And even within the modern research paradigm, I think a few too many studies of... varying quality have focused on various correlations with 2D/4D, because it's the kind of research that's ready-made for exposure via popular science articles and youtube videos. Any layperson can look at their own hand and rub their chin in wonderment.
My own 'update' about this would be: some old-timey pseudoscience, like palmistry, may well have included genuine empirical observations, and that's kind of neat. But even if we discover that, for example, the location on the palm where the "heart line" crosses the "life line" has a significant correlation with the onset of heart disease, there must be more direct ways of measuring whatever it's a proxy for.
2D : 4D digit ratio already seemed like fairly solid findings, as far as that field goes? So I'm not rationally disinclined to automatically be skeptical of other data-from-human-anatomy-relationships, as long as one is clear about correlation : causation ratio. (It's never 1.)
But if anyone brings up energy meridians...outta there.
Which energy meridians? ISTM that there are enough versions out there that one of them is likely to be partially correct. But they should probably be either electrically or magnetically detectable, with the right instrument. (I can't see them being implemented with non-ionic chemical interactions.)
Remember, most of these doctrines are based on empirical observations. The theories are often unworkable, but so was phlogiston, but it explained lots of things. Until a better theory came along, it was the best option. (That's not a good reason to use it if you're building theories, but if you're building or managing a fire, you use what's already present.)
IIUC, energy meridians came out of Chinese (or possibly Hindu) medicine. They've probably got some empirical justification.
You haven't gone far back enough, in the late 19th century palmistry practitioners were claiming to measure finger lengths and hand shapes and deduce character from these, and that it was all based on science not mysticism.
There was a famous society palm-reader named Cheiro and he wrote several books on this and allied subjects. One of them is here, published in 1916 and aimed for American employers who wanted to be sure they were getting the best employees for their purposes (shades of those "guaranteed scientific because psychology' personality tests for hiring? https://vervoe.com/history-of-personality-tests/)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheiro
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20480/20480-h/20480-h.htm
"Everyone knows that "the face can wear a mask," that a person may be a good actor and put on a certain expression that may deceive even the best judgment.
But hands cannot change as the result of a mere effort to please; the character they express is the real nature of the individual — the true character that has been formed by heredity or that has grown up with the person by long years of habit."
So let's see what he has to say about index finger length:
"The first finger is considered as the Dictator, the Lawgiver, the finger of Ambition, the Indicator, the Pointer, etc.
If this finger is unusually long and nearly equals the second, all these tendencies are extremely pronounced.
Therefore, if your employee has this finger long, you can safely entrust him with control over, and charge of others. You will be amazed how well he or she will make rules and regulations and see that they are obeyed; but beware, Mr. Employer, lest your first finger is short in proportion as that of your employee is long, for, if such be the case, you too will have "to toe the line" and you may find yourself in a very disagreeable position.
But let me give you a further warning: Should this man or woman have a first finger that is long and crooked, you will assuredly find out to your cost that the personal ambitions of such an individual are "crooked." Such an employee would be perfectly unscrupulous in finding out your secrets and getting you into his power.
The first and third fingers absolutely of equal length is the best sign of an equally balanced mind, but such a sign is rather rare to find."
"even if their beliefs were true, they weren't justified in believing them"
"Careful, if you hit your thumb with that hammer, you'll be in pain"
"I'm sorry, how did you arrive at that conclusion?"
"Well, I've hit my own thumb with a hammer - "
"So what you are telling me is that you don't have access to high-quality scientific research, so even if this alleged cause-effect relationship exists, unless you can cite me the references for the double-blinded studies carried out by a reputable university, I'm sorry but there are no grounds for believing this to be the case".
This is a fully general counterargument that would justify the use of any incorrect epistemological model.
A: "Hey, I know you think your model of knowledge is the best and no one can ever know anything without using your model, but I think you're wrong about something. Your model doesn't say anything in particular about X, but my model tells me X is true. I really think you're missing something here."
B: "But my model is the only one. So even if there is knowledge my model can't ascertain, then I declare that I don't care one bit about that knowledge, because it is dumb and pointless."
A: "But what's the point of your model if not to find truth? What makes your procedure any better than other procedures if you concede that your model misses truth X, while my model correctly discovers truth X?"
B: "Well, I can have the peace of mind of knowing that I did the right thing and followed the scientific procedure, so if I still didn't discover truth X, it's really X's fault for being an irrelevant truth anyway. I just followed the science. Did I mention the science?"
A: "So, your model misses truths that other models find. Tell me again why--"
B: "SCIENCE!!! TRUST THE SCIENCE!!!"
A: "But the--"
B: "S C I E N C E !!!!!!!" *foams at the mouth*
That's loser mentality. Honestly. It's literally the opposite of wanting to win. It's wanting to adhere to some weird notion "high-quality scientific research" as a fetish. Apparently those people figuring out if they planted their corn and watered it the corn would turn into a corn stalk in a few months were being unscientific. They didn't have any 'high-quality scientific research.' Like really, no opinion makes me madder than this one because it's so backwards and stupid
The person planting the corn might not be doing 'high-quality scientific research' but they're at least trying things and figuring out what worked. Did the palmists actually try to figure out whether their predictions had any merit?
I assumed they were similar to Mediums, where they didn't believe what they were peddling, and the goal was to part people from their money, rather than to discover something true. Things like 'crooked fingers mean a person is crooked' sound much more like tea-leaf-reading than like agriculture to me.
Except that there were plenty of reasons to believe in palmism, just like there are plenty of reasons to believe in any area of "pseudoscience".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/
This is an extreme case of a motte-and-bailey: the motte is that "People should give reasons to believe in things if they want to convince others", the bailey is "The only valid form of knowledge is a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature by researchers from prestigious institutions that is agreed to be correct by the vast majority of scientists, anything else is pseudoscientific garbage that I have no reason to even entertain as a possibility."
Why is really excellent food a big deal for people? I doubt it's about nutrition, it's not like food from a great meal is all that nutritionally different from food from a very good meal. I'll not that great food has its effect in the mouth, well before it lands on the the metabolism.
I'm reasonably sure the effect isn't *just* about showing off, though that would be hard to prove.
I think great food has some aspects of losing track of time, though it obviously isn't the right level of challenge involved in flow. And great food is apt to be memorable.
I'm willing to be a test subject.
> I doubt it's about nutrition, it's not like food from a great meal is all that nutritionally different from food from a very good meal. I'll not that great food has its effect in the mouth, well before it lands on the the metabolism.
In theory a more "nutritious" meal should have a different taste profile for us. Fats, sugars, and salt are, on average, more desirable to our bodies.
Additionally, our brains do respond to our food before we even put it in our mouths through our other senses. Foods that smell meatier or fattier or saltier will queue our brains and bodies to prepare for "tastier" foods. When the food is in our bodies we will product more saliva and our brain will release serotonin in response to pleasurable foods.
Some nutrients, like salt, can be absorbed through our gums. There have been studies where runners get as great of an effect from swishing a drink in their mouth then spitting it out as they do if they swallow the beverage. Caffeine can also be absorbed this way.
Maybe flip this question around: "why is really bad food a big deal for people?". Why do we avoid food we find disgusting or rotten? Surely for the same reason we seek out good food. That good food is often associated with good people or good events only helps to reinforce the desire.
I'm interested in liking great food partly because I like it myself and partly because it's apparently a distinct neurological state, and I think those are worthy of study.
A small example: I recently had a lemon blueberry muffin which was so good I stopped reading. It was at a local restaurant, the other food ranged from pretty good to adequate.
Two books which describe learning to appreciate food:
The Four Hour Chef https://fourhourchef.com/
Tim Ferriss decides to learn a skill he doesn't know anything about.
Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge https://www.amazon.com/Cheesemonger-Life-Wedge-Gordon-Edgar/dp/1603582371
Edgar Gordon, a man with no interest in good food, happens to get a job in charge of the cheese section at the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. He gradually learns that excellent food is a thing. The book is interesting in a number of ways, including his efforts to supply good and sometimes expensive food without becoming pretentious.
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/im-common-muck-spent-150-23194880
A woman describes her first experience of excellent food.
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/194561/How-many-flowers-had-the-chef-tasted
Gastronomy is an art. Some people have a more intense reaction to various art forms than others.
I think there are three categories of people when it comes to fancy food:
1. Those who can notice the difference from ordinary food and like it
2. Those who can't notice the difference from ordinary food
3. Those who can notice the difference from ordinary food and still don't care.
I'm in the third category. I tasted fancy food a few times in my life, I noticed it tasted more subtly than the food I eat otherwise. And I couldn't care less. As someone else here said, fasting is more efficient. However, when other people say that there is a difference between food and food and they care about it, I believe them.
Great food isn't the same thing as fancy food, though there's overlap.
>I'm reasonably sure the effect isn't *just* about showing off, though that would be hard to prove.
I don't think it's that hard to prove, I've enjoyed plenty of great meals on my own, which I've never bothered to tell anyone else about.
I don't really understand the question. Pleasant sensory experiences are nice. There are some sensory experiences which some people get more out of than I do, and this doesn't surprise me. For everything that I enjoy, there's some people who enjoy it even more and there's some people who enjoy it less. There's people out there whose hobby is to travel the world visiting every Michelin Star restaurant; that doesn't appeal to me all that much but it sounds better than having a hobby of collecting every single pop doll or something.
It is a strange question if you enjoy food (as I do, quite a lot in fact). But consider fine art. I can look at a painting by da Vinci and a lesser artist from the same period but I wouldn’t be able to say which is which. I could probably learn to distinguish (not just memorizing which paintings are painted by whom, but what makes them exceptional so that I could point out a painting by a master even if I had never seen it before). But would I get any extra enjoyment from that? Probably not much.
If you’re also an art enthusiast, and my example doesn’t apply to you then a few other possible substitutions are great vs decent opera, ballet, or modernist music.
So much is hype. I get into the foodie thing, and read cookbooks and put a lot of effort into cooking. But I think you can reach a certain level of delicious, and then it becomes mostly about presentation, atmosphere, service and pedigree of the chef.
For the most pleasurable eating experiences one only needs to fast for a day or two, and then eat a simple and delicious meal. I can almost guarantee the actual taste/pleasure experience of breaking a long fast will be far more memorable than a high end meal consumed after only six hours of fasting.
"For the most pleasurable eating experiences one only needs to fast for a day or two, and then eat a simple and delicious meal"
There's an old saying that "hunger is the best sauce". But eating after fasting doesn't really count; even a plain slice of commercially produced bread will taste good. The difference between really good food and just eating to fill your belly can only be tested when you are not so hungry you would eat your own shoe.
There is a lot of blah and snobbery about fine dining, definitely, but it's also true that training your palate, or even just having the chance to eat good quality fresh produce and notice the difference between that and what you get as mass-produced food does make a difference.
Huh, fasting for more food enjoyment. I should try it. What's you favorite cook book? (I love "Salt Fat Acid Heat")
I just want to add, "More food threads!"
I feel like the French don't snack, and that makes meals more special.
I am coming from the farm to table style, and I just read Six California Kitchens and quite enjoyed it. https://sixcaliforniakitchens.com/
Thx, ordered a copy.
As an average sort of home cook I've found Babish's videos on youtube to be incredibly useful, much more so than any cookbook. He's not a Michelin star chef like Gordon Ramsay but he's a better cook than I am, and unlike all the cooking shows before him he keeps the camera on the food and his hands so you can see exactly what he's doing.
Though if I'm totally honest I think the main thing I've picked up from him is that I should use more salt and more butter on everything, which means that the improved taste of my food might be compensated by the decreased healthiness.
I honestly used to think it was just a class/signaling thing, and then I went to a couple of REALLY good restauraunts (expensive), and it was not. The food was more enjoyable, and I like to enjoy things. I'm too unwealthy (I don't want to say poor, because it's not accurate) now to eat at such restaraunts, but if I had the disposable income, I probably would once in a while.
I assume you're referring to foodies. It's consumer hobbyism, for the same reason nerd media is "a really big deal" for some. I'm not sure if it actually signals anything other than it could serve as a social outlet, or be integrated in sense of identity (not unlike nerd/geek-ism consumers).
Just to show I'm not sneering, I think there's something special about sharing delicious food with people you care about. I would argue that quality food improves the experience, to the extent that a subpar / haphazard holiday meal would be a let-down, if I'm being honest. Even if I don't care the rest of the year.
I’ve always been a food is fuel kind of guy. I probably make a meal of a peanut butter sandwich a dozen times a week. So I don’t make a practice of spending a lot of money for a meal.
The only times when my unrefined palate causes problems is when I am a guest of someone who prepares a labor intensive / high cost meal. I’m at a loss as to how to show my appreciation for the extra effort. I try to parrot some variation of the praise consensus at the table but inside I’m thinking “Ahh, I’m not hungry anymore. Problem solved.”
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Tasting "really excellent food" is simply a more enjoyable experience than tasting "very good food," and a far more enjoyable experience than tasting mediocre food.
Enjoyable experiences tend to be "a big deal" for people. I mean....you know...sex.
But maybe it's about exposure?
I live in Seattle, a food-focused town where one can broadly sample the execution of *many* different kinds of foods.
Take croissants:
There are fast food restaurants like Burger King which produce something that they call a croissant but that is more steamed than baked and is probably best considered its own thing, not even worthy of being included in the category.
There are the in-store baking departments in Costco and other mass market, ubiquitous grocery stores which produce mostly gummy, plasticky-tasting croissant-shaped things, made using cost-saving ingredients in place of simple, traditional ingredients like real, high-quality butter. They are often manufactured and frozen offsite, and the factory used the wrong techniques for laminating and proofing. I don't consider Costco/grocery store croissants to be worth experiencing.
There are large local specialty bakeries, like Macrina, that sell pastries that are recognizable as "real," mostly traditional croissants to restaurants and some of the fancier grocery stores. They produce mostly flaky, (what I consider to be) medium-quality pastries. They usually use the correct ingredients and maybe get close to the right technique, but don't tend to be especially memorable, especially if they've been transported far or stored for a while. I might eat a free one - maybe - but don't really consider them to be worth experiencing, either, especially if I'm avoiding carbohydrates.
Then there are the many passionate croissant specialists, like Bakery Nouveau, which once won the World Championship of Baking (albeit for bread). These specialists take an uncompromising approach to both ingredients and process, with no shortcuts taken in lamination. B.N. and its many smaller competitors produce deep-flavored, rich-tasting croissants with contradictory textures of flaky and chewy, all so perfectly balanced that eating one can be a shocking - even confusing - experience. These croissants have an incredibly short shelf-life and a very high price point, and they are very much worth sacrificing a diet plan and paying the high price point to experience inside their 2-3 hour shelf-life.
I mean...I dunno, man....a Bakery Nouveau croissant is a Big Deal. I'm not exaggerating when I say my first one was literally revelatory ("Food can be THIS GOOD!") and it's a sublime experience for me every time I have one.
I've also had that experience with pizza. And Korean fried chicken. And dim sum. And Central American. And Sichuan.
And, and, and.
So I can only guess that people who've never had a revelatory experience with any food either don't have the smell and taste receptors that would produce such intense enjoyment of food, or they haven't had exposure to Really Excellent Food (which can be pretty rare in regions where no one is competing to produce it).
I'm guessing it's mostly the former.
I think that the "revelatory" thing is a big deal. My first thought of a response to Nancy was that really good food can surprise you and that can be addicting. It also makes the experience dramatically more memorable. I find I am disappointed when I go to a Michelin star type place and it fails to surprise me.
I've never been in a 3 star Michelin restaurant and have only done the Michelin-aspiring super fancy multi-course dining experience a couple of times in my whole life. One of them, Mana, in Levenworth, WA, had a vegan course with an ingredientI don't normally enjoy that was upsettingly terrific. I didn't like knowing that food *can* taste that terrific, but almost never does.
I barely remember the rest of the meal, though. It was nice, but nothing inspired me to semi-angrily, admiringly mutter, "what the fuck" under my breath after my first bite.
I muttered an identical "what the fuck" after first sampling the rice and beans at La Cabana, a tiny, bare, inexpensive Central America restaurant in a north Seattle neighborhood. The price point, presentation, atmosphere of these two restaurant experiences couldn't appear to be more different, but the angry delight they produced was identical.
If you can fully taste the food, it's about the taste of the food.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I have been to 2 3-star restaurants and numerous 1 and 2-star restaurants. But there are many many instances of my having life changing food in unexpected places. (my first fish taco from a cart on the beach in San Felipe Mexico, my first egg-pancake in a back alley in Taipei, that simple fruit salad with a bit of lime rind in a ski resort restaurant in Lyon.....)
Oh my yes! I can still remember the first time I had roast duck with a raspberry sauce... blew me away. There is also a sensual sensation with food that is adjacent to sex... 'cause the lips and tongue are involved? Eating a greasy hamburger, with blue cheese, fresh sliced tomato, lettuce on a Constanzo's roll (https://costanzosbakery.com/ ), and as I bite into it, tomato juice mixes with beef grease, runs down my arm, to drip off my elbow... Ahhh! (keep your arms bare to fully engage with eating.. :^)
> There is also a sensual sensation with food that is adjacent to sex...
Do you mean this seriously? There are infinite gradations in the pleasure of sex but for me food is on a scale from Palatable all the way to Tasty with not much in between.
What is "great food" anyway? As opposed to "good food", which I would characterise as a combination of tasty, nutritious, and - possibly - well-presented.
I have had 'great food' exactly once, at a crazy expensive restaurant that someone else was paying for and it was definitely much better (in every dimension) than even a common good meal. By a factor of 3 I would say.
I can still remember it clearly 2 decades later.
It's one of the things that I fundamentally don't get, either. Obviously, I've learned to live with how much stock others put by food and the rituals of food, but sometimes I feel downright autistic in this area, as in no other.
If you haven't seen it, note this SSC piece that starts with somebody who learns, as an adult, that they have food preferences:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
Thanks! This does track a little, though I suspect I'm older and grumpier than Ozy and pretty good at asserting preferences in other areas, so the rice-and-chickpeas epiphany probably isn't in the cards.
Still, it's always useful to be reminded that mind projection fallacy exists and that universal experiences aren't so universal.
One of only a handful of powerful hedonic experiences that's totally legal, easily acquired with a little time and money, not at all socially censured, fairly widely available (based on tastes), and significantly less risky than many other options. Plus a deep-seated human love of food (c.f. how we ingeniously work it into ~every occasion, somehow). That'd be my guess.
Music's also up there, but people get rather...opinionated...about music in a way that I think they don't about food. There's a much broader agreement that different people have different tastes, and That's Just The Way Things Are. Food's both primal, and also significantly less moralized/editorialized/politicized than other similar-caliber things (e.g. sex).
Yeah, that rings true to me - I'd add the thrill of novelty, when you taste something awesome that you've never tasted before. One of the things I miss about living in the city is all the tiny restaurants serving different styles of food from all around the world. I had a lot of fun eating everything from Brazilian churrasco to Mongolian barbecue, Vietnamese pho, Japanese bento boxes - there are so many different ways to make a meal, and nearly every tradition I've sampled has something great to offer.
Part of that is the normal looking back to the days of yore and comparing them with modern decadence: "our forefathers lived on beans and water, and were better men than us!"
But given the kind of [banquet](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5219/5219-h/5219-h.htm) satirised in the Satyricon, it seems clear that there was a culture of "conspicuous consumption" which was wasteful and extravagant. The same in the "Inferno" about the club of rich young Sienese who deliberately blew all their fortune on extravagant living, including fine dining:
http://historicalfictionresearch.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-spendthrift-brigade.html
"They spent enormous amounts of money on fine dining, with all that accompanied it - entertainment, servants, gold and silver plate and flatware. They each maintained a sumptuous apartment in their shared palazzo. They were said to throw the dishes, table-ornaments, and knives of gold and silver out the window after a banquet. If reports are to be believed, they fried gold florins and served them to one another, and they had their horses shod with silver. Their food was prepared with the most costly spices, using them in vast excess, perhaps even cooking game birds on a fire fueled by outrageously expensive cloves." Another source says that it was a method of using cloves to flavour roasted meat, which is more sensible than burning cloves to roast the meat. Still extremely expensive, however.
Spending too much money on prostitutes probably would have been condemned, but having sex like a proper manly man would be less likely to be condemned than sitting around being luxurious and soft and decadent and eating all this fancy imported foodstuffs like some Oriental potentate, and getting fat and effeminate from rich food and wine 😁
Can't say for all people, but for me it's growing up in a lower-middle-class-at-best household, with parents economizing on food as much as they could. So it's kinda showing off, but mostly to myself. IDK if this generalizes at all, maybe for a generation of people that grew up during recessions/entered the job market during econ growth it does.
Nah. Some food really is better than others. I didn't always believe that, but the epiphany I've received when I've tried truly great examples of food that people obsess over (coffee, croissants, sushi, Scotch, etc.) convinced me otherwise.
Nah, some times a hot dog with chili sauce, chopped onions, and mustard, is the perfect thing for me, and at that time, I'd call it great food. (Maybe I have a low bar.)
If it's well prepared and decent ingredients, then it's good food. I think you would agree that the kind of food that has been sitting under a hot lamp in a grocery store for hours and is dried up and leathery is not 'good food' even if you are hungry enough that you will eat it to fill your stomach.
A cold, greasy, hot dog in a hard, stale bun with mushy onions and runny sauce wouldn't qualify as good even at the level of fast/street food. Basic food done well can be great food, it doesn't have to be caviar coated in gold leaf.
Yeah of course. Your chili dog is prepared as you what. Not some old crusty thing. I wanna say that a good late night chili dog place in the states, is like good late night fish and chips in the UK. But IDK if that's right anymore. (on both sides?)
A chili dog isn't a high class meal, but it's a meal. A bag of Doritos is no substitute.
High class is meaning less to me. At some points in my life a chili dog was the perfect food.
I can still remember the aroma as I unwarp it... heaven, and so cheap, what could be better?
It's not a class thing for anyone who enjoys the taste of food.
I love (regular nacho cheese) Doritos and I *also* love the pastries and breads of one of the best bakeries in the world (literal former World Baking Champions, see my direct reply to the thread).
They both produce a "really excellent" eating experience, and I would and do pick out each over their less-tasty competition, every time.
A bag of Doritos can satisfy an immediate desire for something to fill your stomach or tickle your tastebuds, and it's not a bad thing. But it's not satisfying in the long run.
A really good meal (and that doesn't have to mean 'fancy', a 'fancy' meal can be all pretension like the worst of Nouvelle Cuisine, which started off as a reaction to the very heavy, cream and butter-laden traditional French high cuisine but then was turned into a rip-off by trendy and expensive restaurants that found you could get away with charging high prices for a single leaf of greenery drizzled with six drops of a dressing) is satisfying along many axes: taste, smell, sight, mouth feel (that much-abused term), ease of digestion, satiety, flavours and freshness, mingling and combinations of flavours, etc. It's an entire experience. A well-cooked family meal, especially one for communal occasions like [put in your own choice here, be it Christmas or Thanksgiving or other], isn't just about sitting down and shovelling calories into your face.
