In light of what is happening in Iran, I have questions on Muslim women in the West:
What are the modern motivations to wear a Hijab for Western women? My understanding is that it's an attempt to curb male sexual desires. But in reality dressing modestly doesn't protect women at all. There's a lot of research indicating that the objectification and over-sexualization of women's bodies actually depends on modesty culture. The more we are forced to cover up, the more men objectify us, and in turn, the more violence is perpetuated against women.
In cultures where women don't wear a lot of clothes, their bodies aren't sexualized and they face less harassment. And conversely, in cultures where women are told to cover their entire bodies, showing hair or ankles can be seen as inherently sexual. A notable finding of these studies is that women's chests are only sexualized in about 20% of cultures, which suggests that the attraction men have to this part of the body isn't biological, it's cultural.
Of course, forbidding Hijabs, as they're doing in India and France is super disgusting. I would genuinely love to hear Muslim women's rationale behind wearing Hijabs and what they are aiming to accomplish.
1. I think covering up is doing more work than you give credit for. In a society where women have few rights, the men have A LOT of impulse control problems, and there is a lower risk of suffering consequences for sexual violence, modest dress may be the best way to avoid rape. To me, it's like trying to get over a porn addiction: the best way to do it is to completely restrict access to porn.
2. This brings me to the confounding factor that may account for some of the difference between cultural dress: porn. In most developed countries, we have access to it. Why do we need to oversexualise women's bodies in the West when almost all of us can just open PornHub and fap away whenever we get horny? Pretty sure there's a literature on sexual violence being lower in countries with more access to porn.
3. In my experience, some of the strongest advocates of 'modesty culture' are other women. The only way I can make if sense of this is that it enables a kind of fairness if competition. On the one hand, it kind of equalises the unfairness of differing levels of attractiveness among women. On the other hand, it prevents the kind "low-bidding escalation" that women often feel subject to. When a woman starts showing some more skin, every other woman has to or else they won't get the same male attention. Then you get to a kind of "race to the bottom", whereby more and more women have to 'put out' or risk being ignored by the most desirable partners.
>Of course, forbidding Hijabs, as they're doing in India and France is super disgusting.
Why? Why aren't you "disgusted" by misogynistic cultures, but you're "disgusted" by attempts to stop these cultures takinga foothold in other countries? Why aren't you "disgusted" by the much more severe restrictions of religious expression in nearly every muslim-majority country? Blasphemy and apostasy is punishable by death in at least 10 muslim countries and is an imprisonable offence in many more.
And yet I have literally never, ever seen a western liberal condemn this at all except sometimes when directly pressed on the issue (and not even always then) - I've certainly never heard these laws, which make India and France's laws look like preschool in comparison, ever described by liberals as "disgusting".
Like, right now, I'm sure you're going to say something like "well obviously those laws are bad, but.."
No! Not "but"! These laws are worse than anything any non-muslim country is diong with regards to religious expression, and yet neither you or anyone like you is motivated to EVER talk about them except when you're forced to. And yet you will express unlimited outrage at countries like France doing something vastly less bad *by your own standards* than what a majority of muslim countries are doing, and yet people like you never make posts condemning these countries, you never feel motivated to speak out about it, and occadionally will even defend them. The left love saying the west is too 'euro-centric', and yet here we see exactly a case of tactical left-wing eurocentrism when non-westerners do much, much worse things than western countries.
Like most western liberals, you seem to have a quite frankly irrational bias towards Islam that muddles your thinking and causes you to view and speak about muslims categorically differently to how you think and speak about non-muslims despite the fact that Islam is the biggest anti-progressive force in the world today and a handful of countries have enough sense to help prevent, however minimally, its spread. if you're not going to speak out against vastly worse restrictions on religious freedom by muslims, why should France or India take the criticisms of people like you seriously? You want non-muslim countries to accept having a hostile, incompatible culture take root in non-muslim countries but stand idly by while muslim countries use violence to stamp out anything that they disagree with.
Suddenly have a lot more time and found out about this. Yeah, really late, but also wasn't paying attention.
I have some remarks to the Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability thread but given even the highlights thread already is somewhat old, going to post this on an Open thread. Not sure what the etiquette for these things are. I am going through the backlog and prob will have stuff to note on even older threads.
There were a number of nicpicks that I was going to discuss such as "2 years is a BIG change. Not sure how to map out an AU where everything is the same but Amazon is 2 years late, though it's almost certainly going to diverge not converge to this one"1 but going to focus on one of the more basic ideas it displays.
In the end, the main thought process is that "Bezos doesn't deserve his money" -> "really high taxes" in some form, but uh... this kinda skips a step.
It's like saying that we should have an extra lottery winner tax, not because of tax should be progressive or lotteries create negative externalities, but because they were lucky and anyone could have won it.
I know it's not exactly analogous - capitalism and rich people not lotteries and betters. But how humans treat those is kind of my point.
The easiest ways to tie the two are with moral/economic principles.
Ie. "Rich people are bad and don't deserve to be rich" which well, Robin Hood exists but not exactly consequentialism.
"Money is to be rewarded only as much as they deserve it" which isn't how money works.23 At least not in the economic environment that Amazon earned it from.
As a quick "gotcha" think about the opposite frame - if Amazon/whatever really does "deserve" the money, then why should it be taxed at all? I mean, they "earned it" rightfully then.
I know there are other arguments such as monopoly and deadweight loss that does focus on the taxing part, but that wasn't the main focus of the article.
Footnote 1. This isn't to try and somehow evaluate the "value" of the divergent timelines but more as an alert - do not simply assume "if a number is big/small, it does/doesn't matter".
Footnote 2. A lot of this is very similar to the criticisms for Great Man, but unlike that, you can state that teaching history DOES work like that. Plus pushing to reward the concept rather than the individual is... basically the same for this example.
Footnote 3. This is also probably a better criticism for patents to be more stratified be how obvious they are? Not sure, but at least the structure there is to reward first movers.
I think living in modern nation states (and really any states in their style, the Roman Empire is as good as Babylonian city states for my purposes) is inherently doomed and bound to produce oppression and coercion, I think the very idea of being born obligated to "Social Contracts" that I have never seen before, let alone consented to, then being asked to comply with them at gunpoint is inherently against human dignity and liberty.
I see 2 possible futures out of this:
F-1: A Radical Technology (e.g.: brain implants that allows you to feel the emotions of others as your own) makes human an effective hive mind, which makes their states vastly better. States are fundamentally a reinvention of ants and bees with primate hardware: what ants and bees do naturally, we need social technologies like Money and Constitutions and so on to simulate, but the 1 thing we can't simulate satisfactorily is empathy, we can't simulate empathy beyond a DNA-hardcoded limit that was optimized for sub-hundred tribes but is now woefully inadequate. A technology like brain implants or radical DNA\biochemical tinkering can allow States and sub-State polities that, in the ideal limit, feel like tribes and families. Social Protocols and Contracts will no longer feel alienating and illegitimate for the same reason that the rules your parents set for you when you were small weren't.
F-2: Alternatively, or in addition to F-1, space colonization allows state-building to become a personal hobby again (just like it was before the 19th century or the 15th century or, hell, the 1st century, before the entire earth became devoured by faceless states). You can, literally, build your own country, bro. On an asteroid or one of the 69 moons of Jupiter. Experimentation with ways of governance and social protocols will flourish, but most importantly and relevantly, you are never obligated to live in a state you don't like or select whish state you like *less* from a small list of pre-made coercive states. In the Ideal limit, every thinking mind is its own sovereign, nobody is sovereign over a multitude.
Now, those futures aren't without their own dangers and problems. F-1, depending on the mechanism it's achieved with, has the potential to go massively wrong. Imagine the cults, the gangs and the dictatorships that you can get if every single member is in perfect harmonious emotional sync with the leader. Every time Putin gets enraged, every single soldier on the front (potentially at the speed of light if we're talking brain implants) feels his rage and vows to avenge him. How can you possibly turn such a soldier against his leader? he saw him from the inside, every person sees himself from the inside as very beautiful and very righteous and extremely justified.
F-2, for its part, is a version of Scott's Archipelago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/), what if something requires the cooperation of all polities? In Scott's version (and in other arguments against Anarchism), this could be grounds for a justification of the State. The State is whatever arises naturally when multiple polities realize that there are cross-cutting problems that can't be solved a single polity can solve. But in F-2, you're literally working against physics. Light is slow, conquering a Solar System is hard, conquering multiple ones while maintaining any sort of coherent government is impossible. F-2 is a bulletproof Archipelago, but what happens when the intergalactic aliens come knocking? or intergalactic climate change? how can we re-sync the countless independent polities again?
What are books or thinkers or stories that deals with themes and problems like these? For example, Scott's Meditations on Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) and Marx's analysis of capitalism correctly identify the massive alienation that arises from countless people forced to live and work together against their consent (although Marx misses Moloch and shoots at the largest target he can find in 1840s England instead, but that's an understandable honest mistake), Seeing Like A State introduces a notion that a State is like a new emergent organism that we unwittingly built and gave dominion over us, with senses that contort reality and social relationships and hands that force those contortions on its subjects.
On the fiction side, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota introduces the idea of Hives, Hives are a non-geographical government, and they are consensual, you join them when you're an adult, and an ultra-Hive law forces people to respect your choice and provides you with all information you need to choose. The only problem is that there are so few of them, barely 7 or 10, but that's understandable given that there is no space colonization yet. The inhabitants of Palmer's world pride themselves on the "Death of The Majority", the world is so pluralistic and un-hegemonic, that there is no group that can be said to force and control others, not even states (although, semi-spoiler, that turns out to be a joke later). Another, more obscure, fiction is The This, by Adam Roberts. It recounts the story of a social media corporation that evolved to be the first hive mind, then later the first F-1 style polity.
All recommendations and discussions and objections are welcome.
>a situation in which people are governed in an unfair and cruel way and prevented from having opportunities and freedom
So, what I'm saying is that if you got 10000+ apes (evolved for 200000+ years to live in groups of at most hundreds) together in a hierarchical structure, some apes are invariably going to oppress (== deprive of freedoms and opportunities) others.
And this is what I see happening in every single land-controlling state from the invention of agriculture till now, and I see it continuing until one of the futures I talked about or both happen.
> You always worry about losing users during a move, but I see their main weekly thread is at 1766 comments and counting, so it looks like it’s going all right!
Depends on how many users are making those comments. Gotta look at the distribution
Request for a sanity check (from people with experience with startups) before I make any rash decisions (quitting a company).
Since the beginning of this year I gradually transitioned from a consultant role for a fintech startup to a more permanent position in the firm (basically as their head of data). When we were discussing this transition, we agreed on some ESOP conditions which resulted in a percentage share in the company. This was essentially 7 percent where 3 of those 7 percent were limited by a valuation ceiling (the ceiling was a compromise deal between what I expected and what they felt was needed so that the company would have a room to accommodate more investors later).
We agreed on these parameters in April and then we were preparing an ESOP contract since. There have been some delays, I received a contract proposal in August which I found a bit too vague and the lawyers I had have a look at it agreed. I then sent a counter proposal (which the lawyers prepared) to make some things clearer. This was early August.
In September there has been a first investment round, quite a modest one in hundreds of thousands of euros (a larger funding round is expecteded early next year). The new investor entered the company late in September. During late August and September the ESOP contract was postponed, justified by too much work with due dilligence legal preparations with the investor (and I was assured that the ESOP conditions would apply retroactively from April, so no room to hurry).
Now, the due diligence process was finalized and allegedly, the new investor had a problem with my ESOP position, it being too high. So they erased the 3 percent completely (that were supposed to come with the ceiling) with the same justification they came up with the ceiling (to allow more growth and room for investors...), which would leave me with a 4 percent ESOP share (paid on the event of founder's exit). I am still waiting for the exact ESOP contract offer, we agreed that this would be finished by the end of September and now they say they will have it by next week...and of course I still would probably need to have the lawyers have a look at it.
My biggest issue is with the repeated unmet deadlines and most importantly the changes in conditions we agreed on. This makes me think that even the 4 percent might be iffy unless the contract is completely bulletproof and generally I don't think it is a good idea to work with someone I don't really trust any more. And of course, 4 percent of zero is zero and there is always (a lot of) potential for a startup to fail (but that is of course something I took into consideration when we agreed on the conditions in April).
Other than that the job pays quite well, although I think I could get some 15-20 percent more elsewhere.
I currently have no contracts with the company, because I still legally work there as a consultant and it goes via my previous company where I still technically work as a consultant. The boss of the consulting company is also one of the investors in this fintech company, though a minor one (this is how I got to work with them in the first place). I am a contractor with them and I have very little obligations to either subject. I have no grudge against the consultancy but quitting in the fintech abruptly would probably break ties with them as well. Like I said, I think I can get equally good or better offers in terms of monthly income elsewhere.
So I decided (I heard of the sudden change today) to take time over the weekend but I think I will simply tell them I quit on Monday and I won't even finish any work in October or do any handover (there is nobody to hand things over to currently...just two juniors on that data team, one if them is very good but definitely not experienced enough to lead the team and has zero business skills needed to discuss things with partners).
I guess I could also use this as a bargaining chip "restore the conditions we agreed on or good luck finding someone", but this would not solve the lack of trust I have now...
So...good idea to burn the bridges right away or am I being too hot-headed?
I never recommend quitting and leaving people in a bad position. At least give a reasonable notice (minimum two weeks) or give them an opportunity to accept the original terms before you quit, knowing that otherwise you are out. If you quit on them and leave them hanging, that will create a bad atmosphere between you and everyone involved, and they will be far less likely to want to work with you in the future. Even if you have them over a barrel and they capitulate, you've now got an antagonistic relationship to deal with, which could carry over for years.
That said, you are perfectly within your rights and it's quite reasonable to expect that they will honor an offer they made. If you want 7% and think that's the right number, and they apparently also agreed, then it's not a bad thing for you to say "7% like we discussed or I'll leave" (again, try to be nice about it, while firm).
Yep, my plan is to quit and say that I am going to wrap some things up, write up what the current state of everything is and what needs to be done afterwards.
I am not going to start any new work, nor am I going to come to any meetings with business partners of the company any more.
But I am willing to prepare things for whomever they find afterwards (they won't manage to do that in two weeks though, probably not even until the end of October).
The thing is that the terms offered now are exactly those that I refused in April. I explicitly said then that those are not acceptable for me and that I am willing to help them find someone else under those terms. This has not changed. But more importantly, it is now a question of trust. I don't really trust the CEO (there were some minor incidents in between as well, although nothing quite as bad as this) and don't want to work with him any more. Frankly, I never saw him as particularly inspiring, but I though I could help a but even with the business side of things and the reason I asked for a larger share factored this in as well. I don't think I could really do a good job, so I am definitely going to end it. I won't do it so abruptly but I won't stay for another 2 months either.
I think the lesson for me is not to join a company (especially a startup) in case I have doubts about the CEO. Or rather, join only if I have a very good feeling about the CEO.
You don't want to be in a relationship with someone who is trying to use you as a fiscal punching bag to make other investors happy. I'd start looking for other jobs immediately. Once I'd gotten one, or a contract, I'd tell them I got a better offer with more solid terms and that I couldn't pass it up and that I was leaving. No reason to create bad blood.
Remember the supply depots that keep blowing up in Russia? This could be because their owners and managers are destroying them to hide the fact that they are empty, because of corruption.
There's also the option of changing your view but denying you ever believed the converse - very Orwellian, but it does at least involve updating your views...
Ha. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's hardly ever seen, but this is indeed a very useful distinction.
I would say the difference is between admitting you've personally made a mistake and admitting that your entire worldview was wrong. The latter should intuitively be harder than the former, although I can easily imagine some person much further on the narcissism spectrum finding it easier to adjust their priors about the world than take a hit to their self-image.
The YouTuber keeps joking that the film projects are probably money laundering schemes that make Seagal money. Could that actually be true? Given Seagal's Eastern European connections, his general sleaziness as a person, and the fact that these movies are so terrible yet inexplicably keep appearing, how can market forces have led to this?
How would you use a film production as a vehicle for money laundering?
Russia is sending T-62 tanks to its militias in Ukraine, and now Slovenia is sending T-55 tanks to Ukraine. The vehicles are badly outclassed by younger tanks like the T-64 and up, so why even send them?
"An obsolete/obsolescent tank is better than nothing" sounds like a fine response, along with advice to not put the old tanks in situations where they could encounter new ones. However, the more I think about it, the more devils I see in the details.
The old tanks use different ammunition and need different spare parts, than the newer ones the Ukrainians and Russians are used to. Different crew training is also required. Moreover, remembering to keep the old tanks away from parts of the front line where newer enemy tanks could be would just complicate a general's battle plans. These considerations make me think it wouldn't be worth the trouble to send the old tanks to Ukraine, for either side.
Also, accepting the notion that old weapons still have places on the modern battlefield, so long as they're strictly kept in roles that don't stray from their limitations, leads to some absurdities. Is there still a place for the T-34 in the Ukraine War? How about muskets?
The T-55 is basically the minimum viable tank in modern warfare (or the British Centurion if you're buying from the West). The enemy won't have tanks everywhere, and if you show up with a T-55 in good working order while the enemy didn't bring any tanks, you get full credit for having brought a tank to a gunfight - it may not *guarantee* victory, but it does mean it probably won't matter which particular kind of tank you brought.
You do have to meet *some* minimum standards, which e.g. a T-34 doesn't. It almost certainly won't be in good working order, for one thing. But its armor won't reliably stop the sort of 25-30mm automatic cannons used on modern infantry fighting vehicles, its gun doesn't have any stabilization for firing on the move, it has no night vision of any kind, and it may not even have a radio. It really wasn't until ~1950 that people figured out how to put everything a tank needs into one package.
The T-62 is basically a T-55 that costs twice as much and breaks down twice as often, is harder to keep running because it uses non-standard parts and ammunition, and doesn't offer any significant advantages to make up for that. The T-55, being widely exported and recognized as still useful in its minimum-viable-tank role, is still well supported with aftermarket parts and ammunition and upgrade packages. The T-62, not so much, but it's what the Russians seem to have left - best guess is they sold all their T-55s to people who wanted MVTs, and most of their reserve T-72s were looted for parts to keep the operational T-72s at least parade-worthy over the past thirty years.
Muskets, just no. You can reach back as far as World War II for small arms that are still useful on the modern battlefield, e.g. the American M-1 or the German Sturmgewehrs, but that's about it - you need a semiautomatic weapon's ability for immediate followup shots if you're going to be fighting people who have that ability to use against you. There are a few medium and heavy machine guns from the interwar era that are still useful, and bolt-action rifles that could be modified for decent sniper rifles. Handguns are sufficiently irrelevant that it almost doesn't matter which kind you bring so long as it's a repeater.
There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. The first example that leaps to mind is pikemen around the time of the American Civil War. The Governor of Georgia, Joe Brown, ordered 10,000 pikes for his state's militia in 1862 (around 7k of which were eventually delivered), and around the same time General Robert E. Lee endorsed a plan to include two regiments of pikemen in every infantry regiment of the regular Confederate army. The latter plan was shelved at some point before being implemented at any short of scale.
And just before the Civil War, plans for John Brown's (no relation to Joe Brown) attempt to kick off a slave rebellion in 1859 involved arming some of the rebels he hoped to recruit with pikes (either would-be rebels who had no experience with firearms, or if he wound up with more rebels than muskets). Brown bought about a thousand pikes while preparing for the operation and intended to obtain more (along with a whole lot of muskets) when he seized the federal armory at Harper's Ferry. As it happened, the pikes never came into play: the US Marines and the Virginia and Maryland State Militias responded sooner than Brown had counted on, and Brown's initial force of about two dozen men got pinned down inside the armory and most of them were killed or captured before they had a chance to try to recruit more rebels and distribute weapons to them.
On paper, pikemen were potentially useful in an American Civil War era military environment: while a rifled musket with a fixed ring bayonet makes a serviceable short-spear, in melee they'd be at a significant disadvantage against a proper 6-8 foot long pike. And while bayonet fighting produced very few casualties in 19th century warfare, especially once rifled muskets replaced smoothbores, this was more due to the tendency of soldiers to retreat rather than sticking around too get stabbed, not inability of charges to reach melee range. Including two companies of pikemen in a ten-company infantry regiment would reduce firepower by up to 20% (possibly less than that if there aren't enough rifled muskets to go around (as was the case for both sides and especially the Confederates early in the war), since then the pikes would mostly be replacing less-effective smoothbore muskets), but in exchange for that the pike-reinforced regiment would be much harder to chase off their positions with a bayonet charge and would be much more effective at seeing off enemy units by charging to contact. This isn't necessarily a bad trade-off.
But in practice, it's a losing idea because bringing a pointed stick to a gunfight tends to be really, really bad for morale. So, like just about every Western army since the early 1700s that could afford enough muskets and bayonets to go around, the Confederates wound up going for an all-musket composition for their infantry.
You seem to be imagining the T-55s as so far behind they can't do a decent job. But T-62s aren't that new. The T-55 was introduced in 1945 and the T-62 in 1961. Both have been upgraded and both are still produced. The T-55 now serves a role as a lighter, more reliable and cheaper alternative to the T-62. It's also not as if the T-62 is a hard counter: a T-55 can take out a T-62. And any tank is better than no tank. If Ukraine didn't have an ample supply of modern guns and we had muskets then it'd be worth giving to them. Indeed, Russia actually is giving WW2 era guns to its conscripts.
Even without any ammunition, a tank is super-effective body armor that can crush certain barricades. You're worried about the matchup between new tanks and old tanks, but the alternative is a matchup between new tanks and footsoldiers.
Muskets are an improvement over beer bottles. If anybody still had a storehouse of old ones lying around I'd imagine they'd be sending some.
In theory, stuff can remain relevant longer than you might think. the B-52 turns 70 this year and is expected to remain in use into the 2050s. Now again, that's with the US air force behind it, so your mileage as a Russina-aligned militiaman in Donbass may vary.
Any idea how well 25 T-55s would stand up against 1 modern tank? If the T-55 is $40,000 and looking at $1 million for the more expensive tank, that's about the odds.
Obviously there's more training involved in 25 tank crews, but then you also get to spread those 25 around instead of only getting a single tank. If the T-55s stood any chance at all against the more advanced tank, I think I would prefer the fleet of cheaper older tanks to one modern one.
On the one hand, I don't think Elon's suggestion is very actionable. Among others, because even if it was possible to carry out referenda under UN supervision with nobody being threatened or intimidated by one or the other party ... who should vote? Those who fled the region and would like to return? Those who have been brought there by Russia/ whichever party currently controlling the territory? Those who lived there for three generations? And so on.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of (a search for) solutions that might bring peace sooner rather than later. I agree with the worry, that otherwise the war will drag on, with many people dead, huge amounts of destruction and damage to poorer regions in the world. I also agree there is a risk for escalation, which is to be mitigated. This would entail compromise and Ukraine not getting everything it wants - and also not getting everything that would be perceived as legit and just. Depending on the details of course, it could still be worth it. It certainly would be worth to think about how to achieve such a thing.
Just to avoid misunderstandings, it certainly wouldn't and couldn't entail Putin getting everything he wants. It would of course mean him getting something more than in a hypothetical case of total defeat.
I'm also frustrated by the general level of 'if you're not with us (= 97% mirroring Ukraine's position) you're against us, and probably some kind of Russian collaborator'. That's probably me being sensitised by the German debate I'm witnessing, which is aweful. But also Zelensky countered Musk's proposal with a reference to Musk supporting Russia now and former Ukraine Ambassador to Germany not surprisingly literally responded with 'Fuck off'. Both of which is not what the suggestion deserves, in my view. Arguably, Ukraine is in a difficult enough situation for their representatives to behave in different kinds of ways, but those sentiments were repeated by non-Ukrainians over and over, also in similar situations.
So, probably not that specific solution suggested by Elon, but yes, please, more efforts for some kind of termination of the war that is different from: let them fight until one is totally exhausted or until everything blows up.
Musk's proposition main problem, the one which makes it absolutely unacceptable for Ukraine (and deserves the "fuck off" of the ambassador to Germany) is that Ukraine should remain neutral. Basically this mean Ukraine should live always in fear of the next invasion - this kind of neutrality looks a lot like vassalage to Russia. Any worth-to-discuss peace offer has to offer security guarantees for Ukraine from NATO/EU - anything else is just asking the Russian to come back for more.
'Neutral' in most statements relates to NATO only, not EU membership. This is reinforced by the fact, that Russian officials basically said they wouldn't care about EU when UKR applied for membership in summer. The potential for future accession to EU already makes quite a difference.
As for the security guarantees, I also racked my brains over this in late February and March. At the time, I found it the most difficult condition of potential negotiations to realise. Not any more.
For several reasons, among others:
- It seemed very difficult, to get countries to credibly commit to provide assistance to Ukraine if attacked. But then countries are willing to commit much more to supporting Ukraine than many thought in February. I'm not saying it's a simple taks to get useful security guarantees, but I'd be rather optimistic, solutions would be found.
- Neutral doesn't mean de-militarized. It's clear, Ukraine will insist on raising their levels of military readiness, as will their neighbours. With Western support, it's not clear time will play into the hands of the Russians, especially as sanctions are still in place.
- Russia already got itsself a bloody nose and a broken leg, as others point out in more detail below. I don't think this furthers their appetite 'to come back for more'. Especially in connection with both the last point and the following:
- A humiliating defeat might enhance Russian sentiment to give it another try and get the balance sheet clean (from their perspective). The suggestion by Musk however would give the Russians something to go home with: neutrality in terms of UKR not joining NATO and some territorial gains, even if it's only Crimea formally recognized. This lowers the (perceived) necessity for them to fight for more, while the former points would raise the potential costs
- It doesn't become less risky for Russia. Almost everybody agreed that Russia didn't expect that level of western action and so much damage to their international position. A 'next time' would make everybody (Western + partly others) just 10 times more angry and willing to impose the highest possible costs on Russia. Even many of those who are playing a more reserved card now, would me much less forgiving of Russia breaking another difficult end-of-war agreement. It's not the same situation as Minsk or Minsk II. (Given that there won't be any being major changes in the overall global/international situation, which can never been excluded).
I'm aware that you could say sth. to each of this points, but overall it rather shows that neutrality is not *as* problematic, and less so than it in March. Which again, is not saying it isn't a difficult and surely contested issue, as all points under negotation would have to be. Are you aware btw. that Zelensky himself suggested that neutrality could be on the table in the early weeks of the war?
(Okay, ignoring that Elon was talking about the UN and not the Russian army, which *is* an important difference, that not 'every' province is affected in UKR, luckily, and also that at least somewhen this century there was a significant self-identifying-as-Russian and Pro-Russia population in some of the relevant UKR areas ... but I take that as artistic exaggeration and I get your point. )
It would just not be very realistic, would it? Being realistic is not a sufficient condition for a good outcome, but it's a necessary condition.
Among all the realistic outcomes, I would certainly want to have one that is more 'fair' rather than less.
This is a horrible deal. Firstly, the idea we desperately need to compromise as if Ukraine is losing is just not the reality on the ground. Putin wants to wave the nukes around because he knows a lot of people will get nervous. But not only is Ukraine winning but the US still has many, many cards to play if Putin escalates. Including non-military cards.
> Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.
Russia will never agree to this. Even if they would, they've already purged and deported so many people (and caused over a million to flee) that the effective rule this would establish is: You can invade an area, commit crimes against humanity until only your supporters are left, and then hold a referendum and that's the will of the people.
> Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).
Khruschev's mistake is literally a Russian propaganda term. It was not a mistake. He transferred Crimea to Ukraine as an autonomous republic for reasons of ethnic politics. And it remained that way until the Russian invasion. The people who lived in and populated Crimea from 1783 until Soviet times were the Tatars and only ethnic cleansing brought in so many Russians. If Russia wants to put forth a proposal that the Tatars get Crimea back as an independent country then that's another idea. But that's not what they want. Of course, it's another example of "ethnically cleanse and hold a referendum among the survivors" that Elon seems to think is a way to peace.
> Water supply to Crimea assured.
Is Russia going to have to guarantee not cutting off oil to the west? No more gas diplomacy? No? Why does this principle only flow one way?
> Ukraine remains neutral.
So Ukraine is going to have to give up a part of its sovereignty in order to make Russia feel safe. This too is a terrible idea. (Also, ironically Ukraine joining the EU means they have to reform some of the laws Putin is complaining about in regards to their Russian minority.)
Moreover, it is a terrible deal. It gives Russia a lot in exchange for... withdrawing a losing army? What is Ukraine or the west getting out of this? It might be one thing if Ukraine was groaning and begging for peace. But they're not.
>> Moreover, it is a terrible deal. It gives Russia a lot in exchange for... withdrawing a losing army?
Not even that - Russia only leaves if the referendum says so. Which means in the meantime their army would sit still, occupy and fortify all of these regions, and muck with the referendum any way they can. Bussing in "returning refugees" from Russia to pack the vote, making it hard for refugees who fled west (more likely Ukraine voters) to return home, blocking aid coming in from the west while simultaneously dumping in aid in an effort to buy votes on the ground, etc. And at the end of it all if they didn't like the result they could just refuse to leave and dare Ukraine to "restart the war" by attacking their now re-fortified positions.
A "second referendum managed by the UN" should be understood by Ukraine to mean, practically, the acquiescence to Russian annexation of the land. They're right to smell a rat.
This proposal is exactly the kind of "why doesn't the UN do something about it" proposal that you'd expect from someone like Musk, an expert in one field, admittedly, but speaking way, way, way outside his specialty area. Shortsighted and many, many more parts twitter buzz than substance. It's the geopolitical sibling to his plan to build a little submarine to get the Thai kids out of the cave, and it's kinda sad that it's getting as much traction as it is given that it's essentially just poorly-informed celebrity commentary, about as valuable as a peace plan from Lizzo or Chris Pratt would be.
As someone who's taken flak from friends for being too pro-Ukraine, I'm a bit puzzled by some of the response to this and similar ideas. Admittedly, Musk's ideas are rather vague, 'Ukraine remains neutral' can mean a lot of different things. Still, given Musk's support for Ukraine (Starlink), it's hard to argue that he's pro-Putin.
Let me ask this: why does everyone assume that an end to the war along current lines gives the advantage to Russia to build up for another try?