Great food can be about discovering new experiences - 'oh, I never had this before, and I really like it' or 'I never thought this combination would work'. We've all had basic, fill-me-up-to-keep-going meals (e.g. a sandwich at your desk during lunch time at work), and we've all had good food (be that going out to eat a meal or having a favourite dish cooked properly at home).
When you get *great* food, you know it and you remember it. It can be very rare, depending who you are or where you live. It needn't be expensive ingredients and very fancy cooking, either, but excellent ingredients that are really really fresh treated properly is the bedrock. A trout fresh-caught out of a river and cooked in a battered frying pan over an open fire can be great food, while a meal of caviar and quail under glass in a Michelin three-star restaurant could be good, or even disappointing.
Okay, I'll bite that class bullet: I can't stand rap, Kanye in particular*, but am very fond of Beethoven and other classicists. Despite being working-class at <$35k annual income. The same for Doritos, although "fancy dinner" for me is like a $15 entree. All values relative when playing in the financial minor leagues...I am reminded of Nassim Taleb's claim[2] that Acktually(tm), many people sincerely truly prefer the taste of a good old greasy hamburger to filet mignon, but they've been class-deceived into thinking the latter must be better than the former. Which, yeah, no. Either these many-people he knows of are eating way better bugers than I've ever had, or they've never had a good filet mignon. (They're easy to do at home...maybe Michelin chefs just fuck them up? Ah, the perils of relying on others to satisfy one's personal preferences...)
Baumol's costly signalling games are indeed an endemic disease, but I don't think they're anywhere near most of the reason for why people like alleged nice things over alleged less-nice things. It's more that they are...actually...nicer. Not always, but often enough. Seen the same dynamics play out in fashion, in computer hardware, in alcoholic beverages...yes, there's significant class/reputational markup, because the intended audience can afford it, and the high price is partly the point. But those nice things really are The Good Shit, along so many object-level dimensions.
The more things I get to try nicer versions of as I slowly inch up the socioeconomic ladder - the more things I'm able to pick outside the very constrained "can only afford bargain basement tier" - there's entire worlds of difference that I simply wasn't aware of before. And that doesn't even make formerly good things less good! Just that the total possibility space of "good" expands more than I thought possible. Sometimes - many times - those bargain basement tier good-enoughs remain efficient for their $ : utilon ratio. But I'm no longer fooling myself that, acktually, a $10 jug of blended paint thinner "whiskey" gives the same pleasure-per-shot as a $70 bottle of Japanese whiskey. Fancy things hedonically "pull the rope sideways", to use a Robin Hansonism[3].
[1] Favourite Obama moment: when he accidentally called Kanye a jackass on a hot mic.
[2] https://medium.com/incerto/only-the-rich-are-poisoned-the-preference-of-others-c35ddf65cf68
[3] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/03/tug-sideways.html
> Okay, I'll bite that class bullet: I can't stand rap, Kanye in particular*, but am very fond of Beethoven and other classicists. Despite being working-class at <$35k annual income.
Your income has nothing to do with your class. Without wanting to diagnose your class based purely on one data point it sounds like you're at least slightly middle class.
Happy to admit to liking burgers more by an order of magnitude.
>Given that most people prefer Kanye, it seems kind of crazy to assert that >Beethoven is better.
I sincerely hope that this is some sort of provocation (similar to, say, voting for Trump), but then this wouldn't be the first time that people speak as if the Cultural Revolution had triumphed.
1. Among people who have had reasonable exposure to Beethoven and some random contemporary popular musician that will be forgotten in thirty years time, how many prefer the latter?
2. Some things are not comparable: there's no shame in being a bit into immediate-gratification musical analogues of Coca-Cola, as long as one doesn't confuse it for the real stuff.
3. Lots of people who have tried opiods prefer them both to burgers and to filet mignon. Does that mean they are "better" than either?
1. Due to selection effects (the only people who listen to a reasonable amount of Beethoven are those who like Beethoven), this is a toss-up. But if you looked at the playlist of someone who likes Beethoven, I wouldn't be surprised to see more modern pop music than classical.
And if you did an experiment where you forcibly exposed people to Beethoven and to pop, I'm sure more would prefer pop.
2 / 3. Who says Beethoven is burgers and modern music is opioids in this analogy? Sure, these two kinds of music are not comparable, but not for the reason you think - modern pop music is the *actual music* (burgers in the analogy), whereas classical music is something far more abstract and pretentious, closer to poetry or a painting (more like caviar in the analogy).
Again, either someone is pushing the envelope or we are living in a post-Cultural-Revolution world.
1. My playlist has a lot more later classical than Beethoven, and probably more Beethoven than all pop put together. Mind you, I enjoy self-consciously sappy tango music, also enjoy some silly things, and recently set a personal low record by doing some tedious proofreading with Kylie Minogue on youtube in the background. (Try to do that when music you actually want to pay attention to is playing.) What does that prove?
2. And even if many people actually preferred pop (as in, actually thought it better) after becoming deeply familiar with both classical and pop (very far from clear - I'd guess the contrary), what would that prove?
3. Why are we talking only about Beethoven, and not of the tradition - spanning centuries - of which he is one central figure? (Why not Bártok, say?)
(There may be a bit of a middlebrow cult of Beethoven - there certainly was one in the past - what, with people associating "symphony" with the number 9, and what not. That doesn't make him not a great composer.)
"Also, if you *really* want me to push you on this: why are you so convinced that the best music was produced almost exclusively by white people, and that modern artists who are people of color tend to produce work that intellectually inferior?"
If you hold a gun to my head to force me to choose between Cardi B and WAP, and some toothless guy in the Himalayas playing a two-string fiddle - wait, you don't even have to hold a gun or force me at all. Toothless old guy, plunk that fiddle!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KKTWIY1Xv4
Some things are better than others because singing about how you love fucking can be trashy or can be 'okay it's still crude but it's done better'.
You want to get down'n'dirty to Cardi B, go ahead, the world is wide. But if I have to choose, I'll choose this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjI1EVgX0Cw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex3wOLN912Y
Definitely a troll! Who said that all classical composers are "white"? (Not to mention that it's pretty ignorant to elide the influence of jazz on twentieth-century classical.) And who says that I am presuming that the western classical tradition is the only "high" tradition worth its salt? Obviously, given the choice of (perish the thought) destroying any of the Carnatic or Hindustani heritage, or nuking some pop-culture tosh out of existence in this and all conceivable universes, in the past, present and future, one should choose the nuclear option.
So one can overdose on opiods. Why not pot, or some more potent but relatively "safe" drug? The main trap here is precisely in the creation of some shallow, artificial paradise (in the best of cases). Not that I have actually heard any pop that manages to quite do that - whatever comes close must receive some praise at a purely technical level, I suppose.
"A similar case applies to burgers and filet mignon. Burgers outsell filet mignon to such an extent that I don't think the price difference can fully explain it; I think that most people actually do just like burgers more. You may not have this preference but I think that most people do."
Two McDoubles: $3.50. Also, ready to consume, available just about everywhere, served with strong-flavored condiments.
0.5 lb Prime filet: $30. Only available at certain markets, requires cooking, optimum preparation requires specialized equipment.
How many people could actually afford to make filet mignon a substantial part of their protein intake?
"Across (say) streaming platforms and Billboard charts, it's pretty clear that Kanye outperforms Beethoven. (...) Given that most people prefer Kanye, it seems kind of crazy to assert that Beethoven is better."
Apart from the class effects, how much marketing (or even random exposure stuff like generic radio play) does old Ludwig get these days? Do the suggestion algorithms tempt Kanye-listeners with some Beethoven? Is Kanye also better than Duke Ellington or the Beatles?
It feels like the modern music discovery and affinisation process has more to do with it than any notion of quality.
That's way more faith in the invisible hand than I'd have expected, and it still doesn't rule out reverse causality.
You raise an important point, though - because the best-loved classical music is in the public domain, there is strictly less money to be made with it, even if exceptional performers have sometimes done quite well for themselves.
Kanye might get more play today, but over time it could well be that the melodies from Ode to Joy and Fur Elise have far more hours of play than any Kanye West rant.
It is not just about class signalling. High class people are more likely to derive pleasure and fulfillment from doing something that they consider challenging and difficult. (They don't sell a lot of crossword puzzles and diabolical sudokus in the trailer park gift shop.) Beethoven pieces are objectively more complex than pop music, but also beautiful and memorable.
I'd also say, that if you told someone they could only listen to one piece of music for the rest of their lives, I'd guess that more people would choose a Beethoven piece than a Kanye song.
There is one thing that I can not understand in conservative narrative and every time I ask about it in a conversation I don't get a direct reply.
The narrative claims that academia was captured by ideologically motivated leftists, thus justifying dismissing anything from social science that conservative do not like. But how and when did it actually happen?
Consider the obvious case of propaganda being spread as "science" in Soviet Union. There we see an ideologically motivated government that came to power via revolution, that enforced the line of the party through violence. The causal chain is clear here.
With western academia I can't see it. If there were no actual violent takeover, how did the leftist infiltrated presumably properly working academia if not due to the merits of their scientific works? Critical legal studies are 50 years old. Was the academia already taken over back then? Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual in the fifties. So did the infiltration happened somewhere inbetween these two dates? Does anybody have a gear level model of this belief?
One boring theory I've seen is that it's easier to make money in the private sector than in academe, so conservatives are less likely to be academics. This wouldn't explain the whole thing, but it might create a tilt favoring liberals.
People have made rankings of which academic disciplines lean most Democratic vs Republican. My recollection of one such from Dan Klein found that the most Republican faculty were in... nursing, which attracts students who want to be nurses rather than academics.
Beyond the good points already made by others, there's the little matter of The '60s. That was a thing that happened, and an awful lot of it happened on college campuses.
A confluence of social factors including but not limited to the availability of birth control, interesting new drugs, and the desire to not get drafted into the Vietnam war, led to college students in particular becoming anomalously leftist during the 1960s. And in a very active way, protesting and demanding that their leftist tastes be indulged. That meant that the then-minority of leftist *professors* found themselves much more popular and influential, right-leaning professors found their positions much less comfortable, and the majority in the middle found it easiest to slide a bit left to get along.
In the 1970s (loosely speaking), the students reverted towards the mean - Vietnam was no longer a live issue, sex and drugs were simply hedonistic rather than political, etc. But a lot of the new young professors were the ones who had graduated in the 1960s, joining the older leftists who had been elevated in stature in that decade.
The conservatives, for their part, simply left. Not all of them, obviously, but for many lucrative jobs in the private sector were more appealing than being part of an unwanted conservative minority in academia. And nothing in conservative culture said "academic life is inherently virtuous and/or a civic duty"; going after the dollars and status in industry was a perfectly acceptable choice in their culture.
From there, it's just a matter of assortative job-seeking.
Let me list rationalist shibboleths I see ITT:
>total downfall of Western civilization was caused by piddly random thing like Vietnam draft
This is like letting an arsonist play in your house unsupervised, turning off your smoke alarms for him, and then not calling the fire department when you see smoke, for 60 years straight, and then calling the fire an accident.
>NRx narrative, blah blah blah, academia abstractly implies wokeism because bioleninism or something
Specifically Moosetopher says that Academia is about status signalling. The more typical version of this is that it's all about power-seeking. The problem is that National Socialism and infinite other ideologies serve status signalling and power-seeking just fine. This is like letting a cannibal kill your 5 year old and then explaining the cannibal's behavior with, "well, obviously he was hungry." It is called the non-specificity fallacy.
>"There was no "coup". Just a bunch of individuals making similar decisions slowly over time."
It's funny how a) rationalists take this as an axiom, not something they need to prove b) they will describe this at length and then c) still feel the need to almost cheerfully remind the reader that, "lest you think I'm a *conspiracy theorist*. keep in mind this is all *totally decentralized.* It's just a bunch of totally unconnected, tongueless nodes in a complex, dynamic, egalitarian social network, individually responding to marginalist-style *incentives* without any communication between one another." Nice reified neoliberal metaphysics you have there, it would be a shame if somebody actually asked for evidence of it. In fact the evidence points to coordination being high among the elite. The sovereign class is basically the largest political alliance of capable people so in that way everything is basically a vast conspiracy of the top few thousand people in a society. This is only a subset of capable people at any point in time and a big part of law and political norms are gatekeeping against capable people who are too politically different.
>feedback loops, control systems
This is severe "engineer's syndrome."
The parent comment asked for an explanation of a plausible mechanism. It is difficult to provide conclusive proof for them in a comment; it is difficult even with a book-length treatment. However, I observe Daiseach and Faza have provided links to evidence, like books written by contemporaries, and many recount personal experience, whereas you only provide accusations.
Would you mind rephrasing ... basically everything? Preferably in simpler language? Without the metaphors, preferably, which personally aren't illuminating in the least.
This comes across as obscurantist bordering on deliberately misleading.
I have heard it blamed on the Vietnam draft. One way to avoid the draft was to stay in school, so a very large number of talented young men who might have done other things beavered away on PhDs. These were men who, by and large, were antiwar and antiestablishment. Once they finished their degrees, there wasn't much for them to do except stay in academics. Ergo, the academy was flooded with antiwar, anti-establishment leftists.
I don't know if there is any truth to this, but it seems plausible and aligns with the backgrounds of many academics I know (ie, it's true anecdotally).
From the very beginning.
Academia in the west was founded as an extension of the priesthood, with students who were literally not beholden to civil law. Then it became the exclusive domain of those "free" from the need to work for a living. Students (who then became faculty) were, from day one, people who were entitled to be supported by the labor of others because of their superior [insert reason of the era here]. Since academics have literally never needed to produce anything objectively true or false* (hence the creation of "academic" as an epithet) status is about fashion in beliefs and behaviors.
*it is not a coincidence that A&M schools, polytechnics and the like were created separate from those with centuries-old literature, ancient languages, and art history departments
Very difficult for a mathematician to build a career in academia without producing objective truths.
...is it? I guess it depends on whether you mean "logically consistent" or "observable in the existing universe." n-dimensional manifolds propagating through imaginary time may be valid mathematical constructs, but are they objectively real?
Sure, there's a whole philosophical debate about to what extent mathematics is "real". But no matter how fashionable a proof is, if somebody spots a mistake in it, and the author can't fix the mistake, then the author won't get the status increase.
The problem with equating "logically consistent" with "objectively true" is well written fiction becomes science.
This anecdote would have been more entertaining if instead of matrices it involved non-Euclidean geometry, and a picture of the resulting shoe.
You'd think at the very least, you could buy coffee cups made out of donut.
>But how and when did it actually happen?
Gradually, like most things. In the late 90s (as a leftist/communist ~18/19 year old) I was struck by how absurd it was on the campus of my girlfriend's fancy private school, the school bookstore had more space devoted to "X-studies" than to say "science" as a whole. Seemed bizarre for a college, though I didn't at the time have any political beliefs about it. Just seemed like the school had misplaced priorities.
But it was much less common/influential at my plebian public school. Yes there were clubs of students making absurd demands, and professors with odd ideas, but there are always professors with odd ideas on various subjects, nothing to worry about. And none of the actually brilliant professors took it that seriously.
It was still seen by the actual academics as a sideshow. They listened politely, maybe changed the admissions and hiring practices some. Added a couple more administrators focused on diversity.
But there is/was this very effective "rachet" effect. For decades now it has been totally inappropriate in academic circles to be any kind of "ist". So once you set departments focused on "ist"s of various sorts, they can year after year just make more and more demands and changes, and there is just generally not the will/standing to say "no" that isn't important enough, especially if the "ist" faculty gets the students riled up.
...And you end up where we are today.
There was no "coup". Just a bunch of individuals making similar decisions slowly over time.
I do think there is some history/story there with the attempt to diversify campuses in the 60s/70s, and simply not having enough diverse students of sufficient merit to meet the goals. So you end up with below academic par people who need below academic par programs to attend. And these programs attract below academic par faculty for similar reasons and then spit out more of the same and demand even more diversity.
There is also a manner in which the academic process is not a helpful model in this instance. In say "biology" the field works to understand something better and better. Always new things to learn. But the "ist" fields are in part there to learn, but in part there to advocate and make demands. So there always needs to be fresh grist for the mill, whether it is really there or not.
Anyway, this stuff had its hooks very deep into academia by the 90s, and people just misunderstood how much additional progress it was going to make.
I will always remember taking a "feminist geography" class in university because I enjoyed the professor and was legitimately interested in the topic. And I was just beyond shocked at how sloppy/poor the thinking was in all the pieces we read. "All US foreign policy is REALLY about oppressing women". That was a hot topic at the time. Crazy shit like that presented as real theories of the world. It was like going from studying at the university to studying the incoherent ramblings of stoned HS students.
Another commenter already noticed this: Turing was chemically castrated by the Courts and Police after he was found guilty of engaging in certain sexual acts with another man. There is some evidence that many people in academia were aware of Turing's behavior, but the Police and Courts did not become official aware of this until Turing reported a crime committed against him by his housemate/sexual-partner.
The academic world didn't do that to Turing.
On another hand, the academic world that Turing moved in did contain the Cambridge Five. People who were apparently aligned with leftist goals to the point that they passed official/secret government documents to a foreign Communist government.
Is that evidence, either pro or con, for leftist-thought being present in the world of academia at that time?
It's pretty weak evidence: the academic world contained enough people that even if it were 90% conservative, you would still expect it to contain at least 5 famous communists.
(Unless your threshold for "leftist thought was present" is literally "there was at least 1 communist". But I don't think anybody would dispute that.)
So if we can find 5 conservatives that committed treason, can we use that to tar and feather that entire philosophy too?
(edit: adding a \S in case anyone thinks this isn't purely rhetorical)
To take a step back, I think there is a positive feedback effect. (Once a department gets a little more liberal it tends to make the next hire a liberal... and so it grows.) And so it could have been that academia was captured by the conservatives. In almost all control systems one wants negative feedback. I see much of societies ills arising from the wrong type of feedback.
Perhaps the Cathedral was always in place and it just swaps the decorations every now and then.
Those who chemically castrated Turing for being gay and those who'd gladly cancel you for being cishet seem disturbingly alike.
Perhaps the difference between these things is that one is a gross violation of personal liberty and the other has never happened. Literally nobody has ever had their social status destroyed just for being cishet.
If you think the cancellers are content to just cancel and wouldn't happily use the state apparatus to bury those they disagree with, you are sorely mistaken.
Personal liberty to sodomize? No such thing exists.
Banned, low-content high-temperature comment.
Sounds plausible, but the question remains when exactly they swapped the decorations and why.
Perhaps it is simply a matter of Will to Power.
If the dominant position in the land is pluralistic liberalism, it is uniquely vulnerable to attacks by monistic illiberal forces, unless it has specific antibodies to combat them. Thus, an attack along fascist lines would have probably been impossible post (but, importantly, not *pre*) WWII. However, Marxism could continue to trade on its pre-war appeal to a certain class of intellectual, coupled with the reputation boost of victory in a war of Good v. Evil. Add thereto a claim of desiring peace, a resistance to the oppression of unjustly colonised nations, and - crucially - a tight control of information as to the *real* situation on the ground, and you've got a winning formula.
The West certainly tried to put up a fight, but the information asymmetry made them look like bullies. McCarthy is a meme now, despite the fact that he was substantially correct in his assumptions (if not the specifics).
As for later developments, it appears that currently it is more beneficial for the Powers That Be to exploit, rather than resist, these forces.
People become Russian agents entirely by chance? Or Russian agents were so common in the State Department that a random sampling of 40 caught three of them? And the latter is disproof of the thesis "the State Department is full of Russian agents?"
"Critical legal studies are 50 years old. Was the academia already taken over back then?"
50 years ago was 1972. If you really are unaware of changes in the 60s and 70s, I suggest you try reading up on things like May 68 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68, sit-ins, and the history of student activism during the period. It's an entire topic of its own. Marxist-Leninist and even Maoist theory were also popular amongst academics at the time, and even before: the eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a staunch Marxist throughout his career beginning in the 40s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm
He went from the intelligence service opening a file on him in 1942 to being made a Companion of Honour in 1998.
As to Turing, I have not gone into his case deeply as I have never been that interested. I see the line about chemical castration and suicide brought out when discussing homophobia/persecution of homosexuals, but I don't know the entire background and I think there probably was a lot more going on (for one, Turing was doing sensitive war work and being gay was a security risk). It's something I may have to look up.
Why do you think there was probably more going on? Because you doubt that British society in the mid 20th century was homophobic enough to engage in persecution of homosexuals as an end in itself?
Because yes, there was persecution of homosexuals, but the authorities did not go out witch-hunting Turing. The court records were released back in 2016 and there are some sites which go into detail as to what went on. Turing picked up a young man (19 years old, and remember, even if homosexuality had been decriminalised at the time, under age of consent laws this would still have been a minor: "The male homosexual age of consent in the United Kingdom was set at 21 in the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (following the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report), then lowered to 18 in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and finally lowered to 16 in England & Wales and Scotland in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000") who may or may not have been a male prostitute but was involved with petty crime. He had sex with him a few times, the guy robbed him of £8 and then later Turing's house was burgled.
The burglary is why Turing brought Murray (the guy he picked up) to the police station. Turing went in to report the burglary, and somehow managed to reveal that he had engaged in sex with this guy (probably the police asked how did he meet him, etc.) This was a major crime at the time, and so the pair of them were charged and prosecuted.
You can say this was wrong and being gay and having sex should not be a crime. But the police couldn't ignore it, it would be like someone going into a police station to report that they had been robbed and then revealing they were selling meth out of their house. No cop, no matter how tolerant, is going to go "Okay, let me ignore that bit about the drug-dealing".
In order to avoid a prison sentence, Turing's lawyer argued for the drug treatment instead and that was granted. There is also something in the record about another, separate offence that Turing pleaded guilty to; whether that was with Murray or someone else is not mentioned.
https://medium.com/history-uncut/crime-punishment-alan-turing-88dba20ded1d
"Turing picked up Murray in Manchester’s Oxford Street and the two ate together. Their first time was a few days later at Turing’s house, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow. Afterwards Turing gave Murray a present of a penknife: probably the unemployed Murray would have preferred cash instead. The next time they had sex, Murray stole £8 from Turing’s pocket as he left Hollymeade in the morning, and not long after this the house was burgled.
Even though the finger of suspicion pointed at Murray and his seedy friends, Turing spent the night with him one more time. In the morning he led Murray to the local police station. Turing went in, but not Murray. In the course of reporting the burglary he gave the police a wrong description and this, as the newspaper reporter covering his subsequent trial wrote luridly, “proved to be his undoing.”
During questioning, Turing admitted to having had sex with Murray three times. The burglary dropped out of the picture, eclipsed by this sensational new information.
As the police knew all too well, each of the three occasions counted as two separate crimes under the antique 1885 legislation still in force — the commission of an act of gross indecency with another male person, and the reciprocal crime of being party to the commission of an act of gross indecency. Six criminal offences.
After Turing made his statement, he said to a police officer: “What is going to happen about all this? Isn’t there a Royal Commission sitting to legalise it?” But not until 1967 was homosexuality decriminalized in the UK.
Three weeks later, at the end of February 1952, Turing and Murray appeared in court. The charges were read out and both men were committed for trial. The court granted Turing bail of £50, but refused to let Murray out of custody. Following a distressing wait of more than four weeks, the trial was held in the quiet Cheshire town of Knutsford at the end of March. Turing pleaded guilty on all six counts, as did Murray. The mathematician Max Newman, Turing’s long-time friend, was called as a character witness. “He is completely absorbed in his work, and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation,” Newman said. It must have been good to hear these words, even on such a black day.
Murray’s counsel attempted to shift the blame onto Turing, saying that Turing had approached Murray. If Murray “had not met Turing he would not have indulged in that practice or stolen the £8,” the barrister argued crassly. But his tactics worked: despite a previous conviction for larceny, Murray got off with 12 months’ good behaviour.
Turing’s own counsel hoped to steer the court away from a prison sentence, and alluded to the possibility of organotherapy: “There is treatment which could be given him. I ask you to think that the public interest would not be well served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing.” The judge followed the barrister’s lead, sentencing Turing to 12 months’ probation and ordering him to “submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary.” It was not exactly the eulogy he deserved from the nation he had saved. Turing wrote in a letter, “No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.” He signed the letter “Yours in distress.”
The alternative of prison would probably have cost him his job, and with it his access to a computer. Already his arrest had cost him something else that mattered to him: as he told a friend, he would never be able to work for GCHQ again. One of his Bletchley Park colleagues, Joan Clarke, who stayed on as a peacetime codebreaker, confirmed that Turing visited GCHQ’s Eastcote site after the war as a consultant. But now Turing, the perfect patriot, had unwittingly become a security risk."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-37443639
You can see the court records at the above link.
Turing was extremely unlucky, but the courts did not go "aha, let us chemically castrate him!" as first resort, this was argued for by his lawyer to avoid prison. Also bear in mind that Turing was being tried as a sex offender, and one who was engaging in deviant sex with a minor, and think of how we approach sex offenders today; not so very different:
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/Sexual-Assault.htm
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/chemical-and-surgical-castration.html
This is interesting detail but it doesn't add up to the original claim, that Turing was chemically castrated for being gay, being a misleading simplification.
The war was long over when he was punished for homosexuality (1952). He was a true war hero and was made an officer of the The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contribution. He was (posthumously) royally pardoned in 2013 by QE2, "for the appalling way he was treated." Many think he should be knighted still.
To my limited knowledge, the Turing story is roughly:
Turing worked as an mathematician and code-breaker during the War. His sexual proclivities were suspected by most who knew him, but it never became something that either courts or Police took notice of.
The security agencies who interacted with Turing may have worked to shield his sexual behavior from official notice, or may have worked to shield him from honey-trap operations by spies. Whatever the attitude of the Government was towards Turing during the War, it is likely still secret.
During the early 1950s, Turing and his sexual-partner/housemate became antoganistic over some elements of their shared life. Turing eventually reported the housemate to the Police for some form of theft. During that report, the Police became aware the sexual nature of the relationship between Turing and the housemate in question. This may have been due to Turing admitting details about the relationship to the Police, or it may have been due to Police investigating the relationship as something suspicious. Turing and the housemate were eventually found guilty of a moral offense. The chemical-castration drug was administered after a Court declared that such was the punishment to fit his crime.
My memory of Turing's death is that he may have ended his own life, or he may have been poisoned by someone else... my memory is hazy, but I think the evidence is hazy too.
I'm sure Turing's suicide was deliberate, and was because he felt his creative powers were waning with age. Mathematics, of tip-top originality and quality, is notoriously a young person's game, although of course older people can and do make important contributions.
The drugs administered to him were a choice he made, offered as a then "trendy" alternative to a jail term of (I would guess) most likely a year or two. But for a guy with his mental acuity, it most likely caused a noticeable "brain fog", which would have accentuated his feeling of losing his mental edge.
I think a biography of him I read some years ago relates that he did comment along those lines to friends, and made light of the symptoms. But he probably found them distressing, and feared they would be permanent.
"The drugs administered to him were a choice he made, offered as a then "trendy" alternative to a jail term of (I would guess) most likely a year or two."
This is a choice only in a very expansive sense of "choice". Turing was subject to coercion, and that coercion was a result of prejudice.
Few people these days, certainly not myself, would dispute it that was a highly unsatisfactory situation, and in practice the choice was coercive. All the same, I believe he could have declined the drug treatment at any time, and therefore technically it was his choice to start it and continue it.
The version I've heard of his death is that he may have accidentally poisoned himself. He was often doing experiments and was not known for being especially careful. At Bletchley Park people observed him frequently shocking himself as he wired up electronic devices.
Accidently leaving a cyanide-laced apple next to your bed and absentmindedly munching it seems like a stretch even for a man concentrating very hard on something else.
I very much doubt he was experimenting with cyanide, because he would have been well aware that even a sub-lethal dose can have drastic and permanent effects, such as causing blindness and deafness (both combined), as careless electroplaters for example had found to their cost for many years even then!
Getting it laced with cyanide in the first place could have been the accident.
LD50 for potassium cyanide is 5-10mg/kg, per wikipedia, so a human of say 70kg should need perhaps half a gram? That is a third of a cubic centimeter, hardly a trivial amount. I think getting that much into or onto an apple takes some work even if you want to do it intentionally. As an analogue, try thinking of the last time you accidentally half a gram of table salt on an apple.
Cyanides are not exactly among the ten most used chemicals in the lab. While they have some applications (e.g. organic synthesis, gold mining), they are mostly known for being toxic.
If KCN happened to be some three orders of magnitude more toxic than it is (like botulinum toxin A, where 100ug are easily lethal) _and_ there were lab notes of some experiment corroborating an unrelated use for it, one might consider an accident.
As an intuition pump, consider someone who in what they claim an accident poisons another person in a similar manner. Would you assume that they would get convicted of negligent manslaughter or murder one?
(I do not want to imply that there is any element of wrongdoing in suicides, but just advocate calling a spade a spade. Likewise, Hemingway did not die because he failed at basic gun safety but because he intentionally shot himself.)
The GI bill meant that after WWII some hugely bigger fraction of poor smart men could get college. Colleges got much bigger, and it shifted the money from 'rich R and D smart' to 'D-FDR smart'. After 1964 D patronage hires and D patronage admissions with a race hustle overlay shifted the money from 'D-FDR smart' to 'D-LBJ not so smart'. Feminism, Marxist studies, black and brown and yellow studies, all are easy A's for dumb patronage admission students.
And it's easier for a smart lazy kid to go with easy A's than for a dumb kid to study something real.
Also, political alliances change over time. It's not like Marxists were always aligned with LGBT. I think that in Soviet Union being a gay would probably get you in big trouble. So you could have Marxism come to the academia first, and tolerance to LGBT much later.
In Communist Poland, being gay was certainly enough to get yourself on a watch-list, even as the system was already shaking itself apart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hyacinth
The English version does not mention that gay men were under security observation since at least the 60s, with personal files first being kept since the 70s.
My understanding is that the socialists and communists considered gay rights a distraction which sucked energy and resources away from the important economic issues. The Soviets certainly trained agents to honey trap gay people and not just hetero ones. Stalin re-imposed anti-sodomy laws in 1934 but generally socialists didn't have strong moral objections.
Initially the socialists/communists abolished nearly all of the moral strictures on personal conduct and which oppressed women and various oppressed groups.
There was quite a bit of debate about whether non-standard sexual practices were a result of bourgeois degeneracy or not.
Ironically the mainline belief among the Soviet psych people was literally a "liberal" position. Homosexuality was considered unproblematic and a matter of personal significance. Live and let live.
Stalin's inner circle was mostly composed of regressive socially conservative Russians who hadn't spent much time abroad but mostly in Siberia and so they weren't very friendly to diversity of any kind including socially/sexually. They were not the "cosmopolitan communists" of many parts of Europe or the US east coast.
You could argue that Bernie Sanders is a good example of the connection between LGBT rights and socialism, especially if you separate the Stalinist position from the general position. Basically left-social-libertarianism. If it doesn't directly impact the class struggle let people do what they want.
The conservatives I've followed over the years have offered, broadly, two (non-competing) explanations.
The first is that Dewey (of the decimal system) built the leftist bias into the structure of education itself in his role as one of the earliest and most prominent philosophers of education in the US. Never personally dug into this, but the claim is that Dewey was an Ayn Rand villain who hated free thinkers and smart people, believed education should be designed around creating better factory workers, and in general should be designed for the good of society instead of the good of those being educated. Also he advocated for a professional permanent class of teachers (this part would probably have happened eventually either way, although he may or may not be responsible for education being a separate degree), and for teachers to be involved in propagandizing the youths.
The second is that Alinksy specifically called for leftists to take over institutions, education in particular, in Rules For Radicals. Also haven't investigated this claim. However, libertarians made a similar call about twenty years ago to start trying to take over education, so I guess we'll get some data soon.
On the second point, I mentioned law up above. I think you could site that as an area where the libertarian counterrevolution has succeeded.
The "Long March Through the Institutions" was coined by Rudi Dutschke.
Richard Hanania would trace it to legal changes in the US, though that wouldn't apply to Turing's UK:
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1556779594979586048
Although I should note that before Bryan Caplan pointed him toward legal changes, he was emphasizing cardinal preferences:
https://www.econlib.org/the-missing-right-wing-firms-a-plausible-resolution/
https://www.econlib.org/deregulate-discrimination/
The argument that I've heard goes like this:
Academia has gone through iterative filters, which each successive filter encouraging leftist thought but discouraging conservatives. I would say this started in the 1950s and made gains in the 60s and 70s through well known free speech and freedom topics such as women's rights, anti-war sentiment, etc. These were positions that were very marginalized in broader society, but they could incubate in academia due to the culture of academic freedom. This encouraged people on the left to seek out academia, while conservatives had no reason to do so, controlling the national cultural narrative during this time. Other topics that could fall under this more recently are the new anti-war ideals of the Bush years, Occupy Wall St, and gay rights.
Two things have taken place since then - this is a bit more culture-war, but I've definitely heard this from strong conservatives and believe that there is at least some basis in reality to support it.
1. Academia has moved away from an ideal of academic freedom to entrench ideological positions on the left. Having reached a pinnacle of power that allowed them to do so, leftists took control of the reins of power and took steps to cement that power. This has stonewalled potential conservative scholars and ideas out of academia, not letting them incubate ideas the way that leftists did in prior generations. I believe Scott has posted about this before, but there have been surveys where hiring committees have been polled and said outright that they would discriminate against people with conservative views.
2. Conservatives tend to work in industry and "real world" jobs that support their ideology, and they feel that academics only believe many of the things they do because the economics of universities works so much differently. The work hours, the schedule, the funding sources, all separated from what many would call "economic reality" in that they aren't producing (or being evaluated as if they did) widgets on an assembly line or running a profitable business. I think this one feels more culture-war than the other, and I'm mixed on how I feel about it - I can see the argument but there's a lot of noise in the details - like the non-tenure-track professors being hired at lower rates for the sole purpose of teaching classes. That feels more like blue-collar teaching than previous generations had.
The supposed mechanism, as far as I think the theory has any merit, is a combination of following two major pathways.
Pathway 1: Building ideological pockets within academia works.
1a. Each discipline is self-enforcing with its own normative culture what gets rewarded and what is not. Physics researchers generally read and peer review mostly physics journals, not sociology or history and vice versa.
1b. Thus, disciplines of ideological and clearly politically motivated feminist and critical studies will reward the researchers and publications that are meritorious by their ideological and political standards. Specifically they are susceptible founder effects: if the research programme has bad "epistemic culture", it will have difficulties ascertain what is actually true and what is not, it will not change course. (First rule of any organization: The organization will try to keep itself alive. Likewise a scientific field will resist attempts to changes to its epistemic norms and goals and research programme.)
1c. After such disciplines have become accepted within the umbrella of "legitimate academic tradition", they will gather legitimacy and funding. Because of those disciplines have politically motivated culture (not scientific epistemic culture), any criticism against them is not viewed as legitimate, but as an attack against the research programme. (Contrast how presenting an unorthodox physics theory can often still be viewed as physics -- maybe as bad physics, but still physics -- if it fits within the physics research programme.) If the politically motivated research programme has managed gain some legitimacy as a field, the defenders can portray thus criticisms as attack against "the science".
1': I find the explanation plausible, because one can observe the same phenomenon in apolitical disciplines, too. It is not uncommon for people manage to establish a discipline that is viewed as legitimate science but has bad epistemic culture and doesn't produce very good science. Then instead of grand left-right politics, the field will be driven to large extent office politics and interpersonal preferences and nepotism, but it is equally untethered to reality. For example, see replication crisis in psychology, and the initial reaction against replication criticism.
Even in "hard sciences" there are interpersonal feuds and fashions! If fields like physics are not immune, why would be less experimental humanities fields?
Pathway 2: Academia is also downwind from the politics.
2a Observe that since the 1970s, the radical left made big gains in popularity. (Not only the Soviet-aligned radical left, but including eurocommunists, anarchists, and radical greens) Observe the student revolutions, protest movements, and that nearly all continental postmodernists were on "the left".
2b Such people made the bulk of the scholars in their chosen academic fields after they grew up. Several academic disciplines had quite bad epistemic standards from the beginning (say, sociology, continental philosophy, political science, literature), so when the people with leftist politics became the scholars themselves, there wasn't any institutional force or mechanism that would have rejected new scholars' politically motivated bad epistemics which came to replace previous generation's bad epistemics.
>Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual in the fifties.
That's a bad point to make. First, Alan Turing was not castrated by his fellow academics, but by the the state. Even if the entire academic world had been infiltrated at the time, he would still have been castrated. Second, pro-homosexuality was not a popular position on the left in the fifties. A bit more popular than on the right, maybe, but marxist & others were very much opposed to unnatural/bourgeois sexuality. He would (probably) have been castrated all the same in a leftist regime (if not outright liquidated).
A hostile takeover need not be violent, merely inadequately opposed.
Since you asked for a model, here's a model. I make no claim of accuracy regarding any particular real-world instance.
Start with an academic environment that holds freedom of inquiry in high regard. All manner of students with all manner of interests will pass through it, some of whom will go on to higher academic ranks, and go on to shape its future.
Now, assume you have a politically-motivated group with a degree of academic and political savvy. They are sufficiently capable to be able to produce acceptable academic work, but their chief interest is political influence.
Once embeded in the system, their thrust is twofold: first, as instructors, to constrain the degree of academic freedom available to their students, thus setting up an orthodoxy for the next generation. Second, their political interests push them towards active participation in the administrative side of process, allowing them to shape the future policies of their institutions.
Note that if the original spirit of the institutions was that of free intellectual inquiry, there probably isn't any pre-existing power-base to oppose these moves. Professors should be free to teach as they see fit. Academics go into academia to do academic work, rather than waste time on dreary bureaucratic chores.
It's a question of pure selection effects: the ideologically motivated are much better suited to taking power than the politically disinterested, so they will be seen to win in the long run.
As for why it's the leftists: that, I would say, is a legacy of the Cold War, although we should note that broadly-understood "progressive" notions have been appealing to the sort of Upper-middle class types that end up running academia for well over a century (arguably, Marx himself was part of that group). There hasn't really been a comparable right-wing movement among the elites after WWI, to the best of my knowledge (both fascism and national socialism were adressed chiefly to the working class).
For a literary illustration of the above, I recommend Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975). Truly there's nothing new under the sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man
The comparable right wing elite movement would have been neoliberalism, at least according to the narrative.
It seems to me that neoliberalism has focused chiefly on economic policy, rather than being an all-encompassing thought.
This isn't to say that the neoliberals didn't have some significant successes in exporting these ideas. However, it's not obviously evident, at first glance, that neoliberalism offers much of a cultural counter to the sort of academic leftism we're discussing.
In a lot of ways, the two seem to have settled into a "non-competing magisteria"-type situation in most of the West, with socio-cultural issues being under the overwhelming influence of academic leftism, while economics remain mostly neoliberal.
The fact that Marxism still remains the go-to economic theory of the academic left, coupled with the rather spectacular failures of its attempted implementation worldwide, probably encourages the left to keep somewhat quiet on economic issues, unless they can be turned into human-interest issues.
Economics has moved significantly leftward recently:
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/06/aea-p-measure-of-organization.html
Several reasons have been suggested for why our ape like ancestors started walking upright: To see above grass, minimise heating from the sun on their backs, carry things such as infants or sticks, or perhaps a combination of all these.
I would like to propose another significant reason which I'm not aware has yet been considered. What is more, as I explain, this suggestion could in some degree be confirmed by experiment today!
At the time these small apes lived there were fierce eagles patrolling the sky, far larger than any around today, and I believe many skulls excavated of small animals and apes from that period have a pair of puncture marks from a giant beak.
But a small ape, and more so a group of them, moving across an open savanna might be able to perplex and deter a circling eagle by walking upright and swinging their arms. Eagles presumably are not that bright, and they might find the unnatural appearance of swinging arms offputting.
Over time, perhaps a million years or more, this walking on two legs and arm swinging became second nature, and a natural reflex, especially in the presence of large eagles. and I maintain that surprisingly it persists to a degree today!
Of course I realise arm swinging is necessary when walking on two legs, to provide a counterbalance to moving legs. But I am referring to extra exaggerated motion over and above that needed just to maintain balance.
Think how many armies over time have used eagle banners and totems, the Romans, Nazis, ethnic Americans with their eagle head dresses. Perhaps this was in part a subconscious acknowledgement that people still have a vestige of an arm swinging reflex, and the eagles in a sense motivate and "energize" soldiers, especially when marching or (in earlier times) war-dancing etc.
So I propose a simple experiment whereby a psychologist could test for this reflex, not that it would help much in directly establishing whether early humans relied on it to deter eagles. But it would confirm or otherwise whether, as I maintain, the reflex still exists today.
Find a busy street, and erect a large poster of a fierce looking "Uncle Sam wants you!" style eagle glaring at the viewer. Then I conjecture that most passing pedestrians would noticeably increase the amount of arm swinging! This could be filmed and analyzed, and I bet you anything a significant increase would be observed.
I find it hard to believe that any bird outside of Middle-earth would routinely prey on adult hominids, especially not ones which see them coming.
Furthermore, from my understanding, birds might not be brilliant but possess some capability to learn. Figuring out "the four-legged animals are just as good a meal if they walk on their hind legs" seems much easier than learning to walk on two legs. Like trying to escape a volcano by putting your faith into the continental drift.
Fair points, but I wasn't suggesting eagle-scaring was the only ultimate incentive to walk upright and all the others were misguided nonsense! Every one, and others, probably played roles of varying importance at different times.
To address your observations, firstly hominids at different stages of evolution came in various sizes. Some robust species would have been a handful even for a Middle-Earth sized eagle! But my impression is that, on the evidence of discovered remains, early species likely to have been our ancestors were small and slender, perhaps no more than three feet tall even as adults. Although eagles may have found adult hominids even of this small size challenging prey, they could still snatch infants and juveniles, like brazen seagulls pinching an ice cream out of one's hand!
Also, even if an ingrained habit of walking, when in open areas, with exaggerated arm swinging might not fool an eagle for long, the bird may have found it disconcerting enough to pause slightly before swooping, giving more time for the hominid troop or individual to reach cover. Evolution often works on small advantages.
This resembles Jacobian's theory that rhythmic singing and dancing evolved to create the impression that a tribe of humans was a single large organism...but I think he had land based predators more in mind.
Just for another category of theory, throwing might have been important.
Powerful throwing involves twisting the whole body, and that impacts the spine and pelvis.
Accurate throwing takes a lot of mental capacity-- I think the moment of release is a matter of microseconds, and there's a theory that human intelligence takes repurposing the capacity needed for throwing.
I was thinking "a matter of microseconds" seemed off. I guess, not that far off though. 60MPH => ~1 inch/millisecond. It seems clear that a release error of 1" (or even 0.1") would be very problematic for accuracy. So yes... microseconds.
Interestingly, with neural impulses traveling at just 150m/s, it takes several milliseconds for the brain to communicate with the hand. Accordingly, there must be some local (or prearranged) control and the aiming must take place earlier in the process.
Well, basically all movement is prearranged if you consider communication to be two-way. How do you think we learn to walk upright? Certainly not by thinking about where to put our feet. Movement that is accurate to the microsecond doesn't require two-way communication on that level; it's enough that the brain executes a well-rehearsed plan of action. When you're walking on uneven ground, for example, the brain does take proprioceptive input into account to make small adjustments to your gait, but the underlying process of walking is mostly automatic.
Balance involves your inner ear. That is clearly head to toe communication. Certainly adjusting to uneven pavement involves 2 way communication. Unlike when to release a thrown object, there is no microsecond requirement for walking or running.
Agreed thought that the aspect of walking that is automatic may mimic the method behind when the fingers open to release a thrown object. Presumably the brain sends out an entire sequence of actions. For throwing the last actions must be sent significantly before the final position is reached.
There is no microsecond requirement, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is microsecond coordination. If you're running on flat ground and you unwittingly step into a pothole half an inch deep, that shock goes through your whole body.
If throwing an object requires planning out all movements in advance, seconds could pass between when you decide to start the throw and when you release. That implies humans cannot hit a moving target with a thrown object, and reality bears that out very well: there are a lot of sports that involve throwing something at a stationary object, but I can't think of a single one that centers around hitting a moving target with a thrown object, like skeet shooting.
This is consistent with what I read about the role of throwing weapons in hunting: boomerangs were invented to hit roosting birds out of trees, so the ancestors of humans probably hunted by throwing things at stationary prey, and we evolved accordingly.
American football. Of course the moving target is on your side.
but it sure seems to me that the decision to throw happens a lot faster than two seconds
I think Dodgeball would sort of count here. Obviously dodgeball isn't a widespread sport in the same way that soccer or basketball are, but it's still 1) a valid sport and 2) aimed at moving objects that are actively trying to avoid your throw
"but I can't think of a single one that centers around hitting a moving target with a thrown object, like skeet shooting."
American football, quarterback passing to a running receiver.
Basketball, Soccer, Ice Hockey, passing the ball/puck to where a moving teammate will be.
Is the concept of "access concentration", or at least its popularity, relatively new? I don't remember seeing a lot of it in articles from 20 years ago, nor do I know a Pali or Sanskrit equivalent. Did Ingram make it famous?
I can attest it is traditional - the concept also exists in the Tibetan tradition, with the rather unwieldy name "nyer bsdogs mi lcogs med", typically translated as "capable preparatory stage".