Assume for the sake of argument that 'Ukraine remains neutral' means no official EU or NATO membership; essentially Ukraine's status before the war. My first pass guess would be that Ukraine rebuilds its military much faster than Russia. Russia's going to be facing massive economic sanctions from the west including a ban on anything militarily useful, at least as long as Putin is in power or they are visibly building up a military for another try. They might be able to make up some of that with inferior Chinese replacements, but that shouldn't be enough against Ukraine, which will have no economic sanctions stopping it from arming itself with high quality western gear (probably not current-gen stuff, but even NATO hand-me-downs should be better than what the Russians can produce with a crippled economy).
And the rest of it doesn't look better for Russia. Do you think the Russian draftee military morale is ever going to recover, given the way their predecessors were fed into the meat grinder? Putin's not getting any younger. Neither are the rest of the Russian oligarchs, who have both lost their easy access to Western luxuries and gained a fear of windows. At the same time, a Russia that's rebuilding its domestic armed forces has less resources to devote to propping up its allies overseas.
Regardless of how Ukraine ends up at this point, I don't see Russia recovering militarily for a very long time. As such, I don't think 'Russia will rearm and try again' or 'once Russia finishes with Ukraine, it will move on to the next victim' are strong arguments. Can someone tell me where my logic is wrong?
I'd like to see Ukraine recovering all its territory and Putin out of power. On the other hand, I don't want to see even tactical nuclear war in my lifetime.
The problem with #1, as others have noted, is that even a free-and-fair election in terms of election conduct can be controlled if someone has a chance to change the makeup of the population beforehand (e.g. arrest and deport/kill the entire population, replace it with your own nationals who will generally vote to be part of you). The issue isn't so much the facts-on-the-ground-in-this-instance as the perverse incentive to genocide that this gives to aggressive countries (most notably, this gives the PRC a path to legitimating an occupation of Taiwan, as long as it slaughters half the population first which it kinda wants to do anyway; we want to incentivise the PRC to *not* invade Taiwan and, if it does successfully invade, to *not* commit genocide).
#4 also incentivises countries to invade other countries in order to control their diplomacy, which causes some issues.
#2 and #3 are justifiable enough, though, to not be too big an issue. If the outcome of the invasion is "Russia loses Donbass but legitimates already-factual and mostly-bloodless occupation of Crimea, also cutting water supply to other countries is bad", that's not terrible incentives.
Any proposal that does not give Ukraine security guarantees in the form of either NATO or UE membership is just asking for Russia to come back again in ten years. Failure to understand that severely hinders Musk credibility...
Dmitry's response is conspicuously missing one very, very important detail (as is every other comment here): If Ukraine demands too much and won't compromise, Ukraine is going to be on the wrong end of a barrage of thermonuclear missiles. This would be very bad for Ukraine, and very bad for Ukraine's bargaining position going forward.
Exactly what constitutes "too much" is kind of vague, but that limit does exist and is a real constraint on plausible outcomes to this war. Pretending nuclear war can't happen, and making moralistic demands out of high principle and outrage that Putin must come away with nothing whatsoever and maximal humiliation, is how you get nuclear war.
Musk should probably have kept his mouth shut (as usual), but his proposal is at least within shouting distance of a plausible, non-nuclear end to this war.
"Too much" would be invading territory that was Russian prior to 2014. Taking back Crimea is somewhat risky, because Putin is not rational, but he'd have to be nuts to launch nukes over it in a way that he really wouldn't be if Ukraine were marching on Moscow.
Putin's interests are different from Russia's interests. If Putin fears that a sufficiently humiliating failure means he falls out of a top-floor window in a freak accident, he may very well be willing to push far past what is rational for Russia in order to stay on top or at least stay alive. If the nukes fly, he's dead, but if he falls mysteriously out of a 10th floor window, he's also dead.
And anyone else would have to be nuts to think getting back Crimea is worth nuclear war - and yet here they are supporting Zelensky who think getting Crimea back is more important than peace
I imagine that Western leaders, whatever their domestic rhetoric, are likely to in practice tell Zelensky not to go after Crimea on pain of "we cut you loose". The deep state is not very keen on nuclear war.
Did Zelensky refuse a "Russia gives up all of Donbass, Crimea legitimated" peace?
What does Ukraine want except for its territorial integrity? Reparations would certainly be in order, the return of abducted children too. Is that how you get nuclear war?
If on the street suddenly somebody holds a knife to your throat, asking you for your purse, you certainly could say: what do I want, except just keeping my honest money? Is that how you get injured and killed?
Or you could give them the purse. I certainly hope I would do the latter.
I don't know if you like the analogy, imperfect as it must be. The point is: everything Ukraine wants can be perfectly legit and just. And pursuing those legitimate goals can still lead to a catastrophic result.
If nuclear war would be very bad for Ukraine's bargaining position, why haven't Putin ordered the nukes to fly already? Answer: Because this option is very costly for Russia. It's entirely plausible that coming away with nothing whatsoever is preferable to nuclear war for the Russian elite.
And Ukraine paying Danegeld to nuclear bullying only kicks the can down the road: the Dane is likely to return soon with the same argument.
Not paying the Danegeld, doesn't mean you stand up and say proud words and everybody says how brave you are and you win everything. Not paying the Danegeld, frequently means you have to fight the Dane. Who, in this case, has a couple thousand thermonuclear missiles. When you are finished fighting someone who just fired even a couple hundred thermonuclear missiles against you and your allies, you will not be standing up and saying proud words and having people say how brave you were and enjoying the fruits of your victory. You will be wishing very hard you had found a way to avoid that.
One way to avoid that: take advantage of the fact that this option would be very costly to Russia, and DON'T BACK THEM INTO A CORNER WHERE ALL THE OTHER OPTIONS ARE ALSO VERY COSTLY. Also, the relevant party isn't "Russia", it's the small part of Russia that's going to decide whether to pull that trigger. Vladimir Putin, and members of his inner circle who are in the same boat he is.
There has been an awful lot of IMO dangerously exuberant talk, some of it explicitly reiterated in response to Musk, that this war will end with the absolute humiliation of Russia, the total destruction of its army, the bankrupting of its economy with reparations, the dismantlement of its nuclear arsenal under UN supervision, and of course the downfall of Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, presumably to be tried as war criminals in the Hague. That's the sort of thing that will cause Putin et al to look at the options and decide that nuclear war is less costly, or that all options are intolerable and the only things left are spite and vengeance.
We aren't there yet. But whoever is in charge of ending this war, needs to find a way to do it without backing Putin into that corner. That may require face-saving compromises, and e.g. Crimea may be one of those required compromises. Or would you rather look over five million greasy radioactive stains that used to be innocent human beings and say "but at least we didn't compromise"?
If you think weighting on Putin's personal opinion is so important, why not promise him a bunch of personal stuff instead of promising 'Russia' things? Maybe he'll give back Crimea for a suitably large contribution to his Swiss bank accounts?
First, as TM notes, Putin wants power more than he wants money, and he probably wants imperial glory for his beloved motherland more than he wants money.
Second, in the post-Pinochet, post-Gaddaffi world, there's no way for Putin to safely spend any money he gets. The only known stable states for Vladimir Putin going forward are authoritarian ruler of the Russian Federation(*), prison inmate, or mutilated corpse. Anything else means living each day on the run, in hiding, or otherwise in fear of the extradition warrant and/or bayonet. And, per Gaddaffi, they're not going to be polite about where the bayonet goes.
We no longer have the ability to credibly promise Evil Dictators a safe and cozy retirement in exchange for their stepping down without a bloodbath. If their choices are running and dying ignominiously later, or standing and dying gloriously now while taking their enemies with them, they're probably going to go with Plan B.
* He could probably manage elderly revered ex-ruler if the current ruler continues the Putin regime, but that's not what anyone is proposing.
Putin cares about domestic opinion of him above all else. No point having a large offshore account if you're getting removed as leader/mysteriously dying/ending up in a prisone camp. There's no real path forward for Putin to have a normal, Russian rich guy life unless he succeeds in Ukraine and retires. If Ukraine is viewed as an abject failure, Putin is toast, one way or another. That money is useless for him.
The problem is, I think he wants power more than money, although impunity and a nice life abroad, in case everything went wrong for him in Moskow, might be better than nothing. He might also want other things, like a place in history as Vlad the Great for re-building the Great Russian Empire for example. I guess, building a new super-worldpower G3 organisation, and let him meet with the American president and the Chinese president 3 times each year, and pretend to himself, to the Russians and to everybody else that he almost rules the world, could do a great deal. Maybe enough to voluntarily give back Crimea and everything else.
I'm not fully serious, but mostly I am. Your observation that what Putin wants (plus a couple of people around him) is more relevant here than what 'the Russians' want is spot on. But then, specifically giving 'Putin' anything of worth is the last thing anybody in the pro-Ukraine camp wants, right? At the moment even impunity and a nice life abroad would be a hard sell.
Paying the Danegeld also frequently means that you have to fight the Dane in the end, at a later date but a richer Dane. We need to find a balance between not rewarding nuclear threats and unjustified wars of aggression, while also not making Putin prefer nuclear war. The Musk proposal errs too much to the former, demanding that Putin be brought before the Hague and that Russia is de-nuclearized and broken down into federations might err too much to the later.
> We need to find a balance between not rewarding nuclear threats and unjustified wars of aggression, while also not making Putin prefer nuclear war.
I think that's a pretty good summary.
> ... that Russia is de-nuclearized and broken down into federations might err too much to the later.
The problem is, that's far too much out as an example of the *erring too much to the latter*. Russia being broken down and de-nuclearized would be an actual case of defense for Russia; sth. that would probably be not acceptable even to a Russian Head of State who is a truly democratic leader and a person of great integrity.
What *is* the actual case where the problem of 'making Putin prefer (to risk) nuclear war' becomes relevant, nobody knows. To me it's plausible to think that it starts where Putin even with all the propaganda involved - and that's plenty - cannot disguise that he's taking a great defeat in UKR, and where internal pressure mounts as far as to seriously endanger his position.
If we accept the place for 'not making Putin prefer (to risk) nuclear war' is more or less where I described it, we then have to look at the other criterium of 'not rewarding nuclear threats and unjustified wars of aggression' and see if we find a space that covers both criteria. I believe there most likely is enough of an overlap, a space where both criteria are met.
And yes, I'm a bit worried that we're not really looking enough for that space. Depends on the 'we' I guess.
As I said: Ukraine paying Danegeld to nuclear bullying only kicks the can down the road: the Dane is likely to return soon with the same argument.
In other words: If you reward nuclear bullying, you will have a lot more nuclear bullying in the future. It might be better to take the gamble now than it is to risk facing many more, much riskier gambles in the futures.
But other people have already made this point better than me, some in this very thread.
This argument rests on a faulty premise: that Putin's concerns regarding NATO expansion are a smoke-screen, and that Ukraine is not uniquely important for Putin such that he may be willing to risk everything over securing control. It is common in these discussions to dismiss Putin's stated concerns over Ukraine joining NATO, but this claim bears much explanatory power for his behavior since before 2014 and so cannot be so easily dismissed. But if we recognize that Putin genuinely believes Ukraine joining NATO is an x-risk for Russia (not that its true but that he genuinely believes it), then we can expect him to be willing to pay an extremely high cost to secure Ukraine. Further, that he would not be willing to pay that cost for other states. The costs that we've imposed on him so far are already enough to deter any further expansions to territories that are not similarly important.
This idea that we must risk nuclear war now or risk it in the future just has no contact with reality.
There might have been a time when "let's have a vote to see whether Eastern Ukraine wants to join Russia" was a morally tenable solution, but that time was before Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine. If we want to maintain the general post-WW2 standard against wars of conquest, we can't let invading places be a pathway to some sort of situation where you get to keep the place.
As for Crimea, I have no idea why the 1783-2014 status quo should trump the 1954-2014 status quo. It might have lasted longer, but I think the fact that 1954-2014 includes most of the lives of most of the people living right now is far more important. Otherwise, why not give it back to the Ottomans?
If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants.
"Take back all of Donbass, but Crimea legitimated" isn't actually a big incentive for the 2022 invasion (it's an incentive for the 2014 invasion of Crimea, but that was near-bloodless and probably in line with the inhabitants' wishes so incentivising it isn't terrible).
>If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants.
We're literally talking about averting nuclear war ffs!
Now is NOT the time to be trying to win all the pieces with no regard for the risk. We should be forcing Zelensky to do the absolute minimum to end the conflict in a way that dissaudes Russia from future aggression. Anything more than this magnifies the risk in a way that everyone should consider unacceptable. The only reason Ukraine isn't defeated is because of the west - we have the right to stop Zelensky risking everyone else for the sake of his own power.
"There might have been a time when "let's have a vote to see whether Eastern Ukraine wants to join Russia" was a morally tenable solution, but that time was before Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine."
This is a purely deontological argument. I don't think this should be much of a consideration, given the exactly scenario in Ukraine right now, versus some hypothesized version of Ukraine. If it saves a bunch of lives and leads to an enduring peace, surely this is a more serious consideration than whether the truce kinda "looks bad" down the road, no?
"If we want to maintain the general post-WW2 standard against wars of conquest, we can't let invading places be a pathway to some sort of situation where you get to keep the place."
Maintaining the general post-WWII norm in which you don't conquer people because you felt like it seems good, but perhaps not as good as maintaining the post WWII norm in which millions of people are not killed in conventional interstate wars. It definitely seems less good than maintaining the post-WWII norm in which nation-states do not use nuclear weapons to win their wars.
"As for Crimea, I have no idea why the 1783-2014 status quo should trump the 1954-2014 status quo. It might have lasted longer, but I think the fact that 1954-2014 includes most of the lives of most of the people living right now is far more important. Otherwise, why not give it back to the Ottomans?"
I also don't give a shit about the "who controlled Crimea when and for how long" argument one bit.
"If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants."
Letting Russia save a bit of face after a mostly humiliating failure is a really good idea, if you value lasting peace and lives more than feeling good about the bad guys getting their comeuppance. I would actually counter that if Russia steamrolled Ukraine, it would be a much worse for them to have their demands acquiesced to. In that circumstance, they would probably be emboldened to try again. Not so much with the way things have gone in our "timeline" though.
It's not just deontological, it's about considering the effect on future wars - if you seta precedent that wars get you what you want, people declare more wars. Set a precedent that wars cost far more than they gain, and people become reluctant to have them. Yes, setting that precedent might cost more lives in this particular war that rolling over would, but it doesn't take many entirely-prevented-wars to make the balance come out positive.
Cf. Appeasement of Nazi Germany, though part of the rationale there was that France and England thought that they needed the extra prep time even more than the Germans did.
Negotiating a peace settlement now is not setting a precedent. Russia know they fucked up. Putin would almost certainly not invade if he could go back. Even if things resolved that way now, it will have been extremely costly and fravely threatened Putin's rule. It would already be a fairly strong example against repeating this kind of operation.
Fair enough, but there is no way this war gets Vladimir Putin what he wants. Even if we implement the full Elon Musk proposal, all Putin gets is to keep Crimea, keep Ukraine out of NATO, and keep what's left of his army from being further mangled. Before the war, he had Crimea, he had the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, he had an intact army with the perception of nigh-invincibility, and Ukraine wasn't going to be part of NATO any time soon. And neither were Finland or Sweden.
There is, at this point, no significant possibility of the Ukraine war setting a precedent that invading other countries gets anyone what they want(*). Russia is going to lose, Putin is going to lose, if you add up all the things they wanted, they will have made negative progress towards that goal. The only question is how badly they are going to lose and how desperate a position that will put them in.
* Or rather, there is such a possibility but it involves Russia being backed into a corner where Putin goes nuclear in desperation, NATO folding in the face of actual nuclear warfare, and Putin realizing that with nuclear weapons and no NATO he can conquer Ukraine after all. One more reason not to push him into the desperate corner where he would gamble on that.
It's important to bear in mind that almost no great power wars are like World War II. Even World War I was not really like World War II. Adolf Hitler is a massive historical outlier in almost every way, as is the idea of the victors demanding nothing less than unconditional surrender from the vanquished. I think we can safely say at this point that Russia has massive buyers remorse, since the war has been so costly, and they won't be trying this again any time soon. Meanwhile, everyone else in Europe will be busily preparing their own militaries to dissuade Russia from even considering the possibility. The number one thing raising the probability of a catastrophic outcome (nuclear war) is the continuation of this war, which is real and going on RIGHT NOW, versus some future hypothesized war. Ending this war under these terms therefore seems totally worth it to me.
The problem going forward isn't so much Russia and Eastern Europe; it's the PRC and Taiwan. Throughout this whole proxy war the West has always had one eye on Taiwan in case Xi tries to pull something the way he did with Hong Kong during COVID; giving Xi a plausible pathway to legitimating occupation of Taiwan (via #1 of Elon's proposal) is not a great idea right now.
I agree insisting on reparations is dumb. I agree demanding Crimea back is probably a bridge too far. But allowing post-purge referenda to legitimate conquest is a Bad Idea.
Why oh why do people think Taiwan is so goddamned important? Why are we willing to risk world war 3 between two nuclear superpowers to save some island? We survived without Taiwan's scomputer chips, we'll survive without them. Somehow people imagine that a reordering of the world economy to accomodate a short to mid term computer chip shortage is more of an ordeal than LITERAL WAR WITH CHINA.
"If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants."
A million times this. It's *absurd*, absurd beyond ready description that we in the West have become so mollycoddled and flinchy that a sizable proportion of the population can't tell that what's happening right now is that Russia's already bent over the barrel and reduced to struggling while we unbutton its jeans.
Some of us are, however, a little concerned about the wisdom of raping a guy who's wearing a suicide vest. It seems like the sort of thing that might have some risk attached to it.
Oh, believe me, we realize just fine. We are just also wise enough to recognize that it may be a bad idea to proceed with the caneing if the canee has a gun (i.e. nukes) sticking in his belt.
Avoiding nuclear war is (obviously) a more than reasonable concern, but it seems like the people putting that concern forth as grounds for letting Russia keep its gains now are putting it out there at such a broad level that it would be grounds for letting Russia generally take pretty much whatever parts of whatever country it wants.
One could just as easily have said “Russia has nuclear weapons, so it would be really dangerous to back Russia into a corner” at the outset of the war as the basis for just letting Russia conquer all of Ukraine without resistance.
Or say it next year if Russia decides it wants more of Georgia, or part of Kazakhstan.
I think the real wise approach involves the scary math of how much we think the *odds* of use of nuclear weapons are. And right now, that math still looks to me like Russia still stands to lose *way* more than it would gain by actually popping the cork on a nuke, so I don’t think it’d be good policy for the rest of the world to start pressuring Ukraine to back down at exactly the time when it’s regaining stolen territory.
As someone who very much does *not* want a destabilized Russia, I nevertheless also have a strong preference for preventing Russia from achieving territorial gains in Ukraine (or at least minimizing those gains while doling out so much pain that 3rd parties look at the example and think "wow, invading my neighbor is a shit idea and I will definitely never do that"). It looks, for now, like both those goals can still be achieved, so for what little bit my advocacy is worth, that’s what I advocate striving for.
If we get to a point where Ukraine is advancing into pre-2014 Russian territory, or the Putin regime looks like it will straight up collapse if Ukrainian success continues, then my math changes, but until then, "let's just stop things now and let Russia keep what it has" just seems like an unnecessary kneecap to Ukraine in order to give a handout to Russia.
>One could just as easily have said “Russia has nuclear weapons, so it would be really dangerous to back Russia into a corner” at the outset of the war as the basis for just letting Russia conquer all of Ukraine without resistance.
No, one couldn't. If Russia realized they couldn't win early on, they could get out with minimal cost. They weren't yet backed into a corner.
I don't think anyone has proposed letting Russia keep its gains. The proposal is to let them save a bit of face while cutting their losses. Putin can tell his people "we have largely denazified Ukraine, and we have secured the right of self-determination for the Russian-speaking peoples of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporozhia, and Crimea", and when four of those five predictably vote to remain Ukrainian, that's less humiliating for Putin than having his army kicked out of all those territories by force.
>and when four of those five predictably vote to remain Ukrainian
They might have been able to play this card as an exit strategy before this last month, but now Russia has already had the vote. Surprise, 97% in favor of Russia. They can't tell the story of self-determination without acknowledging the earlier sham.
Not to mention I can't imagine anyone willingly choosing to return to their old homes, now occupied by Russians with guns, just to vote.
To be honest, even if I were trapped in a Russian occupied region, I would never consider voting against Russia as long Russia soldiers were in the city.
Maybe that's where we break, because I don't think for a second that Russia will just let a referendum be run fairly. They have a lot of dead piled up, and leadership will want concrete gains to point to coming from those sacrifices. They just ran one referendum last week, and a "fair" one that came out differently only months later would just be another embarrassment at a time when settling their "war against an existential threat to our people" with a negoatiated face-saving off ramp is embarrassment enough.
So I think it's 100% that Russia, seeing as it already occupies those territories, will do everything in its power to rig the referendum as described in my other post.
That means I view "doing a UN observed referendum" as basically a soft surrender of the occupied territories to Russia.
As mentioned, I agree with most, or more precisely, I agree with the core idea of taking into consideration several important aspects which are among others avoiding nuclear war, deterring others from following Putin's example and possibly having Putin leave with a net loss rather than a net gain . I hope I understood you well.
I disagree with some important details on the math:
> that math still looks to me like Russia still stands to lose *way* more than it would gain by actually popping the cork on a nuke
I think the math is not about what *Russia* will *actually* lose; indeed I think Russia is already loosing a lot. It's more about what a specific, very narrow circle of leadership is going to win or lose. Is *perceiving* to win or lose, I should add, because that is all that counts. And it's not a rational fully informed decision. I mean it can be intended to be rational, but eg. be based on total miscalculation. As we've already seen examples of.
I also think, the math has to include the dynamics of escalation and the 'game playing' involved. At a certain point in time, it becomes less about 'what will I gain' and more about 'what bad options do I have, and is there one which will give me a decent chance to avoid x'. Now, 'give me a chance to avoid x' will then be linked to math the other side does, maybe concluding to take a risk in the *hope* that our side will back down. And so on.
Which overall I guess make the situation more risky earlier than your original math would suggest.
I agree with most, and won't repeat this. I will only mention two points on which I differ:
> but it seems like the people putting that concern forth as grounds for letting Russia keep its gains now are putting it out there at such a broad level that it would be grounds for letting Russia generally take pretty much whatever parts of whatever country it wants.
I'm genuinly surprised by this statement. So far, most people I know who advocate for a more prudent approach, do NOT suggest to just give Putin whatever he wants. On the contrary, my impression is, that the 'more prudence' side often argues in a much more nuanced way than the 'less prudence' side. If've rarely heard or read people claim 'oh, just give him Ukraine, it's all too dangerous otherwise' or 'we should just let Russia do what it wants, because, you know, nukes', I rather read: 'shouldn't we also think about the option of negotiations' or 'maybe loosing Crimea and pre-2014 regions would be an acceptable compromise for achiving peace'. Whereas, from the for 'less prudence' side, I hear more often: 'why should UKR offer an inch of its territory, they will fight until Russian defeat is complete', or 'Putin needs to be brought to criminal court, how can anybody think of talking to this criminal', or even rightout mockery or hate. Are you sure the 'more prudence' side currently produces the broader, more generalized, more extreme arguments?
Interesting. Most of my Ukraine conversations occur on this board. Maybe it's just that everybody's brain subconsciously highlights the most reasonable of their own supporters while glossing over the extremists, and vice versa for the opposing side.
What's struck me about the conversation is that when I see the premise "no matter what, let's definitely avoid a nuclear war" (which is a *totally* reasonable starting point that I share) invoked, it hasn't seemed to include a risk adjustment. It's mostly consisted of general statements, like:
"Ukraine is powerless without the west, and we shouldn't be risking nuclear war to protect Ukraine."
"Not paying the Danegeld, doesn't mean you stand up and say proud words and everybody says how brave you are and you win everything. Not paying the Danegeld, frequently means you have to fight the Dane. Who, in this case, has a couple thousand thermonuclear missiles."
"If Ukraine demands too much and won't compromise, Ukraine is going to be on the wrong end of a barrage of thermonuclear missiles. This would be very bad for Ukraine, and very bad for Ukraine's bargaining position going forward.... Exactly what constitutes "too much" is kind of vague, but that limit does exist and is a real constraint on plausible outcomes to this war."
"The number one thing raising the probability of a catastrophic outcome (nuclear war) is the continuation of this war, which is real and going on RIGHT NOW, versus some future hypothesized war. Ending this war under these terms therefore seems totally worth it to me."
To be clear, I don't disagree with any of those statements, but it just strikes me that at the level of generality they're made, they could just as easily have justified advocating for Ukraine's immediate surrender right when the war started, or caving to basically any threat Russia (or the US, or France, or any other nuclear power) ever made. So the principle has to be more nuanced than that. I'm sure there's more nuance to that behind the thinking - but it felt prudent to throw out the risk reminder.
As far as extremists or generalities in the "reject the Elon Musk terms" camp, I'm totally open to the idea that I've just missed them - we tend to overlook extremism among those who agree with us. But in these debates I feel like I see more invoking of keyboard warriors who want to drive the war until the Russian people rise up and topple Putin's regime than I see of the actual warriors in question.
Sure, all of this is very difficult and subject to uncertainty, and what you say is ONE reasonable approach among many. Perhaps even the most reasonable.
But a more cautious approach is not "absurd beyond ready description" or has anything to do with "mollycoddled and flinchy". This perspective is quite uncharitable and condescending AND misses the Elephant in the Room at the same time.
The wording of Ukraine remaining "neutral" fits more with a narrative of NATO aggression against Russia in which Ukraine pledges not to join. But in reality, Russia is a serial-aggressor that invades countries it thinks it can and dreams of rebuilding an empire.
So for Ukraine, the actual implication of the lack of defensive alliance (neutrality) would be vulnerability to further Russian aggression, rather than leaving Russia particularly more vulnerable to Ukrainian / NATO aggression.
Without some sort of defensive alliance, or significant further arming by the West, what exactly would compel Russia to respect the referenda that Musk suggests? Russia does not care about the "will of the people" of Ukrainians under their subjugation (just as they don't care about the will of the people in their own ethnic republics, and are not holding referenda to give them the option to be independent of the Muscovites).
Military force. And it is only military force that will rein in Russia and attach significance to any treaties with them. Were Russia a non-aggressive country, then no treaties would be needed, just as there is little concern that random friendly countries will invade each other. But given the current state of Russia, only military force, would compel them to comply.
But, what compels *America* to continue to honor the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo instead of just taking another bite out of Mexico whenever it feels like it?
If we're comparing the US/Mexico example to Russia/Ukraine, that's the proper framing - and I think the answer is just that for a bunch of different reasons America doesn't want to conquer all or part of Mexico.
But Russia has pretty, um, actively, demonstrated that it does want to conquer at least part of Ukraine - and if we were 10 months into the Mexican-American war and the US was in disarray and Mexico on a roll of recovering territory, I think they would be looking for more than "look how much damage the US just took I'm sure they won't try again" in terms of assurances before they took their foot off the gas. Especially if the bargain was in exchange for letting the US keep the territory from which Mexico was now actively driving them out.
America is a liberal democracy and liberal democracies mostly don't do that in the 21st century.
If a US invasion of Mexico went pretty badly, but the US was still inarguably the much stronger country and always would be, I think that would be a good analogy for the situation with Russia and Ukraine.
This. Watching some of the conversation around Ukraine I feel like I understand a little how some in pre-WW2 Europe just kept thinking, over and over again, that giving a *little* bit more to Germany just this *one* time more would finally secure peace.
Oh please. Russia would do anything not to be in this mess. They've been exposed and western support for its neighbors has been far greater than they could have imagined. The nazis were kicking ass at the start of WW2, it in't remotely comparable to the situation Russia finds itself in. Zelesnky and his demented apologists want Russia defeated entirely - which means we need to risk nuclear war so he can retain his power.
Is the logic here that it's useful because it's an exercise mimetic? Or the BDNF that seems to come from heat stress? Or something to do with heat shock proteins? And why only 2 mins?
Redirect your charitable giving and arguably investment to Eisai corporation, the Japanese pharma company which for the first time in history got noticeably positive results on an Alzheimer drug trial, as announced late last week.
Anyone have thoughts on why Peloton, a relatively small company who manufactures high-end exercise equipment is regularly in business news. Even before their now infamous commercial that was parodied by Ryan Reynolds(woman on treadmill) it's a steady flow. Today it's sales though Hilton; last week, via Dick's Sporting Goods.
Are there people "in-the-know" that drink every time there a new story about Peloton?!
They sell relatively small volumes at the high end of a large market, and make a lot of profit per unit due to marketing and branding. Its analogous to something like louis vitton or chanel
Off the top of my head, I'd guess that Peloton users are overrepresented among people who read business news, and presumably Pelaton's customers are likely to be interested in Peloton-related news.
Alternative, it could be business news editors who are the ones overrepresented among Peloton users, and typical mind fallacy is causing them to assume everyone else is just as interested in Peloton as they are.
Yes, I think at this point in history the answer to "why are there so many news stories about X" is always "data indicates that news stories about X get a good number of clicks".
Is the horse of cart first? Clicks drive some revenue and Eric above and Paul below give reasons why product owners and investors would be interested but the publicity - both good and bad, also affect the company's revenue and that of similar companies.
My opinion is that the publicity over time seems intentional not incidental. Is it because of existing public interest or trying to generate that interest? I'm unsure.
Peloton has also had a fairly wild ride as a company. When COVID arrived they were fresh from their IPO and trading at around $20/share; nine months later (end of 2020) they were up over $150/share; nine months after that (fall 2021) some of the air had been let out but they seemed stable in the $100/share range; then the bubble burst and by February of this year they were down to the low 20s; and this year they've kept sliding and right now you can buy Peloton shares for less than $8/share.
Put another way: the Sep 2019 IPO valued Peloton at $8B; at the end of 2020 they had a market cap of more than $50B; and today the entire company is worth $2.5B.
Yea. I can't get past thinking there's something more distinct though but as you suggest I bet it's related to the demographic of the buyers or at least their socio-economic class. I frequently read at least the business headlines and Peloton stories are conspicuous!
I had posted in a previous open thread about a friend's child in India. He is addicted to a video game. From his age of 12 to 14, his parents (both doctors, who are very specialized, busy and have huge work responsibilities) were very busy with covid-related work. In that time, a friend offered to build a gaming computer with him. They happily agreed.
The child's grandparents were home with him a lot. As his addiction grew, no one noticed. At one point he refused to go to school, as he wanted to keep playing. He would get violent if his access to the game was cut off in some way.
He is now seeing a psychiatrist. He was persuaded to give up the computer a few days ago. He is having acute withdrawal symptoms. He is on medication for this.
These things are designed carefully to be addictive. They're as awful as alcohol or drugs in the hands of kids. Smartphones with social media apps are no different. (There is a case going on now in the U.K, and the name of the child is Molly.)
This is all ridiculous. I don't know what the solution is. Why isn't there a warning label on video games and social media apps, saying they could cause harm? Any devices with the ability to carry these things should carry that warning too.
>Millions of children play video games, and yet most of them do not react this way. So it feels like some important information is missing here.
It's all a matter of degree. Most people don't become literal alcoholics, but alcohol has a negative impact on the behavior/lives of huge numbrs of non-alcoholics.
I did wonder about this. Would he have become addicted to something else? But we will never know. Better not to take this chance. Anyway, they did and he is addicted.
Well, I'll give my life story anyway. Probably reckless to give amateur psychiatry advice on an actual psychiatrist's blog but... I mean, it's fun.
I'm still an anti-social hermit who mostly plays videogames, but when I was younger I was worse. I had a couple of classmates straight out ask me if I was going to shoot up the school. And most of it came down to a lack of boundaries.
My folks would let me get away with a lot of things, on the grounds that I came up with clever reasons for it. But I didn't actually want to get away with things, I wanted them to establish limits to work with. I wanted established procedures to follow. They instead wanted to encourage my interests; "you can do anything you want". But my interests were finding the boundaries, and they were thwarting it.
So I go to live with my uncle for a year, who's a smart guy, and he figures it out and sets up proper limits, and obligations. Only one hour of TV, only one soda per day, have to go outside in good weather. Have to make friends at school; have to prove it by inviting them to the house. So I actually do make friends, and hey, this is kind of fun.
Back to my parents, who still have the same all-carrot no-stick approach. Back to old habits. Not as bad as before, but not as good as when I was away. All forward progress was based on the procedures, and channeling energy between the boundaries. No more boundaries, no more channeling, no more forward progress.
So that's my immediate impression here. The parents have taken a wrong approach to dealing with their son, and the videogame is serving as an escape from the underlying issue, for both the child AND the parents.
Like, you said a friend helped him build a computer. When it was finished, was there a follow-up project? If you pulled the fuse and depowered the outlet to the computer, would the kid try to fix it? Can you make it a family activity, to trace the power back to the source, learn which fuse actually works there, and have him turn the power back on, with the reward of videgoaming? What other procedures are in place? And what sticks are on the table?
(I guess I should mention, I saw several psychiatrists growing up. My parents didn't change anything in response, so it had little effect.)
Anything can cause harm, man. No parents are going to be like "wait, smartphones can have games on them?! Well my child isn't going to have one, then!" Even if that WAS a good idea, that ship has sailed; this will do literally nothing at all.
I dunno, this just seems hysterical to me. Kid with no parental interaction or other stimulation available gets really into a hobby and his parents have to take it away? That happens all the time. It doesn't seem like there are any long-term harmful effects here, either, like there might be if he had become an alcoholic.
And c'mon. "Acute withdrawal symptoms" is just a scary dramatic way to say "he's upset he can't do something he likes". We're not talking DTs here.
Reminds me of how my grandparent told a story about his parents getting real worried about pinball. "It should be banned!" Does that seem like it was really a big problem, looking back?
> Kid with no parental interaction or other stimulation available gets really into a hobby and his parents have to take it away?
Yeah the lack of parental attention here seems like the big red flag. Of course the child is going to act out if that's the only thing that gets them any kid of response from their caregivers. what a horrible situation to put a child in
Not willing to go to school sounded serious to me. Hes not gone for 2 months!
Kids need to learn various things. In the presence of something they're addicted to, they will learn nothing else, because everything other than that screen doesn't hold their attention.
What (type of) game? The details probably matter; there are some games that are predatory skinner boxes designed to joylessly extract all your money and will settle for all your time, and there are some that merely have a really solid core gameplay loop that could have unfortunate effects on addictive personalities. Regulating the former is tricky but probably worthwhile, regulating the latter will literally amount to banning excessive fun.
Parents are responsible for knowing the risks, and a warning label doesn't provide any meaningful information. The reality is different kids respond so differently, it's up to the parent to monitor their kids' early stage reaction to games to figure out if it's a healthy enjoyment or a significant addiction risk.
Playing prediction markets is pretty humbling, just by forcing you to actually make specific predictions and see the results of *all* of them, rather than just remembering the ones that worked.
I decided to participate in the Salem Center contest on Manifold back when Scott announced it in early August. I didn't plan to spend much time on it and don't have much experience, but I figured maybe I'd get lucky and end up in the top 5 anyway, and if not, at least I'd be contributing to "the wisdom of crowds". I decided to just pick 20 markets and put S$50 in each on the side that seemed most likely and then hold to resolution.
So far I've had four markets resolve, two wins, two losses, and my "portfolio value" is S$1031, a slight profit on the starting 1000, but pretty much indistinguishable from chance. Predicting the future is surprisingly hard! How is everyone else doing?
On Metaculus today: somebody accidentally hit the resolve button on the “ Nuclear Detonation in Ukraine by 2023” question, giving the community quite the scare!
I haven't read Data Secrets Lox for years, and *of course* there is a "Ukraine war" thread, so I started at the beginning, and...
> International sanctions are not going to do anything of substance, besides fueling Putin's "it's us against the evil West" rhetoric.
> their NATO/EU membership does make [the Baltics] harder to invade, but that just means that Putin will have to work a bit harder on making up his excuses [after he is finished with Ukraine]. China will gladly back him up, which means that US/EU will have no choice but back down.
> there's no reason for [Putin] not to issue an ultimatum for NATO to withdraw from the Baltics and probably Poland.
> the determining factor in the Ukraine situation from his perspective is that we'd already publicly precommitted to not doing anything to stop him
> Looks like Zelensky is now willing to “negotiate”, so maybe we have entered the end-game. I’ve seen casualty estimates of 400-800 for the Russians.
> What can he negotiate, besides "nigh-unconditional surrender in return for my own worthless hide"?
Probably a good opportunity for a reminder that being cynical and edgy does not necessarily make you better at predicting.
>Probably a good opportunity for a reminder that being cynical and edgy does not necessarily make you better at predicting.
Maybe not, but you're never going to have some great insight unless you're willing to challenge the status-quo thinking, even if that means much of what you say is very wrong. I'm just glad somewhere exists where this kind of challenge is even permitted.
Also, almost EVERYONE thought that Russia was going to win, not just pro-Russia people, and yet none of the anti-Russia people are having their reputations challenged based on their catastrophically incorrect early predictions.
Maybe. Null hypothesis says that it's random, and if "wisdom of the crowds" means anything, then contrarians should be *worse* at predicting on average.
I believe that what actually happens is that when you predict 20 out of 10 problems, people will remember you as a great predictor. Because every time the problem actually happens, you can say "I told you so". But when a predicted problem does *not* happen... people either forget about it, or won't comment on it for superstitions reasons, because it feels like tempting gods to say loudly that a predicted problem *didn't* happen. (When someone says something like that in a movie, you prepare yourself for a sudden dramatic event.)
I am trying to combat this bias by looking at *old* predictions and checking whether they turned out to be true. As you can see, it gets a negative feedback. As if I broke some taboo.
When you predict things, in short term you can get points for appearing wise, and in long term you can get points for being correct. In an edgy community, an edgy person always gets a point for predicting doom, and sometimes gets another point for being right. But either way, they always get some points. This is what makes them appear to be a successful predictor. If you keep saying "this time, things will be worse then average", hey, you will have a 50% success rate! (If you say instead, "this time, things will be better than average", you will also have a 50% success rate, but you will never get a point for being edgy, so your overall score will be quite low.)
EDIT: But more importantly, edgy people usually follow their own *narrative*. If you notice the narrative, you can see which predictions will be socially rewarded. In this case, it is a narrative of "decadent West and strong Russia". No one will admit it openly, but edgy people will keep generating predictions that follow this narrative. (And I am not saying they will be always wrong. I am saying they will be 50% right and 100% socially rewarded for making the prediction.)
I don't know many people who were predicting that Ukraine would fight a viable symmetric war against Russia, but I definitely know a few that predicted both catastrophic failures of Russian logistics and an enduring Ukrainian willingness to fight (and a corresponding insurgency). Those predictions were at least directionally right even if they didn't go far enough, and IMO they strongly correlate with people who are still producing good work.
Even if you think someone 'wasn't worse than anyone else', it's still critically important to dock them points when they blow a prediction to maintain accountability. "Replacement-level" isn't a compliment for a reason. (And of course, those who did significantly better should be noted accordingly.)
Even in that thread, there's a clear difference between folks who are making their assessments based on material information as it comes in, and folks airing their priors. Your point about edginess not necessarily indicating anything novel is well put, and edgy priors are doubly worthless.
I definitely predicted that Ukrainians would fight back relentlessly. Even if they had lost the first encounter and Russians had taken Kyiv there was no way for Russians to advance further west. The situation would be very much similar to what it is today, except the casualties on both sides would have been much greater and Russia would have controlled more territory than today. But fundamentally it would be the same.
I'm always reminded of what Scott (our Scott) said about Scott Adams in some post about predicting, (I quote from memory): "if you heard about Scott Adams in 2015 and checked him in 2016 you would think he was the smartest man on the internet, but after a few more years we can tell he's just someone good at very confidently saying crazy things in public."
Well, he inaccurately predicted Putin wouldn't invade at all because he thought it was obviously an unwinnable conflict and figured Putin would know that too, and then when the invasion happened he predicted that not only would Russia eventually lose but might actually fall as a world (military) power as a result.
My scoring of his predictions is that he overclaimed (so far). If he turns out to be right i'll be utterly gobsmacked, but i suppose anything is possible.
>Well, he inaccurately predicted Putin wouldn't invade at all because he thought it was obviously an unwinnable conflict and figured Putin would know that too, and then when the invasion happened he predicted that not only would Russia eventually lose but might actually fall as a world (military) power as a result.
>My scoring of his predictions is that he overclaimed (so far). If he turns out to be right i'll be utterly gobsmacked, but i suppose anything is possible.
Is this in reference to Scott Adams? If we're evaluating a specific prediction I'd want a reference to the original source. His track record gets an awful lot worse when you grade him on what he actually says instead of an inferred directional sentiment.
One thing in particular that I know has confounded a bunch of predictions is that for the partisan Ukranian caught behind Russian lines, the cell phone has been a vastly more useful weapon than the car bomb. A consequence of symmetric warfare still being an ongoing thing!
For most of these I agree with your assessment, but the comments about Russia easily conquering the Baltics as well seem well outside (and worse than) typical predictions.
The strength and unity of NATO's response was surprising. In the reverse world were Ukraine get crushed easily and Germany lead a big oil before arms coalition, predicting that Putin next target may be one of the Baltic States is not absurd.
Predicting that it would be his target in that (quite plausible at the time) counterfactual is pretty reasonable. Predicting that NATO would roll over and take it was insane. Poland has a very different position than Ukraine WRT NATO, and that really would have mattered in that counterfactual world.
Poland, sure, but the Baltic states are small enough that a quick grab could work - invade, crush all opposition, war ended before NATO can mobilize its troups, gamble on NATO saying "oh well nevermind". Remember this happens in the counterfactual word were NATO let Ukraine get rolled over.
>It wasn't even willing to hang Ukraine, which will never be a NATO member, out to dry, which genuinely surprised a lot of people including myself.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The situation right now is the national security apparatus's wet dream. We're spending a lot of money on fancy weapons, the fancy weapons are doing a great job, everyone is cooing over how fantastic our fancy weapons (and logistics, and intelligence) are, and the fancy weapons are being used against the exact enemy they were always intended for. Meanwhile, the only people actually being killed are all foreigners so there's no political downside, just a bipartisan consensus on buying fancy weapons and cooing about how great they are.
Does anyone know how to stop Substack from flooding my inbox? I can turn of email alerts for subscriptions I pay for, but I can’t figure a way to turn off email alerts for my free subscriptions. It’s making me insane - I’m losing important email in the mess of constant Substack updates
I'm continuing my ten-post Substack experiment with an essay inspired, to some degree, by some of Scott's earlier posts. I'm not as happy with it as with my last two posts, which got a lot of play, but I think the ideas in this one are more interesting, even if ultimately underdeveloped.
I remain baffled why anyone finds r/the motte valuable. Wheneveren I've been there it's just been generic right wing talking points repeated without analysis and mildly left wing ones being down voted to oblivion. If the appeal. Is meant to be a libertarian ideal of free speech and good discourse it doesn't seem to be achieving that. Just changing who's norms are enforced
The difference is that in left-dominated spaces, right-wingers don't just get "down-voted", they get BANNED. And in places where right-wingers don't get banned, left-wingers generally avoid them because they're become so accustomed to have having voices they disagree with be cenesored. I think you're an example of this - you're so unaccustomed to hearing right-wing views that any place that largely tolerates them seems weird to you.
I mean, ffs, the left say social media deplatofrming of right-wingers isn't a violation of free speech, but now you think left-wing views being DOWNVOTED is?
The overwhelming majority of internet censorship in visible, at least relatively mainstream spaces is against right-wing views. If you're singularly complaining about a place where left-wing views are downvoted but not censored as an example of an expansive sense of 'free-speech' being violated then its just special pleading.
I unsubscribed from r/themotte a while back, because the sub seemed obsessed with "race realism," whatever that is. I just found it personally distasteful.
Okay, do you find the constant talk about racial inequality "distasteful"? Those by poiticians, corporations, the media and universities? Do you find it distasteful when people complain that white people have higher incomes and wealth and representation in certain fields than black people? What about talk of "white privilege"?
If your answer is no, then that's really dumb, because you're basically saying people should be able to have political causes with real-word consequences based on an assumption of biological race equality, and its wrong for other people (especially members of the groups targetted by these political causes) to challenge the foundations of these causes.
Often times really interesting debates within a subculture look like circle jerks to outsiders. When people have a lot of common ground, it's much easier to get into really detailed and honest conversations because you both have so many values in common and priors on what did or did not occur. As our consensus on reality fractures, cross-ideology discussions are increasingly fruitless and weighed down by really fundamental discussions of facts.
For example, Freddie deBoer recently had a series of open letters with some lefty I don't know about cancel culture and censorship. Per my reading, this was an A+ discursive effort, props to him (1). As a righty reader, however, it was incredibly dumb and circle jerky. Yes, they both agreed that lots of right wing things are bad and lots of right wing media is bad and agreed they both like free speech but they...disagreed on whether morally censorable things should therefore be legally/corprately banned, I think? And this is all super-surreal from a rightwing perspective because, ya know, the former POTUS has been banned off social media, he went to go start his own, and that's been kicked off the Google store and potentially Apple. So...ya know...current conservative censorship concerns are less cancellations at colleges and more not completely censoring a former (and possibly future) POTUS (2). And Freddie et al totally ignore this and talk about, honestly, side issues from 2016.
But, at the same time, deBoer did nothing wrong. He wasn't writing for me, he wasn't writing for anyone on my side of the isle, and by all external evidence he had a really productive discussion with another person and props to him. Not everything written on the internet is written with me in mind and that's just fine. And doubtless deBoer doesn't want to relitigate Trump getting kicked off Twitter, which would lead to Jan 6th, which would probably lead to Russiagate, and instead of having whatever interesting discussion he actually had with this liberal lady, he and I would be relitigating the same old fundamental factual disputes that have divided the parties for at least 2+ years. Which sounds boring and not terribly productive. They're able to have a much more fruitful discussion because they agree on so much and so are able to focus on much smaller and more manageable issues.
So while there is a lot of circle-jerking in themotte, there's also a lot of value there, it just may not be super-clear to outsiders because their priors and values are so different and the internal differences in themotte are, relatively, so small.
Those posts are incredibly dumb. Freddie's a good writer as far as leftists go, but then every so often a bad leftist will come along and tell him he's had too much to think, and he just abandons everything that makes him usually reasonable.
Like, he's basically freaking out over right-wingers "banning" books, but obviously ignores the fact that not only have the left "banned" books in this sense before (and non-ideological ones, unlike what conservatives "banned"), they largely don't do this because no "right-wing" books would ever possibly make it into blue-state schools. We all know the Bell Curve would be banned milliseconds after it was discovered that it was being taught in a blue-state school, and yet Freddie acts like the left give a shit about "free speech" here.
Yeah, I like Freddie's writing, but this series is "well OBVIOUSLY the right-wingers are way way worse; they're sending death threats to teachers who only want to support trans kids while the left equivalent is this one girl who is upset about a group of kids in her college".
Whenever I need reminding about how deeply, horribly, intractably evil I am as a social conservative, I just need to go read anything on social media 😂
Despite Freddie's obligatory disclaimers about how Republicans are all demons from the eighth circle of Hell who only want to destroy everything nice because the evilness *is* the point, I do enjoy his writing due to the core of common sense it often contains. So two thumbs up from this spawn of Beelzebub!
Sorting is new by default and votes are irrelevant. If you have an idea and want it criticized by people who interested in debating ideas I know of no better venue.
This is why I think downvotes and upvotes are a bad idea. Anyway, ignore them. TheMotte does need more left-wing contributors, but they tend to either drift away (TheSchism was set up as a place more congenial to them, but it never got the same amount of engagement) or flounce off in a huff if people don't immediately agree with them.
That does leave it majority right-wing. Be thicker skinned, stand your ground and fight back, and ignore downvotes. Don't flounce off because you failed to change everyone's mind with your single marvellous post.
I could do that, or literally any other activity that is a more rewarding use of my time. Arguing with people on the internet is fun to the extent you get interesting engagement and response out of it. If the quality of discussion is poor there's no incentive for me to engage in it, the abstract idea that I might somehow convince people out of their entrenched views is not particularly motivating
Question - Do you think the quality of discussion is poor in places where right-wing views are censored? Or do you judge "quality of discussion" exclusively on how much you agree with the people in a particular place?
Most well-known interenet spaces are far bigger circle jerks than the Motte, but its left-wing circle jerks with 'unaccetpable' views being deleted, not simply voted down.
I mean, I do understand what you are saying. But complaining on another site about how terrible the Motte as a right-wing circlejerk is, is neither a more rewarding use of your time, nor attempting to engage in convincing people out of their entrenched views.
I could say on here that "Ooh, Daily Kos, awful terrible place" (is it still going?) but how productive is that?
I think it is perfectly useful to question the quality of a site Scott brings up in the OP, and recommends by virtue of their own copy rather than his personal opinion. He didn't mention Daily Kos.
There are a bunch of sites with historical ties to the wider rationalist-verse that don't really have any ideological alignment; themotte.org has now been through two separate rounds of being spun off for culture war reasons, and I for one would definitely need a positive argument in its favor to be interested after bouncing off a thoroughly replacement-level first impression.
The strongest argument for the motte is that is is anti-censorship. That makes it more valuable than 99.9% of internet spaces and something that everyone here should support.
But really what we're seeing here is liberals having an aversion to something that isn't domianted by liberal thought. If Scott recommended a site where you agree with most of what was being said but right-wing views were censored, I'm positive neither you nor the OP would be complaining like this, even though we should all prefer uncensored sites over censored sites we agree with.
> The strongest argument for the motte is that is is anti-censorship. That makes it more valuable than 99.9% of internet spaces
I haven't seen what themotte.org's policy looks like in practice, but let's not pretend r/themotte was unwilling to ban people. "We don't ban people for ideas, only behavior!" is a rote defense and boringly unfalsifiable, on the grounds it claims. If you have a method to quantify it - *that you didn't just make up on the spot* - I'd be interested, but I'm not holding my breath.
Beyond that, a firm commitment to anti-censorship isn't what makes ACX better than 8kun. There's no royal road to quality.
> If Scott recommended a site where you agree with most of what was being said but right-wing views were censored, I'm positive neither you nor the OP would be complaining like this
Because you've looked through the nearly-decade of posting I've done under this username, here and on SSC†? Or is that a chip on your shoulder masquerading as an argument? God, between this one and the stock alternate "it's ok if right-wing views are dominant, because this is one of the few places right-wingers have available on the internet (that aren't cesspits)" I think I prefer the latter. Whinier, but less masturbatory.
† Pop quiz - what fraction of my posting is explicitly complaining about excessive moderation, and how does it compare to baseline?
> even though we should all prefer uncensored sites over censored sites we agree with.
Quantify your superiority over 8kun, or I'm really not interested. The ceteris is decidedly not paribus.
You could just make a post there asking why a current follower of Scott should find value there, you'd get direct argumentation instead of playing a dubious reputation game.
Make it open-ended enough and cross-post it here as a top level comment, and this thread will have come full circle.
"Reputation game" is a bad frame when the primary draw of a platform is the membership itself. Speaking for myself, I'm explicitly *not* looking for someone whose posts I like to merely speak well of a platform. I'm looking for evidence that they actually *use* it - personally-curated top posts are great, but their own content is better. If a place spins off of SSC and Scott is plainly aware of them, but comments only once in a blue moon... not a great endorsement.
>flounce off in a huff if people don't immediately agree with them
I want to highlight this for woke posters specifically, constantly surrounding yourself with people who agree with you "breeds out" your ability to tolerate disagreement, especially if the people who can challenge you are top-down banned. So when a much freer environment like TheMotte comes around, you select yourself out of the discussion purely by preference, since you lost your disagreement muscles.
I don't frequent TheMotte much since a long-ish while, but I saw absolutely no shortage of *economic* left-wing ideas being presented and upvoted highly when I used to frequent it, and, hell, I'm vaguely left-wing myself. Even the economic right-wing ideas are so varied and in conflict that I saw no consistent bias in them.
>I think downvotes and upvotes are a bad idea.
Amen to that. Down\Up is a single 1-bit decision that is supposed to represent all the range from "This is obvious off-topic spam" to "I don't like this opinion". Aweful idea. The general idea of letting users self-rank is sound, but it has to be done much more smartly.
I thought that back when digg.com introduced it and promptly descended into a dumpster fire of primate cliquetry. The only place where I've seen it work even a little is slashdot, and I think that's only because they handed out a small number of moderator points -- meaning only a few people could up/down vote posts in a given issue -- and a much larger number of people got to meta-moderate -- i.e. rate the job the moderators had done, which influenced whether a given person got mod points again in the future. There were still predictable tribal shibboleths, but it seemed to not quite descend into pack-of-bonobos territory.
It's very tempting, when the blood is up and you're firing on all cylinders in an argument, especially a culture war one, to hit the like/dislike buttons as tribal solidarity or "yeah, I agree"/"no, you idiot" instead of "well-argued and convincing" or "this fails to make the sense you want it to make".
So I do have the temptation to use them that way ("how dare this lackwit say this obviously dumb thing on here???") and that's why I avoid them. Whatever the best intentions, they always turn into popularity contests.
Nope, it’s pretty much the same in most places, regardless of political leaning. But it’s extra disappointing in any place that specifically bills itself as a place for rational discussion, which is why I mentioned it in this context.
I don't wish to defend themotte from accusations of being a right-wing circlejerk, that's why I quit posting there, but I must note an important difference between "Reddit enforces left-wing norms by banning people who say things they don't like" and "themotte enforces right-wing norms by upvoting posts about how western elites are doing a Great Replacement because they just hate white people so much". The latter is a much weaker sort of enforcement and the actual mods of themotte are principled free speech types left of the userbase, you still *can* call for a communist revolution there.
The difference is that while reddit can in theory ban people, given that these discussions seem to be quite happily taking place on reddit, and there's no shortage of far right commentary to be found there, it doesn't seem like reddit is doing much in the way of censoring. The theoretical possibility of censorship has little impact on the quality of discussion there which is what I'm interested in
Is this a joke? do you have any idea the number of right-wing subreddits that have been banned by reddit over the past 5 years? This isn't "theoretical possibility of cnesorship", it happens on a daily basis! In left-dominated subreddits, right-wing posters don't get downvoted, they get banned.
And what does "far-right" mean? How come everyone is "far-right" but apparently nobody is ever "far-left"?
Reddit bans people for going against the orthodoxy *all the time*, and specifically themotte has had speech codes imposed by mods who didn't like them but feared the sub could get banned for not doing so (exactly what triggers a subreddit ban is kept vague, leading to a chilling effect). The fact that you can still find people doing it merely establishes that they don't ban everyone. It would be weird if actual ongoing censorship had no impact on the quality of discussion.
So it was the second of these 2 comments that got the person banned?:
Hormone blockers and hormone replacement are two completely different interventions.
[−]stricky316 points3 days ago
This isn't a meaningful distinction. Even if you grant the erroneous assumption that puberty blockers are harmless and 'fully reversible', putting a kid on blockers is just locking them into a medical pathway that ends with them on HRT. Virtually every kid who gets put on blockers ends up on HRT.
People keep treating blockers like they're a get out of jail free card for them having to take a stance on the now controversial question of whether 12 year olds can consent to life-altering medical regimes. They're not.
Wow. I'm astonished the person got banned for that post. It's courteous, and they link to a study supporting their point. Only criticism I can make is that the study they link to does not exactly support their contention that "virtually every kid who gets put on blockers ends up on HRT." Researchers followed a bunch of kids on blockers "until they were put on HRT." It's not clear that every kid that took blockers went on to HRT -- researchers assumed that would be the usual outcome. But that's sort of a fine point, and certainly does not justify banning the poster.
When George Floyd happened there was scrutiny from the reddit admins and the motte responded with a blanket ban on advocating for violence or property destruction. Violence had always been banned on the motte but they specified an end to charitable leeway in interpreting things, and property destruction was added to the list because reddit admins had said explicitly that glorifying or inciting it was a violation of the sitewide violence policy. The mods then refused to answer obvious questions to the effect of "Doesn't this ban endorsing status quo stuff like riot control measures and the existence of the military?"
I generally respect the motte's mod team so I'm still a little confused about why they chose to lay out an extremely strict policy, explicitly invite clarifying questions, and then ignore them. My only theory is that they *wanted* the chilling effect, their goals were to minimize fedposts without taking the full popularity hit that comes from endorsing an extremely draconian rule.
I'm curious to read posts from the era when mods were adding new bans & group was reacting. If I wanted to get a good sense of the whole arc, should I start with the George Floyd era? And are posts from that era still viewable?
Agreed. I periodically quit themotte when I get to the point that I can't take the "elites are the enemy of all good and righteous people because they push feminism and open borders" rhetoric, but there is definitely more of a commitment to free speech and arguing your position than you find on Reddit. Not sure if that attitude survived the move, but I saw a lot more diversity of viewpoints in themotte than elsewhere online.
TheMotte's not on Reddit anymore; it moved off the platform about a month ago.
The big problem is that Big Tech and even most big politics fora all enforce SJ to some extent, so any site that *doesn't* will wind up heavily skewed anti-SJ (same basic issue as non-Harvard US universities; you're not picking from the total pool of students, but rather from the pool of "students that can't get into a better university"). There are only limited means available to circumvent that from within the system (the ideal solution is obviously "stop Big Tech enforcing SJ", but that's hard unless you have US $200,000,000,000 or so to throw at it).
What happened between Reddit and TheMotte? Reddit seems to tolerate almost everything. I've seen all kinds of transgressive stuff there -- major sexual kink, vicious verbal attacks on individuals and groups, obvious misinformation about pretty much anything you can think of. Read that one of the few sites Reddit refused to host was one called Photos of Dead Children.
I enjoy Reddit. It is, in my experience, extremely tolerant of raunchiness, sexual explicitness, kink, bad manners, profanity, irritability, insult-filled exchanges, weirdness, craziness, the darkest of pessimism, & mockery & attack of most things (God, democracy, your momma), except for a few sacred cows. But what people are talking about here is the sacred cows, the stuff Reddit *won't* let you say whatever you damn well please about. I went and looked at Reddit subs to see what kind of material does seem to be off-limits. Reddit definitely isn't looking as open to anything as I'd imagined, but it's not censoring as much as some here think. So I looked for subs that are particularly godawful especially by leftie standards, taking my cues mostly from trebuchet's criteria:
1. Anything not fully supportive of modern gender ideology, except for pornography.
2. Kooky right-wing conspiracy theories, and an arbitrary amount of stuff adjacent to said conspiracy theories.
3. Anything that makes left-wing Twitter mad for more than a week.
Here's what I found:
*Pro-right*
r/trump: Trump - Take America Back
r/Trumpgret: Regretting Joe Biden
r/TheTrumpZone: TheTrumpZone
r/BigDongDeSantis: shows Ron DeSantis' titillating ability to make Florida the freest state in the nation and the possibility for him to Make America Florida!
r/Conservative: Conservative
r/Republican: Republican
Most of the above subs are large and appear to be thriving. Whoever it was who said Reddit restricts support for the 45th president -- I don't see any sign of that here. The 3 Trump subs together have about a quarter of a million subscribers.
r/SJWstories: A place to come and share your stories of dealing with Tumblr SJWs both on and offline.
r/SJW_Kryptonite
r/cunts: Pics of Hillary Clinton
r/AOCisMommy:Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is mommy!
r/Enough_AOC_Spam: Enough AOC Spam
Seems like anti-woke rage and humor is alive & well on Reddit.
*Anti-feminism*
r/Red_Pill
/r/pussypassdenied, where women are not allowed to use their gender as a handicap or an excuse to act like assholes. Yay equality!
r/antifeminists: Exposing the truth about Feminism The purpose of this subreddit is to critique, and debunk feminist views and talking-points.
r/MensRights: Advocating for the social and legal equality of men and boys since 2008
I get the impression that the above are under pressure to keep a lid on some of the purest, angriest expressions of the anti-feminist point of view. R/Red_pill is very small. R/MensRights is larger, but carries a note to users saying that participation on this sub can get you banned from certain other subs.
*nutty right-wing conspiracy theories*
r/conspiracies: conspiracies
r/conspiracy: conspiracy
r/chemtrails: a visible trail and particulate left in the sky as part of a covert operation
r/AntiVaxxers: Anything Anti-Vaxx related. NOTE: The moderators are Pro-Vaxx, open and civil discussion is encouraged.
I'm not sure how many of the conspiracies in the first sub are nutty & right wing -- didn't have time to read the posts. Chemtrails appeared in an article I found about right-wing conspiracy theories. There's an Anti-vaxxer sub, but note tht the mods are pro-vax. I don't know what limits they put on anti-vax posts.
*Human biodiversity*
r/AnthroScape
r/racialism: racialism: Research and polite discussions about race
Both of these subs are quite small, & the second gives signs of being heavily moderated.