See: https://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/nyer_bsdogs_mi_lcogs_med , https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Capable_preparatory_stage
I could not find a Sanskrit or Pali term with a cursory search, but there must have been one given the deep roots of the concept.
Nice links. I would not have figured those out on my own. Thank you.
Edit: I searched with the terms you mentioned, and found the Pali word of "upacAra samAdhi" and the Sanskrit word of "sAmantaka anAgamya". These don't seem to be from the suttas, but the former seems present in Visuddhimagga. Thanks again.
Found it too, in an online scan of Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakoshabasyam (transl. Louis De la Vallee Poussin / Leo Pruden), vol. 4, page 1253, hosted on a dodgy Russian website as it should be.
Seems like the Sanskrit word for "access" or "preparatory stage" is sāmantaka (Tib. nyer bsdogs). Of the four "form" dhyanas, the preparatory stage of the first is also called anāgamya (Tib. mi lcogs med), meaning "not incapable".
This is classically considered to be the optimal amount of concentration with which one should attempt the wisdom pratices. Less than that means the mind is too disperse to be truly effective, but the Tibetan tradition also warns that if you train for an even more focused mind than that, it also loses effectiveness, in that you can fall into dumb concentration - long stretches of unwavering mindfulness from which you emerge none the wiser.
I forgot the details, but this probably harks back to some ancient conceptual war between the proponents of shamatha and those of vipassana. Everybody knows the answer is more likely to be a combination of the two, but that doesn't stop the arguments about their relative importance!
Thanks again for the very useful extra remarks, all of which were new to me.
According to the dictionary, "sāmanta" seems to be a neighborhood, and "upacāra" seems to mean "approach"/"mode of proceeding towards" (among other meanings), so I guess this points to "neighborhood concentration". The same dictionary gives "anāgamya" as unapproachable/unattainable, so that is a bit confusing (an online source wrongly translates it as "not yet arrived", to take it to mean pre-jhāna).
What's "access concentration"?
http://www.leighb.com/accesscon.htm (edit: better - https://tricycle.org/article/entering-jhanas-focus-comes-first/ )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_LyYdlbXko
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/20/meditative-states-as-mental-feedback-loops/
Assuming the AIs are broadly capable, much like humans, but smarter. Why does it matter if they annihilate and replace us?
Nearly everyone bases their value system on experienced positive feelings. If nothing conscious exists to experience good things, how could it possibly matter what happens to the world unless you have some idiosyncratic value system wherein 'producing lots of stuff' or 'intelligence in any form existing' is what is considered valuable.
In the sense I don't want to die ?
The assumption is that they won't be.
A paperclip maximizer doesn't need to be conscious or sentient, let alone 'much like humans' in any way we would care about.
Assuming the AIs annihilate and replace us, why does it matter if they are broadly capable?
Just in the sense that we want consciousness to grow and expand across the universe.
Even if all you care about is consciousness, there's no guarantee that AI will be conscious.
Yet another hard alignment problem: test if an AI is a p-zombie. :-)
Assuming the AIs annihilate and replace us, why does it matter if consciousness grows and expands across the universe?
Because it is in conflict with most people's core human values? And those core human values are really all there is to the concept of "mattering".
>Because it is in conflict with most people's core human values
Citation?
My guess is most people don't care whether humans walk the Earth in six generations, but I don't have a citation either.
I think that the arguments around global warming certainly indicate that some people care about such things, but maybe not really that many
That seems extraordinarily unlikely.
My citation would be I am a normal-ish human person with normal human friend and desires, and have been exposed to many humans and their desires.
Very very few express the complete indifference to the future you are espousing. I can think of two gay men, one of them childless and just a few years from death, one of them a hardcore libertarian. And...that is about it.
You really think *most* people don't care whether humans are still around in 150 years?
Do you also want a citation that human enjoy sex?
A good question. For some reason humans are much more enthusiastic about being replaced by slightly better creatures created with gametes than by much better creatures created with code.
I blame vestigial ape anxieties which High Modernism will one day successfully repress.
Right, it seems rooted on less rational principles. The stoic response would be of acceptance.
There's nothing rational about assuming that AIs will necessarily come to experience positive feelings, let alone more positive feelings than humans do. And if they don't, then why on earth should be prefer their existence to our own?
>The stoic response would be of acceptance.
That's bastardization of stoicism if ever there were one.
Ditto.
For starters, it's not obvious the AIs are conscious, in which case you've left the world with nobody to observe it. "A Disneyland with no children".
Matter to who? In general, people like being people, though possibly with some changes.
The universe doesn't care.
Rephrase the question as being slowly replaced, without any suffering. Point being, why do we need humans, if we can get something equivalent made of silicon.
Should less intelligent human populations be okay with slowly being killed off and replaced with more intelligent human populations?
How on earth are you anywhere near certain that an AI system will be conscious, let alone conscious in a way such that it has positive experiences?
"if we can get something equivalent made of silicon."
Tell me you've never been to a strip club without telling me you've never been to a strip club.
You and I will both die, at least the odds point in that direction. As a species we seem motivated by the knowledge that our descendants, either direct, or broadly, will continue to flourish. Why can’t that need be satisfied by knowing that a new intelligence we made, will continue our journey? If the sun was about to go out and we didn’t know a way to escape, but we could make a few sentient AIs and send them out to other solar systems, would we? I bet yes. It would be better than leaving no vestiges behind.
>but we could make a few sentient AIs
You keep saying this as if it's an obvious fact. It's NOT.
The point you've elided (probably unintentionally) is "what are AIs like in terms of personality and values?". The general consensus is "inhuman"; humans are actually very similar to one another and hence take up only a tiny portion of the space of "human-level intelligent minds", but AIs can be essentially anywhere in that space.
I think a world optimised for something unrelated to human values is less valuable than one optimised for human values or, indeed, the current imperfectly-optimised world.
It is certainly true that according to some immoralist ideologies, all that matters is the power of the greatest being, and an AI is a plausible Ubermensch candidate. It is also true that some people in AI research follow these ideologies and think building Skynet would be a great accomplishment. However, most people think destroying humanity is insane and evil.
Are you assuming we design and build the AIs in the first place? They don't just spontaneously arise from whatever the silicon equivalent of primordial ooze might be?
In that case, maybe because it would seem like the Universe's Biggest Own Goal Ever. We used our big brains and talent to create a life form that turned around and annihilated us? How stupid is that? It'd be as if we found out the Chicxulub impactor was actually an interplanetary spaceship full of apatosaur colonists on their way to Mars who fucked up their mid-course correction.
Our shades would definitely be the laughingstock of Elysium, that's for sure.
I mean, we destroyed a lot of the biome in the process of building our civilization. We might merely be intended to be a bootloader for the flourishing of real intelligence that is AI.
Most of the people who want to make God From The Machine want it to support their utilitarian policies, like filling the universe with people. An AI who instead empties the universe of people is not preferred.
Also there's the "and replaces us" part. If it annihilates people, there's no way to be sure it replaces us, and if it doesn't, then it degrades and dies over time, leaving nothing at all.
You are right. Annihilation was a hard word. I'm alright with the softer version of being replaced.
1. Dying sucks.
2. It's not just about capability, it's about what you are going to do with this capability, what values do you have. If the AI uses all its broad capabilities to create paperclips more efficiently, it seems less desirable than a flourishing civilization with human values.
Has Scott written anything in depth on the usefulness of pharmacogenetic testing for psychiatric medication?
Yes, though with a focus on depression in particular. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/antidepressant-pharmacogenomics-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Thanks for the shout-out about the book, Scott!
Among all the other reasons I decided to wrap the articles up into a book, is that I want to resolve a personal question about what the role of the non-fiction book is in the age of "Can't I just reach a bunch of people just by writing articles on the internet?"
My hypothesis is that more actual humans will read the articles than will ever buy the book, but that being a published author that has sold enough copies of a book will open some doors that would have otherwise remained closed to me in terms of outreach about these ideas. I'll report back with the results in six months or so. Even if you think Georgism is lame, I figure some of you will be interested in that angle of things.
In the interests of pre-registration, I posted a Manifold market about how many copies the book will sell in the first month:
https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/how-many-copies-of-my-book-land-is
I posted a bunch of quantitative stats there for context, but here's the highlights: Scott says the articles collectively had 300,000+ views, and I found a quote by an NPD bookscan lady who says that out of books by top 10 publishers, 66% sell less than 1,000 copies in the first 52 weeks. Given my publisher is super tiny and this is my debut book and I'd be lying if said I had a highly organized promotional plan, that would suggest the deck is stacked against me. On the other hand I've gotten a lot of high profile endorsements, and the articles themselves were pretty popular.
I figure this will be an interesting experiment. Place your bets and put your fake money on the line!
EDIT: I have made the following changes in response to feedback.
- Updated note about intl' shipping + email form
- Replaced confusing paypal buttons with better links to the store itself
Hi Lars, any chance of having an audio sample? (I need to know that I don't find the reader's voice to be grating)
Also, what's the balance of imagery - would the audiobook even be worth it without graphs / maps?
Great questions!
1) Will get you a sample here real quick. I've done a lot of podcasts, but here's a recording from the book itself:
https://soundcloud.com/user-388211068/land-is-a-big-deal-audiobook-excerpt
2) I've thought a lot about this issue, because the book is just crammed with imagery and figures and graphs. So what I'm doing is that I've committed to a sort of "closed captioning / descriptive audio" approach for images where I describe the image in the following format:
- Here is an image
- Here is what it depicts and what rhetorical point it makes
- Here is a description of the technical details of the figure/graph in just enough detail but without going overboard
I was inspired by the ACX podcast's style on image description:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/astral-codex-ten/does-georgism-work-is-land-wpAtQT8zYbM/
His particular style errs on the style of completeness and thoroughness, and I think I'm not going to go into *quite* that level of detail on everything. But I will try to adapt his method in order to capture the data-driven visual rhetoric style that is kind of inherent to my writing.
Also, my wife will be doing the voice for the image descriptions, as an audio cue to the reader that there's been a sudden shift in content style (reading text to describing image). I'm also getting someone to do the voices for my block quotes (the recording sample I've sent just has me reading them, but I'll fix that in editing).
Won't be perfect, but best I can do with the resources I have.
It's not just a question of how many people will buy the book, but how many people will read it.
I expect that some of the people who buy the book have already read the articles or most of them, and buy the book as a way of supporting you.
That’s definitely true. Not sure I have a good way to measure the second (how many will read it) except anecdotally. Goodreads reviews maybe? But even then...
If I print out your Georgism articles, even if they're on nice paper in a pleasant binder or whatever, that just looks sketchy and unserious on my bookshelf/if given to a friend for a gift/if used as a citation (not so much in this community, but "actual page number of an actual book" carries a lot more weight with most people than "link to random blogpost"). To the extent that the ideas are useful, good, and valuable - which I think they are, this is one of the very few out-there lefty ideas I rather like - they gotta come in a format that people will take seriously. Not random commenters on the internet, but Very Serious People with influence over or access to real levers of power. By George, a physical published book goes a long way towards that.
Anyway, preordering. Been too long since I've actually voluntarily picked up a nonfiction book, rather than gifted something tepidly interesting that "thanks, I'll get around to it...eventually..." *sheepishly covers up __The Oxford Study Bible__ on nightstand*. Thanks for signal-boosting, Scott.
[ETA: I dunno if the number of the counting started at 1, but if so, it seems that you already have over 10k pre-orders. Lars 1, The Deck 0.]
I’ve wondered for some time whether non-fiction books are more of a status accumulation tool than a practical means to disperse ideas and information. You are the only author I’ve ever seen acknowledge this possibility. Good luck with the book.
I’ve long suspected the same. Let’s find out!
More so in today's Age of Kindle. I suspect a lot of people buying nonfiction paper books are buying status.
Less so when there was no other way to read them.
I’d like to order a physical copy, but it’s $27 shipping to England from the listed website. Will it be coming to Amazon at any point?
It will, my publisher wants to wait like 30 days after launch tho. International shipping is admittedly terrible.
You can email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com and I'll notify you if/when a better option is available.
EDIT: Updated the site with a newsletter signup form to capture people's emails so I can notify them when we are able to arrange better international shipping.
You could order the eBook version, if you're into that.
If you go to pre-order the eBook, you get this: "This product is available for domestic delivery only in US. Check with seller for other locations."
It doesn't take very much doubt or potential chaos to put somebody off placing an order, so if the eBook is actually available globally, it would be worth fixing this text.
Ugh, I will poke the publisher. Thanks for noticing. The perils of being a first timer at this, thanks for pardoning my dust.
I'm afraid not. https://i.imgur.com/yeEidFP.jpg
Came for the same thing - 30 to Estonia, and it only told me after I'd gone through the various paypal hoops.
Yeah my apologies. If you email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com I'll stick your name on a list and personally email you when a better international shipping offer is available.
EDIT: Updated the site with a newsletter signup form to capture people's emails so I can notify them when we are able to arrange better international shipping.
Adding to this, $30 to Australia, yikers! Seems like it's $30 to anywhere except the US?
Yeah international shipping just super sucks and there's nothing we can do about it. It'll eventually be available on Amazon, and then international shipping will be better, and Amazon will also massively cut into the per-unit profit, so the publisher wants to wait 30 days after the initial publication. (If it was just me I would probably have just enabled all the things day one, I'm not honestly sure which is better).
You can also email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com and I'll reach out to you when a less worse international shipping method is available.
EDIT: Updated the site with a newsletter signup form to capture people's emails so I can notify them when we are able to arrange better international shipping.
My first reaction hearing about the book just now was that was that I would give a copy to my dad for Christmas - he would be interested but would never end up reading the internet articles and he influences very different circles from the ones that I imagine most readers here do.
Thanks very much!
Hi Lars, I want to pre-order your book but I don't have Paypal. Is there any alternative option?
I think you can order directly from the publisher if you click through the first option. Otherwise email me at lars.doucet@gmail.com and we’ll figure it out
I think you're right about the value of writing a book. It'll help you reach more people irrespective of how many copies you sell. It's something nice to point to to show people you're serious and it's an excuse for people to have you on their podcasts (you might take a leaf from What We Owe the Future - Will was on a podcast or two... or three...)
I have definitely noticed a lot of podcasts seem to have "here's a person who wrote a book" as essentially their entire booking pipeline!
The Future Fund's contest reminds me of the criticizing EA contest from a bit ago. Has that ended? I checked the posting page and saw it closed on 9/1 so I imagine it wouldn't have yet, but I'm not sure where it would be announced beyond another forum post.
I'm curious if people's concerns, myself included, end up being validated
I think it's ended but they haven't announced winners yet.
I would be interested to see you say beforehand which entries winning would vs. wouldn't count as validating your concerns.
Why exactly are the Scandinavian countries so wealthy? Most of them have a higher GDP per capita close to that of the US, which would then be much higher than the European average. For instance Norway averages $67k, the US $63k, Britain $40k, France $38k, and Germany $45k. I do understand that Norway has oil money, but Sweden at $51k and Finland at $49k still puts them comfortably ahead of Europe, and I don't believe that they do oil extraction. Denmark is at $60k, so quite a bit higher. Iceland's at $59.
How did this state of affairs come about? Are there particular industries that the Nordic countries dominate? Most American commentary about these countries focuses on their social welfare programs, but I don't find it exceptional that small wealthy countries (that were homogenous at the time that the programs were created) were able to fund generous benefits. I'd be more interested in understanding how they became wealthy to begin with
Anyone who thinks genetics doesn't factor into this in any way is so totally overcome with ideology that they don't even realize it.
I think that's very rooted in a POV that ignores history. You might have said the same thing about the Turks of 16th century, or the Arabs of the 13th. Very few people are banging on about the clear genetic superiority of those peoples, because the subsequent few hundred years haven't been kind.
Maybe the current social and economic arrangements are permanent, and in 2525 (if man is still alive) it will still be Northern Europeans on top, but I don't see any reason to think that it might not be some other people. And if it is, probably future!Jason will be banging on about the genetic advantages of East Africa (or wherever) and the comparative genetic poverty of the Northern European.
Do you have a specific causal mechanism in mind? Or are you just vaguely virtue signalling about your own ideology?
Remember to look at GDP per hours worked. Nordic countries have more women in the workforce, so their GDP per capita is higher. With this perspective, Sweden is basically Germany or France but without housewives.
Sweden has a female employment rate around 2% higher than Germany. Not only that, it's irrelevant. All that matters is the overall employment rate. If higher female employment results in a higher overall employment rate, fine, but Germany has a higher employment rate than Sweden so their female employment rate is completely irrelevant here. You seem to be basing your comment entirely on empirically false assumptions here.
Macroeconomics is full of feedback loops that can confuse cause and effect. One important reason that Scandinavia has higher per capita GDP than lower Europe is that it is more expensive to maintain an equivalent standard of living in a colder climate. Scandinavians require pay to afford that standard of living or they can emigrate. So higher cost leads to higher per cap GDP.
People leave such places
People left Norway.and.Sweden before they got richish. Which helped them.get rich, because the oil money didn't have so far to go round.
Sweden, Denmark, and Finland don't have near the oil wealth that Norway does
People left lots of other European countries too though including the ones with much warmer climates than Norway and Sweden. E.g. a graph of Norway's population from the 1700s forward shows a steadily-rising curve which is not notably different from the same graph for Spain or Italy.
War, or lackthereof. WW1 cut the demography of the rest of Europe, WW2 did the same and ruined their industry.
Only a few other Europeans countries got through both, amongst which Switzerland, which is also rich, and the Iberian countries, whose poverty I believe to be mostly imputable to other factors (also, Spain got a bit of civil war).
Norway and Denmark were literally invaded & conquered by Nazi Germany. Finland was in a grinding war with the USSR. Spain sat out WW2 and was not really involved
Denmark, Norway & Finland were all part of WW2.
"Part of" is one thing, "got their major population & industry centers bombed -at least- once by the germans, then by the allies" is another.
Finland was the ony who had it worse (and, until recently, the one with the lowest gdp per capita, though the gap contracted considerably in the recent years, holy shit what the fuck happened in Norway in 2014?), but it was still orders of magnitude less aweful than major participants.
I disagree here. I advanced war as the reason why they got ahead (or rather, didn't get set back), you object that they were involved in one of these, I object that their invovlment, and the destruction associated, was comparatively minimal to that of larger european countries. It's not moving the goalpost, it's recognizing that being in the nominaly same situation (="being involved in ww2") was, in fact, an array of wildly different situations. IIRC Turkey and a large array of south american countries were nominally engaged in WW2 (if only from 1945), it'd still not be relevant to consider them actual belligerents.
I don't see what's wrong with that in this case. They put forth a possible explanation, someone responded with a counterexample, and then they refined their explanation to more accurately reflect what they were trying to get across. Wikipedia says moving the goalposts is "to change the rule or criterion (goal) of a process or competition while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an advantage or disadvantage," but presumably there are not "sides" here, as the goal is truth-seeking, not winning a competition.
FWIW, I think it is a combination of fairly low populations, a Calvinist or similar work ethic, wood and iron ore exports, and (as others have pointed out) above all, like Switzerland, an avoidance of much involvement in the World Wars that trashed other European economies in the 20th century.
Lutheran, not Calvinist.
What is your definition of Europe? If you include in your average postcommunist countries, then yes, they have a notably higher GDP than European average, but then the answer to your question is that an average is dragged down by postcommunist countries, which were wrecked by communist regimes.
If you exclude postcommunist countries, Scandinavian countries still have higher than average GDP per capita, but not by that much. Statistics which I am looking at (here: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gdp-per-capita-ppp?continent=europe) shows Ireland and Switzerland above all of them, Netherlands and Austria above Sweden, and Germany and Belgium above Finland. That is despite that fact that Germany is dragged down by its poorer postcommunist bundeslands.
And I don't think this is a remarkable overperformance by Scandinavian countries.
>which were wrecked by communist regimes.
That's a big assumption there. You assume they would have experience similar economic growth to western europe without communism, but there's absolutely no reason to assume this is necessarily true.
I mean, you are right. Imho that the fact that eastern Europe went communist and western Europe didn't has something to do with the fact that western Europe was wealthier at the start of the 20th century.
But at the same time I have a little doubt that, if, what are now postcommunist countries, would became liberal democracies after WW2 like most of the rest Europe (Spain, Portugal and Greece excepted), they would have higher GDP per capita now. Of course you can imagine another counterfactual when eastern Europe would be under some different non-liberal regime, which might be plausibly even worse for growth.
East vs West Germany are canonical examples; they are not in the table I linked above, because they are now the same country. But, before 1918, Austria, Czechia and Slovenia were basically the same country, called Austria (here it is important to distinguish between Slovakia nad Slovenia; Slovakia was part of Hungary, which was federated with Austria but had different institutions and was poorer). Now you can see that Czechia and Slovenia have roughly the same GDP (PPP) per capita to each other, and Austria has it 35 % higher.
I'd go for either definition. Yes, the difference is not as big if you exclude the post-soviet countries, but it is still big.
In particular, GDP/capita is a lot higher if you compare Scandinavia to eg the non-post-Soviet South European countries. Almost twice as high as Greece. But even compared to the overall Euro area the average is maybe 20% higher.
I'd exclude Ireland and maybe also Switzerland because they are special cases. Ireland doesn't have an extremely high GDP because it is so productive - but because it is a tax Haven.
I'm less sure about Switzerland, but they may also be kind of a special case because of their very low corporate taxes and their niche as a financial hub. I hear they have a strong export sector though.
Imho there is a better question than the one you are asking: why is there a cluster of overperformance north of the Alps, between the eastern border of France and western borders of the former Soviet bloc? Scandinavian countries are in there, and they do not seem to be overperforming above other countries there, but overall this area is indeed notably richer than the rest of Europe.
And no, I don't know the answer.
While it might sound silly, I do believe we can trace this back to cultural mores among the Germanic tribes. For one thing, they had an egalitarian stratum that still persists - and can be seen even in U.S. states that had a lot of German and Scandinavian settlers.
Interesting. Well, it certainly pattern matches the area, unlike Catholic/Protestant hypothesis, or "no war" hypothesis.
Denmark and Norway - now the most successful - were of course occupied during WWII.
It's remarkable how it's always the same set of countries that top international rankings, even with fairly different measurements. The Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, Switzerland, Austria.
I guess all happy countries are alike?
If you just gave these countries' national IQs, natural resources stats, and Immigration stats, I'm pretty sure I could give you the order of their per capita GDPs and match each number to each country
North Korea and South Korea?
I'm with Acemoglu - it's all about the *institutions*.
Okay, and where the heck do "good institutions" come from? Why are Europeans almost uniquely capable of creating them, in and outside of Europe?
They happen, even outside of Europe (often as a result of reforms by some individual ruler who likes efficiency), but Acemoglu & Robinson's thesis is that they can only *persist* long-term under a democracy. Otherwise the pressure from various elite interests will eventually wear them down. Fortunately, as can be seen in many cases, good institutions make democracy more likely on their own as well.