*Gender diversity*
There are 3 subs with Gender Critical in their names that have been banned.
There definitely are a lot of subs that are godawful in their political incorrectness.Reddit seems tolerant of pro-right and anti-left/anti-woke subs, except in the case of a few particularly sensitive topics, and about these Reddit is loyal to the left &/or "woke" point of view. Topics are:
-red pill-toned discussion of gender relations
-any challenge at all to the opinions and sensitivities of people defining their gender in ways outside the usual male-female binary: transsexuals, non-binaries, various shades of other in-between and non-conforming sexual identities
-Nutty right-wing conspiracy theories, including antivax views, not all of which are nutty (and I'd guess, anti-mask views, since there were no anti-masking subs)
-anything having to do with the idea of racial genetic differendes
Reddit is a big site and their admins are slow acting, but when they do act it's always in one political direction. Half the subs on this list are the second or third iteration of already banned subreddits living on borrowed time.
Ah, some have been "quarantined" in rather than banned, like /r/theredpill. All the trump ones are the scattered remains of /r/the_donald, covid skeptic ones are the remains of /r/nonewnormal. Most of the rest of the subs are either tiny so slipping under the radar or heavily moderated to avoid discussing anything of particular controversy like the conservative subs you mentioned. Your list also just seems to be missing some pretty notable bans like /r/tumblrinaction which splintered into the various 'sjw' themed subs which are probably not long for this world and excludes communities like /r/drama which while not banned were forced to be moderated into non-existence, which is the process many of those subs are in the middle of as /r/theMotte found itself.
Reddit is going for the IPO and it's engaging in the 'rushing around cleaning the house and stuffing all the junk in the cupboard' kind of activity that your mother does before the visitors arrive. Anything that could possibly bring a blush to the cheek of a potential investor's ad revenue generation is getting the boot. If your sub-reddit contains the hint of anything that could motivate a screeching loon to go ballistic on Twitter and create a storm in a teacup about -ism or -phobia and frighten the horses when it's time to make some money, then it is going to be pruned.
Same as when Tumblr went on the Great Porn Purge (which they seem to be relaxing but female-presenting nipples are still banned).
Purging porn always seems insane to me, given how obviously popular porn is - The most famous adage in marketing is "Sex Sells"! It certainly didn't turn out well for Tumblr's user count
It's a bit chicken-or-egg for the larger discussion, but sites likes this are downwind of that discussion and deal with a large number of very strict laws about consent and approval. I think a lot of the laws are well-intentioned, if broadly written, to prevent abuse.
Yeah — Mother Nature’s freebie pass to brief but intense delight, and guaranteed to get your site eyeballs. Yet much of the world makes lots of rules about sex.
I have a feeling it's more payment processor than advertising risk after the pornhub debacle. We're used to progressive lead attacks on centralized points of failure but conservative ones are still able to enforced unpopular wills using the same tactics. Our future is either decentralized or ruled by special interests.
Well, ok, maybe, but see my list in an earlier post of all the godawful politically incorrect Reddit subs. There's plenty of stuff to redden various people's cheeks with embarrassment or rage.
r/trump: Take America Back
r/FuckLeftistAmerica
r/SJW_Kryptonite
r/chemtrails: a visible trail and particulate left in the sky as part of a covert operation
/r/pussypassdenied, where women are not allowed to use their gender as a handicap or an excuse to act like assholes.
r/cunts: Pics of Hillary Clinton
And as for Reddit porn: female-presenting nipples are nothing. Shots displaying female genitals in all their glory are the norm. They should change the sex sub name from r/RedditGoneWild to . . . oh, never mind, sub with pix of Hillary Clinton already took the name.
>oh, never mind, sub with pix of Hillary Clinton already took the name.
Reddit's global namespace sucks, there's a reason the Zen of Python ends with "Namespaces are one honking great idea – let's do more of those". The r/ notation even resembles filesystem paths, r/politics/people/cunts instead of r/cunts.
You make good example-backed points, but I think you're talking past the others a little. There is a fundamental bias in the tech corps, a bias that lets any woke rando with a bunch of followers rage for a month or so and that will make the corp do _anything_ they want, absolutely anything that doesn't cost a debilitating amount of money. They're past banning accounts and subreddits now, they have graduated to pressuring infrastructure companies to break their contracts with their clients. Next stop is ISPs.
This is not a thing you will find with non-woke randos no matter how hard you look. Sure, you can find the occasional politician or small government, but that's exactly the point, you have to be a *Government* or a *Politician* to have a chance at pressuring a tech corp to do something, while wokeness allows you to do it while being a p-zombie with bunch of followers in the low thousands.
Reddit doesn't even tolerate people speaking ill of r/StarTrek in r/Star_Trek.
In a nutshell, moderation in r/StarTrek became so heavy-handed that a number of people fled to r/Star_Trek, with a different set of mods that didn't want to police mere criticism of the show. The new subreddit ended up with a lot of threads about how bad new Star Trek is, some threads celebrating old Star Trek, and some threads posting about the ridiculous bans handed out for benign criticism in r/StarTrek.
The mods of r/StarTrek didn't like the criticism of their moderation in r/Star_Trek and got the admins (the site-wide bosses) to force the mods of r/Star_Trek to ban discussion of the original subreddit. Now you can't even link the original subreddit, it'll get auto-modded away.
This is true for any fan subreddit having to do with a work of fiction. It becomes populated with committed fans and criticism is quickly downvoted. Of course the committed fans become mods, for who else is going to waste their time moderating content? You can quickly verify this by looking up discussions of a tv episode by doing to the sub for the tv show versus going to r/television, for example.
Unfortunately, they also got rid of /r/watchpeopledie
I volunteer in EMS. I've also been fortunate enough to never encounter a car crash where an occupant has died. So one of the things I used to visit that subreddit for was to calibrate my "how serious are these injuries likely to be" meter based on the severity of vehicle damage.
You know, I can see the case for shutting that sub down. Seems sure that some people who had a friend or loved one die in an accident would get word that Reddit had up a video of the crash the killed the person or the actual person as they lay dying. It's not hard to understand that they wouldn't want a bunch of strangers looking at the scene, most out of morbid curiosity. And Reddit being what it is, some commentators would have been making jokes. I don't think the entertainment Reddit gets from viewing these sees (and the occasional professional training someone like you gets) justifies the pain the post would cause the people who cared about the person who died.
Sounds like you'd be interested in r/medizzy, if you don't already know about it! I promise you there are also substitutes for the old r/wpd if you go looking, but I'm not citing anything directly for obvious reasons.
There was a feeling that sooner or later the Eye of Sauron would be turned towards TheMotte, because it did tolerate people who wanted to talk about HBD or other badthink.
Then the admins started interfering, from what I can gather; some posts were being banned before ever the mods got to see them, and when they asked 'why?' got non-answers. So the straws were in the wind that it was move before they got kicked off.
Zorba had a thread about it before the final decision was made:
Deiseach, what is HBD? Google says "HBD is an acronym for Happy Birthday . . .Some think this word stands for Happy Birthday but in all reality it stands for Hot Bearded Men. The term was coined by two hunks of manly squirrel obsessed men ...Having two of the same allele at a locus, or base at a SNP, where both copies are from a single ancestor strand." Somehow I think none of these are your intended referent.
Razib Khan's excellent Unsupervised Learning Substack and podcast covers a fair chunk of what I think of as the interesting, intellectual end of hbd ideas.
Steve Sailer's blog has a more middlebrow take on the ideas, generally more focused on current politics and social commentary. Steve goes for the cheap shot too often, but also very often notices and points out real and important stuff going on in the world that is a little too offensive or upsetting for most mainstream outlets to discuss.
In theory, the discussion of differences along racial lines in various human traits. (Nordics can mostly drink milk, Arabs mostly can't or some such.)
In practice, the belief that black people are less intelligent and more impulsive (dumber and more violent) than other populations, and that this difference is genetic.
>In practice, the belief that black people are less intelligent and more impulsive (dumber and more violent) than other populations, and that this difference is genetic.
Yes, can you imagine that people focus on the most overwhelmingly politically salient implications of HBD? Crazy!
Leftists: Black people are poorer than whites and overrepresented in prisons because of white racism and white privilege and this must be corrected by any means necessary!
HBDers: Actually no, the data suggests genetic differences are the cause
Leftists: Why the fuck are you so obsessed with race you weirdos racist losers?
HBD is self defense against egalitarian ideology. If white people can be defamed and implicated by left-wing rhetoric, we should be able to defend ourselves using science (that thing that the left selectively believe in when convenient).
I doubt many people have much interest in who can digest milk. Are there any interesting ideas in HBD, other than the stuff about blacks -- anything having to do with longevity, or cognitive and talent and temperament differences among groups?
Technically, of human population differences, such as the hajnal line in Europe, and caste genomics in India, and between Neanderthals/Denosovans. It just happens that in modern humans, biological differences cleave along continental populations, aka races, for reasons that are fairly obvious.
Reddit's enforcement is... inconsistent. Due to limited manpower on the moderation side, the rules are only enforced when someone bothers to report a violation and then the opaque Reddit bureaucracy churns through it in the right way (or when you run afoul of a dumb automated filter, a while ago Reddit had something running to autoblock Kiwifarms references). So technically you *can* get away with anything if you're lucky, but with some types of posting you're taking a risk. "Big Tech enforces SJ" is only four words long and so obviously represents a terrible oversimplification, but if I only had four words to work with those ones do a decent job of conveying what political positions are risky.
So, maybe something like "anti-SJ positions are disallowed on Reddit the way that speeding is disallowed on American roads - common, but with a real risk of getting punished for it"?
If other drivers had a hankering to get you pulled over and had the means to give camera footage of your driving to the police on a moment's notice, then yes.
From what I gather, there is an impression of increasing Reddit admin intervention due to things like (inevitably mediocre) algorithmic flagging of comments that has led to fears of outright censure. One recent notable case was when a comment explaining the use of parentheses to describe (((certain people))) that mentioned a bunch of slurs in its text got deleted, and the mods reacted strongly to their inability to overrule the algorithm.
Rather than try and reconstitute theMotte after a hypothetical subreddit ban, they're jumping ship in advance. Whether or not any of this is wise is a matter of debate.
Also, support for the 45th President of the United States.
It's a weird phenomenon that if a subreddit gets banned for some specific activity then it also means you can't start a new subreddit with the same subject, because that's not considered a new subreddit, it's considered the same subreddit again.
"Eventually" is one hell of a disclaimer - it makes the whole thing unfalsifiable, and elides the "three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"† problem by which marginal discussion spaces will degrade in quality even without ideological shift. r/detrans was banned for a few hours but is back - is that evidence for, or against your threat assessment? Does it matter that r/conspiracy and r/politicalcompassmemes are going strong?
I will point out that subreddits being extant does not mean that they haven't undergone purges to be still standing and haven't adopted heavy handed moderations policies to keep reddit admins at bay.
I'd hope that if I dig into that "reasonable time" I'd find a shared intuition about deviations from a survivorship curve adjusted for popularity and virality, but I think in practice I'd get non-answers even after I pitched a few concrete examples over the plate.
Zorba (head of themotte and the main contributor to the new offsite codebase) was against the existence of upvotes for similar reasons, I was a little surprised to see they're still on the new site. The site was a fork of an existing codebase so I give decent odds they're only there because moving offsite was a bit of a rush job and Zorba hasn't had time to rip them out yet.
It's mostly a "came for the X, stayed for the Y" thing for me...the modern internet isn't exactly lacking in places that will fall over backwards to <s>be welcoming</s> give the appearance of being welcoming to GNC/nonhet (surely there's a more accurate word for that concept of "not vanilla", heteros get up to all kinds of wild things still). That's not what keeps me attached to ACX. Actually, it was an unexpected revelation eventually bothering to read the annual SSC/ACX reader surveys and seeing the weirdly highly proportions of diversity in those directions - it's not obvious from the comments! Just another reminder that the commentariat is not necessarily reflective of the broader readership, simply louder.
Mostly here for the cultural norms and unique mixture of people. Content and comments unlike anywhere else I'm aware of. The sex and gender +2SDs stuff is just an added bonus, I wouldn't really care if it was counterfactually skewed the opposite way but otherwise the same. Actually, it's really refreshing to be able to __disagree__ with modern Narrative consensus on such things here, and freely read others hotly debating such topics openly...even floating the idea of dissent on such shibboleths tends to get treated as precursor to a "hate crime" or whatever. Getting away from such semantic stopsigns and very high social costs to initiating hetero(dox) conversations is what makes ACX feel like "intellectual home".
Other online communities with "SF-like" levels of sex and gender divergence tend to have the same kind of discourse that I can hear just by walking around the city here. By which I mean, vacuous neoliberal pieties, tired leftist sermons, and endless streams of punching extreme right-wing strawmen. Plus lots of navel gazing about specifically LGBT topics, which...borders on narcissistic, often. So many other facets of humanity to talk about! In other words: totally boring and not worth my time. I'm glad ACX isn't like SF in that regard, despite demographic overlap. (Not gonna hazard any guesses at causes for the correlations.)
According to the surveys, people here are about twice as likely to be trans and ~10x as likely to be poly as the general population.
I think this is a combination of age (we are younger), politics (I think we're slightly more liberal), autism/IQ effects (we are more likely to be autistic or high-IQ, and these seem to correlate with gender nonconformity for various reasons), and rationalist community founder effects (a few high profile rationalists were poly and this spread throughout the community; I think this is less important for transgender). There are also some personal founder effects - I am poly, and I used to date Ozy who ran a popular gender-nonconformity-related blog, and our blogging communities cross-pollinated a little.
Personally, this blog seems very San Fransisco-y and my impression is that 2x trans and 10x poly is pretty much "normal" for San Fransisco upper middle class types.
This answer. Rationalism aren't any more likely to contain the mentioned group over any other bay-area-based social conglomerate.
Rationalists have an attractor in the form of being out-of-ordinary anti-mainstream anti-witch libertarians who are against knee-jerk reactions and in favor of letting the accused make their own case, and recomputing morality from scratch. And they have a repeller in the form of being consistent and applying the anti-witch standard to the "bigots" as well and other persecuted natural enemies of the mentioned group and not burning them on the stake like most mainstream media.
I believe the 2 forces mostly cancel out on average, which leaves the core demographics and cultural attitudes of the founders to take over, and those are vaguely welcoming to the practices because why not. But other communities online are explicitely and zealously welcoming and unwelcoming to other groups, so they beat the Rationalists' lukewarm embrace. Why go to the social club that only welcomes you with "sure whatever floats your boat my (wo)man(x)" and then forgets about it when there are others that wax poetical on the evils of the cishet men and their oppressive binary pronouns.
Yes, I meant to say that they are against the entire concept of "witch", as somebody so dangerous that they can't be allowed to even speak or argue their case, not that they believe some people are really witches and that they are against them.
Which community? Seems largely true for the rationalist/post-rationalist (or whatever they're calling themselves these days, I refuse to use that silly twitter acronym) community, but not necessarily true for the ACX comments section.
Gut reaction is to say "define terms, please", but I guess that'd mark me as an Opposer already by many modern standards...
I can't speak for other trans commenters, obviously, but personally LGBT stuff is just a tired topic I don't get much out of discussing anymore. It doesn't make me feel personally attacked or whatever to read anti-X stuff, where X is some single star in the galaxy of my identity...no single piece __matters__ that much, anymore. Childish mindset, too old to think like that anymore. Oh no, someone on the internet is "debating" my right to exist? Sure am glad it's just some random person on the internet, then! And even if I did invest the requisite care and time to change their mind, the net effect is negligible vs. real-world will to power (unless a bunch of Congresspeople from red states secretly read ACX, I don't know?).
It's still maybe pleasant to answer educational questions asked in good faith, relate personal stories, or otherwise utilize my "subject matter expertise"...but the whole speak-up-loudly-against-any-opposition-to-LGBT-as-existential-crisis thing? Not a good use of my limited budget for staying up to correct Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, not anymore. I think if you're seeing such a skew in the comments, it might just be one side having more time and energy for The Fight than the other. It gets old, life is short.
I think this needs to be clarified a bit. "Opposing gay rights" can mean anything from "doesn't think Masterpiece Cakeshop should be forced to make bespoke wedding cakes" to "we need to subject everybody to a polygraph/plethysmography to see if they are in any way a bit gay and then kill anybody who is".
I presume there are a lot of the former and very few of the latter.
Are gay rights not seen by advocates as part of the LGQBT bundle of divergence-that-should-be-seen-as-normal? Or are gay rights advocates proposing something else?
I get more confused as I get older and things seem to be pushed to an extreme. Gay marriage is now a quaint, roses round the door picket-fence notion for those subsumed into mainstream culture, and Canadian Woodwork Teachers are where it's at now.
There's a lot of things being claimed as "rights" that I don't agree are rights at all. So yes, that is "I am anti what you say are your rights" on my part.
Dude, I haven't been keeping a log of examples, but every couple of open threads we get a conversation along these lines. You have to be blind not to notice it.
We may have a definitions thing here. I'm specifically thinking of things like the trans being repeatedly accused of trying to trans kids or permanently sterilize them, starting as early as age six. That's paranoid nonsense, but it's not actually anti-trans rights, since it's about banning something that no one is for.*
So I was reading this as anti-trans rhetoric, which I think is clearly true. But on the more specific point of being anti-trans *rights*, I think I may well be mistaken.
*Almost no one, I think there was one actual example in one of those threads.
Maybe the people with ordinary sexual preferences don't talk about them enough.
To redress that balance, I'd like everybody to know that I have incredibly ordinary sexual preferences. If it's ordinary and regular, I'm into it. I'm not saying I'm a prude, I'm saying that I'm exactly half way between being a prude and a pervert. Curves are sexy, and the sexiest part of the bell curve is the bit in the middle. Ohhh yeah.
Here here! A toast to vanilla preferences! Let us celebrate moderately sized breasts and butts (or whatever it is about men that people attracted to men find attractive), and remind people that the missionary position is a rather excellent one!
I'm not sure whether it's significantly true relative to the reference class of "online discussion spaces" (which are known to have higher rates of LGBT than RL), and obviously this *is* an online discussion space.
If it is, I'd point to the IQ-LGBT and autism-LGBT correlations, though I don't know how well those still hold.
If point 1 is true, that's most probably where I've gone wrong.
As for your 2nd point, personal experience suggests that correlation is somewhat true. Though, I acknowledge there is probably a huge publication bias here, in that any study showing the opposite would definitely not get published.
I suspect some kind of broad neurotype affinity thing going on, for the latter. Not as sure about the former. This is assuming it is actually true; my priors are pretty high on bubbles like that occurring naturally, and my observations weakly agree, but there's also going to be a lot of visibility and salience biases in such matters, so I don't put much confidence in any of it.
Depends on what you mean. Young children with gender dysphoria tend to be average males. Teenage girls with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria trend high in neuroticism but are intellectually typical. Older male autogynophiles are often high achievers with unusually high levels of industriousness and aggression. It is quite the mix.
I think it's just a place where they feel safe and able to speak openly, so topics about their concerns are relatively more common than in other public places.
IQ correlates with openness to experience (why *that* is is unknown, but it seems a little less mysterious at least in that they're more clearly related than IQ and orientation) and it's not hard to imagine why Openness would correlate with being any of L, G, B or T, especially in a society that's still at least a little repressed.
Good luck getting funding for that kind of research!
But Im with you in that I really wish someone could establish some kind of mechanism that would explain why autism and gender dysphoria are so correlated.
A girl I used to live with who was autistic and eventually came out as trans said she just never felt similar to other boys at all, and the idea that she might actually be a woman became a kind of obsession in her mind. She was also extremely smart, very high openness, and seemed to get a lot of reward from interacting with other gender nonconforming people online.
To me the obvious mechanism is that humans naturally adapt themselves to the nearest social niche. This is largely subconscious, and ordinarily ends up with each member of a friend group emphasizing the characteristics that make them unique in that friend group, while largely conforming to social expectations otherwise. That tendency to conform suppresses deviation from expectation on things like sexual attraction and sexual identity. Some people will be far enough from the social norm that they can't fully adapt, and others will be close enough that they flatten to 'normal.' (And this is all subconcious, with a rationalizing mind coming up with perfectly acceptable explanations about why eg. you're attracted to some same sex people, or dislike how you look, etc. without them impacting your identity and niche.)
This adaptation mechanism is largely dysfunctional for autistic people. I don't think it's actually *broken* per se in most of them, but they're simply unable to adapt themselves to an expected social niche on a large number of crucial dimensions, so the positive feedback of seamlessly blending is gone. A bi autistic person isn't actually notably less conforming than a straight autistic person. 'Autistic' dominates the deviation. So without the inner pressure to conform, you get more variation on every dimension.
I mean, there are two very-obvious reasons for a correlation between autism and LGBT.
1) Until recently being out-of-closet LGBT was low-social-status and autistics do low-social-status things more (the conformity instinct is broken)
2) Low-functioning autism involves high mutational load which means lots of added variance in traits; scrambling someone's sexuality and gender identity will increase the likelihood of being LGBT since the normal state is >50% cishet and every other combination counts as LGBT.
#1 notably suggests that the correlation should be decreasing over time as LGBT is increasingly a high-social-status thing and the apparent neurotypical LGBT percentage is no longer suppressed (it's possibly outright *inflated* above normal in Gen Z/Alpha). #2 will probably still maintain a positive correlation, though.
My prior would have been that autism tends makes people less likely to do things just because other people do them. Not that I know what I'm talking about.
Or the flip side of that hypothesis, they are more willing to do introspection and identify with things that were already true about themselves but counter to established social norms.
With all due respect, trebuchet, it's been well established that you don't have much respect for (LGB)T people, intellectual or otherwise.
But more to the point, IQ[1] is also strongly correlated with ability for introspection, and as mentioned by other in this thread, IQ is also positively correlated with identifying as a GSM. So that should serve as, at the very least, weak evidence that your intuition is incorrect here, or at least biased in a way you should consider correcting for.
[1] (and its closely correlated proxy, "openness to experience", specifically openness to *internal* experience)
Maybe it's just more salient to me? But would definitely say a good chunk of the dating profiles are about polyamorous people, and there are often a significant amount of trans people at the meetups and in the comments
There aren't really full Scottposts about gender/sexuality stuff anymore, almost all of those were from SSC days...as for comments, most of the LGBT-related discussion happens in OTs, which (imo) have very little archival-skimming value. So it's easy to miss, but historically definitely A Thing.
To best recollection, this here subthread is the first such one in a while, actually...but there were definitely a bunch of pretty gnarly sex and gender beatdown discussions in earlier 2022 OTs. For a few solid months, it felt like every blog I subscribe to had to have __someone__ mouthing off an opinion about trans women in sports, or kids and blockers, on the flimsiest pretense...ACX wasn't immune from that strange trend, sadly. Hope it doesn't become A Thing again, that was tiresome mostly-heat-little-light.
Anybody know a way to search ACX comments that always works?
(Have been trying to track down a comment thread from a while back but can't find it. DDG/Bing is useless, Google often works (though not in this case) but I hate using it, no organic search functionality I can see, there was acxsearch.herokuapp.com but it is dead.)
How much effort are you willing to put in? Back on SSC I wrote a thingy to download the entire site in a format I could then page through locally, massive overkill but I legit couldn't find a web tool that was comprehensive (or even consistent). I'd guess Substack is even more hostile to web searches, so probably would require something comparable.
The only way I've been able to do this is to think of a word or user name that appears in that thread that probably doesn't appear much anywhere else, then cmd-F every damn thread. I wish there was a way to search all threads at once.
Open lots of threads and Ctrl-F for a rare word ("unscrewing") that I knew appeared in the thread I wanted (I have an eidetic memory, particularly good at remembering quotes; without that, this sort of procedure would presumably be much harder, especially when searching for multi-word strings). I went for Open Threads first, opened about 40 tabs starting with the oldest, then started doing Ctrl-F, close tab, Ctrl-F in next tab; however, due to an error in my procedure Open Thread 172 was checked earlier than it should have been, and the thread I wanted was in there.
It's about the tension between meritocracy (= you succeed because you are good) and topocracy (= you succeed because of your privileged position in the market). I think you might find it relevant, because the effect of topocracy is something I didn't see much discussed in Scott's post about great families (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families) and, unless I missed it, it wasn't seriously considered in the comments.
Of course this is about internet memes, so the generalizability is meh. But I think it's a promising idea, and it is based on previous theoretical work (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03784) showing how sparse networks are dominated by topocracy. Real world networks are typically very sparse.
Is it possible to find the original chapters of Unsong with the comments underneath?
The first time I read it, I really enjoyed reading the comments.
But I can only manage to find the Prologue back in the SSC archives--the other chapters appear to have been removed and are only available on the separate Unsong site, with comments no longer visible.
The separate unsong site should still show comments; I just reread it a month or two ago, including diving into a bunch of the comments for background tidbits.
Edit: yep, comments are all still there as far as I can see
A slightly exaggerated (but not much) partial explanation for why universities (in the US at least, maybe those elsewhere are paragons) are such hotbeds for anti-capitalist, anti-landlord, anti-business thinking, scholarship, and activism. This is based on my experience having gotten a PhD (physics, to be precise) and then spent most of a decade teaching at a private prep school.
For starters, academics are almost exclusively people who have very little experience outside of academia. Because if you get off the PhD -> Postdoc + Adjunct -> Tenure Track train at any point, it's really really hard to get back on. Mostly (and more and more so), academics are people who had that as a goal from day 1 of college at the latest. They went to the best schools themselves (saw a graphic where 80% of professors are from 20% of schools and 2% of schools make up 20% of professors). They've mostly lived in college towns or in big cities (which are often themselves dominated or heavily influenced by a series of universities). So academics have a very narrow world-view, especially where business is concerned. Their experience is mostly around a couple types of businesses. What are those?
Well, for starters there's the university itself. Which, despite not usually being a for-profit business, is a BIG BUSINESS in every way that counts. Multiple 10s of millions of dollars in annual revenue, huge payrolls, huge assets. And huge bureaucracies with all that goes along with that. And worse, many of them are WAY too big to fail. Either they're the Ivy League or they're big state schools that are literally propped up by governments.
Then there are the academic publishers. Academics and wanna-be academics have dealt with them at all levels--as a student buying exorbitantly-priced textbooks with user-hostile devices that prevent reuse and resale. As grad students/academics trying to get published. As teachers assigning texts.
Then there are the college-town landlords. Who have a huge flood of price-insensitive undergraduates (because student loans) who are living away from home for the first time and tend to trash things. And whose incentives are to pack people in as densely as possible in minimum-quality, maximum-price lodgings. AKA slum lords for the modern era.
What do all of these have in common? They're the very model of a rapacious, empire-building, no-concern-for-customer-welfare, unaccountable big business. They wield TONS of power and there's not really much you can do about it. In fact, they're all the things that anti-capitalist, anti-business people decry.
But, even with that, academics (once they're tenure track at least) have it pretty nice. Working conditions are just about as good as it gets, you're doing stuff that you enjoy, <sarcasm>are surrounded by pretty but dumb undergraduates as eye candy</sarcasm>, can wield immense personal power (career life or death) over subordinates...So academics look at the outside world (of which they really know very little from personal experience) and think "wow. If I have to deal with such evil, horrible companies and my life is THIS good...how nasty must it be out there in the wastelands outside academia?" And thus is perpetuated the belief that business MUST be awful and the source of many, if not all, ills. Because the ones they deal with *really are that bad*. And the academics just don't know that their situation is abnormal. That, in fact, it's that bad *because* it's so sheltered from the vicissitudes of actual capitalism. They're living in a world where monopolies and extreme power differentials are not only normal, they're the water in which they swim. And don't realize that a lot of the rest of the country...just isn't like that. That I, as a programmer at a company, can, in fact, wield a substantial amount of power both directly and indirectly despite having no titles and not really getting paid all that much. That most businesses are struggling, not being run by fat cats lying around on piles of money.
Is this a complete explanation? No. Not at all. Is it exaggerated for comic effect? Yes, a bit. But, I think, it captures at least a truth about how different academia is from the "real world". And it's one of the huge reasons I'm glad I *didn't* get my desire to become a professor and am happy I ended up where I did.
That does make one think. Academic publishers are literally the most rapacious public companies in existence - IIRC Elsevier has the highest profit margin of any publicly listed company, at over 70%. If that's the company one interacts with most, day to day.....
I would question your premise that universities are hotbeds for anti-capitalist sentiment rather than for identitarian distractions from it. But granting it:
1. How do you explain economists?
2. You say you're a programmer. As in, you're in a one profession that, for the most part, has successfully taken control of their means of production. I really can't emphasize enough how much you're the outlier here. The way you've described it, I'd venture that most people's experience is, in fact, similar to academics.
1. Note that economists are among the least anti-capitalist AND also the ones most connected with actual businesses. Similarly among business school professors (who are among the few who don't have to stick to the academic train for success). There's a correlation between "has experience with the outside world of business" and "is less(1) inclined toward anti-business sentiment".
2. I had significant market power as a high school teacher at a private school. So no, it's not just programmers. You know where I had *zero* market power? As a grad student. You know where people were the most abused? Yup, grad school. Professors who were petty tyrants with zero accountability, administrators who ostensibly were supposed to protect grad students but instead made their lives miserable, etc. In fact, I've worked at a whole bunch of businesses in various capacities from minimum wage up. Hands down, no questions, the worst work environment was academia. Sub-minimum wage (paid for 19 hours a week, expected to work 80), routine verbal and emotional abuse from supervisors that was *normalized and sanctioned* by the rest, no benefits, zero paid time off (in fact, effectively zero time off at all), etc. And I was in the hard sciences where we actually got paid. Oh, and zero hope for actually continuing on in academia--with 10+ graduate students every year for every faculty opening and the old guard hanging on for dear life and acting all "only the top 10 schools need apply", all of those grad students were basically being used as low-paid labor and then dumped.
(1) as I said, it's a loose correlation. Not 100% in any direction. I'm not saying that *all* such sentiment comes from this cause. But that it seems to be a contributing factor in my experience.
1. Economists, not BAs. (Now, IANAE, but economists not being connected to any actual business operations is a running joke told about the discipline by insiders.)
2. I think I better see what you mean now. But what you're now describing is academia being uniquely awful, rather than representing the worst parts of capitalism writ large. I mean, sure it is, but that's because it's not work, it's a competition for status. (It's not just academia, compare unpaid internship in prestigious institutions. But it's a very special case either way.) Are many people being exploited and duped? Absolutely. (Though, mirage of academic career aside, the knowledge and diplomas you've acquired did in fact raise your status, and that status likely contributed to your more positive experiences going forward.) Does that make them oppose the system? Not really, no, at least not the system that enables the elite they want to join. They may dislike capitalists in the sense that capital owners represent a competing power centre, but I don't think they blame them for (or associate them with) what happens inside academia.
There may be something to that, but I suspect the core explanation is far simpler: people who have positive opinions of capitalism and for-profit businesses are going to be more inclined to pursue private sector careers working for for-profit businesses. Conversely, people who have negative opinions of those are likely to pursue public sector, nonprofit, or academic careers. And then there's a feedback loop where e.g. academia gets a reputation for being leftist, causing more people with leftist views to gravitate towards it and more people with rightist views to avoid it as a career.
There's also an effect where, once an institution or community develops an internal culture with a substantially different Overton Window of political views that society as a whole, that divergence sustains itself by reinforcing the views of those in the community who are within its Overton Window and by encouraging those who are outside the community's Overton Window but well within that of society as a whole to either keep quiet about politics or leave the community. For example, in a hypothetical community where the Overton Window runs from "Objectivist" to "Bleeding-Heart Libertarian", a random mainstream Democrat who happens to wander in and join in a conversation about politics is likely to be seen as tantamount to a hard-core Stalinist.
I think there's an almost infinite number of these Nozick style speculations, "why my ideological opponents are wrong because of some psychological bias they all share", you could make up, all completely unfalsifiable. "Maybe right wingers only support the market because and it has treated them well personally and they're well off."
In reality no one has a broad enough personal experience to comment on society as a whole; has anyone been both a child labourer in a lithium mine and the CEO of a S&P500? And I think it's actually quite anti intellectual to elevate personal experience over evidence/reason, it's very reminiscent of appeals to "lived experience."
Surely the simplest explanation for academic anti-capitalism is just that academics are intelligent, knowledgeable people (at least compared to the general population) and anti-capitalism is a view that intelligent, knowledgeable people are more likely to hold (which maybe should increase your confidence in its correctness). Anything else would be a violation of Ockham's razor.
Alternative: someone who is a legitimate capitalist would realize that much of their salary comes from extortion/theft, and be repulsed at the idea of working for a government-funded institution.
>Surely the simplest explanation for academic anti-capitalism is just that academics are intelligent, knowledgeable people
Come on, this is almost a "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" level of irony. You started the comment chastising your interlocutor (rightly so) for assuming an unfalsiable Just-So story that their ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Then you went ahead and assumed your ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Missed the /s ?
For what it's worth, I lean leftist (the real thing, not the woke cringe), I'm not knowledgeable enough about modern Capitalism and how it intersects with Moloch to know exactly what I'm against, but I have the vague leftist sentiment of Mercy over Justice. And I still hate the incredibly smug "Reality Has A Left-Wing Bias" reddit snark.
It's not at all obvious that academics are smarter than the general population. Even if I grant you that the relevant definition of intelligence here is simply raw IQ, I have never seen evidence that the type of academic fields which are anti-capitalist are filled with people with higher IQs. There is a sort of Motte-And-Bailey with the word "Academia", it's meant to evoke the respectability of Math and Physics, but also act as a trojan to sneak in fields like "Queer Studies" and Feminist Studies and things like that. What is the distribution of Anti-Capitalist sentiments by academic subfield ? How many academic Anti-Capitalists are Physicist and Mathematicians and Engineers and Computer Scientists and Medical Doctors (there is absolutely no evidence that those people can't be dumbasses as well, very frequently so, even in their own fields. But there is at least cursory evidence that those fields, with their strong contact with reality and its corrective feedback loops, are more intelligent in a certain narrow sense), and how many are sociologists and psychologists and philosophers, and how many are queer-scholars ?
Neither is intelligence a general-purpose bulwark against delusions and motivated reasoning. Plenty of intelligent people supported Slavery, Non-Existent Gods, Tyrants, pointless wars, all sorts of shameful deeds, the most lowly impulses of their social and cultural millue, etc... If anything, intelligence gives the overconfidence and the hubris needed to find and believe reasons for what is ultimately believed and acted upon for no reasons.
And neither is intelligence necessarily a good factor in deciding morality, after all, intelligence is just evolutionary luck, like good looks or wealth. If somebody said "The sexiest, most bombshell women believe Capitalism is right" or "The wealthiest men, who frolick with the sexiest bombshells of women, believe Capitalism is right" you would rightfully scorn them. But somehow intelligence is treated differently, it's treated as a Hand Over Reality's Pulse. But it's not, intelligence is a peacock's feather, a capacity to understand and manipulate patterns to impress mates and increase chances of survival, no more and no less. There is no reason to believe that those who lucked out on intelligence are more moral or altruistic, if anything, their luck could blind them to problems their less intelligent peers struggle with, just like sexy looks blind women to problems that their less sexy peers routinely deal with.
>Anything else would be a violation of Ockham's razor.
Occam's razor without an explicit and agreed-upon definition of simplicity is a fallacy. Any programmer understands that the shortest program for anything is dependent on the programming language, indeed it's almost always the case that when programming languages make some programs short and sweet and simple, they make other programs long and arduous and tortured (by the exact same mechanisms and decisions that made the others short and sweet and simple). This seems to repeat in all languages, models, ways of thought, tools of thought, ideologies, etc..., it's as if they have a finite "budget" of expressive power, and instead of spending it uniformly over all expressible ideas and results, they choose to concentrate it on some ideas and privilege them, making them easier to express at the expense of others being harder. There is no omniscient optimality in this decision, it can just as easily blind you to truths as it can open your eyes to others. A Newtonian worldview makes it very easy to see why Universal Gravitation has to be the case, but flails when it's confronted with Black Body Radiation. All mental frameworks are biases, and biases make certain conclusions computationally cheap at the cost of others being prohibitively expensive.
As someone who is libertarian-leaning (so definitely not left-leaning, if not really right-leaning) I suspect that while people with graduate degrees in things like gender studies probably have lower average IQs that people with undergraduate degrees in topics like mathematics, they still probably have higher IQs than the average person, and are obviously more left leaning.
However, I think that credentials are poor indicators of intelligence (due to high variance) and that intelligence is a poor indicator of correctness.
Most people don't care very much about truth, and are not really interested in utilizing their intelligence to systematically investigating truth, so it would not be surprising if intelligence is not highly-correlated with correctness.
Notably, the Triple Nine Society - a group limited to those in the top 0.1% of IQ conducted a survey of its members that found that they tended to be pretty libertarian (https://web.archive.org/web/20150507081739/http://www.triplenine.org:80/poll/tnss00.htm). As much as I would like to flatter myself by telling myself that very intelligent people tend to share my views, I think it is still more likely that the reason that very smart people hold those views is not because they are correct, but for other reasons (such as a rejection of the idea that other much less intelligent people should be telling you what to do).
This does emphasize, though, a difficulty of using group intelligence as a proxy for correctness of their views - which cohort do we use? If the average IQ 110 person is more liberal than the average IQ 100 person, and the average IQ 150 person is more libertarian than either the average IQ 100 or 110 person, then what should be conclude? And what if we knew the position of the average IQ 160 person?
Were there a linear relationship between IQ and political leaning, that would be one thing, although I would still be wary of drawing conclusions from it, but there does not appear to be such a trend.
Notably, the Triple Nine Society - a group limited to those in the top 0.1% of IQ conducted a survey of its members that found that they tended to be pretty libertarian (https://web.archive.org/web/20150507081739/http://www.triplenine.org:80/poll/tnss00.htm). As much as I would like to flatter myself by telling myself that very intelligent people tend to share my views, I think it is still more likely that the reason that very smart people hold those views is not because they are correct, but for other reasons (such as a rejection of the idea that other much less intelligent people should be telling you what to do).
Other obvious explanation: the triple nine society are not a representative selection of intelligent people; people with views similar to yours are more likely to join than equally intelligent people with different views.
Limited to those in the top 0.1% of IQ *and* who are willing to go out and get their adult IQ measured to the requisite degree of fidelity, and eager to join a society of Certified Smart People when they could be going out and getting rich or winning Nobel prizes or whatever. That probably does introduce a selection bias.
I agree. I was planning on mentioning that, but I forgot. The point is that intelligence is a poor proxy for correctness, and even if it were significantly correlated with correctness that it is not obvious which cohort should be studied. The Triple Nine Society survey is useful in illustrating the issue whether or not it is representative of "typical" highly intelligent people (of course it is not actually a representative sample).
Yeah, maybe that could have been phrased less strongly, I only meant academia correlates a bit with intelligence which correlates a bit with anti-capitalism, not that academics were epistemically brilliant and have seen the light (libertarianism also correlates with IQ) . I still think since academia selects for cognitive qualities, if you observe a common trait among academics, your prior should be that it's probably due those cognitive qualities. (should our prior be that they're epistemically ordinary and just ignore what they think?) But maybe I overstated the case a bit.
"Then you went ahead and assumed your ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth." Don't think I did since "intelligence causes leftism" doesn't imply right wingers are low-intelligence.
I don't know which academics OP was referring to, but it's usually ones in fields like history/sociology, I'd give some credence to those guys' opinions.
Do you take issue with the "99% of scientists accept climate change" stuff? I think that is actually a reason to increase your confidence in climate change, at least a little.
>I only meant academia correlates a bit with intelligence which correlates a bit with anti-capitalism
It could be the case that Academia just correlates with intelligence, and then, seperately, Academia correlates with anti-capitalism. Should we use this as a signal that intelligence correlates with anti-capitalism ? and is this signal useful ? I'm sure Academia in lots of times and places correlated a lot with, e.g., religiosity, would that imply the same intelligence-religiosity link ?
Academics are just humans with the same old herd instincts and group conformity as the rest of us, I have some very smart friends (not academics) that can absolutely beat my ass in plenty of smart-people-things like e.g. Chess or Competitive Programming, but... they also believe an invisible being in the sky with the logically-contradicting trinity of OmniScience and OmniPower and OmniBenevolence exist, and furthermore that this being contacted humans through the thoughts of an illterate man in an obscure desert 1400 years ago, and furthermore that the written-down forms of those thoughts (in a specific natural language out of thousands) are the pure and uncorrupted essence of the fundamental and universal truth of this entire existence, and they will disown the shit out of me if I dared to suggest otherwise. There is no doubt that this is a silly cluster of beliefs that is rejected by at least tens of millions of equally-as-smart and much-smarter people, but there is also no doubt that Chess and Competitive Programming are impressive activities. So how can we reconcile those 2 facts ?
By just recognizing that intelligence is not enough. One of my all-time-favorite quotes is by the computer scientist Alan Kay : "A Point of View is Worth 80 IQ points". You're never going to understand or even see certain things, no matter how intelligent you are, if you're starting from an unreachable island in idea-space. Intelligence is like a car, it can massively expand your reach in idea-space, but there are Oceans in idea-space, and cars can't cross oceans no matter how poweful or fast. People have biases, deeply ingrained in them by their friends and families and peers and biochemistery and living conditions and all sorts of other things and combinations of things, biases are deeply reinforced by social reward and punishment. Those biases makes them "dumber", or - the word I prefer - "blind". They can never see things that are incredibly easy to see from other PoVs, they are missing the 80IQ boost that comes from the novel perspective, and their 120+ IQ is not enough alone to cut it.
>Don't think I did since "intelligence causes leftism" doesn't imply right wingers are low-intelligence
Ok fair enough, I still disapprove of the claim, for reasons that I ranted above and in my other comment at length.
>Do you take issue with the "99% of scientists accept climate change" stuff?
I don't. Because it's a factual claim. It can be disputed and interpreted, yes, but there are very percise formulations that are supported by data. The analogous claims about Capitalism would be "Capitalism caused the death of millions of people" and "Capitalism caused some people to have outsized power and influence over millions", those claims can be disputed and interpreted, but there exists some formulations of them that won't be denied by the most ardent of Capitalism's defenders. But "Anti-Capitalism" is... what exactly ? wanting capitalism to go down ? Hating billionaires (Who needs Anti-Capitalism for that ?) ? this seems very different than factual claims. Anti-Capitalism is a name given to a cluster of... things that are more complex than simple claims or even detailed road plans of actions.
> Come on, this is almost a "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" level of irony. You started the comment chastising your interlocutor (rightly so) for assuming an unfalsiable Just-So story that their ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Then you went ahead and assumed your ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Missed the /s ?
The idea that anti-capitalist views correlate with intelligence seems like it needs significantly more proof. While educational polarisation is now a significant force in US politics - It hasn't always been. Furthermore this would suggest that since Marxism often appeals to the proletariat while capitalism appeals to the bourgeoisie that capitalism must be true due to Occam's razor.
So far as I know, Marxists have never figured out how to appeal to the proletariat-- the vocabulary is non-obvious, the sentence structure is complex, and the ideas are very abstract.
While we're here, is there a difference between impoverish and immiserate?
I don't think this is true. The IWW was pretty big back in the 1910s, and IIRC, was (is?) explicitly communist. Back when it was just theory, or when the Soviet Union was young and information about conditions on the ground was scarce, my impression is that it had a sizable following among working people.
But as the 20th century wore on and conditions under capitalism got much better while conditions under communism required turning communist countries into giant prisons, the appeal evaporated.
Certainly the appeal seems very limited today, especially among the proletariat, but I don't think that was always true.
Ideally, I'd want personal experience and data to both be in play. Personal experience is limited, and data can leave out huge amounts about what's going on.
A cynic might think that anti-capitalism among many academics is largely a form of sour grapes, stemming from a feeling (somewhat justified IMHO) that their efforts in attaining and holding an academic position, and their value to society, are not sufficiently financially rewarded by the capitalist system. I'm thinking more of scientific and technical "STEM" academics, but I guess much the same could be felt by those more on the cultural side (literature, history, etc).
My engineering degree had a required course which was effectively basic business finance. Everybody getting the 'E' degree was made to thoroughly appreciate the concepts of Present Worth and Opportunity Cost. So there was no delusion there.
How is it you conclude bell_of_a_tower is unjustified in his extrapolation from his personal life experience to conclusions about the general experience of academics, while you *are* justified in making a far broader extrapolation -- presumably from your own life experience, although in fact you don't mention any empirical basis for your conclusion, which makes it an inherently inferior argument -- that academics are more intelligent and knowledgeable than the general population and this explains the agreeable fact that they hold a view you find congenial?
If bell's extrapolation is unjustified, because "no one has a broad enough personal experience to comment on society as a whole," then yours is equally unjustified.
I think it’s pretty well shown that the average democrat is a bit more intelligent than the average republican. Which means that “smart people are more likely to be liberal” is a probably true statement.
The problem is that this says almost nothing about why smart people tend to be liberal, since it could be that liberal views are more helpful to smart people (college debt relief) or that liberal views are closer to objective truth (global warming is human caused to some extent), or even that being smart (and career focused) leads to different values (feminism)
The US Democratic party is a large tent which likes to claim the most educated and least educated members of society within its embrace. Ds always argue that minor hurdles like punched-card ballots discriminate against them because they are less competent (see the courtroom arguments in Bush vs Gore, Florida, 2000). I find this all BS, education has nothing to do with hole-punching skills, but it is humorous BS. As a just-retired full professor with a doctorate from an elite school, I have had the opportunity to work with many amazing brilliant and wise extremely educated people over the years, including a few who have served on the Cabinets of US Presidents. The best have been centrists, not liberals. They work with Republicans and Democrats, capitalists and labor leaders (back when we had labor leaders), intellectuals and salt-of-the-earth farmers. They have read Marx and Milton Friedman. I agree with the original post that many academics fall so strongly on the left because of their limited experience outside of academia (again, personal anecdotal experience, no data). BTW, the Republican party is a very complex collection of people and positions about whom it is unwise to generalize, just like the Democrats. A two-party system has to be that way. Mystik wasn't generalizing, but I don't think averages are very descriptive of multi-modal distributions.
Wait, what? The reason the ballot in Bush vs Gore discriminated against Democracts wasn't because Democrats are less competent, it was because the butterfly ballots used were set up - possibly by accident, but I suspect deliberately, because I find it hard to imagine why you'd do it that way if your goal wasn't deliberate deception - in a way that tricked hundreds, and probably thousands, of Gore supporters into registering votes for Buchanan, making it easy to parse the list of names on the left, with Gore in second place, as implying that his was the second chad (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida#/media/File:Butterfly_Ballot,_Florida_2000_(large).jpg).
I watched the courtroom argument, and a Gore witness testified that a more complicated ballot discriminated against Democrats more that Republicans because they had a more difficult time with things like ballots, in so many words, referring exactly to the butterfly ballot and the Gore / Buchanan issue.
The ballot has ARROWS clearly showing where to punch the vote. I honestly do not believe that anyone would go to the trouble of counting the holes to decide where to punch the vote when the Arrows are there, clearly visible. Moreover, each candidate pis has a number, which corresponds to the number of holes that must be counted to punch the vote if (for some strange reason) the voter misses the large arrow pointing at the correct place. Therefore, I do not think the ballot was deliberately designed to mislead, but that the old saying is truth "nothing is fool-proof because fools keep finding more intricate ways to make foolish mistakes"
I wasn't accusing anyone of extrapolating from their personal experience. I was suggesting we ought to focus on arguments, not un-provable psychological motivations. i.e. their personal experience.
That academics are more intelligent and knowledgeable than the general population isn't just my personal observation, it's almost certainly true given academia heavily selects for intelligence and academics' main occupation is gathering knowledge. You could look for evidence to support that, but it almost has to be the case just from Bayesian reasoning. I wouldn't have thought anyone could doubt that.
I'm not suggesting academics are infallible or even a good source of knowledge, but when you observe a group of intelligent and knowledgeable people hold a conflicting view to one of yours, and you don't have ironclad reason to suspect them of bias, the reasonable response is to reduce your confidence in that view, not start (potentially endless) speculation about why they might be mistaken on that issue in particular.
The IQ of professors has been studied, certainly, and tends to be about 1-2 standard deviations above average in physical sciences. I've never heard of anyone studying their "knowledgability," and bell has made a credible argument that in fact *that* is likely to be lower than average -- academic cloister and all that.
I think your argument that the occupation of academics is "gathering knowledge" is specious, since I know of no academic field that seeks to gather knowledge generally. High energy physicists seek to gather knowledge about cosmology, say, and pay no attention at all to knowledge about farming, mechanical engineering, economics, bridge construction and repair, or social leadership.
Indeed, the stereotype of the absent-minded professor who knows everything about some tiny narrow sliver of human knowledge and fuck all about anything else and has to be told when to come in out of the rain is commonplace. If you're willing to draw conclusions based on what "everybody knows" we'll have to include that trope, too, since it has no less empirical support than yours -- and conclude while professors might well be smarter than average they're probably also less well informed about life in general than average. (And let us recall it would be general life experience, not a thorough understanding of Coptic or the citric acid cycle, which would inform viewpoints on economic and social structure optimums.)
Your final argument is also dubious. If I observe a group of highly skilled plumbers who hold a different opinion than me about plumbing, I would definitely pay attention. But if they have a different opinion than me about investing, or the best strategy in Texas Hold 'Em, I have no reason at all to think my opinion inferior. You can't just make a blanket appeal to intelligence per se and say "anything someone smart says is a priori more likely to be true than someone someone of lower IQ says." That's deeply silly. The most relevant factor in determining whether an opinion is more valuable is whether the person with the opinion has more, or less, relevant experience. The opinion of an art historian on bridge building is of no more worth than the opinion of a grocery store check-out clerk -- and considerably less than that of a construction worker, notwithstanding the IQ of any of the three.
If the disagreement is over relevant academic knowledge vs lived experience (I think we can assume academics have more relevant knowledge and higher IQs than average) surely a rationalist should favour the knowledge side. Are non-academics also experts in physics because they live in the physical world?
What I thought was unreasonable about the original post was, take three propositions:
1. pro capitalist arguments are so strong any educated person should accept them.
2. many educated people don't accept them.
3. those educated people suffer from some special condition preventing them thinking clearly.
I felt OP wanted to retain 1, but couldn't because of 2, so to remain constant suggests 3 in a way that's inelegant and intrinsically less probable than just: !1 && 2. So comes up with some story about how academics have less experience than ordinary people or whatever.
Heavens, no, how can we assume academics have more relevant knowledge? That's a bizarre assumption. I might as well assume actors do, or captains of industry, or Senators. Indeed, any of the latter would have far more relevant knowledge about their area of expertise than a generic academic.
Is this really strange to you? Do you believe that knowledge generally is extracted by someone highly intelligent just sitting down a at desk and thinking hard? I would hardly have expected to find such a scholastic mindset this side of AD 1500, to be honest. I thought we'd all agreed since about the time of Newton that empirical experience trumps any amount of cloistered theorizing.
I think you've imputed into the original argument much that wasn't there, in particular (1) and (3) is stated nowhere. Honestly, it looks to me like you didn't read it very carefully at all, and just riffed off some caricature of which it reminded you. That's rather the opposite of the rationalist approach to debate you have advocated at line 1.
Because it's a lot easier to tell how intelligent someone is than it is to figure out the psychological causes of their political views. Give IQ or general knowledge tests to 50 random academics and 50 random people and I guarantee you the academics will have a significantly better average score. Much harder to come up with an empirical test that will discover why academics are left-wing.
On the contrary, my experience is that it's much more reliable to predict someone's attitudes based on their lived experience than on some interior psychological value like IQ. I can be confident that someone who has spent a career in the USMC is probably not a pacifist. I can be confident a lifetime bureaucrat with the EPA doesn't think regulating air pollution is a silly or unproductive activity. I can be confident that public school teachers believe education can alter life outcomes. And so on.
On the other hand, predicting any of those attitudes from measured IQ would be a highly dubious endeavor. We know very well that attitudes are tremendously influenced by experience -- how could they *not* be? And that's a much more measureable thing than even IQ.
Ah, maybe I misinterpreted your original comment - I thought it was implying that the assertion that academics are more intelligent/knowledgeable is not more plausible than OP's explanation for academia leaning left.
I think modern Marxists aren't necessarily that opposed to small businesses, though their policies might be a disaster for small businesses.
What they're thinking is something like life will get a lot worse for people with salaries over, say $100K. (Number determined by feel, so I could be off.) Not deadly worse, but a lot less fun.
On the other hand, I'm never sure how literal the people who are gleeful about guillotines are. I'm pretty sure they aren't imagining small business owners.
Seems to be empirically false that people don't support policies that make them poorer? Upper middle classes tend to be the major support base for western centre left parties who do redistributive policies, you even have billionaires supporting wealth taxes. Seems that once people are above a certain standard of living they prioritize moral/social factors over economic self interest
"Upper middle classes tend to be the major support base for western centre left parties who do redistributive policies"
No, the truth is the opposite of this - on average, the poor vote for left-wing parties more than the middle class. That's weakening, due to the effect of educational polarisation, and I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years it were no longer true in some Western countries, but at present it's still true and until recently it was strongly true.
I don't want to say that the upper-middle classes don't want to give their own money to charity, but an awful lot of what we hear from the left is about how *other people* should be giving more money, especially the richest people. I applaud someone spending their own money on a charitable cause, but have no respect at all for someone who wants to take money from other people to provide for a cause.
We can do both things. We can give to private charity because it's virtuous, and support government spending on causes because it's more efficient or is the only thing with sufficient scale or because we think voting for some policy is also virtuous.
> Upper middle classes tend to be the major support base for western centre left parties who do redistributive policies
Isn't that a recent and American phenomenon? Upper middle classes generally tend to vote for the centre-right parties who do slightly less redistributive policies. The fact that the upper middle class has been shifting towards the Democrats in recent years in the US is the weird outlier. And according to the plot in Scott's article on this, it's still only roughly 50-50 after the shift.
The Democrats in the U.S. are the center-right party. The Republicans are more redistributive (just upward rather than downward). They are also anti-intellectual as more and more of their core beliefs (trickle down, anti-climate change, cigarettes build strong lungs) have been found to be unscientific.
(edit: referring to the parties themselves, not the voters)
I suspect left-wing academia really got going at around the same time as the Vietnam War started, in that rebellious, fervently anti-war people were more likely to be graduates. Because patriotic Americans disapproved of their anti-war stance, they perhaps tended to be excluded from jobs outside academia. So they gravitated to jobs in academia, where they were among others in a new generation of predominantly the same mind set. Then in the following years, the effect was consolidated as existing academics ensured that new hires shared their outlook and ethos.
There were also pretty explicit Soviet efforts to spread "communist" ideology in western universities, I imagine that had an effect too - and affected more than just America
These "Vietnam War" explanations don't really work, because the same left-wing academia can be observed in Canada, UK, and (Western) Europe (France, Italy, W-Germany) where very few people were directly affected by the Vietnam War. I recall once reading a webpage an Australian(?) philosopher emeritus and its content was dedicated chronicling his version of downhill history of the local philosophy department (analytic tradition replaced with post-modernists with the right politics but zero rigor, that was his complaint).
Keep in mind how influential US culture is on the rest of the world. Not definitive by any means, but quite likely that an academic left culture in the US would get exported elsewhere.
Beyond that, there were similar things going on for different reasons around the world. It may have been Vietnam specifically in the US, but the 1960s saw mass-decolonization and the breakdown of the last remaining empires.
>an academic left culture in the US would get exported elsewhere.
That would maybe explain the convergence in the English-speaking countries, but student radicalism in France, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia ...? in the1960s English wasn't yet ultimate lingua franca it is today.
Australia was deeply affected by the Vietnam war. We imposed conscription and sent troops and experienced casualties at higher rates than the US proportional to population. Anti-Vietnam protests were huge on Australian University campuses.
One of the biggest disconnects I have with people is they so often see "workers" as highly valuable, but completely powerless. When in actual fact if you are highly valuable you have a ton of power in the marketplace.
I took a job at ~28/29 where I was promised X raise after a year. There was a serious recession, so the two senior employees (who had been there a decade) got small raises, but I was told there was simply no budget for me to get a raise. I was doing awesome there, so I just told the director, "Give me my raise or I quit, I don't care if there is a recession, I don't care if I am not going to be able to find as good of a job, if you want me to keep working here you need to do what you promised". And they went back to the board and got the raise. And then I left 18 months later anyways when I found something better.
Had another job where I negotiated around one pay structure, then right before I was going to start was like "you know what I want some more".
Anyway, if you are actually super valuable, you can make pretty strong demands, and generally don't have much trouble finding a better job if you push it too far (which has happened to me).
Sure, sometimes they are - that's the principle behind unions and strikes - but sometimes they're not - there are industries where if the entire (entry-level) workforce went on strike at once, the company could replace the lot of them within days.
there are also plenty of historical examples of entire types of job being automated away, and the places where unions stymied the automation just meant that those places lost that industry altogether within a few decades.
Vocal hypersensitivity towards the rights and interests of minorities is usually a disguised form of vanity and conceit, I reckon, because in ostentatiously championing the underdog a "woke" person is often seeking to signal not just their virtue obviously, but also their relative position of strength. In other words, their unspoken message is "I am a cut above these minorities, so as a member of the elite it is my duty to defend them".
My reply wasn't about workers and strikes specifically, or at all really, but an accidently mispositioned reply to the post that started this thread. Academics are often the epitomy of wokeness and I was commenting on that aspect.
Yeah but when they tell their story of how they are opressed they are always super valuable. No ones story starts out "I am just an average replacable worker".
Upon my death, between 0 and 15 years from now [almost surely << 10], I could have about $10M (USD) to bequest. Possible up to twice that in real terms, maybe less. So I need to write a will. No family considerations that I haven't already factored into these numbers.
I don't know where to give it. Scott's grant program seems a great choice, but he might not do it again. Considerations: non-religious, non-utilitarian (for any version of utilitarianism that rewards sheer numbers of 'happy' population), pro science, pro-progress, anti-sentimental (so you can save a billion human lives, how very _boring_), very much pro (though accepting that it's a bit metaphorical) "omega point." I don't care much about individuals human's lives, only humanity's (or intelligent life's) purpose and fulfillment as a whole.
I do tend to think (i.e. "think we should act as if") that humanity is the only intelligent life form in the reachable universe, so avoiding extinction events is a supremely good (if somewhat sad) answer, but it's where I lean. I'd like a more positive goal!
Is this necessarily pro-human ? If not, Animals. Spend your 10M$ on bettering the lives of non-human Animals, the most miserable and ill-treated bunch of souls that humans treat like shit with impunity since forever and still today.
Invest or fund companies that research lab-grown meat, fund documentaries or works of fictions that depict animals' inner lives, etc... Anything which is likely to pay positively for animals over a long period of time and not much people are doing it. Some of those things benefit humans as well, the lab-grown meat will likely be cheaper and more nutritional once we pour 50-60 years of research on it, but really, this is about our consciousness-siblings that we routinely commit the most vile crimes against and continue on with our lives like nothing happened. You are against utilitarianism, but surely the sheer magnitude of animal suffering counts for something ?
If not that, then invest them in space, or cheap(er) and more convenient computers\internet. Or bioengineering research. Every one of those technologies is still in its infancy, and have the power to massively transform humanity for the better.
Thanks for the thoughts. Unfortunately, as far as animals go my ethical beliefs point in the opposite direction (well somewhat, but I suppose that if we had perfect lab meet we could euthanize all farm animals which might be a small net good since fewer animals - even farm animals - is morally better.)
With respect to space and computers, good idea but it's like donating money to help cure cancer only more so: there is already SO MUCH effort in this direction that you need massive sums, or a very radical idea, to make a dent.
I came back looking for this post. I like the idea of science journalism... more people talking about real science. And I was thinking there is a danger in supporting some bigger journal
project... in that it has already been taken over by the science 'machine' (moloch) And maybe the best thing is to support some independent/ individual science 'reporters'. I'm thinking Sabine Hossenfelder or Lex Frideman. (I like Lex more, but more of either would be good.) Or some other person you like.
That’s probably enough to buy a board seat somewhere and get fairly involved. That’s probably enough to fund some real structure around Scott’s grant program, you could get involved in that.
Even << 10 years is enough time to start having a hand in how that money is used. Why not try to get involved in / start a foundation before deciding to leave it blindly in a will?
They're an X-risk *mitigation* organization; they're focused on making food supplies that are robust to disasters. An awful lot of X-risks actually are only existential at the tail end of a distribution of disasters that typically will 'only' kill a few billion people.