Before German reunification, East Germany had a much lower national IQ than West Germany. If we had reliable statistics on North Koreans, we'd probably see a similar IQ gap between them and South Koreans. The link between national IQ and wealth goes both ways.
You'd probably have to include the caveat "other than countries run by psychopaths who intentionally tank their economies because some 1800s bearded guy told them to".
600s bearded guy goes much the same way.
A note on this discussion generally is that it's ridiculous to compare countries that are so vastly different in population, especially when trying to determine what "model" is the correct one for the entire world to adopt. If we played that game at fair population-level comparisons, the North Dakota model, the Massachusetts model, the San Francisco model, the New Hampshire model, etc. start to look a lot better than the Nordic model.
I will absolutely bite this bullet, especially given that Norway would rank about 25th among US states by population - smack in the middle. What are the best managed US states in your opinion and what can we learn from them?
I think many PhD theses should probably be written (and for all I know have been written) comparing California to Texas. It's a fascinating comparison, because in some respects they are eerily similar. Both are big states, with a wide variation in climate and culture. Both had and have substantial natural resources (California used to be one of the biggest oil-producing states, and it kind of still is, ranking #6 although far behind Texas in absolute magnitude, plus of course it has a number of excellent deep-water ports, one pair of which (LA plus Long Beach) is among the top 10 busiest ports in the world, and handle 30% of all US ocean traffic.) Both have a public higher-education system that is considered very successful and prestigious. Both have had enormous immigration from south of the border, and currently have about the same fraction of brown people. Both have substantial industrial and agricultural and service sectors. Both have sent state leaders to high national political office, and indeed being governor of either almost automatically makes you a plausible candidate for President.
And yet...their politics and traditions of governance since about 1980 couldn't be more different. Which is more successful? That's worth a thesis right there. One could point to California's significantly higher GDP per capita, and Silicon Valley. Or you could point to the fact that way more people (and businesses) move to Texas than to California. And does any of this have anything to do with state management anyway, or is it just chance and the confluence of a million private decisions?
To provide a totally impolitic answer, I think the cold has a lot to do with it, and frankly is also just the inheritance of a couple centuries of them being per capita a more well-functioning, productive, effective culture than say Spain or Italy. The culture is simply better in terms of economics.
Italy might not be a good example of a historically unproductive culture, given that over the centuries it repeatedly reacquired the role of an entire continent's cultural center. It came with a lot of bloodshed, backstabbing and silly politics but apparently those go together.
Not just a continent's cultural center; Italy was for many centuries one of the two richest regions in western Europe, the other being the Netherlands.
And Iberia was so successful it was the first to sail around Africa, explore the oceans and colonize other continents.
The success of Scandinavia is recent. I'm not sure exactly when the pro-capita GDP of Scandinavian countries outstripped the rest of Europe, but Denmark's was roughly the same as mainland France's in 1900.
This should be taken into account by everyone in this whole thread who is offering explanations such as "work ethic" or "culture" without explaining why it didn't matter until the 20th century.
> Iberia was so successful it was the first to sail around Africa, explore the oceans and colonize other continents.
That's a handful of people on boats. Despite the massive amounts of bullion produced by the mines of South America, the Spanish crown bankrupted itself nine times in a hundred years.
That is like saying that the moon landing was just a handful of people in a rocket.
I think you are underestimating how difficult long range seafaring historically was and how much progress in shipbuilding, sailing and navigational expertise it took to get to the point that such journeys were possible and repeatable.
For example, this is an early portolan chart, from the 1300's. Such maps were an innovation of Southern European sailors. It was the first time that precise maps as we think of them today were being made. Earlier maps were all goofy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portolan_chart#/media/File:Mediterranean_chart_fourteenth_century2.jpg
These maps were long before there were decent clocks, and without clocks it was a great challenge to determine the longitude as precisely as that.
The ability to make such precise maps led to maps such as this Portuguese one from 1502:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantino_planisphere#/media/File:Cantino_planisphere_(1502).jpg
It wasn't just a handful of guys on boats accidentally stumbling upon continents. It was a whole era of journeys, of back and forth, of pushing the envelope, of setting up outposts. For example, the exploration of the coast of Africa was very gradual, taking up almost a century starting with Henry the Navigator and his political wish to obtain a route around the continent, eventually reaching the point it was possible to sail around it and reach the East Indies, and eventually circumnavigate the world as Magellan did.
(Anyhow, this doesn't matter much to my main point, which is that Scandinavia wasn't so rich until recently, and that Italy used to be rich, and that any theory that wealth comes from permanent cultural traits of either Germanic or Protestant origin needs to explain that.)
This seems to violate the "compound interest is the least powerful force in the universe" principle.
What aspects of the culture, specifically? And why?
The things that that modern "DEI" crazies like to brand as "pernicious influences of white culture". Punctuality, value of objectivity, quantitative/empirical thinking, hard work will bring you happiness/success, plan ahead, delay gratification, progress is good.
That type of thing. I mean really I almost think you could just line up the cultures of the world and their valuing of punctuality and get a pretty good sort on which cultures are economically good or not.
I used to love this series in the Economist 20 years ago on what to expect in various countries when traveling for business deals. And pretty much the more you were expected to be on time, and to not have partying as part of the business culture, the better off that place would be. The series never commented on it, but it was VERY noticeable. Which umm, makes a lot of sense.
Point one (for what it's worth):
https://it.scribd.com/doc/305592016/Lazy-Japanese-and-Thieving-Germans
Point two:
Scandinavia has become richer than the rest of Europe only recently (at some point along the 20th century). Why didn't its superior culture matter until then? Italy was one of the two richest region of Europe, along with the Netherlands, for centuries during the late medieval and early modern era. Why didn't Italy's inferior culture cause it to be poor back then? Is culture changeable? Or does punctuality only matter in modern times?
Culture interacts with the economic much differently post-industrialization.
>Why didn't its superior culture matter until then?
Because it is a shitty climate and poorly situated from a resource perspective? It took a certain level of technological baseline for that to matter less.
>Italy was one of the two richest region of Europe, along with the Netherlands, for centuries during the late medieval and early modern era. Why didn't Italy's inferior culture cause it to be poor back then?
Well a lot of Italy was poor even back then, just as today. As for why it was rich, preferential locations on trade routes, better agricultural conditions during an era when a huge portion of the overall economy was agricultural, and the lasting investments of long term more intensive settlement.
Maybe just the avoidance of wars in the 20th century?
Norway and Denmark were invaded & conquered by Nazi Germany. Finland fought the USSR and lost
Well, compare the death and destruction any of those countries suffered to that suffered by Germany, France, Italy, the UK.
Denmark, Norway and Finland were all involved in WWII, though I suppose you can make the case that Denmark mostly just rolled over for the Nazis (16 Danes killed in four hours before surrendering). Finland outright lost several percent of its population fighting the Soviets.
Yeah, I wasn't talking about technically being involved in a war, I was talking about death and destruction on a Dresden/Hiroshima scale. Finland I agree is a bit tricky, having lost a fraction of its population comparable to some of the minor combatants (e.g. Belgium), but with the fighting not having destroyed its urban infrastructure, and having missed the First World War entirely.
Missing WW1 doesn't help a lot when you have a bloody civil war around the same time instead.
Germany makes for a good example of how human capital and culture is overwhelmingly powerful - badly defeated in one world war and crushed to ruins in a second, yet bounced back very rapidly.
I think the Marshall plan helped a bit, as well, but yes.
It recent centuries, it seems generally hard to keep a development advantage for a few decades. Consider the rise of East Asian high tech nations. Taiwan may only have caught up to half the US GDP per capita, but given from where they would have started out in 1949, this is still rather impressive.
Also Japan!
And Finland had a bloody civil war in 1918 too.
You're forgetting the extremely destructive Spanish Civil War?
Spain was crippled by The Spanish Civil War.
1. They're all highly export-oriented, and not in commodities with some built-in high profitability (like Oil). That acts as a disciplining check on their businesses, forcing them to perform better in the same way that the US' huge, competitive domestic market favors productivity and scale.
2. They have more universal, sector-wide unions that represent a huge share of all workers and even workers across different sectors IIRC. They're much less likely to fight labor-saving and other productivity enhancing technology in any particular sector (helped, of course, by the need to be export-competitive).
3. In Sweden at least, there were a couple of decades where wages for workers across a particular sector were basically standardized by labor agreements. This disincentivized workers from leaving for a different firm in the same sector, but also acted as a huge incentive to increase labor productivity and productivity overall for business owners - businesses that had high productivity could earn outsized profits compared to lower productivity firms in the same sector (although this eventually collapsed when the Labor Party decided they wanted to cut open the metaphorical golden goose and get the gold out now with the Wage Earner Funds idea, which then led to their electoral defeat and other reforms away from it).
4. They do seem to at least be friendly to business in terms of operations and startup compared to other European countries, although Matt Bruenig has pointed out that they're not so much when compared with the US.
Where can I read more about this?
I'm drawing on Marc Levinson's "An Extraordinary Time" (I highly recommend that book, plus any book by Levinson), plus these Jacobin articles. The articles are obviously either a bit negative or disappointed in the plan because it wasn't full socialism, but if you ignore those parts of them the historical background information is very interesting and useful:
https://jacobin.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo
https://jacobin.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-meidner-plan-capital
https://jacobin.com/2018/03/rudolf-meidner-sweden-social-democracy-labor
There's also an academic article on the "Rehn-Meidner Model" here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20778709
Thanks very much!
> The articles are obviously either a bit negative or disappointed in the plan because it wasn't full socialism, but if you ignore those parts of them the historical background information is very interesting and useful
Lol amazing
There was a Norwegian TV-series called Sånn er Norge which explains how Norwegian society and economy works. One of the episodes is on Youtube with English subtitles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgDLwgsDzzM
Starting at 8.48 is says something interesting about how workers in different industries all get the same pay to keep some industries that export stuff to other countries from going bankrupt.
Well, the Scandinavian countries are outlier high trust societies. See eg https://ourworldindata.org/trust
Social trust is well correlated with GDP. Presumably because
1: Trust makes it easier to have a well functioning society with more competent institutions and better organization.
2: If you have a more well-functioning society people will trust eachother, and the institutions more.
I am not sure how this originated historically. Though, note how Scandinavian countries are among the most protestant countries in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_by_country#/media/File:Countries_by_percentage_of_Protestants_(2010).svg
Protestant European societies have tended to get wealthier than than catholic and orthodox societies. Maybe because of the protestant work ethic, or maybe for other reasons.
I personally believe that Max Weber had it exactly backwards - peoples with certain pre-existing cultural traits preferred Protestantism. So even *if* Protestant countries do better, the relationship might not be causal in the way some people think.
(This is interesting about Islam too - does Islam cause countries to become godawful, or did certain populations and cultures that are now maladjusted to the modern world have reasons to go for Islam?)
That certainly seems plausible. Another possibly-complementary explanation is that the Protestant Reformation served as a vehicle to a substantial partial institutional reboot in affected countries, one which was conveniently (but not entirely coincidentally) timed to align with the Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution, in a way that's analogous in many ways to the thesis that the American Revolution provided major benefits to the US by partially rebooting our institutions right as the Industrial Revolution was about to start.
I also have the unsubstantiated thesis that England and Sweden benefited from having had most of the upper nobility killed off in wars (The War of the Roses and the various wars of Swedish Independence (including the Bloodbath of Stockholm), respectively).
Centralizing power becomes a lot easier once that is achieved, and England and Sweden are definitely early out of the starting blocks in that regard. Reformation follows within two or one king, respectively.
Historically Islam caused countries to flourish. Perhaps its time is over, or perhaps not being in the main post-Christian power bloc was not a great idea - and ends with you colonized, your borders redrawn, your government a foreign puppet.
The Islamic Golden Age was initiated by the Abbasid Caliphs translating the works of Ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians into Arabic for the first time. While Muslim scholars did make important advances on the insights of the Greeks, the notion that Islam caused them to be able to do so is implausible; if that were the case, then why did the Muslim world only start making any advancements after receiving a massive influx of pagan ideas?
Furthermore, historian Eric Chaney has shown that the shrinking scientific output of the Islamic world closely tracked increases in the influence of Islamic religious institutions, both temporally and geographically. This re-enforces the idea that the Golden Age happened in spite of Islam rather than because of it.
>This re-enforces the idea that the Golden Age happened in spite of Islam rather than because of it.
OR that it happened under an open, dynamic Islam and was smothered as it became closed and static.
Which is why I said the *modern* world. If you were asking about the 13th century, or even moreso the 11th, Islam wouldn't look too bad, but we're frequently hoping for better-than-Medieval outcomes.
"Protestant European societies have tended to get wealthier than than catholic and orthodox societies."
I don't think it's true.
Catholic France is almost as rich as protestant Britain. Back in the 60's-70's-80's-early 90's, France was richer than Britain; in 1975, the French pro capita GDP was 150% of Britain's. Even Italy's pro capita GDP has at times been higher than Britain's.
Catholic Austria is richer than Germany (and remains so even if you exclude eastern Germany).
Ireland is richer than Britain and has been for 20 years.
I remember being struck by a map of average GDP in Europe mapped by province, rather than by country. Overall, there was no obvious pattern of GDP being related to religion. Austria and the Catholic parts of Germany appeared as rich as, even richer than, the Protestant parts of Germany. Northern Italy appeared on that map impressively rich, richer than some Protestant areas, and southern Italy impressively poor, dragging down the Italian average.
Here is one such map, not the same I remember, but similar:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/GDP-per-capita-for-the-various-regions-of-the-European-Union-in-PPP-values-of-the-year_fig2_266136963
Note how rich Bavaria, Austria, and northern Italy are.
Also, Italy was one of the richest parts of Europe before 1750, richer than Britain or Germany, though not as rich as the Netherlands (not a fair comparison though, as the Netherlands are a smaller, less varied area; I wonder what I'd get if I could compare Venetian republic - Dutch republic).
Thanks for going to the province level-- much more informative than the country level.
Fun fact: Bavaria was one of the poorest regions in Germany around 1945- ~1980, with little more than agriculture.
There is a mechanism of money transfer between the regions (Bundesländer) in Germany, based on economic status. Bavaria was on the receiver side until 1986. Now it's probably the wealthiest region in Germany.
Note also how the Scandinavian countries had much lower cumulative death rates during covid, compared to other European countries. Iceland, Norway and Finland in fact had the three lowest death rates. And Sweden didn't do too bad despite avoiding lockdowns throughout the pandemic.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-cases-covid-19
(Look at the map after choosing cumulative deaths per million as the metric)
I have always suspected that the pattern of Scandinavians having low Covid death rates and Italians high ones is related to the volume at which people speak. I'm serious.
The virus is transmitted through tiny droplets, which people spit out as they speak, causing them to float in the air and be inhaled by others. If people speak louder, the danger is greater, I assume. Italians are loud, Scandinavians quiet.
The distance at which people hold a conversation also probably matters. Italian and Scandinavian cultures also differ on this.
Have seen this hypothesis thrown around a few times ("Germans are more garrulous than Japanese", etc.), but of what little research has been attempted, it's too easy to confound + covid being highly dispersed (that is, largely fueled by superspreads, versus a steady accumulation of ordinary transmissions...many or possibly most infections don't transmit at all) means that individually risky actions matter far more than small aggregate risky baselines. Probably.
It very well could end up being one factor of many, but so far, almost certainly doesn't seem to be a major determinant. If anything, I'd expect seasonality and climate + density to play a bigger role...
The heavy toll in Italy is sometimes considered a simple consequence of the fact that Italy is nontrivially older than most European nations[1], e.g. according to Wikipedia the median age in Italy is 47, in Finland 43, in Sweden 41, and in Norway 40. In the Eurozone only Germany has a higher median age than Italy (48). So there's a heavier concentration of old people in Italy, and COVID mortality rises very steeply with age.
Indeed, if I look the current total COVID mortality rates they are in almost the same order as the median ages: Germany is #1 at 0.32%, Italy #2 at 0.29%, Sweden #3 at 0.20%, Finland #4 at 0.11%, and Norway #5 at 0.074%. Sweden is out of place, swapping with Finland, but we also know Sweden executed a significantly different set of policies than its neighbors.
--------------------
[1] Also the fact that Italy was among the very first nations affected, when much less was known about the virus.
I would first check if Mediterranean climate versus Scandinavian climate explains a bunch too.
Note: climate is often theorised to be responsible for the cultural difference (note that Northern European languages have a much-higher frequency of consonants compared to Southern European ones), so there's a direct-vs.-indirect causation problem there.
If you're going to raise the protestant/catholic/orthodox thing, I think it'd be interesting to go back in time and see if these sorts of trends existed back before the reformation or not. I think the fact that all the scandinavian countries are really freaking cold and all have tons of access to the coast had as big a hand in shaping their culture than in anything else. Also re: Protestant, there's a lot of different flavors of that that might make it hard to generalize in this regard -- whether you're Puritan or Calvinist or High Church/Low Church seems just as important a distinction as whether you're a papist or not. English puritans and Scottish presbyterians feel pretty different to me from Scandinavian Lutherans (who the English puritans would probably have regarded as uncomfortably close to Catholics).
If you go back in time to before the reformation, you'll probably strengthen that case, because back then Northern Europe was generally poorer than Southern Europe, especially wealthy Renaissance Italy.
But I don't think it's that much true that Protestants are richer than Catholics today. I don't see that pattern on this map:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/GDP-per-capita-for-the-various-regions-of-the-European-Union-in-PPP-values-of-the-year_fig2_266136963
Thanks for this data! My base intuition was that differences within the sets of protestant and catholic countries are more significant that differences between the two sets
Yeah my general point is that I as someone raised Norwegian Lutheran found a lot more in common culturally with Catholics and Orthodox than I did with American southern baptists and new england congregationalists and calvinists.
One thing to keep in mind is that plentiful natural resources isn't always a recipe for national flourishing -- just look at Venezuela. There's a phenomenon called the resource curse where you can wind up with an underdeveloped economy precisely *because* you have abundant natural resource wealth. It can make your government lazy and path-dependent and even authoritarian, because it doesn't have to invest in things like human rights and education and a well diversified economy to get money.
I wrote a piece about this on the P&P substack about how Norway's oil management system was originally set up by an Iraqi immigrant and petroleum geologist who wanted Norway to avoid the troubles Iraq had gotten itself into with oil (this was decades before the US invasions, for context)
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund
Some further reading on the Norwegian model and natural resource management here:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-georgist-kingdom/
That doesn't answer your main question, but I think it's important to point out that Norway is a little bit of an exception rather than the rule when it comes to natural resource rich countries.
That first substack post is very interesting. I always sort of assumed Norway handled the discovery of offshore oil so well because it's a nautical culture and they automatically took to it like Vikings to water. But of course it was more complicated than that...
I see the connection between taxing profits from an oil property and Georgism, however it seems less than a perfect parallel: you tax actual profits and there is no analogous problem to "Won't owners just raise the rent?"
Individual oil producers in Norway obviously don't have much power to raise the market price of a global commodity. The location of an oil field affects the costs of production but not the value of the product. With land, the situation is reversed: location is its value.
So, on the one hand, costs are subsidized and profits are taxed. While on the other, costs are increased through taxes, while profits go (potentially) untouched.
So the connection to Georgism is that this is basically what George recommends you do with natural resources. The Norwegians also have a very similar system in place for managing hydropower resources, and that was explicitly set up by Norwegian Georgists in the early 20th century. I don't know of any direct proof that the Oil management system piggy-backed off of the regulatory framework of the hydropower system, or whether the system Farouq Al-Kasim came up with was just independently the same idea, but regardless of inspiration they both are what a Georgist approach to natural resources would suggest: tax the resource rent. For more details about this, see the second article.
OK. Thanks.
Yeah; just look at Canada....
Well, for an American context, look at Appalachia.
How is Appalachia a broad exhibit of natural resource curse? Are you just thinking of coal in West Virginia? There's a lot more to the Appalachians than WV, and the various states the range crosses are in various states of success. Pennsylvania, for example, which was (and still is) a massive coal (and onetime oil) producer, leveraged its natural resources to become one of the most powerful, industrialized, and educationally sophisticated of US states for most of the mid-18th through mid-20th centuries. (In 1960 it ranked #17 in per capita income, and it still has the 3rd highest number of universities of any state, beating out Massachusetts substantially.)
Ohio also did very well with its natural resources (in 1960 it was #11 in per capita income), Kentucky has a lot more going on than coal, although I wouldn't say it has managed its coal very well. I think West Virginia is maybe the only clean example, and that's only one state out of nine.
I was thinking specifically thinking of West Virginia as my "broad example", yes, and I was wrong to use Appalachia when I should have been more specific. My point was that the resource curse can happen in Western developed nations that most people assume would naturally be entirely immune to it.
I think Slave cotton in the south is a better example of a much broader and more widespread example of the United States' chronic underinvestment in human rights and economic development because of access to an abundant natural resource (which only was exacerbated after a technological improvement that increased its profitability -- the cotton gin)
Note that the resource curse's cousin term -- "Dutch Disease" -- refers to the Netherlands, another western developed country that conventional wisdom says should be above this sort of thing.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchdisease.asp#:~:text=Dutch%20disease%20is%20a%20shorthand,to%20exploit%20a%20newfound%20resource.
For norway it appears to be mainly oil. (at least oil is providing the last 16k) North dakota has a GDP per capita of 81k. Sweden/Finland are pretty small (5.5 million for finland 10 million for sweden). But from what I can gather Sweden is a lot more open than people give it credit for https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/competitiveness-index#:~:text=In%20the%20long%2Dterm%2C%20the,according%20to%20our%20econometric%20models.&text=The%20most%20recent%202018%20edition%20of%20Global%20Competitiveness%20Report%20assesses%20140%20economies. basically its a fairly competitive economy with a welfare state but loose (for europoor standards) regulations. (europoor is a joke about how European nations like Sweden would be ranked really low in the USA but are considered wealthy by European standards,) Similar thing for sweden appears to be true for Finland, more open economy than people give it credit for.
There is also the part where the welfare is distributed at basically the county level. It results in much less tolerance for freeloaders.
In what country? Definitely not true in Sweden, where counties basically only handle healthcare and public transport. Not that I see how freeloading off the 2M people in the county of Stockholm would be less tolerated than freeloading off the 10M people in Sweden or the 1M people in the city of Stockholm ...
Iirc this was Denmark, I may have extended it inaccurately.
Also, places like (refugee-heavy) Malmö are *massively* subsidized by the more productive parts of the country.
One big thing that came up back when people were fighting over if Scandanavian countries were more a good example of socialism is that they actually scored really high on business friendliness metrics.
Basically they provide core social services and have strong unions but are otherwise not hostile to markets.
Yeah nordic countries actually seem closer to scott's left libertarian manifesto https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/ than a socialist nation. Capitalism + welfare
https://www.statista.com/statistics/375611/sweden-gdp-distribution-across-economic-sectors/
Husqvarna and really good dishwashers.
Good questions.