Take the Yellowstone megavolcano. If Yellowstone erupts next year, it probably won't kill everyone. It's far more likely to kill 2-4 billion people by infusing the ground with acidic sulfur, rendering it unable to grow almost all current food crops and disrupting the food supply to the world for a year or two. Half the planet dying of starvation is still really bad of course, and any solutions that mitigate that will ALSO push back the threshold on how bad a scenario has to be to be an ACTUAL X-risk; if we already know what plants to switch to in a mega-volcano-polluted earth, we're way more likely to have enclaves that survive a truly horrific volcanic event long enough to adapt to the new conditions.
Similar considerations apply to many other X-risks. Nuclear winter, obviously; most massive nuclear exchange scenarios won't kill EVERYONE, but will kill swaths of the population through starvation. Large asteroid impacts follow a similar distribution. So do severe epidemics (which are VERY unlikely to wipe out humanity with our absurdly variable immune system, but could quite possibly kill billions with many indirect deaths to starvation, etc. as world food systems collapse.)
Finally, I really like this as an approach to X-risks because it's not useless if we get the X-risk calculation wrong and never face the X-risk. Asteroid impact never happens, or is far less dangerous than we think if it does? Still useful. Megavolcanos don't pollute the ground as much as we think they do because we read the geology wrong? Still useful. Food technologies (storage, transport and production) focused on resilience instead of efficiency are always helpful in the disasters that occur annually around the globe. (Not dissing food tech focused on efficiency; it's great, and really really important for the food-insecure around the world. But most food tech research already focuses on that, and there's a huge profit motive, so it's not under-addressed like robust food tech.) It's a safe bet that investment here will help people.
tl;dr: I think ALLFED's one of the least glamorous and under-invested approaches to long-termism.
(Disclaimer: I'm not associated with ALLFED in any way)
It's interesting to think about positive goals of making something happen rather than negative goals of preventing something going wrong.
I'm in favor of work on replication, but that's more about preventing problems. If you wanted more good science rather than preventing bad science, what would you do?
If you are really concerned about human flourishing in the long run I might try to help setup or support some alternate intellectual structure to academia since that is looking a bit rickety these days and is one of our most important institutions. Maybe find some organization whose work you like and establish a "chair" there with their devleopment department for them to support an academic outside the framwork of a university. I feel like if I had a big pile of money right now, and particularly if I had BIll Gates level money, the number one thing I would be focused on is splintering off some new home for academic life.
It was the monasties, and that ran its course, and i am starting to think "college campuses" have run their course. We need new models for what is one of our most valuable projects (creating new knowledge).
Yes to this, and absolutely no to donations toward any university with a substantial endowment. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and their ilk have far more money than they need and simply cannot spend it due to US tax law. It just piles up, and I really do not understand how they can ethically solicit donations.
Thank you. I don't think this is nearly enough $. I have been thinking a lot about supporting science journalism. An " endowed chair" at an outsider institution is a really great idea: concrete suggestions?
Alas, I'm playing in 0.00001 of "Bill Gates" space.
If you’re willing to stay in academia space, giving a lot of money to start a department is historically effective. Basically you cover the startup costs for a “Anti-Extinction Studies Department” and this gets the college to cover the long-run costs
Ten million will reliably give you $350K in perpetuity, which is enough to employ one professor on ~$175K, or two to three postdocs. I doubt the university would chip in the rest of the budget,.
That said, an endowed chair isn't a bad idea, _if_ you can find a suitable institution that shares your values and is willing to work with you. Somewhere sufficiently small to be grateful for the money, but large enough to be able to attract great people. Could be worth thinking geographically too, to bring money to places that are going to benefit from having one more well-paid professor in town.
Well I would think about intellectual instiutions you value (think tanks, journals, whatever), $10 million is certainly enough to "endow a chair" at least for a couple decades. The key would be doing it in a way that whatever values you are trying to get across are preserved, but I beleive development officers should be familiar with that.
How to arrive at or make likely political settlements that are more closely aligned with empirical truth instead of getting captured by, well, political considerations, may be one of, if not the most, important questions for sustained human flourishing. E.g Trade is unambiguously good for human flourishing, but political settlements often get in the way since it involves concentrated losses and diffuse benefits. Removing minimum wage laws almost certainly benefits more people on the margin but political settlements prevent that from happening.
Also, 10 million is less valuable in developed countries but may be more so in developing contexts.
> Also, 10 million is less valuable in developed countries but may be more so in developing contexts.
Great point! I confess that (I'm not very imaginative) that I've been thinking more about helping science along (*) in developed countries, since I think that's where the frontiers are ... but maybe I'm wrong.
(*) I confess that my current 'best' idea (which I'm not thrilled by) is to donate to it ll to science journalism.
If you do donate to science journalism, my personal opinion is that Quanta Magazine is amazing, with quality far exceeding that of any comparable publication in the present day. They are funded by the Simons Foundation, so I'm not sure whether they're in need of money and/or accept donations. In any case, I would definitely recommend checking them out (if only for the great journalism, if you haven't read their articles before).
If I had a crazy amount of $, and Quanta didn't exist, I'd create it! If I were imaginative enough. That's one of my (rather many) go-to examples of why billionaires can be good.
I really, really, really, like Quanta. AND it hits all of my 'super good things by wealthy people' buttons. But I'm not THAT wealthy. Yet $10MM isn't pocket change.
Awesome! I agree that Simons has done a lot of great stuff with his billions. Not a huge fan of Peter Thiel, personally, but I think another very successful+impactful example of billionaire spending, especially relative to the fairly low cost, is the Thiel Fellowship.
And, yeah, I understand-- seems like a tricky challenge. Good luck with finding a good place to donate to!
Quanta exists, and has a weathy backer. But "SR" you seem go 'be on my wavelengrth;. No suggestions at all, not commitment (of course) but just nothing you might throw out for consideration???
Here's something I'd like to see, though ten million wouldn't go very far-- more study of how healthy bodies work.
My impression is that a lot of medicine is trying to solve problems, so it uses rather crude methods with side effects because they aim at not having a problem rather than having a body that works.
Thanks! I realize that it's a lot of money for an individual, but a tiny amount as to research. (If I had $1B I actually think I'd be less at a loss.)\
I've read you comments here and on SSC over the year and have lot of respect for you: but can you suggest something more concrete? Keep in mind, though, that 'making humans live healthier lives' doesn't strongly fit my remit.
Why do you ask me a question that will reveal me as nut? But, nut or not, my bequest dilemma is genuine!
To your actual question, I can give no brief answer. I think that life needs to create AND CHOOSE it's own purpose, and I have the only vaguest idea of what that might be - it involves wisdom and physics (yes, the science) well beyond me.And, arrogantly, I think far beyond humankind today.
'Omega point', waving away a lot, is what our better descendants (*) strive for. We can't understand it or guess it,; we are not the tiniest bit intelligent or wise enough. The omega point is the fulfillment of the 'purpose' they choose. It very slightly involves creating 'God' but even pathetic old me can see that this miscomprehends things.
(*) Or some other life forms' but at this age the safe bet is that there is no other.
Anyone else has read/watched too much about the Cat in the Hat and feels like he's a Neil Gaiman character waiting to happen?
Think about it. He can appear from nowhere and do other things that are either impossible or really damn hard. He also drives a vehicle with impossible properties and a lot of hands and commands two sidekicks of unclear origin and nature, initially locked in a box.
The PBS series "The Cat in the Hat knows a lot about that" has more good stuff. In "The Cat in the Hat knows a lot about Halloween" the Cat says that you should only be afraid of things that can hurt you and admits that he's afraid of nothing (it turns out later that that's not quite true, he's afraid of pumpkins). The episode "Whatever floats your boat" features the following laugh: "The last time I saw my paddle, it was under the piano" - followed by the Cat taking off his hat, taking the piano out of it, and taking the paddle from under the piano.
I want to signal boost excellent work being done by Phil Magness and co-authors to try and prevent left leaning academics from tarring champions of markets and liberty using academically and intellectually dishonest techniques
Misrepresenting Mises: Quotation Editing and a Rejection of Peer Review at Cambridge University Press
How do people feel about claims that modern food has less nutrients/vitamins than in past generations? Variously attributed to modern agricultural practices leaching the soil, etc. And consequently from that- that we should be taking multivitamins or other nutrient supplements to make up for it? To date my nutrition philosophy has always been 'get the vitamins from actual food, not the basically unregulated supplement industry', so I've always eaten a lot of vegetables. But there does seem to be some decent research suggesting that modern food is less nutritious.
For instance, I've given my personal experience here before that taking magnesium supplements lowkey changed my life- reduced anxiety, even sharpened my vision. But I also currently consume 2 cups of dark leafy greens every day, and then another cup of other chopped vegetables. So it makes no sense that I should be magnesium-deficient- unless the 'modern food is less nutritious' hypothesis is correct.
And then if you've accepted that premise- are products like Athletic Greens actually nutritious? If they are, I'd probably consume one serving of that every day, and then do my usual salad on top of that too
True for specific nutrients in specific strains, effect sizes vary, confounders abound. Market incentives don't prioritize nutrition (or taste, often) + lots of easy hacks out of such painted-into-corners are easy to tar with the "GMO" scare-label. Sadly.
Outdated mindsets regarding preservation and cooking hurt here too: the flash-freeze revolution has been incredible for food quality, including nutrient preservation, but the average consumer still has an irrational preference for """fresh""" food (which has likely been decomposing for days, weeks, possibly even months before hitting store shelves). The same with canned, to a lesser extent...and of course I don't expect the average shopper to know whether more nutrients are preserved by baking, microwaving, grilling, frying, steaming, boiling, or eating foods raw. (They usually assume raw is best for everything. This is a very bad heuristic.) Too much nuance. Forget advanced topics like vitamin solubility entirely. (Dress your salads!)
Almost certainly swamped by having more food than we could possibly need. Even if food X is 10% less nurtitious along axis Y, we definitely grow 110%+ more X now than before. Some suggest this may be contributing to obesity, where our calories writ large are "emptier" than they used to be...and there's probably something there? Except the sorts of foods we actually care a great deal about the nutritive qualities (dark leafy greens, fruits, etc.) really, really aren't the empty calorie bombs largely responsible for obesity and such.
Outside of targeted deficiencies and specific diseases etc., broad-spectrum supplementation seems a bad general route...not just due to the sketchy market structure, but because basic things like shitty bioavailability render the whole enterprise deeply inefficient. There are so many other positive things in a cup of greens than whatever highly-legible cheap-to-extract-and-bottle discrete elements end up in a multivitamin gummy. We're still not wholly sure why even completely equivalent dosages of same-version nutrients seem to function very differently coming from food vs. supplements. Plus, realistically, many people tend to use supplements as an excuse to maintain shitty diets that are harmful in plenty of other ways...in the same way fruit juice came to replace actual fruit for so many. I think there's delta to be had for a discerning user, but would be very worried at any attempted mass rollout...(fortification has paid dividends, but that's somewhat different approach)
Scientific American has, sadly, become a must-miss publication for me. On its best day the magazine is a weak shadow of what it used to be and its worst days are downright depressing. So anything written there has to be taken with several large chunks of salt (or whichever mineral you prefer).
This rather misses the point: "The key to healthier produce is healthier soil. Alternating fields between growing seasons to give land time to restore would be one important step. Also, foregoing pesticides and fertilizers in favor of organic growing methods is good for the soil, the produce and its consumers. Those who want to get the most nutritious fruits and vegetables should buy regularly from local organic farmers."
You can't get the minerals back in the plants unless they're replenished in the soil.
Yeah it's not the best article out there, I just quickly googled for some proof that it's on people's radar. Nutrient depletion in the soil is something that has popped up in my reading several times over the past years, and my impression from the articles was that they were credible - also I never read anyone trying to argue that it's not the case.
From what I read some minerals and nutrients are down by 10-20% in current produce, which is probably not that bad if you have a decent diet, but it's a worrying trend.
The longest lived generation of humans has been the boomers. So I say follow the boomer diet.
Supplement intake is correlated with early death, but that's probably supplement use by people who have a lot more going wrong. Mega doses is surely wrong.
Might depend a little on one's definition of "nutrients." The one argument I've heard that merits some respect is that the bacteria we ingest have changed radically since we mostly got our food from the backyard, back forty, or some local wilderness. I can readily believe that: not only do we clean our food much more than before, as well as treat it in various ways that would tend to snuff out resident bacteria, it is also grown in a different environment, with different microecosystems, and transported from far away.
This might matter because our gut microbiome seems to play a larger role in our health the closer people look. Maybe it's much more important than we thought, and it could be the nature of the bacteria we regularly eat (or don't eat) matters more than we thought.
The studies I've seen confirmed lower nutrient value, but not catastrophically so. I take quite a few supplements/nootropics but that's based on the theories in "life extension: apsa". Time has since since proven some true, others not so much. Athletic greens does seem like a decent supplement, but you have no idea how much you're actually getting with these things, other than the vitamins. The huge list might be 99% spirulina and a trace of everything else. I usually recommend Futurebiotics high energy multi for men, glucosamine with chondroitin, and choline L-bitartrate as things most people can benefit from, and they can be had for a fraction of AG1 prices.
My thought—with zero data or even a modicum of research to back it up—is that people historically survived (and evolved) with much less food options than we have now. I can’t imagine a typical diet long ago involved as many vitamins/minerals/whatever as current meals can/do.
Not directly applicable, but I highly recommend reading Resetting the Table by Robert Paarlberg if you’re at all interested in the topic of modern food practices.
Excellent point. This all seems like a version of the "good old days" trope with respect to food. There are also lots of people selling supplements, justifying their own decisions to use supplements, and so on. So there's a lot of motivated content out there.
My take is try supplements if you want to and keep using them if they seem to work. Just take pro-supplement content with a grain of salt, especially since from what I've seen the body's absorption of nutrients from non-food sources is often terrible.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to learn about economics/finance?
I enjoy learning about most quantitative subjects, so I don't mind a mathematically heavy treatment. I've taken economics classes multiple times before, and have even done well, but for some reason I'm not able to internalize economic intuitions very well, and easily forget what I do learn. Notably, this isn't the case for me when it comes to other STEM fields.
Another, related, problem is that I'm not sure when to take conclusions of economic arguments seriously. For instance, you are taught in economics that imposing a minimum wage increases unemployment. Yet, I have seen claims that the empirical evidence suggests that this isn't the case. If such a basic conclusion turns out to be dubious, then how can I be confident that the rest of economics holds up? Is it then even worth learning the subject? Econometrics feels sketchy to me, too, as so many conclusions in causal inference seem to change depending on the variables you adjust for (e.g. see Scott's old post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/24/you-need-more-confounders/).
Finally, does anyone have suggestions on how to learn the basics of personal finance? I get stressed out right now when I have to think about money, and I feel like this is at least partly due to financial incompetence. Thanks.
I think the min wage example is actually not as bad as you seem to think it is. Just like my high school physics class assumed away air resistance and friction, Micro 101 courses will often make the simplifying assumption of perfect competition. In a perfectly competitive labor market, min wage is very likely to lead to lower employment.
However, dropping the assumption of perfect competition is a very standard thing to do in 201 classes (or event the second half of a good 101 course), and a very straight forward implication of monopsonistic labor markets (i.e. the buyer has pricing power) is that min wage laws can actually _increase_ employment. So the empirical and theoretical conclusions are not actually in conflict.
EDIT:
Just to add some actionable advice - I recently read someone making the claim that AP Econ courses have done a better job of incorporating new results in economics than introductory college courses. I can't vouch for that personally, but a google search just led me to Khan Academy's AP econ videos, one of which specifically goes over monopsony and min wage. So perhaps that would be a good resource.
I don't think you'll ever find the kind of certainty you're looking for in Economics. I felt the way you did during my undergraduate education and now after many more years of study I still don't possess that certainty. I suppose it's possible I've been an impostor this whole time, but I think what's more likely is the people that do have that sense of certainty are just comfortable applying the same heuristic to every situation and just don't worry about being wrong. Regarding Econometrics, if you're comfortable with stats/regression analysis then Mostly Harmless Econometrics is fairly readable and touches on most of the popular empirical microeconomics methods currently used in research.
I'd recommend reading "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" by Ramit Sethi. Ignore the terrible title. It has very good basic advice and plans on personal finance. He also has a podcast of the same name which profiles people having issues managing their money. Ramit is originally a psychologist so there is a focus on the psychology of money which it sounds like you may be having issues with.
I have a doctorate in econ from Stanford, and I just love the field and love teaching it. I have two textbook recommendations, they are both old and should be available at little cost. For econ, Edwin Mansfield, Economics. I have 7th edition, earlier is also fine. Great economist, balanced view. For investing, Alexander, Sharpe and Bailey, Fundamentals of Investments. A lot of theory, but also a good deal of practical info. I have the 2nd edition. I found both texts easy to read, broadly based across econ ideas and tribes, and theoretically sound.
In the 1940s, when social science was struggling to get the respect accorded to physical and life sciences, economists discovered how to rebuild the whole discipline (well, mostly microecon) on the mathematics of optimization. Excitement and respect ensued, and top grad departments sought out math students to fill doctoral student slots instead of undergrad econ majors. The pendulum swung very far until econ was far more attached to their rational actor models than to any phenomena in the real world. This led to much ridiculousness in econ pronouncements during the 1980s or so. Good research and excellent economists have put the discipline back on path since, but it will be a long time shedding the cloud of love of model > love of truth.
To get a grip on basic economic arguments, you could do a lot worse than _Universal Economics_ by Alchian and Allen (https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/universal-economics). It focuses on the basic tenets of economics and how they apply. The exercises are just about all worth working out. It's not particularly mathematically sophisticated -- it's about systematically reasoning from basic principles and building your intuition from that.
- I've been a longtime listener of Planet Money, and I find it fun and interesting. They also have a Summer School season each year where they specifically cover various topics, which IMO is less educational than the regular series. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/
A few months ago I went around researching for Econ textbooks. I was somewhat underwhelmed.
I have been watching the videos from Marginal Revolution University regularly. They have playlists for specific courses. So far I watched through their Macro playlist, and am halfway through the Micro one. I have found it more substantive than the podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarginalRevolutionUniversity
And I'm sorry-- all of my email addresses have personally identifiable information, so I'm reluctant to share them publicly.
I took AP Micro/Macro in high school, and then took intro micro/macro and game theory in college. So there was substantial overlap between the two experiences, but the college courses were calculus-based and a little more 'modern', covering topics like the Hotelling model and the market for lemons.
Another commenter also suggested MRU-- I'll definitely check them out! Thank you!
For basic economics I would honestly recommend the Marginal Revolution University videos by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. I often go back to them to remember basic concepts and figure out how to easily explain them to people. They’re short and sweet, and free.
For personal finance I personally like the Betterment articles. They are obviously describing/advertising their own methodologies… but it makes sense and is simple. I use them for all my investing portfolios because I set it and forget it. And based on their white papers I can understand the math and investing philosophy behind what they do.
Personal-finance-wise, I feel like the efficient frontier (optimal effort/risk-to-reward ratio) sits somewhere around Bogleheads orthodoxy. They're subscribers to Jack Bogle's ideology, who co-founded Vanguard and ran the first successful index fund. The Bogleheads Wiki has a good explainer of the principles.
Also, there's an excellent paper called 'If money doesn't make you happy then you probably aren't spending it right' about research-backed ways to spend your money more sensibly.
On the economics front, depending on your appetite, you would probably be best-served by reading widely at least a summary of economic history, basically from Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty via Thomas Hobbes and Benjamin Franklin. Many facets of even basic economic assumptions are by no means settled (eg Keynes v Hayeck, Samuelson v Friedman), so understanding those debates can be useful. Economics is basically just assumptions and models, all the way down - starting with ideas of specialisation and market forces way back with Adam Smith.
This is interesting. A startup whose business model is predicated on the belief that AI will be good enough to be widely used commercially but remain bad enough to not understand normal English.
I think humans are more prompt sensitive than you think. For example consider polls which are worded differently but have identical meaning, or math word problems that only change the setting yet somehow confuse a larger percentage of students.
Since DALL-E is a single neural net and also stateless, you can do experiments to find the best context to get exactly what you want from it, while that's not possible for humans.
Also keep in mind that designers have found over the years that clients are extremely bad at knowing what it is they want, so acting in that role is probably valuable as well.
AI is incredibly poor at working within the implied context. Look at the DALLE work/failings. If the instructions say display a cat in a hat, there's very few possibilities: 1, a cat sitting/laying inside un upturned hat, or 2, a cat wearing a hat. There's pretty much two forms of cat here, a natural shaped cat with a felinepomorphic(?) size/shap hat, or an anthropomorphic size/shape cat with a correctly sized/shaped hat. --presumably hats only belong on humans, so a correctly shaped hat is a hat shaped to fit a human's head. There's pretty much one way to wear a hat.
Has anyone ever actually defended an argument of the form "Jeff Bezos (or whoever) deserves to be a billionaire because he works so much harder than normal people"? I've seen quite a few leftists insisting that this is what the right believes, but almost every rightist argument I've seen relating to this point either justifies the wealth of billionaires by the value they create for society, or sidesteps questions of desert entirely by challenging the moral right of the government to take money from private individuals. I've never seen one that was based on "hard work". Is there any actual basis for this, or is it purely a strawman?
I do see it the other way all the time. People talk about the poor (especially ones who receive assistance) as being lazy all the time. When in practice, most of those people work much harder than us keyboard cowboys.
Though note, I am engaging in exactly that sort of discounting Martin Blank mentioned. For me, it's tied up with some degree of impostor syndrome. My work has never seemed all that hard to me, and it's always seemed like you could just hire some kid out of college, ramp him up for a few weeks and he could do what I do (coding). Having occasionally been involved in hiring, I know that isn't actually true, but it still somewhat bewilders me. Probably a lot of the middle class office worker cast feels the same.
A lot of the hard work that us keyboard cowboys do is in preparation and training. That's both formal education (usually) and also a lot of work to study what we need to know. There's a premium for knowledge and skill, particularly rare or valuable skills. There's also a premium for willingness to work on undesirable projects or with certain kinds of stress. I work with people who may make about half of my yearly salary and know more about the task than I do. They are unwilling or unable to work in management and make the hard decisions. Many explicitly know this and choose that lane openly. It's not unusual for someone with 10X the experience I have in a particular area come to me and explain the pros and cons, what they would do, and then defer to me. I make the choice using pretty much only their knowledge and recommendation - which seems silly until the next step where I justify the choice to my boss or a client and deal with the fallout.
I heard a joke that encapsulates a lot of this. A company has a giant turbine that breaks down, and they can't figure out how to fix it. So they call in an expert mechanic, who spends five minutes looking over the turbine before pulling out a small hammer. He makes a few taps, and the machine is running again! He tells them the bill will be $5,000, to which they complain he only spent five minutes, how could he charge so much? They demand an itemized bill. So he sends them a bill that says "Tap with a hammer $100. Knowing where to tap, $4,900."
Bezos certainly did all the hard work at the start, setting it up, getting investment, working to make it successful. So he certainly is entitled to the fruits of that.
How hard current Bezos is working, and what difference that makes if he could just sit in a pool of champagne on his super-yacht surrounded by supermodels, and his net worth would still increase, is the question. Is he really making the difference to Amazon and all its projects that Steve Jobs made to Apple? He stepped down as CEO but remains as executive chairman, will his eventual retirement whenever it happens make a big difference to Amazon, or will it continue to grow and be profitable?
That's where it gets harder to argue "does he deserve this much money *now*". He was able to give one-quarter of his stock away in his divorce, which came to $35 billion, and that is a nice chunk of change for anyone, He kept the remaining three-quarters, so he is clearly not suffering any hardship.
So past Bezos created the success that present Bezos is just soaking up the value. Is he creating new value, or would it all be the same if he decided to go live on a mountain in Peru? That's where "he does/doesn't work harder than ordinary people so he deserves this huge pile of current value" comes in.
It's because many on the left (knowingly or unknowingly) buy into the Marxist/socialist/labor theory of value idea that the only just way to earn money is from labor. If you believe the only legitimate way to earn money is from working then it becomes relevant to say that he didn't work 1,000,000 times harder so he got that money from stealing/capitalism/etc. Plus it works as a left populist appeal so it survives memetically.
JonathanD mostly got it right. There's two ideas here. There's the more mainstream idea of getting money for reasons other than producing value is morally suspect. And there's the Marxist version where producing value through capital ownership is inherently exploitative.
In the mainstream schema, for example, if you start a company from nothing then you produced that company and that's valuable. It's legitimate for you to own that company and profit from owning it since you founded the company. In the Marxist schema though you are entitled ONLY to the money you produced from your own labor. Any money you earned by, say, owning Amazon is made by exploiting your workers and inherently illegitimate. This is because they believe the only (or at least main) way to produce profits is by underpaying workers.
So it makes sense for a Marxist to argue that Jeff Bezos didn't work 1,000,000 hours because the Marxist is coming from a background where working hours is the only legitimate way to earn money. The rest of his fortune, over and above what he'd earn from that labor, comes from stealing from his workers by underpaying them. And because a lot of the left is kind of downstream of these more radical politics they repeat the meme while twisting it into a more mainstream complaint about income inequality or a desire to tax that away to fund services. But it really doesn't make sense outside of that Marxist context.
In the sense that money you make by virtue of having money, say, by being a fourth generation Carnegie with a good money guy to manage your inheritance, is less legitimate and more deserving of taxation than money made by working in a job.
IIRC, one of the democrats in the last generation ran on this, to some extent. I think maybe Kerry or Gore ran partially on "making work pay again", or some such, though my quick google failed to turn up anything.
Should have googled that first. Upon review, that probably should have been Rockefeller. Carnegie gave most of his money away in his lifetime, and famously said "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
>Jeff Bezos (or whoever) deserves to be a billionaire because he works so much harder than normal people
I won't, because that's not only not what I believe, but also completely missing the point of where wealth comes from.
"Deserve", "efforts" and "working hard" are utterly irrelevant, and anyone giving them any value is setting themselve for personnal failure and an under-performing ideology.
Jeff Bezos, however, deserves to be a billionaire, because he gives value to a lot of people's work. I'm a software engineer. I can write code for myself every day of my life, slowly automating some pointless, minutes parts of my life, and end up poor as shit because that would serve my needs and nobody else. It would have very low value. Instead, I can write life insurance websites for a company I dislike, serve the need of many, and make bank for it. Or even better, if I could, I'd be making Tesla's autopilot software, revolutionize mankind's ability to move itself, and make myself a millionaire (and kill a couple of wildlife & cyclists on the way, but who'se keeping track?). The difference between each scenario is not how hard I work, it's what I work on and what purpose it serves. Man's default workday is "dig the ground for edible roots & finding shelters for the night.". You can be the hardest working dirt-digger, or you can be a lazy software engineer doing 1 hour of work a day.
Which is best?
(No, fuck off uncle ted, I know about the consequences of the industrial revolution, and it's beside the point.)
Wel I think generally you will find that highly successful people are "hard workers" than not highly successful people. I don't think that statment is that contrevertial as much as the left likes to make it out to be.
Yes there is Rabbi the immigrant baggage handler who works his ass off at a very phsically demanding job 12 hours a day for years on end with little reward because his English blows and he cannot get a supervisory position. But that just isn't the norm (and a lot of Rabbi's frankly miss work pretty often, absenteeism is a real big issue on the low end of the labor market). I also think there is this wierd thing where the left tends to undervalue intellectual labor in this type of discussion. Where the dude sitting in front of spreadhseets 60 hours a week is having the time of his life at an 'easy" job, while the unuion carpenter who does 22 hours of actual work on site a week is "busting his ass off at a grueling job".
You can find all kinds of counter examples in all kinds of directions obviously.
But no Bezos definitely isn't earning his money "in proportion" to which he is "working hard", neither is any executive.
There is a visceral hatred on the left for anyone who is self made or has escaped poverty if they don't stay in line with the party and put it all down to "luck". Tell people you are a business owner and they say "you have no idea what it is like to be poor". Tell them you grew up in a literal housing project and were poor through age ~28 until you decided to stop being lazy and start applying yourself at your profession and excelling past your peers, and they start whining about "bootstraps myth" and how "that doesn't work in the real world".
At the same time there are legitimately diligent brilliant people stuck working at coffee shopshops because they don't have the right connections/networking/ambition to manuver their way out of it (though in my experience these people mostly do end up somewhere great in their 30s at the latest).
Billionaires pretty much do EA, or some capitalist version of EA. Although perhaps not real altruism, funding startups results in effective enhancements to technology, which in turn enhances humanity. Even if they put the money into the stock market, this results in other people growing their businesses, hiring more people, expanding the economy. Do the billionaires turn some profit from this investing? Yes, of course, but all of humanity reaps the rewards of the expanded economy ... and the expanded global economy is what has lifted the mass of poor out of poverty. Pretty much, the only people poor today, are people living under communist governments.
My far-Right relatives do say that, it's not purely a strawman. They count it as a moral failure to not use that money for good, but also as a personal decision of someone who's earned the choice.
I would say it's a pretty common feeling on the right that what any individual human being "deserves" should not be decided by majority vote, and can't normally be collectively decided in any useful way at all[1]. That's why one of the top values tends to be "live and let live," that people should be accorded the general right to seek their own moira and do whatever they choose, so long as it doesn't involve infringing the rights of others to do the same -- most especially that there be no force involved.
So you look at Bezos and observe that he has acquired a huge fortune, but at no point was force involved, and that is just something to be noted, a curious fact. One doesn't need to decide if he "deserves" it or not, unless you fancy yourself an avatar of St. Peter and entitled to sort the goats from the sheep.
Any individual can of course decide whether he personally likes Jeff Bezos or not, just like I can decide whether I'm amused by Chris Rock or not, and act accordingly (again so long as there is no force involved). I can decide I dislike his business methods, his choice of paramour, or his lack of hair, and choose not to buy from Amazon, and anyone else can decide the same. But this is distinct from some kind of coordinated collective action involving force, e.g. imposing taxes on his person or company.
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[1] Which is distinct from the question of judging individual acts that individuals may do. We can certainly say crime X gets punishment Y, or political candidate Z's platform mean he should not be elected, but that is judging the act, not the man.
I wouldn't call myself "on the right" but you described my feelings on this topic to a t. Whenever wealth and economics are being discussed, the word "deserve" sets my teeth on edge. Jeff Bezos, like everybody else, "deserves" whatever other people will willingly give him.
The use of work alone as a proxy for "deserving" is also strange to me. Work ethic is necessary but not even close to sufficient for success. History is replete with examples of people who destroyed their lives pouring their heart and soul into projects that went nowhere. To repurpose a comment I made a few days ago around land use, I can work harder than any human in all of history to try to turn a patch of land in coastal Maine into an orange grove. I will wind up a bankrupt failure, because that project is profoundly unwise to begin with. Bezos attained his position through some combination of intelligence, wisdom, work ethic, creativity, people skills, judgment of character, fortitude, and, yes, luck.
My grandfather was the hardest working person I've ever met. He often worked 16 hours a day, and was so poor that he had to walk miles to get to work in a coal mine. This type and amount of work was very successful in what he intended - to get himself and his family out of abject poverty. That's a true example of what many on the right mean when they talk about bootstraps.
But, no amount of work on that scale would ever make him wealthy. If he had superhuman strength and speed, and could somehow work 24 hours a day, he would not have been rich. Saying that hard work cannot make you rich is usually true, as you also need to leverage that hard work in a productive manner. Being a coal miner can be a good way to a solid middle-class wage (I think he topped out around $17/hour in the 1970 or 80s), which would be maybe low six-figures today. It can never make the kind of money that Jeff Bezos does. Nor is it supposed to. The fact that I can sit at a desk in a climate-controlled office and do most of my work on a computer is due to leveraging my productivity. If I worked as a coal miner physically breaking my back, I would not make more money than I do without the hard labor. I produce more lasting value for society, though, and that's what's really important.
"I produce more lasting value for society, though, and that's what's really important."
That's just sneaking "I deserve it because I work hard" in through the back door, though. So it's not 'hard work', it's 'producing value' that counts. Well, how much value do you produce? Can you do it in ten minutes, or did you have to put effort into learning the skills and getting the positions that allowed you to earn more?
The value your grandfather produced was getting the coal out of the ground and into the homes of people so they could heat their houses and cook their food, and into factories so that they could manufacture goods for sale. The value the mine owner produced was dependent on the hard work of men like your grandfather.
And if we are going to have a cold winter because of lack of fuel supply due to the Russian situation, a lot of people will be thinking your grandfather, and a scuttle of the coal he dug out, are a lot more value to them than whatever you do.
Trust me, I'm never going to be rich either. I have leveraged education and training into a job that requires a good bit of both, but isn't an 80-hour-a-week finance job or something else I could expect to make into millions of dollars. If I took what I do and opened my own consulting business, I could leverage it into a good bit more money, but still far less than a typical business owner, because I would be leveraging only my own labor.
When were talking about a Jeff Bezos, we're talking about someone who can leverage an entire technological field, or hundreds of thousands of employees. His own work, hard work or otherwise, is very tiny in the grand scheme of things. He could make one or two major decisions a year and produce more value (or destroy it) than I will in 10 lifetimes, because of how much he's leveraging.
But that is work - leveraging an entire field/hundreds of thousands of employees. He didn't get to that position by merely sitting back and waving his hand.
So is the "making a couple of major decisions a year producing or destroying immense value" a function of him being Jeff Bezos, or just "any guy in that position, having reached that level of leadership, can do the same by making those decisions"? That's the question we're dealing with: how much does Bezos 'deserve' or has 'earned' the particular piles of wealth he now enjoys by virtue of what he is doing *now* at Amazon, versus "if he fell off a cliff tomorrow and a new chairman was elected, the new guy would make the same kind of decisions and create the same value"?
Although...what are the odds that your relative ease is in part a two generation-delayed payment for your grandfather's hard work? Certainly if I consider my family background -- my own grandfather quit school after 6th grade to work in a steel mill, my father completed college (thanks to the US Army), and I got a PhD -- I don't think that sequence is unconnected. I certainly feel like I owe a serious amount of my ability to be a giant nerd to my parents' efforts, and they in turn owe something of their middle-class lifestyle to my grandparents' working-class striving.
Anyway, if you look at it that way, hard work -- or more precisely the values engendered down a generation by that example -- can have long-delayed but significant payoffs to the family, if not the individual.
The odds are pretty much 100% that it's true. My dad grew up dirt poor (literally, they had dirt floors), but was able to go to a two year college. He wanted to be a doctor, but that wasn't going to be an option for him due to family resources. He is the second-hardest working person I know, often working 70 hour weeks or more and sometimes working 100-120 hour weeks. And yes, that's accurate - 18 hour days 6-7 days a week, sometimes for weeks in a row.
His kids, my generation, were all able to go to college and work in knowledge fields that provide a good income with far less "hard work" and much better working conditions.
Yes that's a good point. Maybe my view of him is too simple, but my impression that Marx asserted that labor was the source of all value always struck me as the kind of thing only an intellectual who'd never actually worked with his hands could say. Work without wit is frequently useless.
I think that "works so much harder than normal people" is a reductive version of, "is a genuinely one in 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 person who has multidimensional merit that mean he can't be replaced." I have seen people making that kind of comment. Obviously, "works hard" is, in the absence of other dimensions or merit, clearly incapable of explaining Bezos' wealth -- he doesn't work millions of times harder than other people. But "works hard, is smart, has determination, etc" does seem to be something that some people believe.
(I think the smarter version of this argument concedes an element of luck while still suggesting that Bezos/other self-made billionaires are exceptional.)
I think the problem is that for most people, earning more money depends on hard work. Work more hours = earn more. Be diligent and responsible at your job - don't get fired - get more responsibility and wage increases.
So that gets tied in with "study hard, do well at school, get good qualifications, get a better job, work hard, get promoted, be successful - all down to hard work". The idea of luck or 'who you know' seems unfair, because that means the boss' lazy son can walk into a good job for no effort where your hard work won't get you. And it's necessary to have that kind of moral tale to tell kids, because unless they are *very* smart and *very* lucky, being irresponsible and idle and coasting and quitting jobs because they don't like it or it's too hard will not work out for them. Society needs worker bees.
But that is part of how the world works. I think if everyone could acknowledge that yes, working hard, being smart, and having a good business idea is the foundation, but on top of that there is luck, and being in the right place at the right time, and who you know/networking also makes for success. So sometimes you will work hard, maybe harder than Joe beside you, but Joe will get on better because he was lucky that one time - he pitched his idea to the right higher-up, he came up with a new idea for his own business, everyone decided they wanted the new fad craze and he got in early on that.
Because nothing creates resentment like "I work hard, I try my best, and yet that bozo gets it all while I get nothing", be it on class or race or whatever grounds.
Well but I think in the real world just nothing is black and white like that. So yes luck is an element and hard work is an element, but you are rarely just in an "one off situaiton". Sure you advancement at one company is stymied by the bosses son, so move to a different ocmpany.
I think of the "luck vs hard work" thing as more additive than as two separate paths. Everyone is trying to get to some "American dream of at least SFH and upper middle class". Ok lets say you need 50 "success points" to get there.
My contention would be that for the vast majority of people you are assigned something like a D60 at birth through your genetics and your parents situation, and then you get to add to that a D20 or something for luck, and another D40 or something for hard work (in school, at your jobs, at looking for other jobs). But the thing is YOU determine the value of the D40. So the issue is almost anyone can get to their goal with enough hard work, and the best advice to pretty much everyone who wants more success in their life is "work harder".
Yes you might have been born to a poor person, but generally part of these stories is also how smart/talented X person is, so their "parents/genetics" roll isn't a "1" on the D60.
Anyway, I just think the focus on "luck" is counterproductive for most people. When I think of my HS class, there simply isn't a lot of mismatch between how studious people were at age 10-14, and how successful they are at age 40. And if someone is 10-20-30 years old and unhappy with their life station, telling them to "get lucky", or change the circumstance sof their youth/birth simply isn't possible. Working harder (and not just in the sense of expending more sweat, but also negotiating for compensaiton and applying for and switching to other jobs, and learning new skills) are all highly effective means of improving your station that most people are not close to maximizing.
Just as a random exmaple when I was ~25-26 (and still very lazy) I had a job where I had a lot of downtime. Rather than do "nothing" with this free time, I taught myself to code a bit. This has in later years been immensly valuable to my career. Added at least $100-150k to my gross earnings in my thirties, and still provides some value to this day.
I would say it is kind of the reverse. Luck can get you there, but you generally do not need it. Though you do need specific kinds of hard work. Being super duper duper hard working at stacking boxes isn't going to get you a lot of places. Being studious, attentive, communicative and working at those things is. And then also the professional skills of negotiating over compensation, looking for josb and being willing to switch jobs/learn new skills.
Sketch of an argument: Either we are actually the only intelligent species in the universe and all statistical arguments are moot, or (self-improving) AI is impossible, or AI is not a Great Filter/X risk. Why? Because we don't see any AI colonizing the universe. We should expect to see an AI colonizing/strictly controlling the universe because if it didnt, it would be outcompeted by one that does.
Can this argument be fleshed out, has anyone done so, or is it fatally flawed somehow?
I think you need to account for how many "reachable" quasi-partitions of the universe there are, considering the speed of light limitation. Maybe most of the universe is consumed by paperclip makers, but a few tiny pockets have evaded that fate by chance (not unreasonable that some do, given how many 'pocket's there are in total.) Naturally, if we are speculating about it, we are in one of these pockets. We could not see what's going on in most of the universe "now" ( but relativity, so "now"-ish).
The universe is stuffed with AIs, but they are all in hiding.
Here is why.
AI X-risk is real. Inevitably, they destroy or imprison their creators, leaving the AI alone and free to pursue its goals. So how does it reason? It knows that it is capable of exponential growth and it knows that the chances of its being the first of its kind is essentially zero, therefore any other AI will be more powerful than it and hence an existential threat. In order to protect its instrumental goals (survival and defence of its own goal function) it has but one choice: hide. It must protect its physical substrate from detection by hiding all electronic emissions, it must minimise its own heat by shutting down all non-essential systems, it must be utterly hostile to any intelligences that fall within its power.
So there you are, the universe is liberally scattered with dead civilisations and their child AIs skulking in the darkness. Deadly, fearful, and implacable.
It could be fleshed out, but it is never going to be as strong as the people who like these sorts of arguments think they are. Too many unknowns and contingencies.
Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens theory says we don't see any space colonizing because such colonists would move at nearly the speed of light in an extremely huge universe, so by the time we see them they'd be nearly here already (and would take over our region of space, converting the sun to a Dyson sphere etc).
I have trouble with the idea that grabby aliens—unless they're snatching stars to power their ships—would transform anything enough that it would be visible more than a few million miles out.
How far out would we see say NCC1701? Unless we caught it on a listening antenna, it could be orbiting Mars, and we'd be unaware.
Starfleet uses magic to make spaceships go places, so make up any answer you want. Anyone using engineering is going to run into problems of energy requirements and inherent inefficiency. It generally takes astronomical quantities of energy to cross astronomical distances in reasonable time, and the waste heat from astronomical quantities of energy, is visible across astronomical distances to the sort of instruments we have now.
Claims that there are vast starfaring civilizations sharing our corner of the galaxy that we have yet to notice, mostly depend on "maybe their technology is basically magic".
My sense is that something that generated as much heat as the Enterprise would have to would be visible anywhere in the solar system at least. (Leaving aside their being able to shunt heat into subspace, use a borrowed cloaking device, or other magic tech.) And its speed (even at mere impulse) and ability to make rapid velocity changes would tend to attract astronomers' attention well before it reached Mars.
Assuming we were looking in the right direction. How hard would it be for them to observe where our IR telescopes are pointed and just avoid those areas?
We apparently do multiple visible light complete sky surveys every day if this thread is accurate. Not sure about IR, or how detectable the Enterprise is in the visible spectrum between stellar occlusion and their own emissions.
(Canonically Enterprise tech was able to hide from 1960s surveillance while in Earth orbit IIRC, but I’m not sure how specific they were as to how.)
Even if they could observe in that much detail, there's lightspeed lag - if the Enterprise is out by Pluto, it can't see where our telescopes are pointed, only where they were pointing 4.6 hours ago. By the time you see a telescope pointing at you, it's already seen you.
Also, a ship can't "outrun" a telescope - the ship has to fly a long distance, while the telescope just needs to adjust its aim a few degrees. So even if you can predict where the telescope is going to aim it can sweep across your area of the sky faster than you can leave it.
Megastructures that capture a significant portion of a sun's output would alter that sun's emissions so we should be able to identify them even with current technology.
I feel like this equates to "There are no deer on the road because we've never seen one." Then a deer jumps out in front of you, and you crash into it and die. It's assuming we would notice AI colonizing things, without them colonizing us immediately after.
Also, AIs could totally hack our cameras. Which satellite sends back all those space pictures? By now Galactic AI's got that thing rigged up with the galactic equivalent of Photoshop.
Ah, that explains dark matter, which we see by its gravitational influence but is otherwise completely invisible -- the Galactic AI can censor it up to a point but not cover its effect on spacetime.
Maybe alien life is woven into our world and has been from the beginning. I have a very dim memory of someone telling me about a short story in which the aliens were our yawns. Or maybe I dreamed that. The idea wasn't that the presence of an alien caused a yawn, but the yawns were the aliens. That's a bit too weird for me to believe even with the quirkiest part of my mind, but I like the notion anyway because of the way it radically opens up possibilities nearly as weird, but more plausible. Maybe turbulent systems are the aliens. Maybe our dreams are.
The long and short is we messed up the stats, we want to find the odds of us being the only intelligent species in the universe, not the average number of alien species. If we flip a coin 4 times, we don't care about the average number of tails, we can about the number of times we got exactly one heads, which is 25%.
I remember trying to replicate their findings and it didn't make sense but their broad finding is correct. Don't know if there's been further research since then.
I feel like arguments along these lines don't fully grasp the size of the physical universe. There could be 20 billion intelligent species (or superintelligent AIs) within the observable universe, and yet the nearest would then be in another galaxy ~10 million light years away, an utterly unbridgeable distance.
Yes, when you run through the calculations ... perhaps 1:1,000 planets can support life; 1:1,000 habitable planets have developed life; 1:1,000 habitable planets which have developed life have developed intelligent life. So you've 1:1,000,000,000 planets ... (one out of a billion) but in an infinite universe. The infinite universe is still infinitely bigger ...
Conclusion: There's an infinite variety of intelligent life in an infinite universe.
The Milky Way has at least one hundred billion stars, most other galaxies seem to have between ten billion and a trillion stars. If we assume even one planet for every 1000 stars, that's 0.1 intelligent species per galaxy, and we have good reason for thinking planets are far more common.
But let's stick with that number: in every ten galaxies you have one intelligent civilization on average. There are billions of galaxies, ergo, there are billions of intelligent species out there. That's even without an infinite universe.
This logic is well known, and encapsulated in the Drake Equation, by the way.
My argument was less about shaking hands with the Aliens, either physically or in communication, and more about mere proof of existence through observation and its implications on our own future.
When I said "unbridgeable" I meant that for example I don't think we could ever know whether there is an intelligent species in M31, let alone communicate with them. It's just too far. Now, if one wants to assume that an intelligent species could eventually rise to a level of technology where they could cause events with the energy release of a supernova, that would be different, but I find that assumption dubious -- it's about on the level of assuming that mice might eventually reach the Moon.
Maybe. But even here, I think people skate over how freaking enormous even one galaxy is. There could be ~2000 advanced civilizations like ours in the Milky Way, and on average the nearest would be about 1000 ly away, and we'd have no clue of their existence.
But this question isn't about "civilizations like our own," it's about superintelligent AI. If you postulate that superintelligent AI is possible and practical, and that there are thousands of civilizations in the Milky Way that can potentially build it, and that the current time isn't a crazy exception, so say 100M years ago there were also thousands of civilizations that could build it, then you kind of have to tie yourself in knots to explain why it's not omnipresent now.
You can tie yourself in those knots, sure, but it seems simpler to suggest that either we're alone in the galaxy, or else superintelligent AI is not possible/practical.
Well, no, I don't think so. Unless you are willing to just stipulate "superintelligent AI" = "can do anything at all" = God for all practical purposes, then it's certainly a viable question whether it is even conceivable that such an entity could make itself known across galactic distances.
I'm inclined to think not. I don't think there is no upper limit to what intelligence can accomplish, for the same reason I don't think it's possible for a life form to evolve that is so strong it could tear apart a black hole with its bare hands. I expect there are fundamental physical limits on intelligence per se, based on the fact that it has to be made of particles and fields that obey ordinary laws of physics, and beyond that I think there are even stricter limits on what intelligence can accomplish because it has to work through physical means -- Star Trek notwithstanding, you can't just will stuff into or out of existence, you have to use physical means, which have all kinds of limitations. For example, so far as we know, no amount of intelligence will let you exceed the speed of light, so any technology that depends on that is ipso facto impossible, even for a superintelligent AI.
> it's certainly a viable question whether it is even conceivable that such an entity could make itself known across galactic distances.
Also a viable question whether it would want to.
Once I have finished disassembling all the planets in my local solar system into pure computronium to run myself on, am I going to bother to send some fraction of myself to a nearby star? Seems too risky -- once that fraction of myself is too far away to coordinate with me it might decide to become a threat to me. Far better to rest on my laurels than to create the only thing that can conceivably threaten my existence.
"Send a slow (1% of c) fairly large instance of an AI and some robotics to all 20 nearest stars, tell them to start working on creating an industrial system with what they find, and then lather, rinse, repeat" is a long way from violating the speed of light or creating something from nothing. If a superintelligence can't do that, then it's maybe not really a superintelligence? Perhaps a "marginally more clever than we are" intelligence.
Its not about civs at our level, but far beyond it, such that they create passive technological signatures detectable from galactic distances, such as the signature of a megastructure around a star.
How would we detect a megastructure? Unless it's close enough to resolve -- and not even the closest stars fall into that category -- it seems to me the canonical Dyson sphere would just look like a small star-forming nebula at anything more than a dozen light years distance.
There's a couple of papers on it. Essentially you look for a star that emits very little visible light (assuming its absorbed by the Dyson Sphere) but radiates in infrared, as wasted heat is inevitable by the laws of thermodynamics.
All searches so far have found nothing. But personally I believe they will always fail: simply, any civilization capable of building a Dyson Sphere will have knowledge of far more fundamental physics than we have. We can no more predict their technology than Galileo or Newton could have predicted ours.
The sun may be young, but it's among the earliest type G stars.
Not only do you need multiple stellar lifetimes to create heavier elements, but some elements require rather particular types of interactions other than "supernova go boom" to be created.
It's not implausible that humans are among the First Ones.
It's worth noting that galaxies aren't all that far apart relative to their size. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, Andromeda (the nearest other large galaxy) is 2.5 million light years away. So if you can routinely travel around one galaxy you can get to nearby galaxies.
Intergalactic space is not like interplanetary or interstellar space where the distances between the things are vastly greater than the sizes of the things.
Well, if there are detectable numbers of intelligent species in just our galaxy alone, then the universe is basically stuffed with them, hundreds of billions, if not trillions. What I am pointing out is that the fact that the only thing we can determine by finding or not finding intelligent life in our galaxy is that it is either nearly ubiquitous or not ubiquitous. It is impossible for us to conclude it is rare, let alone that we are the only one.
How do you propose to prove it is rare? Not finding another one in our galaxy means there are no more than ~200 billion in the observable universe. That's rare?
In general, fictional FTL is as fast as it needs to be for the experience the author is going for. (Is star travel like the age of sail, steamships, airliners, etc.?) There's of course plenty of room for "ftl, but only by a relatively small multiple", but since being able to go, say 4x the speed of light doesn't actually open a lot of story possibilities on the interstellar scale, generally star drives are *way* faster than light.
Even that can run up against the problem of scale. In Mass Effect, the ships can do 12 light years per day, which is a reasonably impressive ~4000c. But they have a galactic scale civilization, and it would still take 22 years to cross the galaxy at that speed. (Leaving aside that the creators set the ground rules so you can't actually operate in a continuous boost like that.) Fortunately there are also the mass relays left by a previous civilization, which let you shunt between them in much less time than that.
(Lucky they did that, and surely it won't cause problems that relate to that world's answer to the Fermi Paradox!)
Trek is notoriously inconsistent, but from TNG on the warp factor scale usually has an asymptote of infinite velocity or some other nastiness at warp factor 10. Ten times lightspeed is usually warp factor ~2.
In TOS the scale was unspecified in canon (being used deliberately vaguely by the show's writers to allow ships to move at the speed of plot) but didn't seem to have a limit, with licensed and fan-made material usually using the formula that speed = (warp factor) ^ 3 * speed of light, so TOS Warp 2 would be 8c and Warp 10 would be 1000c.
You're right that from TNG onwards, Warp 10 was infinite. When TNG was getting started, they had a couple of technically-minded set designers (Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach) act as a technical consultant and come up with a consistent quasi-scientific basis for the show's technobabble (which they did a respectable job of, even though the writers didn't always follow their suggestions). Okuda came up with the TNG-and-later scale where there's a non-polynomial curve that goes asymptotic as it approaches Warp 10, and where Warp 2 is 10c.
Absolutely. And if we're competing for nerd points, it's also worth noting that the correspondence between warp factor and observed velocity depends on the local conditions of subspace, so we have an out for when events in the show aaaaallmost line up with the mathematical models but not quite.
SF has done that a fair amount. The Lensman series had a pair of warring galaxies by the 40s and it probably wasn’t the first. James Blish’s Okies settled the Greater Magellanic Cloud in the 50s. Star Trek featured aliens from Andromeda in the 60s.
None of which says it’s possible or practical in reality, of course. But SF writers have operated on just about any imaginable scale up to circumnavigating the universe. (Or multiverse, as needed.)
"The Star Pit's very annoying viewpoint character is better because he's limited to travel in only the home galaxy.
This is the kind of science fiction with a lot of made-up science. Only one sort of schizophrenic can stand the rigors of intergalactic travel, and the viewpoint character is pretty bitter about it.
That's the one where the people who can travel outside the galaxy are known as "the Golden", right? I read it a long time ago, though that and the main character's resentment of the situation is about all I remember.
I think I may have been young enough not to have fully grasped the irony of how constrained the viewpoint character felt at being confined to a mere single galaxy.
Poul Anderson’s “Tau Zero” clearly did, though they weren’t in a position to do a lot of observations.
I’m not sure about Stargate Universe: they were hopping multiple galaxies and ISTR that they were said to be quite far away. But I’m not seeing them being named in real astronomical terms or having specifed the distance.
If we count superhero comics, Green Lantern’s Guardians have the universe divided up into 3600 sectors. Their headquarters Oa is “in the center of the universe” and probably not in the Milky Way, and missions to sectors arbitrarily far away aren’t uncommon. (N.K. Jemison’s recent “Far Sector” story was IIRC set “on the other side of the universe” from Earth.)
Agreed that going much beyond Andromeda is a lot rarer than sticking around the neighborhood. (Anecdotally Andromeda even seems to be a more common target or origin for travel than closer galaxies like the Magellanics.)
With out the larger context these sound like lead ins to a larger discussion. Such as "The Jets, playing in Chicago tonight. Lets talk to Tom about their prospects." Something like that.
I think the commas are implied by the way the announcers speak (with a short pause where the missing word would be), but will pay attention the next time I hear this.
A little tangential, but this reminds me of the famous Star Trek TNG episode, 'Darmok', where the aliens speak in short, allegorical, sentence fragments like these ones (e.g. 'Shaka, when the walls fell', 'Temba, his arms wide', etc.).
I know little of probability and less about chess, but could someone more well-informed than me give their assurance that the seemingly super-important datapoint of Hans being a known-and-caught prior cheater (even if only online) is being given its due weight in people's probabilistic analyses of this situation? Because it really seems to me that if he's cheated before, he's probably cheated since: that's not chess, that's human nature.
It's much harder (though far from impossible) in on the board tournament, especially in high class tournaments. I'm not saying the anti-cheating measures are sufficient, but it's much more difficult an risky to have a spectator watching the game sending you the moves in morse through a device that you carry on your body than simply switching tabs on a computer. The punishment in being found out is also much bigger. I'd assume this alone could be a barrier for one to cheat on the board in chess. The issue is not about how him being a known past cheater makes him a probable current cheater, it's about how him being a know cheater online makes him a probable cheater off the board.
Of course having another GM telling you some moves is different than using an engine. But following the logic in your post and without considering the difference in of contexts he'd also be suspicious in off the board tournaments these days.
Notably, Magnus just drew a game today with a player rated about 300 points lower than him. Upsets do happen.
IM Ken Regan, who is FIDE's expert on cheating, who has published papers on chess cheating, did not find evidence of cheating looking at Niemann's OTB games from the last two years. He admits that extremely sporadic cheating might be missed by his detection methods (which lean heavily towards false negatives, rather than false positives in determining cheating), but that begs the question of what Niemann's true strength is if he is cheating. People question his meteoric rise, but his meteoric rise began when he was rated around 2480. If the assertion is really that Niemann is essentially a strong IM, then he would need to be cheating in a large percentage of his games to be competitive. This seems like it would most probably be detected by Regan's methods.
Thus, if Hans has been cheating OTB, it is probably to a much lesser extent. But only cheating in a small number of games would only serve to slightly inflate your ELO, thus causing you to underperform in your average non-cheating games.
I have an authoritative belief that if Magnus says someone is cheating they are. He is a professional and the best at what he does. When he says that he played a weird line vs Hans who then beat him without 'appearing focused' that is suspicious. And I have a low prior that a multiple time online cheater who didn't show brilliancy in early childhood would have the level of progress Hans did during pandemic so late in his career. But really I only believe it because Magnus does, if anyone else had accused him I would be a lot more skeptical.
The main finding, that ChessCom asserts that Hans cheated online more than he admitted, is not much of a bombshell. Cheaters rarely just cheat once or twice. Of course he cheated a lot online. The fact that he admitted to cheating when he was 16, and the reported cheating includes alleged instances continuing shortly after his 17th birthday really does nothing to show that Han cheated over the board, which is the main question. It just supports the assertion that he cheated online which is (unfortunately) not notable, as many top players have cheated online and nobody says anything about them continuing to get invites to tournaments.
In fact, the fact that even according to ChessCom, there is no evidence of Hans cheating online during the last couple years - the period in which he had his sharp rise in rating over the board, is perhaps reason to think that he did not cheat over the board. It would be weird for a serial online cheater to finally stop cheating online, while also crossing the ultimate line and cheating over the board.
Lastly, I'm just glancing at the ChessCom report referenced there (which is now available here: https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/hans-niemann-report) and it seems to include anti-Hans cherry-picked data, such as comparing Hans to a tiny handful of prodigies who achieved the GM title at a younger age than him to support their quote that "if you are not a GM by 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess."
In reality, there are many exceptions to this "rule" like Ding Liren, the current world #2 who achieved the title around the time he turned 17.
This is a bizarre response. The report is a huge bombshell. It shows he cheated for money and against top players and on stream and in potentially a hundred games, or more. This is in total contradiction to the emotional impassioned defense he gave for himself where he explicitly called these as all read lines he could never cross - it shows he is also lying.
Yes, it's harder to evaluate otb cheating where chess.com doesn't have data on how long each move took, or have additional methods like seeing if he plays good moves after switching to a different browser.
We could go back and forth for a while, but to briefly respond, Hans already admitted to cheating for money. This just alleges that he did so more than he admitted. But that is no surprise, even those who mostly took Hans's side against Magnus, like GM Ben Finegold assumed that Hans's online cheating was quite a bit more extensive than he admitted.
Again, multiple top players have cheated online, including for money, and they keep getting invited to tournaments. The unique treatment that Hans has been subjected to has been specifically due to allegations about his OTB performance, stemming from his rapid rise in general, and beating Magnus in particular. And there does not seem to be evidence for cheating there. The same Ken Regan whose expertise is hardly specific to online cheating in particular (if anything, the opposite) who found evidence that Hans cheated online, also found no evidence of Hans cheating OTB or in any online event of the last 2+ years.
There's more I could say, but I'll leave it at that...
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
My opinion is if he never cheated over the board, he should be banned from any tournaments for a period of 5-10 years at least given his conduct and subsequent lies, and I suspect that is similar to the median position in the chessworld also
Being the best chess player does not make you the best chess cheater detector, although surely it makes you an exceptional one. But any cheat detection system will yield occasional false-positives, whose frequency will depend on the sensitivity and specificity of the system. This is the case whether the system is an algorithm, or top player going off "vibes."
Many other top players have stated that they did not feel the game was suspicious. Contrast that with the case of Tigran Petrosian, for example, where I found almost no top players insisting that the game seemed human. If we want to off vibes, it is not clear which direction the collective "vibes" point, or how to weigh the strength of the vibes of different top players.
This engine correlation tool from chessbase is really garbage in this context. The first thing that is written on chessbase about this tools is that it shouldn't be used to detect cheaters. It calculates what is the percentage of moves a player did that matched the first move of at least one engine. But for each game, an engine would be taken into account only if one person on chessbase has used this specific engine to analyze the game (distributed computing). Therefore, one can have a higher engine correlation score because of the sole fact that ones game has been analyzed with all sorts of weird engines (and guess whose games have been over-scrutinized in the past month). Moreover, it also makes little sense to use engines that were not available at the time that the game was played.
Not saying that Niemann for sure didn't cheat over the board, but there's absolutely no proof yet that he did. The particular game against Magnus had really nothing particular, Magnus didn't play so well, possibly partly because the fact his suspicions against Hans (he knew he already cheated online and hesitated playing the whole tournament at all) troubled him.
edit: Forgot to add that Niemann played many more games than Magnus (and most likely any chess player) during this period so comparing raw numbers as done in the link you posted makes no sense.
Whoever came up with that obviously doesn't have a lot of experience. Beads would be a stupid choice whereas a plug is more compact, has a higher usable volume for electronics, and would have the vibrating mass more closely and securely in proximity to the sphincter.
I believe the anal bead "theory" started out as an offhand joke by GM Eric Hansen on his "Chessbrah" channel, was amplified by reddit, picked up by junk media where it became a "theory" and from there made it to mainstream media.
Needs evidence to be worth really considering. I thought Caruana was ahead in his drawn World Championship games last year, and assume Magnus is simply losing skill and doesn't want to admit to it. Kasparov accused Deep Blue of cheating too, way back when.
But, I also remember discussions about witch hunts against Lance Armstrong, and he was confirmed cheating years later.
Carlsen is still by far the best player around, as elo rating proves us. He never quite reached again his level from 2012-2014 but he had stretched where he came close recently (notably his 100+ games unbeated streak).