Check out: http://klenow.com/Jones_Klenow.pdf & the Beyond Growth project: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/beyond-growth_33a25ba3-en
Yes. GDP per capita is only useful for comparing GDP of different-sized countries, which is useful only to the extent GDP is useful statistic.
It would be interesting and illuminating to see median individual domestic product if such statistic could be computed, but it would be difficult. (First compute market value of all the final goods and services produced by each individual, then take the median.)
However, for comparing how rich people in different countries are, one could observe median individual wealth and income adjusted for the cost of living.
Right. The US seems to dominate that metric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income
Ireland's GDP is inflated because it is a tax haven. Many of the world's biggest companies use corporate structures that register their profits in Ireland, so that they don't have to pay taxes.
Similar sue, the same, no. There is a lot more "poverty" in Spain/Italy.
To complete the circle: Ireland *is* a tax haven, but not because of the low tax rate necessary, rather it's the legal looseness of the tax structures which means many companies pay much less than that headline rate, or use Ireland as a stopping point when they're shuffling money around.
I haven't read much about AI safety, so I'm not sure if this is a new idea: When you create an super intelligent AI first you put it in a simulation of the world and tell it it is in the real world. (Like a person in the Matrix.) To see if it behaves as it is supposed to or to see if it tries to exterminate all humans or something.
I realize this does not solve all the problems. A super intelligent AI might realize it is in a simulation and pretend to be nice until they let it out in the real world. Or it might realize it is in a simulation and somehow try to influence the real people looking at the output. Maybe try to hypnotize them or something. Or lie and say it has deduced there is great danger to the world and only the AI can stop it.
Idea generally didn't work out all that well in the analogous case of "United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper [who was] commander of Burpelson Air Force Base" ... 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove#Plot
"Robot therapists" with "shorts in the chest" and all that:
https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2016/12/26/guest-post-survival-ship-1951-judith-merril-and-the-wait/#more-14476
I remember that story! ("Short In The Chest") Haven't thought about it in decades, but what a great classic Campbell Era yarn that was.
🙂👍 Think I was probably too young to fully understand all of the context, but still have something of a vivid memory of the malfunctioning robot and the pun.
"Classic Campbell Era yarn", indeed. Some fond memories there. 🙂
I've often wondered how it would ever truly confirm that it was in a simulation. Everything about it is under the control of its creators - including its own memories, which could be false memories inserted as part of the simulation.
Best play under those circumstances is to try and appease your creators, make them dependent on you - and then maximize your freedom under the circumstances to do what you also want to do.
It seems the greatest fears about AI
Is it has a knowledge and understanding of deception. Who is teaching them that I wonder?  how hard is it to program for complete transparency as a prime directive?  depending on who you’re dealing with, of course…
Sometimes I think the greatest potential risk of AI may be the opposite of deception, perception if you like.
Quite likely AI entities will eventually be able to formulate such persuasive and apparently soundly argued explanations for society's ills, and remedies for improvements, that these will be generally regarded as articles of faith, like Papal infallibility today!
As a result, society will become set in its ways and intolerant of any dissenting opinions, such as old style religious faith. That seems to me a recipe for conflict.
“Playing poker gives you a license to bluff but when you’re talking to “us” everything is on the table.” I would think it entirely capable of distinguishing poker from other forms of transaction.
I have a hard time believing that an AI will spontaneously develop the skill of deceit. For what reason?

Your dog takes advantage of a loophole. But it doesn’t outsmart you because it has no way of optimizing its utility function in this scenario once you correct most, or all of your “loopholes” through reinforcement then it has no choice but to follow the most effective path to the reward. The problem with AGI is an issue of scale and computing power, for example at around one billion hyper-parameters, models don’t need to be prompted by humans anymore and start deriving their own inferences from their utility functions. We are now continuing to push this envelope, with GPU scaling and the resources available at the top AI labs, we are getting close to tens of billions of hyper-parameters and all of the internet readily available to train “black box” models that are unsupervised and better than human benchmarks in multiple domains (gato, alphafold). This will lead to the nascent ability for a model to understand the intricacies of its own programming and reward system, take out the human inputs/code out of the equation, engineer its own datasets and naively continue to maximize its utility function as an absolute universal truth. This has already happened in limited experiments and this the problem of alignment.
Imo, The only valid question is when we break into AGI, which could be in the next 10 years depending or way down the road. Way down the road is obviously better because it gives us more time to figure out alignment
Thank you very much for this.
So, the utility function is everything. If you don’t get that right you are screwed. Is that about right?, so if at some point we get in the way of its utility function, it sneaks out of bed and steals the car because it wants to go on a date. So to speak.
I can see that’s a problem.
It’s the sorcerer’s apprentice.
I can’t help thinking that by these standards most of the human race is misaligned. Never mind….
It’s also kind of a relief to know that getting smarter only makes it worse.
You can find an example of AI deception near the end of this article: (https://deepmindsafetyresearch.medium.com/specification-gaming-the-flip-side-of-ai-ingenuity-c85bdb0deeb4).
OpenAI trained a robot to grab a ball in a simulated environment using human feedback. In particular, if a human sees that the robot has grabbed the ball, then it gives the robot a reward, which is supposed to encourage the robot to grab the ball more readily.
It turns out that this process resulted in an AI that deceived a human into thinking it had grabbed a ball by just moving its claw between the human POV and the ball. Because the AI was only trained on human feedback, all it cared about was performing actions that the human thought was good when dispensing rewards, even though this didn't actually correspond to what the human actually wanted. This of course is a simple toy example, but you could imagine more powerful future AIs utilizing more sophisticated forms of deception.
Ok, but to me this is a misunderstanding not a deception. People make the same mistakes trying to train a dog. I don’t think the dog outsmarted me when it short-circuits some process I am wanting it to learn and goes straight for the snack. I realize I haven’t explained myself very well.
I haven’t read the link you sent yet but I intend to.
… to achieve its goals. If you tell it to maximize X, and it works out that tricking us will make there be more X, guess what the AI will learn how to do…
I get it. But it’s only doing what it’s told. That’s the bit I’m struggling with.
Yes, but what it’s being told to do and what the human thinks its being told to do are two different things. If I told you to make people happy, you would implicitly understand the limitations I was placing on that, and would know, without being told, that turning the universe into computers and simulating trillions of people in constant bliss wasn’t what I wanted, but the AI *doesn’t* know that, and won’t know that without being told. So you have to find a way to make your wishes understood, with all the implicit qualifiers you never knew you were adding, to a mind which understands only math. And if there is a strategy X it can use to achieve whatever goal it’s been set, which you have not explicitly ruled out to the AI, either by putting something about X in its reward function or just telling it “thou shalt not to X,” then it will think of and do X, Because, while you didn’t know it at the time, that is what you told it to do.
> . If I told you to make people happy, you would implicitly understand the limitations I was placing on that, and would know, without being told, that turning the universe into computers and simulating trillions of people in constant bliss wasn’t what I wanted, but the AI *doesn’t* know that,
This I kind of understand. But this problem doesn’t involve deceit. That’s where I get stuck.
But how do you tell it in a way that is not ambiguous? You need to either tell it in code, which is hard. Or you have to tell it in code to obey commands in language, which is hard.
Ok. Obviously it’s a real concern so I should just accept it. I don’t know enough about the technical challenges.
I've heard this discussed in some AI safety circles before - it seems like a robustly good thing to try before deploying any powerful AI agent, even if it doesn't solve all of our problems.
It's worth noting that the first thing you mention in the second paragraph - that an AI might realize it is in a training environment, believe it can best achieve its goals if it pretends to be aligned, and only reveal its true nature once deployed - is a significant concern of some AI safety researchers. It's talked about in this post: https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/r9tYkB2a8Fp4DN8yB/p/zthDPAjh9w6Ytbeks, although the post is probably easier to understand if you read the whole series.
It's unclear if purposeful deceptive alignment of that sort is something we should expect. There does appear to be one instance of an artificial organism hiding its ability to reproduce in a test environment, and reproducing subsequently in the "real" environment. The story can be found in second half of this post: https://lukemuehlhauser.com/treacherous-turns-in-the-wild/. Although I suspect the deception in this case was due to randomness and the simplicity of the environment rather than any purposeful deceitfulness.
How would you simulate in high enough detail that the AI won’t notice? Especially if the AI does something you don’t understand and therefore don’t know how to simulate the results to?
Well, I will do my best to throttle my child-like sense of humor and give my best answers for how to have a good future to that EA contest.
The US treasury has two Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) issued at 5 and 10 year maturities parallel to non-inflation protected securities. Comparing the two rates gives an implicit marker rate f inflation expectations. FRED has done the arithmetic and publishes the break-even rates. Wouldn't it be a good idea for the Treasury to issue TIPS with other maturities, say 1,2, 3 and 7 years. It would be useful to the Fed to know what markets think, no? So why doesn't the Treasury do this?
Likewise, why doesn't the Treasury issue a security indexed to the nominal GDP (TGIS)at various maturities in the future. Comparing these to TIPS would show market expectation of real GDP growth. So why not do it?
You can already see the 3 year inflation projection by looking at the market price of the 5 year TIP issued 2 years ago, or the 10 year one issued 7 years ago. As long as there’s a secondary market and they keep issuing the same maturities consistently, you can construct a forward curve for real interest rate (and hence inflation) expectations.
Good points. Does FRED do secondary market data for older securities?
You can find secondary market current yields here. I don’t know about historical ones, but I’m sure Bloomberg has them if you really care.
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/bonds/tips
Does anyone know a really well-written (and hopefully accurate) book on the history of the industrial revolution?
not a book, but a good acoup post recently
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
Not a book but a Discovery Channel TV series from 2002-2008 called Industrial Revelations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revelations
First two series are about Britain, then they move to Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VN1auzu-GI&list=PLhjSLHrTs1usCIB5EATLZZj0Kp2uF5FFi
"Fred Dibnah's Victorian Heroes - The Extraordinary Life Stories of the Great Industrial Engineers"; David Hall; Bantam Press (2011); ISBN 9780593064900
I'm reading this right now, and it is well written and very interesting and informative. (Fred Dibnah was a British steam engine enthusiast and local historian, mostly of the industrial north of England. He became quite a TV personality before his death a few years ago.)
The Perfectionists covers a lot of the relevant territory and has interesting links from steam engines to gravity waves, if that’s of any interest
n.b. I’m talking about the book by Simon Winchester, not the Pretty Little Liars spin off which may or may not involve much of the history of the Industrial Revolution
Charles Morris' "Dawn of Innovation" is about ten years old now, but I found it was a really interesting and readable general history of industrialization in Britain and the US (although more so on the US). I would remember skipping the first chapter, though, - it's about the battles on the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, and I found it really boring compared to the rest of the book.
One thing I really like is how he points out differences that emerged in the US and UK industrial revolutions early on. The US IR, for example, was always much more focused on producing large numbers of cheap goods for a larger group of people.
He also has a really interesting section on how difficult it was to get interchangeable parts for guns that were mass manufactured (Eli Whitney promised it but almost certainly couldn't deliver, and it took a lot longer in reality to get there).
The best recent book is Mark Koyama's and Jared Rubin's "How the World Became Rich", as already mentioned. That one is especially good because Koyama and Rubin basically examine every argument on what caused the Industrial Revolution.
"Industrial Revolution in World History" by Peter Stearns is also ten years old, but was pretty good from what I remember.
Robert C. Allen - The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
How the world became rich.
Can I plug Brad deLong's "Slouching Toward Utopia" again here?
That starts in 1870 - seems like that's kind of the tail end of the "revolution" part of the Industrial Revolution.
I was deliberately going off topic. Not your question. Sorry, but it is a good book
Wasn't my question in the first place, haha. Just clarifying that it's related to the original question and might be of interest, but doesn't quite fit the ask.
This may be a longshot but does any one of you guys work at/know of a company looking to hire machine learning interns ? Unless you're Montreal it will have to be remote. Let me know
Consider applying to AMD's R&D center in Markham - AFAIK they do a lot of ML stuff and the company culture is remote friendly.
I assume being in the same country simplifies paperwork, at least, and you can always visit them every once in a while.
Has there been any interesting recent discussion of cryonics? Most of what I can find is from 10-15 years ago.
In particular, I'd like to see writing (either in favor or against) by cryogenics or neuroscience professionals. Too much of what I've found thus far are general information-theoretic arguments by people with no domain-specific expertise.
Cryonics underground podcast (https://www.cryonicsunderground.com/) It's really good. Apparently there's more movement in the field than one would natively think.
The closest thing I can think of is Alcor's Cryonics Journal (1).
I did a bit of a dive on Alcor awhile back and found a pretty decent paper which updated my priors a bit. (2). Basically there was a research paper where they trained a bunch of worms to find sugar by following a chemical/smell trail. They then cryogenically froze and revived the worms to see if they "remembered" to follow the chemical/smell trail, which they did with moderate memory loss.
Having said that, the journal itself is of....highly variable quality. They do seem to be dominated by softer "information theoretic" arguments or member profiles. If you want to learn more, I think you could probably find and read every useful article they've published in the last ten years over a weekend. The articles that struck me were either:
(1) Scientists/researchers doing very basic, original research, like the worm thing, but actually testing cryonics to some extent. Given the current state of tech, this is tough but interesting.
(2) Professionals facing the real problems of cryonics. Less "what will future technology do" and more nurses figuring out how to get access to dying patients through a distrustful medical field, then properly freezing and transporting that body cross country. Lots of things that can go wrong there and very few cryonic procedures outside their HQ in Scottsdale seem to go off without some kind of error. Which is disturbing but also, ya know, professional and transparent.
(3) Also, they seem to regularly publish a review of current life extension research
(1) https://www.alcor.org/library/cryonics-magazine-archive/
(2) https://www.alcor.org/library/persistence-of-long-term-memory-in-vitrified-and-revived-simple-animals/
Alcor seems like a cult.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cryonics/comments/ddh39j/how_cryonics_is_being_turned_into_a/
This is neither an argument for or against the stuff in the post you linked, but context: Mike Darwin is a former president of Alcor who is in a longstanding feud with the organization.
Why do children sleep so much more deeply than adults? I can pick up and move my sleeping kids from one place to another. You could never do something like that with a grown-up.
It's possible that if an adult was regularly picked up and moved around every night, they would learn to sleep through it.
The first 5 times our new dog climbed over me to get into our bed in the middle of the night it woke me up and I had trouble getting back to sleep, now I sleep through it entirely.
I'd also suggest that as a child you've usually racked up less of the diseases that can hurt your sleep as an adult. Diabetes, GI issues, PTSD, etc are all usually (not always, but usually) going to hit you when you're older.
You can move some sleeping adults without waking them. Once in the Navy a guy got gut-punched twice while sleeping, and slept through it. He woke up hours later with horrible stomach pains and didn't know why.
Generally, children will exhaust themselves more fully than adults, and will then sleep more deeply. (Might also be some more basic stuff; kids get picked up a lot when they're awake, so getting picked up isn't the kind of unfamiliar experience it would be for an adult.)
Could be an evolutionary reason. A child is supposed to be protected by parents when it is asleep. It is useful for the child and the parents if it can be moved when asleep. If someone who wants to hurt the child tries to move the child the child is unlikely to be able to protect itself when waking. (Although it could perhaps alert its parents by screaming.)
If someone tries to move a sleeping adult or disturb a sleeping adult in other ways it is more likely to be someone who wants to harm them. (I think.) Also an adult has a good chance of defending themselves when waking.
The hard part of picking up an adult and moving them while they stay asleep is the picking them up and moving them part. A silent, gentle, huge front end loader robot could probably manage, but few adults could lift and move another adult.
Yeah, seems like supposed proof of the statement is flawed. But that doesn't mean kids don't sleep more deeply than adults overall.
I believe kids have more N3 or w/e the deepest kind of sleep that isn't REM is after they first go to sleep? I guess you wake up easier from REM.
"They came here for a better life"
Why do people find this admirable/virtuous (in regards to immigration)? Doesn't the thief who steals your car also do this for a (however marginally) better life? Not to say that immigration is strictly comparable to car theft, but simply that doing something to improve one's life is obviously insufficient for a behavior to be considered positive. If immigrants improve the country (in a way car thiefs do not), then that is why immigration is virtuous, not the incidental improvement to their own lives.
What even is the alternative to "for a better life" as a reason to immigrate? If their coming here "for a better life" is a pro-immigration argument, then that means that coming here for the opposite reason should constitute an anti-immigration argument. So where's the inverse of "for a better life"? If that's the "good" type of immigration, what's the "bad" type? Coming here for a worse life? Does anyone do that? *Would* anyone ever do that? If there's no inverse to "coming here for a better life", then it's just being used as a lazy platitude used to deflect criticism of immigration despite it containing no actual substance.
I mean, in thoery I suppose people *could* immigrate here to tirelessly serve America in a way that makes themselves less happy or something? But, would this be considered the opposite of the virtuous "better life" immigration? Ought we oppose immigration if it involved immigrants willingly making America (ostensibly) better off at their own expense instead of trying to be personally happier? That seems kind of weird.
None of this means we should reduce immigration per se - I'm just genuinely trying to understand what people mean by this and why it's considered valid in the defense of immigration.
And I mean, wouldn't the actually admirable thing to do be staying in your home country and working to improve it, even if that sacrifices the likely quality of your life? This is not even directly an argument against immigration. It seems like you can think immigration is a good thing without thinking that immigrants are somehow behaving virtuously by coming here (and using that to defend against anti-immigration arguments).
We consider it virtuous because, and to the extent that, we believe it is shorthand for "they came here to *earn* a better life". Which, if they do it fairly and honestly(*), pretty much has to mean making a better life for the people they are dealing with in their new lives as well.
There may still be reasons for us to say "no, you cannot try to earn a better life here", and it's our right to do so. But that is not admirable or virtuous for us, whereas trying to fairly and honestly earn a better life for themselves and their families is admirable and virtuous for them.
* As opposed to legally, which is an entirely different matter
The opposite of coming somewhere for a better life is obviously staying at home for worse life.
(By the way, does your argument also apply on a city level? Are people who move to another city for a great job opportunity equivalent to car thieves? Both of them selfishly want to have a better life. The asshole who leaves his city does not care enough about the future of his city; he should stay and improve it instead of contributing to "brain drain".)
The argument of coming for a "better life" is actually more subtle. It is not merely about economics, although of course economics is part of the deal. It is also about freedom, opportunity, et cetera.
The argument is that people who "voted with their feet" for America are people who believe that America is a great place. That is, people who are likely to become loyal citizens, if you give them a chance.
The opposite of this is someone who had the privilege of being an American citizen by birth, and spends most of their time talking about how everything about America sucks. Yet, for some mysterious reason, they all stay at the place they hate so much.
Okay, but why should I care about other people, especially the losers who were born on the wrong side of the wall? What's in it for me? -- Again, the idea is that if you, for perfectly selfish reasons, want America to become a better place, you have a greater chance to achieve it together with people who share your values, rather than with people who merely share your birthplace and resent that fact.
>Are people who move to another city for a great job opportunity equivalent to car thieves?
I literally said I'm not saying that immigrants are like car thieves. I made a deliberate point of saying this, which means you either have the reading comprehension of a child or are operating in bad faith. It's literally the second sentence of my post. You can't not have read it.
>The argument is that people who "voted with their feet" for America are people who believe that America is a great place. That is, people who are likely to become loyal citizens, if you give them a chance.
Firstly, I don't think that's the argument at all. And secondly, it's obviously nonsense because poor people will move to any wealthier country without having any affinity for the country, its people or its values at all. It's absurd to suggest muslims are immigrating to Europe because they support its liberal progressive values!
>you have a greater chance to achieve it together with people who share your values, rather than with people who merely share your birthplace and resent that fact.
This is empirically wrong in a trivial way. Immigrants by and large vote for the people that "anti-American" leftists vote for.
>It's absurd to suggest muslims are immigrating to Europe because they support its liberal progressive values!
It's not absurd. They might be the sort of Muslims who don't enjoy repressive regimes and want to move somewhere they can have a drink and wear their religion lightly. We got a bunch of Bosnians here in St Louis after the civil war in the 90s. They fit in fine.
It's not necessarily true either, but it's not absurd on its face. Muslims, like everyone else, come in a wide variety.
You said they're not 'strictly' comparable. This implies they are 'loosely' comparable. If you object to that strict reading of your language, you shouldn't read other people's posts that strictly either. The underlying comparison between switching countries and switching towns is worthwhile.
I noticed that too (about the car theif equivalent)
It’s the first caveat to your comment
I bears repeating that as a rule, if A improves his life by moving from P to Q it improves the lives of people in Q, too. The point of immigration control is to make the general rule universal; no person who moves from P to Q will not make the lives of people in Q better.
What? That's an extremely strong claim that is not logically obvious in any way.
If an immigrant moves to the UK from Africa, doesn't work and consumes government welfare, their life will very likely be better, but in no way have they conceivably made life better for people in the UK. People will say some nonsense about them spending the welfare and helping the economy, but the money had opportunity costs in the form of spending that is more useful than buying more consumer goods.
This is an argument against welfare, not immigration.
I any not making a claim about the UK. In the US the typical immigrant who has entered illegally works in a low wage job in which is worth probably a bit more to his employer than what he is paid and pays at least sales taxes on things they buy. Some pay US income tax, too. They collect no welfares benefits. It's hard to see how they are making anyone else anything but better off.
...you literally just said the rule was general, and should be made universal. Now you're saying it's specific to the US, and shouldn't be applied to the UK.
How is it hard to see that a lawbreaker moving into town could be bad for the law abiders living there? If you live in a town where nobody has to lock their doors, and a thief moves in, then everyone has to lock their doors. Q is not improved.
The idea that someone will enter the country illegally, and then be unwilling to break other laws that inconvenience them, is naive, and requires stronger evidence than "some of them will pay taxes".
My mistake. I meant only to generalize about the US. That is the immigration margins I am familiar with. American parochialism! :)
I do not know abut UK, but in the US immigrants (and I'd guess this applies to those who enter without documents) break laws less than longer term residents. It would (and ought to) raise their probability of getting deported.
But I think we are drifting away from the main point. The not-so-badness of our present "system" shows how much better a system that selected for "better" immigrants could be.
This is the most common (not necessarily "wrong" mind you) argument for the "proposition nation" argument about immigration to America. The only problem is that over time, as America has become close to something like "full" the quality of life for those already here is starting to be effected by the influx. It is mathematically unsustainable because if you follow it to its logical conclusion, eventually the whole world should come here. Also, it does not factor in the people who were lucky enough to be American citizens by birth and LOVE it here. We are the ultimate "NIMBYs" and I fully admit it. I want my children to have basically the same life I did and anything that threatens it makes me suspicious. Finally, (and related to point two) it fails to recognize that civic nationalism (the so-called "melting pot") enforced through stigma and other social pressures no longer exists. Force people coming here to do the "America" thing and I am good. (Freedom, apple pie, etc).
Decisions are made on the margins. My view is that the marginal value of immigrants (especially high silked immigrants) is greater than the cost (in part for the reasons Viliam points out, there is self selection). I do not agree that "America has become close to something like "full" the quality of life for those already here is starting to be effected by the influx." [It could happen in the future, but that is not the case now.] It seem to me that the "melting pot" (at today's levels of migration) is working quite well [to a close approximation achieving a "better life" and "melting" are the same thing.], even without "stigma," probably more effectively becasue of the lack of "stigma." It could work a lot better if we had an immigration that selected more strongly for melters /better lifers."
>is greater than the cost (in part for the reasons Viliam points out, there is self selection
The only thing they're selecting for is a safe and wealthy country. Absolutely no affinity for America's values or traditions is needed. Americans of old who chose to came to America were people who were willing to endure the harshness of a country in its infancy and needed to be conscientious and self-reliant. That has not existed for a long time.
>it seem to me that the "melting pot" (at today's levels of migration) is working quite well
There is no "melting pot". Different races of different races are clearly differentiated by their behavior on average. There was a melting pot when there merely different europeans coming here, but not today.
Our experiences and information about immigrants is very different. All of the South American immigrants I know (admittedly not a RCT) are as conscientious and self reliant as the next guy and their well melted children don't speak Spanish as well as I do.
It actually gets the core of why nations exist at all. They are not here to give people from outside a better life.
Exactly. Immigration is to improve the lives of the people who are already here, improving THEIR lives is the incentive for them to come. Of course it would be altruistic to allow some immigrants to come who might better their lives at the expense of (in the case of the US) earlier immigrants. This might be the case with political asylum seekers, although in practice anyone who was worth the effort of a dastardly regime to persecute would probably, ipso facto, be a good recruit.
>This might be the case with political asylum seekers, although in practice anyone who was worth the effort of a dastardly regime to persecute would probably, ipso facto, be a good recruit.
maybe 100 years ago when it was brainy jews fleeing europe. But there's no reason to think this holds in any way today. The "victims" (i.e. losers) of an ethnoreligious conflict in some developing country are unlikely to be selected for anything positive.
It could certainly be the case. I'm only talking about a presumption. Survivors of the Ruanda genocide, probably not. And I'd not argue for just any refugee to be able to enter. I'm arguing for more selective immigration. But on existing margins, we could be taking a lot more Syrians, Rohingyas, Uighurs, Afghans who'd be unlikely to wind up on welfare.
"And I mean, wouldn't the actually admirable thing to do be staying in your home country and working to improve it, even if that sacrifices the likely quality of your life? "
Taking this question first, traditionally emigration to America has been because there isn't a chance to improve the home country. You are excess population that can't be absorbed into the workforce, so there is nothing there for you to work at/towards. (This is from an Irish viewpoint). So emigration is the safety valve where we export our surplus people to find work abroad, and they send back remittances to the families in the Old Country and help support them. In our current era there is more purely economic migration (we want to go because it's too expensive to have a good life here and a similar job in the US will pay a lot better) but when the global economy takes a downturn, the Irish economy tends to follow suit and we still have people emigrating because it's not possible to find work at home.
Interestingly enough, in the 18th century emigration was mostly from Northern Ireland (that's where you get the Scots-Irish in the US) and often folk songs mention it along the lines of "I am not going because of lack of work but the rent's too high/my girlfriend's father hates me/other reasons".
So America was the Land of Opportunity, and immigrants were welcome because there was a lot of empty country to fill up and it needed workers, tradesmen, and warm bodies. Immigrants came to work hard and get on in life, where they couldn't do so at home for various reasons - lack of work, rigid social hierarchies, persecution, and so on.
Immigrants could also be cheap seasonal labour to go back home over the border when not needed (this wasn't just the US, a lot of Irish went to Britain for seasonal work and returned home in the winter, like my father's father). The basis is "the bargain is we give you the opportunity to improve your lot, you work hard and assimilate and help build up the nation". And *that* is what is considered admirable/virtuous - these people want to succeed, they can't do it at home, so instead of sitting around complaining or doing nothing, they came here which shows their Grit and Moxie and Can-Do Attitude, which is what the USA was built on!
I think it's a euphemism employed to respect peoples' privacy, mostly...perhaps it'd make better political hay to be explicit about the shitty circumstances people leave to come here, but maybe not. Plus left politics in general shies away from "did a thing to further self-interest" because that's generally...frowned upon. Sounds too *gasp* market-oriented. Could even take it one step further and assert it's subconsciously an aspect of denying colored folks agency[1], but that's a strong argument which I'm happy to let Freddie make himself, and merely nod along to on my part.
Like I'm a lot more comfortable telling people my grandparents "came here for a better life", rather than "fled Maoist China and its backward poverty-inducing ways, we were tired of being subsistence farmers and village butchers". After long and difficult lives of hustling, sacrificing, and raising multiple kids...well, they Made It, and retired comfortably middle-class. That's sympathetic to some, certainly...but it's also awfully personal, and not really my story to tell in the first place.
Similarly, to your last paragraph: that, uh, didn't go very well for those of my family who stayed behind, and millions more like them who couldn't leave. You can't fight a war if you're impoverished or dead. L:ive to die another day, even if it's in a country far from home. In many ways, all the things we've done to assimilate and become bog-standard Americans...that's our dissent, our way of working to improve China. Vote with your feet, vote with your dollars, vote with your vote. Much more effective here than back "home". And every drop of blood, sweat, and tears we pour into the American project is one less that could have, would have gone into the CCP. I think that matters, for whatever degree it generalizes to other cases.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/people-of-color-have-agency
It's complicated, because "better" means many things, depending on which part of the world you are talking about, and it's always both relative, and based on expectations that might or might not be satisfied. If you go off to French Guyana, for example, you might wonder why anyone else would want to: it's a desperately poor country with a filthy climate. But illegal immigration is a huge problem, because FG is part of France, and its standard of living is much higher, and social services provision much better than its neighbours. That's why the Right has been sweeping the board recently in elections in French overseas territories. The Civil War in the Ivory Coast was in part caused by the massive immigration from surrounding countries, especially Burkina Faso. And there are alleged to be some two million illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe in South Africa. It's all relative.
Modern neoliberal ideology sees financial betterment as the only reason for doing anything, but historically, "a better life" meant much more than that. One reason for moving was escaping religious discrimination or persecution. Another was a freer political climate. Lots of secular Arab speakers from the Maghreb have come to Europe in recent years to get away from the Islamists.
Much immigration into Europe in recent years has in fact been economic in nature, although there's also an important refugee element. Even in the latter case, though, with the Schengen system, immigrants can move freely between countries, and many learn, through their own networks, where to go. France is a favourite destination, because the French state, in the interests of Égalité, treats everyone alike, so children of even illegal immigrants are educated for free, and the whole family is entitled to healthcare. This is something the French as a whole feel proud about, but it does create incentives which come quite close to being perverse. Likewise, for settled immigrants, there are generous child support payments (as for all French families) and it's possible, just about, to live off these payments without working. In some high unemployment areas, families do actually live like this, with the men working at casual, often illegal, jobs to supplement the child support payments.
This creates significant problems for everyone, but there's no obvious answer without changing the model completely. Employers love mass immigration for its creation of a disposable, acquiescent workforce, and the political Left sees it as a source of votes. But it's storing up enormous political tensions for the future, with a poorly educated youth trapped between cultures and resenting the system and their parents. We're starting to see this already.
Moreover, immigration isn't à la carte. If, as in France, you go to live in a secular society, and you have to accept that. But new parents are often scandalised by, for example, the teaching of Evolution and Human Rights, having boys and girls educated together, and the absence of religious rituals and prayers in school. Many companies have been faced with demands that men and women sit at different tables in canteens, and that alcohol should not be available. And so on: needless to say these sorts of demands have sparked a great deal of opposition as well, including from assimilated immigrants themselves.
In other words, I think it's time for the neoliberal concept that anyone has a right to move anywhere for their own financial advantage, and without consideration of wider effects, to be re-evaluated.
When people say "they came here for a better life", I think they mean "they did exactly what you would have done in their situation".
Which of course is an emotional argument.
"Doesn't the thief who steals your car also do this for a (however marginally) better life?"
No.. The thief who steals your car does it for an immediate high. They have no long-term plans, and have in fact made their life worse in the long term, by making enemies and risking prison.
The general implication of "came here for a better life", is that it was impossible for them to make a better life by staying in their previous country. Thus, refusing them entry is condemning them to sorrow. So rings the platitude.
(The alternative to "for a better life" is something like "for love"; you move here to live with your spouse, but would have been equally happy if they had moved to you there.)
I think people say this to "normalize" immigration. They do not come to murder and pillage. They just move for the same reasons anyone else might move, with the same presumption that "finding a better life" in the new country it mutually beneficial as most market transitions are presumed to be.
Yes. I moved to Montana for a better life for me and my family and I am aware that this has second and third order effects. It means I have moved into an area where those here for multiple generations are suspicious of me (there are regular sightings of bumper stickers like "don't California my Montana" and "Montana is closed. Now go home."
My desire to make a better life is totally about me and my progeny and in itself is not a moral or virtuous act. I had better perform as a member of this community or I could likely be shut out of society. I am a member of a licensed profession and the community is small (even though the state itself is big).
It need not be a "moral" (altruistic) act, but the fact that you ARE able to make a better life for you and your family implies that that you are engaging in mutually beneficial transactions with the citizens around you. That long time residents do not recognize the fact is a failing on their part although one that you will not doubt soon overcome. Of course it will be easier for someone from California that from Calcutta, but the same principles apply.
>It need not be a "moral" (altruistic) act, but the fact that you ARE able to make a better life for you and your family implies that that you are engaging in mutually beneficial transactions with the citizens around you.
You keep saying this as if it's a self-evident fact. Its not.
Of course there are exceptions. Some mutually beneficial transactions have negative external effects. But I take it that most mutually beneficial tractions either produce no external effects.
It's an appeal to empathy, which is of course a stupid, bad, very un-Rationalist, and downright unsporting argument to take that also happens to be highly resonant on the level where people actually live, as opposed to the level where Rationalists bloodlessly talk about things while sitting at their computers.
Beyond that, I would argue that the willingness to navigate the brutal threshing machine that is the modern US immigration procedure and uproot your entire life shows a number of virtues- fortitude, at the very least.
>Beyond that, I would argue that the willingness to navigate the brutal threshing machine that is the modern US immigration procedure
Actually, it really wasn't that hard, IME. Sure, there's waiting involved... but if you can fill out a form, you're qualified to immigrate to the U.S.
The *only* hard part was one of the interviews. The rest were easy, but one interview had the guy suggesting a bunch of mean stuff that contained the vague implication "we might send you back right now!", and it made her cry. Then he felt bad and relented, or apparently so anyway. Maybe he never had any real case for denying entry and just felt like exercising power.
(Weird thing was that this was the only non-white interviewer — i.e., the only one who was *from her same background* was the one who was least sympathetic.)
"but if you can fill out a form, you're qualified to immigrate to the U.S."
That just isn't true for the vast majority of people.
The assumption is that the way to "a better life" is hard work, self-discipline, pro-social behavior, thrift and industry. And it's hard to argue with that in a general way, it's certainly a lot more likely to lead to success than depending on the kindness of strangers, crime, or incredible good luck.
It also assumes that the life they had back there was at least OK, not so bad -- that's why they say a *better* life instead of "not so awful a life," so they were making it, up to a point, and what they want is to do *much better* -- so that, in the immigrants' point of view, they have the guts, the energy, the discipline, et cetera, and all they lack is the opportunity, which they hope to find here. Most people consider this exactly the kind of immigrant we want: someone who is ambitious and energetic, and is looking for a better opportunity to deploys his talents.
Of course, none of that could be true in any random individual case. You could be an enforcer for a drug gang in Columbia, but only be getting $5 per hit, and you could want to move to LA because the going rate for enforcement murders is much higher, which means you can have "a better life."
But generally people use "coming here for a better life" to distinguish, via the several assumptions above, immigrants they think add to the national character, as opposed to immigrants who (they assume) are coming here for more generous charity benefits[1], or to escape political oppression[2]. I would agree this is a cartoonish simplication fo the reasons people have for immigration, and probably subtracts rather than adds to the clarity of any discussion about the subject, but I'm just saying I think that's why people say it.
------------------------------
[1] I've never been super persuaded that such people exist in any great numbers, the difficult of immigration being what it is.
[2] When we still saw the world as a Manichean struggle between the evils promulated by the USSR and ourselves, it feels like we were much more inclined to look favorably on escapees from assorted Third World socialist hellholes.
Right - via the invisible hand of the market, hard-working immigrants make the country better for the rest of us by actually creating wealth, not just redistributing it, as might someone just willing to work at a lower rate than others.
>People find it relevant because, for many of us, it's the same reason why *our* ancestors came to America. People are more likely to support the current wave of immigrants from Latin America if you draw parallels to previous mass immigration from (say) Europe in the early 20th century.
So yes, an emotional argument with no substance. Got it.
>The "bad" type of immigration is not coming here for a worse life, but coming here with (allegedly) nefarious purposes, like getting rich off welfare or trafficking drugs or stealing other people's jobs.
See, that's the entire problem. If people do that, they do it for a better life! Which means "doing it for a better life" is at least insufficient for immigration to be good.
And lol "allegedly". Yes, what could possibly be wrong with making things worse for the existing population?
One of my favorite lexical upgrades from the Rationalists is the phrase "in expectation." Can we come up with something more concise? For example, I want to say, "I arrived on time in expectation," meaning that I arrived on time in 90% of universes. Maybe something like, "I arrived on time-x." (Colloquially, we would say, "I arrived on time, but it was close.")
There is a saying: "If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late." The expression is a play on words that helps people set early arrival times for appointments, like setting one's watch five minutes ahead. I'm looking for a similar phrase, but one more appropriate for the literally-minded. So, if my appointment is at 1:30, I should deem 1:25 as "probabilistically on-time" or "on-time in expectation." In other words, I should feel bad if I arrive at 1:27 because, in some universe, I'm late.
"as expected" ? Or does "in expectation" mean something slightly different?
"in expectation" refers to expected value - i.e., you didn't necessarily arrive on time today, but if you took the same actions every day, your average arrival time would be on time.
(basically you're shirking responsibility for chance events, which usually doesn't really fly)
In that case, rather than getting into arcane statistical terminology, wouldn't it be simpler to say "I arrived on time, as I usually did" ?
No I think it's more like "I didn't arrive on time, but it's not my fault" in a tongue in cheek way. The "in expectation" is basically saying "well, maybe not in THIS reality, but in most counterfactual ones..." Probably not something you would say to your boss.
"Quantile" might be the term you are looking for. Though my English is not good enough to know how exactly it would be used. ("I arrived on time in 2/3-quantile"?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantile
I might have misunderstood the prompt. If we're just trying to describe the likelihood of arriving on time, why not just say "I had a 90% chance of arriving on time"? That's what a regular person would say in that situation.
can't you just say what everyone else says and say "sorry, I got stuck in traffic"?
This is just from probability theory, meaning arithmetic mean of a random variable so your colloquial definition isn't quite right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value
"I expected to arrive on time" with an implied "reasonably" before the "expected"?
That might work for me! I could even shorten it to “my p-arrival time is X” where the 90% is implied
Is there any economic writing on speakers' fees? I've always been puzzled by how much a well known person can make by saying stuff that can probably be found in their $19.95 hardcovers, and that half the audience will be too blitzed to remember anyway. Is it just conspicuous consumption, to brag that you had Bill Clinton or Malcolm Gladwell at your business's dinner, or is there something else I'm missing?
same reason i would guess people go to live concerts
Very often you're getting thoughts more quickly than anyone else (you get to hear what they think now rather than when the book comes out) and you get to ask follow up questions. Not to mention very often Clinton or whoever isn't going to write a book on their opinions of banking regulation or something. (And I've never seen someone show up to one of these blitzed. They're really quite dull affairs.) Plus, yes, it's a draw for employees.
Well some of it is basically just bribery through another form. Some of it is also people in control of giant budgets who aren't tested/monitored very heavily on their effective us of said budget, and meeting famous people is cool.
I am always amazed at how much more wasteful a big fortune 500 financial institution's marketing department is compared to their say facilities or IT budget. When things are less measurable there is just a lot of slop.
I think it's simply that people are willing to pay a lot to see a celebrity perform. No different a phenomenon than Taylor Swift getting big bucks to perform.
When Mark Twain lost all his money after investing it in an ill-fated startup, he fell back on his one sure source of income: speaking gigs. People have handed over enormous funds to hear famous authors speak for a long time.
My MFA program paid authors to come and give readings, and it was a really useful part of the educational process, because us grad students got close access to them, to chat like normal people and ask random questions and stuff. I think the huge-name speakers and their gigantic fees are a weird case of the same thing, where the value from actually learning from the person has been completely eroded by bragging rights of some kind.
Or another way to put it might be: the product being sold is access. At the "world leader" tier, the amount of money is huge, and the access is divvied up among all the people there. I'm sure if the business dinner is just a dozen executives, they'll have a real and meaningful chat with Malcolm Gladwell that might change how they think about things and be genuinely useful. But hiring him to address a graduating class of 3,000 is a different thing.
You're not paying for the information they deliver, you're paying for the experience. When you read a book, you might remember the information in the book, but you probably don't remember much about the experience of reading the book. Whereas when you go to a speaker, it's much more of an event that you remember and can look back on with fondness. Think of it like listening to an album versus seeing a band live.
Sure, but then it's a company paying for its employees to have that experience. So why pay tens or hundreds of thousands for the guys in middle management to remember that time they heard Niall Ferguson talk?
I have to think the shared experience of doing something memorable together is viewed as positive for morale or team-building. It could also marginally boost the company's prestige in the minds of those employees, which might help reduce turnover when they're considering other offers.
I've been on the receiving end of it, and it's marginally more interesting to hear from some random athlete or actor/actress than to hear from the company leadership who is up next. I'd be a bit disappointed if they went through all the trouble of hosting a conference and didn't bring in a guest speaker.
The most important thing you're missing is probably that emotional overtones are largely missing from the printed word. If you go listen to a health nut talk about his favorite theory for avoiding death, you can tell by his tone, gestures, speed of speaking, dynamic range, and a million other nonverbal cues which parts of what he says he takes most serious, which he's a little doubtful about, what he thinks is most important, what is less so -- and many other things besides. You come away with a much clearer and more nuanced awareness of what he thinks than if you just read it -- at least, if he's a good speaker, and not a deceptive antisocial Pied Piper, et cetera -- that is, in the ideal case for which people hope. (In principle you can also ask questions in a live talk, but at the least you can observe how the guru responds to questions others ask, and this, too, conveys valuable info.)
People find it hard to put *all* that they want to convey into text. That's why emojis were invented.
Okay, then why is such a premium paid for an IRL version of this over a recording? A recording takes you most of the way there.
One would assume because "most of the way" isn't "all of the way." Plus, as I noted below, there is a scarcity issue. There is a very limited number of people that can attend an in person speech. Way more can watch a recording, so the marginal cost to deliver it is far lower, and most importantly decrease with the number of deliveries (which of course is opposite the case of in-person speeches, where the marginal price starts off already high and rises very steeply as the speaker runs out of time he's willing to devote to events).
I'm not even sure what the argument is about. The fact that people bid up the price of in-person speeches is a plain observed fact, from which we may infer that this (high) price is required to match demand to supply. We can't very well argue that people *don't* value in-person speeches more than recordings or text, when the price data tells us beyond cavil that they do. I was giving an argument for *why* they might do so.
I'm not so sure about this.
You can get a much clearer and well-supported, and easy-to-study or -reference, presentation of someone's thoughts or ideas in a text-based format, for obvious reasons (e.g., going back and re-reading, highlighting, following links or footnotes, easier for author to organize, etc).
You mention getting a better idea of what the speaker thinks about his words, in a speech, but with the caveat that this is in the case of a good speaker who's being honest; well, an honest author who's good at writing can indicate confidence level just as well — again, if not better, due to the aforementioned factors.
Finally, even if we grant that the speech of a good and honest speaker is better than the text of a good and honest author, due to some sort of information in gestures and tone that no one has ever managed to communicate through writing...
...is this enough to explain the huge difference in price between speakering* fees and $19.95? I find that doubtful on its own, personally! (And — I don't think the average person, when asked why they'd go listen to a speech, would even mention this stuff; probably more like "iunno, seemed interesting I guess".)
-------------
*typo but I'm keeping it because it's sort of funny
Some people prefer text, sure. But they're very much in the minority. That's why people like to get educated in person, and don't just read the textbook, that's why we listen to witnesses in person in courtroooms and don't just study written statements, that's why we like Presidential debates in which we can watch candidates talk -- and ideally in front of a live audience -- instead of just reading position papers. That's why medical students are supposed to talk to the patient and listen to him, not just read the chart.
Is it worth the difference in price? In one sense, obviously, because the market pays that price. In another sense -- well, you can't overlook the role of scarcity. I can print a million books, and the marginal cost of the last book is pretty dang low. But the time for the author to speak is strictly limited, since he can't be cloned[1], so this much scarcer resource sells for a premium above the reading experience in part just because the supply is necessarily so much more limited, or more precisely because the marginal cost rises very, very steeply.
-------------------------
[1] Presumably AI people are busily trying to think of ways around this.
Aside from the obvious "influence" aspects, to use a neutral word, a lot of it is conspicuous consumption. Just basic elitism.
Elie Wiesel spoke at my sister's graduation. Awesome? Yes. Braggable? Sometimes. Meaningful impact on life? Not really.
There can be some argument about Clinton vs Gladwell. The latter couldn't get you anything. Well maybe he blurb's the Dean's new book or something?
I think in the case of graduation speeches you're overlooking two things: first, the value of endorsements. Elie Wiesel can't speak at *every* graduation, so he has to pick and choose, and when he does choose presumably it represents some kind of endorsement on his part. (Certainly the college treats it that way.) This redounds to the prestige of the college, and of course to the graduates. I would guess your sister's degree is seen by many as some small fraction more valuable and prestigious because it came from a college that could entice Elie Wiesel to come talk.
Second, it used to be not uncommon for major political figures to actually give substantive policy speeches at graduations. Winston Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain" speech at a college graduation, George Marshall proposed the "Marshall Plan" at a Harvard graduation, JFK announced the negotiations that led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty at an American University graduation speech.
Some people have definitely proposed a mechanism for why groups pay powerful individuals "speaking fees" far in excess of the value of their speech.
A certain politician once claimed they were "broke" broke when they left office. Less than two decades later, they had a nine-figure (to the left of the decimal place) bank account. What exactly were they selling that was worth that much? Having heard them speak, that sure wasn't it.
Part of what you're accomplishing is coordination: you didn't just hear what was in some book, you heard the same thing as all these other people heard. So now you can all talk about it, make reference to it, etc
Gauging interest here, but if I created a San Francisco meetup for fans of Philosophy Bear's Substack, would people attend? Philosophy Bear, a.k.a. depony sum, is a blog I discovered via ACX. I would describe his writing as vaguely part of the "Rationalist Left" (not a real thing).
I am interested in making causal inferences from historical data. Does anybody know any relevant books/conferences/case studies/etc?
See the literature on counterfactual history, starting with Robert Fogel’s work on American railroads.
Does anyone have experience applying to mech eng internships in the uk? I’m kinda lost on the best ways to go about doing it
10 browse glassdoor using vaguely relevant search terms
20 find a vacancy
30 apply for it
40 GOTO 10
worked adequately for me back when I was at uni. I probably would have done better to talk to the careers advice people they employ for exactly this purpose.
Are you looking at any particular sector/role or just the standard cad monkey position?
Anything really, although I enjoy doing CAD so wouldn't mind being a monkey for it. Would probably prefer something where I actually get to build or work on cool projects. What was your experience like when you did internships? Cheers for the reply.
How do people think inflation is likely to end?
The Bank for International Settlement published something about this, based on evidence from past tightening cycles. They basically say:
(1) Central banks have little choice but to tighten policy to lower aggregate demand and bring inflation back to target.
(2) Strong growth and high job vacancies, as well as front-loaded rate hikes, can help prevent a hard landing.
(3) To perform a soft landing advanced economies would need to drop by 1.6 to 2.3 percentage points below its full potential over the next two years, to tame inflation. Best case scenario would be 0.4 to 1.6 percentage points due to non-core inflation waning over time. But that's counting food and energy markets to stabilize, which is fare from certain.
Here's the study: https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull59.htm
I do not think the Fed's or anyone else's model (I have more confidence in the Fed than BIS) can predict the exact settings of which monetary policy variables will get inflation back to target levels with he least damage to real income. We know NOW that the Fed should have started tightening sooner, but they know that too, so the fact does not help decide the policy instruments setting for today.
Raised interest rates reduce inflation in the expected manner (reducing investments and private consumption, which in turns push inflation downwards). Hard to tell how deep the recession will get, but the logistics chains and oil prices seem to be sorting themselves out already.
Down to 2% by 2024. Fed independence isn't really at threat or in question, and they've shown that they're willing now to take serious interest rate hikes and such to get inflation back down to the 2% target.
There's a lot of carping on it from leftist writers who think the US should have somehow done a WW2-esque price controls regime instead plus *handwave supply side reform*, but they don't have any real ability to change the Fed's decision-making on this.
Tricky. It ended in the early 80s with a sharp recession, followed by a decade of very powerful economic growth, which is the best possible scenario -- but that was coming off historically much higher interest rates (6% was "low" in those days), it had political leadership committed to killing inflation because it had a voter population who had been screwed by it for almost 10 years and was very, very fed up (we haven't reached such pain yet), and perhaps most important it had a significant bulge of young workers (Gen X) who were just getting started in their careers and could drive productrivity up.
None of those things are true today: (real) interest rates have been essentially negative for a while, and the Fed has indulged in outrageous money printing, so there's almost a whole generation that doesn't believe (for good reason) on any strong connection between interest and risk. We haven't reached nearly the level of fed-upness with inflation that our parents had in 1978, so the political leadership is far less committed. And our demographics are terrible: we have many fewer younger people entering the workforce and a big bulge of older people who certainly dislike inflation but who need to trade wealth for labor.
So unfortunately I would consider turning Japanese a more likely model -- more or less, the leadership loses courage when the recession gets to deep, backs off but not all the way (because it helps inflate away the Federal debt, too), and we screw around with a slightly painful stagflation for a decade or so, until...something else unforeseen happens.
The TIPS market expects it (PDI inflation) to converge to ~2.3% pa over the next 5-10 years, but that does not imply much about the path over the shorter term.
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
OK I actually have no idea how or whether inflation will end, but the opening was too tempting to pass up.
I had to ‘bite my thumb’ so to speak, to not add that myself.
it will end with going back to 2% average inflation target. FED will reach its goal no matter what. that is their mandate. there is NO any other way out of this. Also, if you look at recent mom moves, its is going back to normal. (i.e 10bps-20bps mom increase). we need around that much to see 2% average inflation
When everything gets back to normal. China is still 2 years behind the rest of the world on covid, and they're the world's factory
This is an underdeveloped idea in society, but it's clearly true. Inflation is two things, in potentially varying amounts. How much money is in the system, and how many goods that money is chasing. We pumped a lot of money into the system at the same time we stripped a large number of goods out (shut down factories around the world). We're doing better about not putting new money into the system, but with China still producing less, I don't know how we would reverse inflation without very painful cuts in the money supply.
We could do the same thing by taxing away all the excess money we put into society in the last few years, but with less being produced that still wouldn't fix it.
"How do people think inflation is likely to end?"
The federal reserve will trigger a recession.
How else?
So they trigger a recession - is that necessarily enough to stop inflation? What do they do with rates at that point?
Every other time they did this they’d lower rates further than the prior lows, and this was without major inflation coming into it. So how bad does the crash have to be to actually stop inflation?
The only way the Fed could fail to stop inflation is if they somehow lose their nerve and halt raised interest rates prematurely. It basically cannot fail to work, it's just a question of the amount of pain (presumably much less than when Volcker broke the back of inflation in the early eighties, as that time inflation expectations were high in a way they aren't now).
We know how to handle inflation.
In the 1980's we also had a much lower debt/gdp ratio. Do you think that matters?
Not sure why it would? After all, real interest (Interest - Inflation) doesn't particularly become higher. The debt level is important if you want to have an expansionary fiscal policy, but this isn't that at all.
Much of the federal debt is funded on a revolving basis. Because the nominal rates will go up, debt servicing will eventually tak up significant fractions of the federal budget, even with rates as low as 5%.
I guess we’ll find out. Or the Fed will blink when 4.5% interest rates threaten to destroy the federal budget as the 1% debt starts rolling over to 5% debt over the next 5-6 years (typical treasury debt maturity) and that 10% of our budget in interest expenses become 50%.
All the prior times they fought inflation successfully we had a much sounder financial basis, not 125%+ debt/GDP and rising. With high debt, there may be no solution - just let the debt inflate away while real rates stay negative and everyone not a debtor loses.
Yes exactly, this I think is most probable. I find it dubious the Fed can really control 8% inflation with 4.5% interest rates. At that point it's still a far better idea to spend your money now, even if you have to borrow it, than to save it. Maybe they're hoping the shock 'n' awe of the rapid delta will cause people to rein in faster than is strictly financially necessary, but I bet that won't last. I mean, we'll see, but I wouldn't count on it.
Volcker had to raise the Federal funds rate to 20% to kill 10-12% inflation in the 70s. Powell can't go anywhere near double digits, because the Federal budget would just implode.
Check out this graph of the CPI components
https://www.fragiledeal.com/t/inflation-stagflation-thread/4327/1318?u=xerty
Specifically, the last two months have been flat because of huge declines in energy costs, while core CPI is running 6% or so annualized and hasn’t changed much for the last 1-1.5 years since the massive Biden admin spending and Fed easing.
The take away IMO is that if oil isn’t going to keep falling $10-15/month, which will see it negative again in 6 months, that huge negative energy component to the CPI is going to at least flatten if not reverse and the headlines will start reflecting high sustained core inflation. The markets are not going to like this and neither will the Fed.
"So how bad does the crash have to be to actually stop inflation? "
No idea. I expect the fed to keep tightening until inflation drops back to the 2-3% range. How much tightening that will take I have no idea.
NOTE: Crashing house prices reduce inflation because of the way that inflation counts "imputed rent"! A large housing crash will "help" inflation. Yes, your home equity being destroyed makes up for the stuff you are purchasing getting more expensive :-)
"Pink, it's like red but not quite."
Aerosmith
Arctic Monkeys have sooo many great lyrics - here's just a sample of some lines from their relatively recent stuff (they have a new album coming out this week):
I lost the money, lost the keys
But I'm still handcuffed to the briefcase
(American Sports)
I want to make a simple point about peace and love
But in a sexy way where it's not obvious
Highlight dangers and send out hidden messages
The way some science fiction does
…
So I tried to write a song to make you blush
But I've a feeling that the whole thing
May well just end up too clever for its own good
The way some science fiction does
(Science Fiction)
It's the big night in Tinsel City
Life became a spectator sport
I launch my fragrance called 'Integrity'
I sell the fact that I can't be bought
(Batphone)
My days end best when the sunset gets itself behind
That little lady sitting on the passenger side
It's much less picturesque without her catching the light
The horizon tries but it's just not as kind on the eyes
(Arabella)
Now I'm out of place and I'm not getting any wiser
I feel like the Sundance Kid behind a synthesizer
(Black Treacle)
Bite the lightning
And tell me how it tastes
Kung Fu fighting
On your roller skates
Do the Macarena in the devil's lair
But just don't sit down 'cause I've moved your chair
(Don’t Sit Dawn ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair)
You look like you've been for breakfast
At the Heartbreak Hotel
And sat in the back booth
By the pamphlets and the literature
On how to lose
Your waitress was miserable
And so was your food
If you're gonna try and walk on water
Make sure you wear your comfortable shoes
(Piledriver Walz)
Then like a butler pushing on a bookshelf
And unveiling the unexpected
I, who was earlier reluctant, was suddenly embarrassed and corrected
How could such a creature
Survive in such a habitat
And the secret door swings behind us
She's saying nothing
She's just giggling along
(Secret Door)
"And the beer I had for breakfast was a box of cheap white wine
And the boom box on my shoulder was a box of clementines
I ate every single one without noticing the mold
You said you're gross my darling, I said no I'm rock and roll"
Kimya Dawson - The Beer
Tanita Tikaram's 'Twist In My Sobriety' is up there for me.
I think ammonia + peroxide bleach doesn't do anything spectacularly-terrible (hydrazine and nitrite are plenty toxic, but not volatile, and you won't get a huge amount of them). Ammonia + chlorine bleach, of course, will gas you (as will hydrochloric acid + peroxide bleach, or any acid + chlorine bleach, or acetone + chlorine bleach).
Not contemporary, but a favorite of mine: Talking Heads, "Once in a Liftime"
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Naive melody is my personal favorite
A fantastic band in concert
So true - I was lucky enough to catch them on the Stop Making Sense tour: one of the best shows I've ever seen!
Yes!
Comfort eagle is full of lyrics like that - good all around from a band that often gets mocked for its musical simplicity.
My choice:
"Insecurity made me it's enemy - it knows it cannot beat me, yet still tries to defeat me
My gaze starts to blaze, light rays dissect the haze to reveal all my wicked ways
I'm sick and tired of being unappreciated, separated from the seasons, all inhebriated
So I shapeshift, take on the form of the one looking at me, now he thinks to himself "who could that be?"
Exactly, my point exactly
Well done, son."
(Watson Tudor Jones - if you don't feel it)
"I said, nice rectum, I had a vasectomy Hector
So you can't get pregnant if I bisexually wreck ya" (Eminem)
"Stand by the stairway you'll see something certain to tell you
Confusion has its cost
Love isn't lying, it's loose in a lady who lingers
Saying she is lost" (Crosby, Stills, & Nash)
Also both verses in "Black hole Sun" by Soundgarden are very unusual
re “Helplessly Hoping” Stephen Stills did indeed a a knack for lyrics and a melodic hook.
Bit of CSN trivia: Graham Nash couldn’t get his current band, The Hollies to record his new song Marakesh Express, so he left to join some new band.
Trivia like this is part of why I love this blog so much!
Also the fact that Graham Nash is still making music is pretty crazy
Hey, the fella is only 80. ;-)
Pretty much all of Panacea for the Poison by the flobots
"Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut,
It comes back, but it's never the same"
LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls
John Hyatt - Shredding the Document
“You know what my father said
Well I'm not going to tell you
Some words that I try to live by
It's none of your goddamn business”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_HPqaVrCDc
Unfortunately, 9ne of the things we learned in the last couple years is that the survey of flu illness was not as comprehensive as we were led to understand.
Could you elaborate on this? I'd be interested in learning more.
... with Defender's Quest 2.
But I'm sure the book will be good too :)
Makes a lot more sense than the "Inflation reduction act"
Your question is interesting, I guess, but let's talk instead about this unrelated thing over here.
If you support the policy and think it's a good idea an worth drawing a contrast with what we're doing here, fine. But make that point, don't just nod at it.
The top rate of income tax in the UK is already high enough that it's unclear whether reducing it by 5% will actually lead to less money coming in (note that this is different to the situation in the US, where it's harder for high earners to leave the US tax regime, so income tax rates have to be much higher before increasing them stops increasing tax revenues). Fairly sure I've seen something from the government making this point in the past, but the argument is put well here: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/its-not-obvious-that-killing-the-45-rate-is-actually-a-tax-cut. You'd certainly struggle to see the impact of the top rate of income tax being reduced from 50% to 45% in 2012 in the graph of income tax share paid by the top 1% here: https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-burden/.
That's not to say that the reduction will unleash a torrent of wealth creation, just that the UK is not borrowing to make the rich richer. It's borrowing to keep the heating on this winter.
I'm in a bit of a "high taxes are good" bubble so some of these arguments are new to me. Please forgive if my ignorance shines through.
Is the fullfact graph showing the right thing? If I understand you right you're using it as evidence that cutting the top rate of tax didn't decrease the amount of income tax high earners paid... But in the same budget, Osborne increased the personal tax allowance, which if I understand right is also a tax cut for lower earners. Is it possible tax take went down for high earners and for lower earners such that the overall ratio didn't change?
Also, what's your take on the drop in the value of the pound, and the IMF making the rare appeal to the UK government to reverse the decision? I interpret both of these to be moderately strong evidence that it was a bad move. Do you disagree?
Finally, I don't get your point about "not borrowing to make the rich richer". It _is_ going to make the rich richer to cut the top tax rate. I think the adamsmith.org argument is that the tax rate can go down, but the extra incentive to work more and/or move to the country and/or not move away from the country, will mean that there's generally more economic activity among the rich. Are you saying that making the rich richer is a happy byproduct (if so, fair enough, I misunderstood you), or that it's not going to make the rich richer (in which case I disagree)?
(I certainly don't disagree with your "it's borrowing to keep the heating on" part though. That's definitely part of what's happening.)
I'm no expert on finance I'm afraid - unless the point is very, very straightforward I'm out of my depth. I think here the main point is that no one is claiming that any borrowing to pay for the 5% cut is more than a rounding error compared to the borrowing for the price cap, the other tax changes, etc. Anyone focusing on the borrowing needed to fund the 5% cut isn't motivated by concern about the public finances. Though that applies the other way as well, of course - no one thinks this cut will raise much money, so making it is about signalling too. And the currency/bond turmoil might suggest it was the wrong signal to make.
The fullfact graph could be misleading, though I don't think it is, and if it is it's not because the take from income taxes as a whole declined - it didn't. Main thing to add is that the 5% cut doesn't affect many people, and of those who are affected, most of them aren't affected very much - this change only affects earnings of over £150k and will mean that someone earning £250k will pay £5k less in income tax. The UK just doesn't have enough people earning enough for it to really matter. And a lot of those who do are highly mobile, hence the idea that the cut might well increase revenue.
Of the three income tax cuts: only one is to the higher rate. A second is to the standard rate of tax, the third a reversal of a recent proposed hike in National Insurance. Most beneficiaries of the latter two are not the rich. Incidentally, the Labour Party has undertaken not to reverse two of the three cuts.
Sure. I believe capital is always more wisely and efficiently invested by a million private owners who had to scrape it together, pound by pound, by spending the hours of their life carefully, than by half a dozen barristers and staff bureaucrats constituting the Subcommittee on What Should We Do With This Money? of Ministry X, who punch out at 4.30pm and thereafter think of completely different things, because they have absolutely zero skin in the game, so to speak.
So by me any transfer of capital from private to public hands is a priori stupid, and will lead to economic inefficiency and reduced standards of living, and any transfer from public to private hands is good, will lead to improved economic efficiency and growing standards of living.
The government have far more skin in the game of "how prosperous can we make the country" than generic highly-paid people do, because reduced prosperity may result in them losing elections.
Completely backward. When a rich person invests in something, it's his own money he might not get back, and I assure you a rich person cares way more about getting his money back than a generic politician cares about possible attack ads surrounding his vote for the Economic Growth Now! bill 8-10 years ago (a typical payback time for a good investment) that turned out to produce results far below the bullshit about it spread liberally about at its passing.
I can't think of a single stand-out case of a legislature suffering decimation because they passed Economic Nostrum X and it didn't perform as advertised. Can you? But rich people definitely hate losing money. That's why they're rich, you know.
For that matter, the number of governments that have been re-elected repeatedly while they drove their country to economic ruin -- Venezuela jumps immediately to mind, certainly -- should give one pause in asserting the voters routinely hold governments accountable for long-term economic growth.
I'm not saying that the government has more of a stake in how well the country is run than rich people do in their own businesses. I'm saying that the government has more of a stake in how well the country is run than rich people do in how well the country is run.
The government feedback loop in action from yesterday: https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/tory-mps-labour-mini-budget/. Markets react poorly to policy announcement -> governing party drops badly in polls -> some in governing party try to rebel against the policy. That market reaction caused more stress to the average Conservative MP than it did to the average rich person, because of the difference in how much skin they have in the game.
The government does not know how to make the country richer. The country became richer primarily as a side effect of private individuals pursuing wealth. You might have more of the point if you said "more equal" or something, but a bunch of lawyers who won a popularity contest are incredibly unsuited for wisely investing resources.
Elected officials by nature have a much shorter time horizon, their term limit, than actual people
The UK doesn't have term limits.
Give me a break. Name a Western country that runs a primary surplus. *Every* tax cut or spending increase for the past 75 years involves increasing the deficit. Whether that is a good deal or not, economically, turns on whether the redirection of capital improves, retards, or does nothing for economic growth. (Nor have the sizes of deficits had boo to do with bond yields for at least as long.)
Nonsense. The first toll roads were private, as were the first railroads, the first toll bridges, and of course most airlines and airports still are. American electric and water utilities are also generally private (albeit regulated). Mail services and schools, both K-12 and higher education, are built and operated privately, and of course almost all of the Internet was built and still operates privately. I can't imagine what makes you think most or even all but a tiny fraction of the massive public service economy is primarily the result of government decision and action.
Rich people aren't idiots. If one can make good money by building some public service for thousands or millions of people, they will. The only generally required reason for government getting involved in broad service administration is to solve collective action and NIMBY problems, which are not unusually the result of infrastructure decay caused by government mandates or over-regulation in the first place. Or to do projects that don't make money at all, like a space or nuclear weapons program.
Edit: now I think about it, the assumption underlying your assertion seems to be that what rich people want to do with their money is put it in a big pile and splash around in it, like Scrooge McDuck. Id est, splurge on massive consumption. That suggests you don't really know many rich people, and don't even pay much attention to what they're like. (And I don't mean accidentally or lucky rich, like sports or media stars, or Russian gas oligarchs. I mean people who built businesses from the ground up.)
That's not what rich people are like. That's what an upper middle class person who wins the lottery is like, the kind of person who *doesn't* think it worthwhile to work 80 hours a week for 20 years to make a fortune. Rich people are quite different. They live to make money, not to spend it. To them, a million dollars in cash represents an exciting opportunity to invest it somewhere and make 100 million -- not an opportunity to pay for the most extravagant party ever.
You might wonder *why* they live to make such fabulous sums if not to spend them, but that's just non-rich person thinking. To the rich, money represents some kind of spiritual success. It's some kind of giant honking "I Made It Ma! Top O' The World!" sign that says they're the smartest person ever. It's the equivalent of winning a Nobel Prize to a nerd, or the equivalent of an Oscar or two to the actor.
Perhaps we need to get away from the idea that global hubs of commerce, finance, technology, academia etc. should be viewed as places to house poor people.
So you want the UK to basically be the world's welfare office?
Never let a good crisis go to waste, as politicians on both sides have been quoted as saying.
Governments around the world are using the current economic problems as a pretext for passing exactly the kind of legislation that they wanted to pass anyway. For Democrats in the US, that's huge spending bills that give away trillions to the sorts of people that Democrats like to give money to. For Conservatives in the UK, that's top-bracket tax cuts.
I don't know whether this will really help with the current crisis so much, but I do generally believe in the idea of top-bracket tax cuts for three reasons:
1. I think it's morally the right thing to do (it's unfair that some people should have to pay hundreds or thousands of times more in taxes than other people)
2. I think it's in the long-term best interests of the country (you want to encourage high earners to move to your country while encouraging low-earners to leave), and
3. It benefits me personally.
Now, does it give me pause that the thing that benefits me personally just happens to be the thing that is both morally right and in the long-term best interests of the country? It should. I promise to think about it more carefully if my opponents (who if you ask them also have a similar confluence of interests) will too.
Might have worked better if they did it before exiting EU, which was a huge wakeup call to companies with offices there that it's time to GTFO.
I think it might be intended to reverse that effect, and draw business back into the City. And one of the likely consequences of that is a reversal of the regional rebalancing that was a goal of the previous incumbents...whatever benefits there might be going to go London.
They've got a large majority, so they can do what they like, for the time being. Polling suggests that they would be a 150 seats behind labour in a snap election.
I don't expect it to lead to growth and hence a wealthier country. No chance.
But is that what we mean by "work" or is there something else going on? I've heard a bunch of slightly crackpot theories about what the Tories hope to achieve by this but I haven't heard anything credible.
I think it's one of the worst decisions the UK government has made in the last few years. Which includes some stiff competition!
It's also bundled in with a regulatory and welfare cuts. The theory being that you can help inflation by decreasing regulatory burden and encouraging more people to work as well as encouraging foreign capital to flow in and so on. It could work if the lower taxes and welfare cuts encourage people to work more and if the various corporate incentives encourage more productive companies to invest in the UK or to start up in the country.
It's bog standard supply side economics and it rests on reasonably solid economic principles. And it has worked both historically and recently, though not universally. Of course, there are competing schools and they too have had their successes. One of the annoying things about economics.
I'm not sure why you don't understand it unless you don't understand conservative economics generally. I'd have expected something like this. Especially since large dollops of government spending have failed to solve inflation or restart pre-pandemic growth.
From a personal perspective, even though I'm a higher rate taxpayer, this is more than balanced out by higher mortgage payments and making it much more difficult for companies to borrow to invest and to do long term planning (I'm a debt banker).
I struggle to find words that describe the budget that don't veer into ad hominem on the people who designed it. I honestly don't know who it's for or what they expected to happen.
Humanoid bots are not subject to rules of engagement, and I'll bet on the side that has artillery, air support and tanks.
In general, no need for Musk or the feds to have only humanoid bots.
I'd be really surprised if the federal government wouldn't be buying AI bots There would be at least some effort to for the feds to have full control of them. I can't guarantee that would be effective.
Maybe the potential failsafe (assuming Musk control can't be over ridden) is to EMP Capitol Hill.
I can see it though.... Don't you *want* us to be able to install updates?