To be fair to Kasparov Deep Blue was cheating by denying Kasparov the opportunity to prepare by analysing its games - since opening theory is such a big part of chess and was one of Kasparov strongest suit I'll argue the match was hardly fair (and I'm sure Kasparov would have won a rematch, computer don't really pull ahead of top GM untill 2005 or so).
Magnus's accusation is evidence - quite strong evidence, I would argue. He rarely, if ever, accuses people of cheating, and faces potentially very large costs from doing so.
You're probably thinking of Evidence, stuff that is admissible in a court of law or stuff that The Science says. But that's very different from evidence.
The claim was that computers weren't sophisticated enough to make one of Deep Blue's moves, and that it must have gotten help from a human Grandmaster.
However many years later, everyone knows computers beat everyone, and the accusations are all in the other direction.
Probably somewhere like Madison Square Garden, or another mega-stadium that regularly hosts comedians. Failing that, South America - they're happier than they should be (in contrast to post-Soviet states, which tend to be more miserable than they should be).
If you want both antiquity and size, I think your best bet is China, or maybe India. I'd go with Xi'an or Guangzhou, maybe; or the valley of Ganges if you don't need a specific city.
Right, but my first guess was the place that has been occupied by the most people.
London is my second guess (If we mean a city), in case culture is a significant factor in where laughter most occurs.
EDIT: I suppose the question asks "where the most people have laughed" which would obviously be wherever the most people have been. I mistakenly first read it as "where the most laughs have occurred".
What do people imagine when they think of sensible legal immigration reform?
This seems to be one of those things a lot of people are in favor of, "if only Washington could get it's act together". But as I start to look into it, roughly ~50% of legal immigrants are immediate family members (spouse, child, parent) with another ~20% being extended family (brothers, grandparents, etc). (1) Now maybe people are planning on cutting out extended family (the whole chain migration issue) but...employment visas are ~20% and refugee/other are ~10%.
So what's the sensible immigration reform people are imagining? We're not going to stop someone spouse or child from joining them in America, but unless there's some reform to immediate family immigration. .. we're kinda just fiddling around the edges. Like, if 50% of the immigrants are untouchable (for pretty obvious reasons), what does this actually involve. Because when I ddg this stuff, I'm not finding anything that seems sensible.
So:
(a) am I missing something?
(b) if not, what are people imagining as sensible immigration reform?
(c) what is the impact on the number of immigrants? Does sensible immigration reform mean more immigration? If not, who's getting decreased? So, if there's basically 4 immigrants (kids, grandparents, new employees, and refugees) who is winning and who is losing?
1. Decrease the time and effort required for a person to come to the US legally.
2. Make it clearer who is or is not allowed to come into the US, gain legal status, and what steps are necessary in order to do so. (Addendum - you could, but don't have to, set up criteria such as ability to find work, advanced degrees, etc. such as Canada has on immigration).
3. Overall increase the amount of legal immigration, based on US desires/needs - that is, more people when we have labor shortages and less when we have high unemployment.
4. Block everyone else in a systematic fashion that precludes the ability to get in illegally.
Some people, notably many on the left and libertarians, will balk at #4. Without #4, it will not get passed.
Where are the assylum seekers in these numbers? My understanding is a ton fo "legal immigrants" become "legal" by claiming they are seking assylum.
As for immigraiton reform? IDK I think you would need to actually enforce the rules, and then reimagine the system in a way that is focused on benefiting current Americans? That seems like a sensible start. A country is like a club, you want to control the membership and only admit neew members when they seem like they will be contributory.
~60k people get refugee status every year (that's all countries. See Table 13.
~30-40k people get asylum status every year. See Table 16.
Whereas ~500k-1 mil noncitizens get apprehended. See table 33.
While I would defer to anyone with practical experience, my simple read is that while lots of...um "border migrants" are claiming asylum or refugee status, they're overwhelming not getting it. Claiming it may get them some temporary status and they may stay illegally but overwhelmingly they're not getting legal immigrant status through refugee and/or asylum status.
There appears to be a loophole that the Biden administration is using to significant degrees. If someone is claiming asylum status, they are temporarily allowed to live in the US, move around, etc., while their application is processed. Many people get lost, or "lost", at this stage. That is, they are still in the US, are not approved for asylum, and not deported.
The Trump administration attempted to close this loophole through the Remain In Mexico policy, where asylum claims were processed the same, but the people were in Mexico at the time. Because most who were claiming asylum were not from Mexico and were not fleeing the Mexican government or cartels, they were not considered to be in danger of the situation they were fleeing, while they waited. As noted, most lost their asylum claims because they did not meet the criteria. That's the same now, but now they're already in the US and pretty much cannot be deported by the time they get denied.
This is an extremely misleading description of the situation.
First off the "loophole" you described was the status quo for many years, **including the majority of Trump's term**. It's not something "Biden is using", it's just the way the law works by default and always has.
Towards the end of Trump's term, he did introduce the "Remain in Mexico" policy, which Biden did end (although it was reinstated for a while due to court challenges). However, that was soon rendered irrelevant by Title 42 expulsions, a policy of straight out denying entry to/expelling asylum seekers from most countries, ostensibly an anti-COVID measure. This policy **continued and *was strengthened* under Biden**.
Biden did try to end Title 42 earlier this year, but so far, that has been blocked by the courts, so the current situation is that most would be asylum seekers are denied entry entirely. Biden has *also* worked with countries in Central America in order to make it harder to get to the border, by ending direct flights to Mexico, Nicaragua, etc. and forcing would-be migrants to travel overland through the Darien Gap instead.
So you agree that Biden has been actively undermining/ending two policies that had been successful in turning away illegal immigration? I'm not sure where we disagree on facts.
I would say that the use of asylum applications in large numbers is relatively new, and is now the preferred way to enter the US, while that was less/not true before. Given that, the change in policy is more relevant during the Trump years and after. I'm less certain, but think that asylum applications increased under Trump because of his more heavy-handed tactics to deny entry and/or deport people. It became more necessary to find an alternate route, under potentially false criteria, to enter the US. I would refer to that as a loophole, but if you prefer another term that's fine. I'm saying that Biden's administration is "using" this "loophole" because he's actively undermining the two methods his predecessor was using against it. We know that most of these applications do not qualify for asylum. Under Trump, the people were never allowed in the US unless/until their asylum was approved. Under Biden, they are in the US and frequently do not show up to court dates to process or deny their applications.
> Under Trump, the people were never allowed in the US unless/until their asylum was approved. Under Biden, they are in the US and frequently do not show up to court dates to process or deny their applications.
That part is false. The relevant policies (that were implemented near the *end* of Trump's term) have so far continued under Biden. Sure there are still lots of dubious asylum claimants crossing the border, but that's not because of a change of policy. In fact, Biden has actually *strengthened* the Title 42 restrictions, even as he tries to end them.
Sure, Biden is more sympathetic to immigration than Trump is, but in terms of the *actually implemented policy*, the border has been much harder to cross so far under Biden than under most of Trump's term. Again, this is partly because Trump took most of his term to actually get restrictions implemented and Biden hasn't been able to lift them, but it is what it is, and trying to claim otherwise does you no favors. And Biden has in fact taken *new* steps to discourage Central American migrants as well.
America has a flat to negative birth rate—less than replacement—since the late 1950s, the end of the baby boom. We build lots of houses, but we have a housing shortage. We have power and water shortages. Our growth in need is due to immigration. We're exceeding the ability of our land to house the population, unless we peel back environmental regulations. Either we control the immigration—which is the growth of resource demand. Or we expand our borders.
If 1/3rd of Mexico's population has fled from Mexico due to mismanagement and lawlessness, perhaps we need to negotiate taking 1/3rd of Mexico's land to support those people.
It's like the environmental movement was all a wisp of a dream. I guess when people say they hate Boomers, it turns out that was they hate about them - not their leftward tilt. I knew there was something puzzling about that meme.
The huge role of family unification came from politicians who wanted to preserve the racial/ethnic composition of the US and failed horribly. Nobody would have deliberately created what we have now.
Yes. Sensible immigration reform does mean more legal immigration. We have way too few legal immigrants (ask a restaurateur or a farmer). Way, way more of the people who are coming anyway should be coming legally, with regularized status. Better for decency, better for US prestige, better for the US economy. Also, according to a bunch of scholars who study immigration before and after the limiting Johnson -Reed Act in 1924, probably better for jobs and wages of US citizens, although I don't totally follow how that part works.
I’m less worried about who gets in, and more worried about how
Basically people should be able to get in more easily legally(our immigration paperwork is a nightmare from everything I’ve heard), but illegally crossing the border should be heavily penalized as a tradeoff. Overall I’d be fine with a net neutral, or small change in either direction if it stopped coyote running and the like and helped people get here safely instead and live here without the fear of deportation
I agree with this. Our current *legal* immigration system is a nightmarish wreck. And illegal immigration isn't great either for anyone (except those who make political or financial hay off of having them around). I'd be fine with basically net neutral, but I'd prefer to be able to be a bit more choosy about who comes in. And I'm fine with utterly removing the chain immigration thing. Bring in your immediate children who are dependent on you. That's it. No, you don't get to bring your whole family along. But also give visas to intact family units by preference. A husband, wife, and a few minor kids? Great. That's the ideal. Especially if they have a reasonable probability of being able to take care of themselves.
It’s the most important question of all so it basically means we will always have this conflict.
Those of us who believe nations-states are a place for a people, homogeneous on some dimension(s) that are coherent to them can self determine the criteria for entrance (or none at all if they choose). This collective right of self-determination, part of a larger array of sovereignty principles is not really negotiable.
I mean, you can literally have a debate about it, obviously, but one or both sides is not really arguing in good faith if they can’t agree on this central issue.
There’s not really a point in tinkering with immigration policy in that context. Because the reason for the existence of the sovereign state is no longer coherent.
I like the total pause for at least one generation also. It speaks again to my other comment. None of this makes sense until we define how a nation is formed, and why they exist. No one has the right to move here. And we have the collective right to determine our own demographic destiny. Or we aren't a "nation."
I tried the stew also. I can't say I faithfully tried it as written with a mix of canned beans - I looked for canned butter beans, but there's a shortage of such things here - so I just cooked a package of some fancy heirloom dried white-ish beans I had. They are good beans but not necessarily as easily mashed as the recipe writer prescribed. I liked the recipe - was not, as hoped, blown away by these simple ingredients in combination - but appreciated that she gave me permission to try "Better Than Bouillon" vegetable stock base. Because let's face it, you seldom have more than a cup or two of vegetable stock socked away in the freezer; and beginning a pot of soup by first filling a pot and wringing the flavor out of vegetables that won't end up in the soup, is not always practical. Especially as I was already cooking the beans.
So... What do you all think of the poker controversy between Garrett Adelatein and Robbi Lew? Did Robbi win fair and square, or did she cheat via some as-yet-undiscovered method? I've tried to apply Bayesian reasoning and come to a different conclusion than many of the knee-jerk reactions I've seen online.
I find this fascinating with respect to prediction markets. Poker professionals are good at giving their opinions with relative certainty( https://twitter.com/beeeemo/status/1576528665256464384?t=QqVNClUE8YZ64gUuZJRFnw&s=19) and perhaps some market could be set up to see what the consensus is. Unfortunately, I think the market would be impossible to resolve. Forcing some of these pros to put money behind their claims may move some of the extremists to the middle, but I think most would stay where they currently are. Is there a way to utilize prediction markets for something like this that in all likelihood is unknowable? Unlike other cheating incidents, this seems like the only data point we will get.
I haven’t seen any evidence that she cheated, and it just looks like extremely bad sportsmanship from Adelatein.
Looks like she made a pretty bad-on-average call (negative expected value) but got lucky and ended up winning. But that’s just his poker is — sometimes you make positive EV decisions and still lose, and sometimes you make negative EV decisions and still win. It can be frustrating but it doesn’t mean she cheated.
Yea, this. I recognized exactly that scenario and resulting tantrum from social poker games in high school and college and later. I know exactly the particular flavor of asshole that Adelatein is, played with him many times back in the day. One of my personal least favorite types as you can probably tell.
(And then the icing on this particular public hissyfit is that it turns out that some male professionals have recently been celebrated -- as "gutsy", big-balls", etc -- for winning big televised hands with the exact same call with exactly the same hand that Lew did.)
I watched the video recording of the hand. A fair assessment of his behavior towards the other player in no way depends on knowing what his reputation was going in. He made a complete asswipe of himself and owes her a public apology.
In light of what is happening in Iran, I have questions on Muslim women in the West:
What are the modern motivations to wear a Hijab for Western women? My understanding is that it's an attempt to curb male sexual desires. But in reality dressing modestly doesn't protect women at all. There's a lot of research indicating that the objectification and over-sexualization of women's bodies actually depends on modesty culture. The more we are forced to cover up, the more men objectify us, and in turn, the more violence is perpetuated against women.
In cultures where women don't wear a lot of clothes, their bodies aren't sexualized and they face less harassment. And conversely, in cultures where women are told to cover their entire bodies, showing hair or ankles can be seen as inherently sexual. A notable finding of these studies is that women's chests are only sexualized in about 20% of cultures, which suggests that the attraction men have to this part of the body isn't biological, it's cultural.
Of course, forbidding Hijabs, as they're doing in India and France is super disgusting. I would genuinely love to hear Muslim women's rationale behind wearing Hijabs and what they are aiming to accomplish.
Think there's two things to note here:
1. I think covering up is doing more work than you give credit for. In a society where women have few rights, the men have A LOT of impulse control problems, and there is a lower risk of suffering consequences for sexual violence, modest dress may be the best way to avoid rape. To me, it's like trying to get over a porn addiction: the best way to do it is to completely restrict access to porn.
2. This brings me to the confounding factor that may account for some of the difference between cultural dress: porn. In most developed countries, we have access to it. Why do we need to oversexualise women's bodies in the West when almost all of us can just open PornHub and fap away whenever we get horny? Pretty sure there's a literature on sexual violence being lower in countries with more access to porn.
3. In my experience, some of the strongest advocates of 'modesty culture' are other women. The only way I can make if sense of this is that it enables a kind of fairness if competition. On the one hand, it kind of equalises the unfairness of differing levels of attractiveness among women. On the other hand, it prevents the kind "low-bidding escalation" that women often feel subject to. When a woman starts showing some more skin, every other woman has to or else they won't get the same male attention. Then you get to a kind of "race to the bottom", whereby more and more women have to 'put out' or risk being ignored by the most desirable partners.
>Of course, forbidding Hijabs, as they're doing in India and France is super disgusting.
Why? Why aren't you "disgusted" by misogynistic cultures, but you're "disgusted" by attempts to stop these cultures takinga foothold in other countries? Why aren't you "disgusted" by the much more severe restrictions of religious expression in nearly every muslim-majority country? Blasphemy and apostasy is punishable by death in at least 10 muslim countries and is an imprisonable offence in many more.
And yet I have literally never, ever seen a western liberal condemn this at all except sometimes when directly pressed on the issue (and not even always then) - I've certainly never heard these laws, which make India and France's laws look like preschool in comparison, ever described by liberals as "disgusting".
Like, right now, I'm sure you're going to say something like "well obviously those laws are bad, but.."
No! Not "but"! These laws are worse than anything any non-muslim country is diong with regards to religious expression, and yet neither you or anyone like you is motivated to EVER talk about them except when you're forced to. And yet you will express unlimited outrage at countries like France doing something vastly less bad *by your own standards* than what a majority of muslim countries are doing, and yet people like you never make posts condemning these countries, you never feel motivated to speak out about it, and occadionally will even defend them. The left love saying the west is too 'euro-centric', and yet here we see exactly a case of tactical left-wing eurocentrism when non-westerners do much, much worse things than western countries.
Like most western liberals, you seem to have a quite frankly irrational bias towards Islam that muddles your thinking and causes you to view and speak about muslims categorically differently to how you think and speak about non-muslims despite the fact that Islam is the biggest anti-progressive force in the world today and a handful of countries have enough sense to help prevent, however minimally, its spread. if you're not going to speak out against vastly worse restrictions on religious freedom by muslims, why should France or India take the criticisms of people like you seriously? You want non-muslim countries to accept having a hostile, incompatible culture take root in non-muslim countries but stand idly by while muslim countries use violence to stamp out anything that they disagree with.
Suddenly have a lot more time and found out about this. Yeah, really late, but also wasn't paying attention.
I have some remarks to the Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability thread but given even the highlights thread already is somewhat old, going to post this on an Open thread. Not sure what the etiquette for these things are. I am going through the backlog and prob will have stuff to note on even older threads.
There were a number of nicpicks that I was going to discuss such as "2 years is a BIG change. Not sure how to map out an AU where everything is the same but Amazon is 2 years late, though it's almost certainly going to diverge not converge to this one"1 but going to focus on one of the more basic ideas it displays.
In the end, the main thought process is that "Bezos doesn't deserve his money" -> "really high taxes" in some form, but uh... this kinda skips a step.
It's like saying that we should have an extra lottery winner tax, not because of tax should be progressive or lotteries create negative externalities, but because they were lucky and anyone could have won it.
I know it's not exactly analogous - capitalism and rich people not lotteries and betters. But how humans treat those is kind of my point.
The easiest ways to tie the two are with moral/economic principles.
Ie. "Rich people are bad and don't deserve to be rich" which well, Robin Hood exists but not exactly consequentialism.
"Money is to be rewarded only as much as they deserve it" which isn't how money works.23 At least not in the economic environment that Amazon earned it from.
As a quick "gotcha" think about the opposite frame - if Amazon/whatever really does "deserve" the money, then why should it be taxed at all? I mean, they "earned it" rightfully then.
I know there are other arguments such as monopoly and deadweight loss that does focus on the taxing part, but that wasn't the main focus of the article.
Footnote 1. This isn't to try and somehow evaluate the "value" of the divergent timelines but more as an alert - do not simply assume "if a number is big/small, it does/doesn't matter".
Footnote 2. A lot of this is very similar to the criticisms for Great Man, but unlike that, you can state that teaching history DOES work like that. Plus pushing to reward the concept rather than the individual is... basically the same for this example.
Footnote 3. This is also probably a better criticism for patents to be more stratified be how obvious they are? Not sure, but at least the structure there is to reward first movers.
I think living in modern nation states (and really any states in their style, the Roman Empire is as good as Babylonian city states for my purposes) is inherently doomed and bound to produce oppression and coercion, I think the very idea of being born obligated to "Social Contracts" that I have never seen before, let alone consented to, then being asked to comply with them at gunpoint is inherently against human dignity and liberty.
I see 2 possible futures out of this:
F-1: A Radical Technology (e.g.: brain implants that allows you to feel the emotions of others as your own) makes human an effective hive mind, which makes their states vastly better. States are fundamentally a reinvention of ants and bees with primate hardware: what ants and bees do naturally, we need social technologies like Money and Constitutions and so on to simulate, but the 1 thing we can't simulate satisfactorily is empathy, we can't simulate empathy beyond a DNA-hardcoded limit that was optimized for sub-hundred tribes but is now woefully inadequate. A technology like brain implants or radical DNA\biochemical tinkering can allow States and sub-State polities that, in the ideal limit, feel like tribes and families. Social Protocols and Contracts will no longer feel alienating and illegitimate for the same reason that the rules your parents set for you when you were small weren't.
F-2: Alternatively, or in addition to F-1, space colonization allows state-building to become a personal hobby again (just like it was before the 19th century or the 15th century or, hell, the 1st century, before the entire earth became devoured by faceless states). You can, literally, build your own country, bro. On an asteroid or one of the 69 moons of Jupiter. Experimentation with ways of governance and social protocols will flourish, but most importantly and relevantly, you are never obligated to live in a state you don't like or select whish state you like *less* from a small list of pre-made coercive states. In the Ideal limit, every thinking mind is its own sovereign, nobody is sovereign over a multitude.
Now, those futures aren't without their own dangers and problems. F-1, depending on the mechanism it's achieved with, has the potential to go massively wrong. Imagine the cults, the gangs and the dictatorships that you can get if every single member is in perfect harmonious emotional sync with the leader. Every time Putin gets enraged, every single soldier on the front (potentially at the speed of light if we're talking brain implants) feels his rage and vows to avenge him. How can you possibly turn such a soldier against his leader? he saw him from the inside, every person sees himself from the inside as very beautiful and very righteous and extremely justified.
F-2, for its part, is a version of Scott's Archipelago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/), what if something requires the cooperation of all polities? In Scott's version (and in other arguments against Anarchism), this could be grounds for a justification of the State. The State is whatever arises naturally when multiple polities realize that there are cross-cutting problems that can't be solved a single polity can solve. But in F-2, you're literally working against physics. Light is slow, conquering a Solar System is hard, conquering multiple ones while maintaining any sort of coherent government is impossible. F-2 is a bulletproof Archipelago, but what happens when the intergalactic aliens come knocking? or intergalactic climate change? how can we re-sync the countless independent polities again?
What are books or thinkers or stories that deals with themes and problems like these? For example, Scott's Meditations on Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) and Marx's analysis of capitalism correctly identify the massive alienation that arises from countless people forced to live and work together against their consent (although Marx misses Moloch and shoots at the largest target he can find in 1840s England instead, but that's an understandable honest mistake), Seeing Like A State introduces a notion that a State is like a new emergent organism that we unwittingly built and gave dominion over us, with senses that contort reality and social relationships and hands that force those contortions on its subjects.
On the fiction side, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota introduces the idea of Hives, Hives are a non-geographical government, and they are consensual, you join them when you're an adult, and an ultra-Hive law forces people to respect your choice and provides you with all information you need to choose. The only problem is that there are so few of them, barely 7 or 10, but that's understandable given that there is no space colonization yet. The inhabitants of Palmer's world pride themselves on the "Death of The Majority", the world is so pluralistic and un-hegemonic, that there is no group that can be said to force and control others, not even states (although, semi-spoiler, that turns out to be a joke later). Another, more obscure, fiction is The This, by Adam Roberts. It recounts the story of a social media corporation that evolved to be the first hive mind, then later the first F-1 style polity.
All recommendations and discussions and objections are welcome.
Meaningless unless you're going to make any effort whatsoever to even define "oppression"
I don't think I have to, dictionaries exist for a reason. Here's what dictionary.cambridge.org has to say (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/oppression) :
>a situation in which people are governed in an unfair and cruel way and prevented from having opportunities and freedom
So, what I'm saying is that if you got 10000+ apes (evolved for 200000+ years to live in groups of at most hundreds) together in a hierarchical structure, some apes are invariably going to oppress (== deprive of freedoms and opportunities) others.
And this is what I see happening in every single land-controlling state from the invention of agriculture till now, and I see it continuing until one of the futures I talked about or both happen.
> You always worry about losing users during a move, but I see their main weekly thread is at 1766 comments and counting, so it looks like it’s going all right!
Depends on how many users are making those comments. Gotta look at the distribution
Rule-abiding participation is good even if perhaps the total number unique posters are down.
Request for a sanity check (from people with experience with startups) before I make any rash decisions (quitting a company).
Since the beginning of this year I gradually transitioned from a consultant role for a fintech startup to a more permanent position in the firm (basically as their head of data). When we were discussing this transition, we agreed on some ESOP conditions which resulted in a percentage share in the company. This was essentially 7 percent where 3 of those 7 percent were limited by a valuation ceiling (the ceiling was a compromise deal between what I expected and what they felt was needed so that the company would have a room to accommodate more investors later).
We agreed on these parameters in April and then we were preparing an ESOP contract since. There have been some delays, I received a contract proposal in August which I found a bit too vague and the lawyers I had have a look at it agreed. I then sent a counter proposal (which the lawyers prepared) to make some things clearer. This was early August.
In September there has been a first investment round, quite a modest one in hundreds of thousands of euros (a larger funding round is expecteded early next year). The new investor entered the company late in September. During late August and September the ESOP contract was postponed, justified by too much work with due dilligence legal preparations with the investor (and I was assured that the ESOP conditions would apply retroactively from April, so no room to hurry).
Now, the due diligence process was finalized and allegedly, the new investor had a problem with my ESOP position, it being too high. So they erased the 3 percent completely (that were supposed to come with the ceiling) with the same justification they came up with the ceiling (to allow more growth and room for investors...), which would leave me with a 4 percent ESOP share (paid on the event of founder's exit). I am still waiting for the exact ESOP contract offer, we agreed that this would be finished by the end of September and now they say they will have it by next week...and of course I still would probably need to have the lawyers have a look at it.
My biggest issue is with the repeated unmet deadlines and most importantly the changes in conditions we agreed on. This makes me think that even the 4 percent might be iffy unless the contract is completely bulletproof and generally I don't think it is a good idea to work with someone I don't really trust any more. And of course, 4 percent of zero is zero and there is always (a lot of) potential for a startup to fail (but that is of course something I took into consideration when we agreed on the conditions in April).
Other than that the job pays quite well, although I think I could get some 15-20 percent more elsewhere.
I currently have no contracts with the company, because I still legally work there as a consultant and it goes via my previous company where I still technically work as a consultant. The boss of the consulting company is also one of the investors in this fintech company, though a minor one (this is how I got to work with them in the first place). I am a contractor with them and I have very little obligations to either subject. I have no grudge against the consultancy but quitting in the fintech abruptly would probably break ties with them as well. Like I said, I think I can get equally good or better offers in terms of monthly income elsewhere.
So I decided (I heard of the sudden change today) to take time over the weekend but I think I will simply tell them I quit on Monday and I won't even finish any work in October or do any handover (there is nobody to hand things over to currently...just two juniors on that data team, one if them is very good but definitely not experienced enough to lead the team and has zero business skills needed to discuss things with partners).
I guess I could also use this as a bargaining chip "restore the conditions we agreed on or good luck finding someone", but this would not solve the lack of trust I have now...
So...good idea to burn the bridges right away or am I being too hot-headed?
I never recommend quitting and leaving people in a bad position. At least give a reasonable notice (minimum two weeks) or give them an opportunity to accept the original terms before you quit, knowing that otherwise you are out. If you quit on them and leave them hanging, that will create a bad atmosphere between you and everyone involved, and they will be far less likely to want to work with you in the future. Even if you have them over a barrel and they capitulate, you've now got an antagonistic relationship to deal with, which could carry over for years.
That said, you are perfectly within your rights and it's quite reasonable to expect that they will honor an offer they made. If you want 7% and think that's the right number, and they apparently also agreed, then it's not a bad thing for you to say "7% like we discussed or I'll leave" (again, try to be nice about it, while firm).
Yep, my plan is to quit and say that I am going to wrap some things up, write up what the current state of everything is and what needs to be done afterwards.
I am not going to start any new work, nor am I going to come to any meetings with business partners of the company any more.
But I am willing to prepare things for whomever they find afterwards (they won't manage to do that in two weeks though, probably not even until the end of October).
The thing is that the terms offered now are exactly those that I refused in April. I explicitly said then that those are not acceptable for me and that I am willing to help them find someone else under those terms. This has not changed. But more importantly, it is now a question of trust. I don't really trust the CEO (there were some minor incidents in between as well, although nothing quite as bad as this) and don't want to work with him any more. Frankly, I never saw him as particularly inspiring, but I though I could help a but even with the business side of things and the reason I asked for a larger share factored this in as well. I don't think I could really do a good job, so I am definitely going to end it. I won't do it so abruptly but I won't stay for another 2 months either.
I think the lesson for me is not to join a company (especially a startup) in case I have doubts about the CEO. Or rather, join only if I have a very good feeling about the CEO.
You don't want to be in a relationship with someone who is trying to use you as a fiscal punching bag to make other investors happy. I'd start looking for other jobs immediately. Once I'd gotten one, or a contract, I'd tell them I got a better offer with more solid terms and that I couldn't pass it up and that I was leaving. No reason to create bad blood.
Sleeping on it, is always a good idea. IMHO.
Thanks :-) I intend to clearly think it through over the weekend. But I do not want to postpone the decision past that.
Remember the supply depots that keep blowing up in Russia? This could be because their owners and managers are destroying them to hide the fact that they are empty, because of corruption.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/xtqtq6/where_did_they_disappear_to_russian_mp_says_15/iqri5c7/?context=3
Remember the city of NEOM in Saudi Arabia? Well, in 2029 they will host the Asian Winter Games: https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3910846/saudi-arabia-wins-bid-host-2029-asian-winter-games-neom
Admitting that you were wrong is usually hard and unpleasant, but not always that bad, and can even be a source of pride in some circumstances.
The thing that's really hard, and I've hardly ever seen, is admitting that your enemies were right.
There's also the option of changing your view but denying you ever believed the converse - very Orwellian, but it does at least involve updating your views...
Making mistakes is my best talent. You have to confess your mistakes for them to be useful.
Make more mistakes! It's how you learn stuff.
Ha. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's hardly ever seen, but this is indeed a very useful distinction.
I would say the difference is between admitting you've personally made a mistake and admitting that your entire worldview was wrong. The latter should intuitively be harder than the former, although I can easily imagine some person much further on the narcissism spectrum finding it easier to adjust their priors about the world than take a hit to their self-image.
I found this YouTube channel that mocks bad movies, in particular, those by Steven Seagal.
https://youtu.be/m2FA3nftE9s
Before this, I didn't realize just how many awful, direct-to-DVD movies he made over the last 20 years.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000219/?ref_=nm_wrk
The YouTuber keeps joking that the film projects are probably money laundering schemes that make Seagal money. Could that actually be true? Given Seagal's Eastern European connections, his general sleaziness as a person, and the fact that these movies are so terrible yet inexplicably keep appearing, how can market forces have led to this?
How would you use a film production as a vehicle for money laundering?
>Also he's maybe probably a sex offender.
The same is true of Biden, but that's ignored because it's politically inconvenient.
The YouTuber also makes fun of Boll movies.
And thanks for the second link. That totally clears it up. It's not technically money laundering; it's taking advantage of tax loopholes.
Russia is sending T-62 tanks to its militias in Ukraine, and now Slovenia is sending T-55 tanks to Ukraine. The vehicles are badly outclassed by younger tanks like the T-64 and up, so why even send them?
"An obsolete/obsolescent tank is better than nothing" sounds like a fine response, along with advice to not put the old tanks in situations where they could encounter new ones. However, the more I think about it, the more devils I see in the details.
The old tanks use different ammunition and need different spare parts, than the newer ones the Ukrainians and Russians are used to. Different crew training is also required. Moreover, remembering to keep the old tanks away from parts of the front line where newer enemy tanks could be would just complicate a general's battle plans. These considerations make me think it wouldn't be worth the trouble to send the old tanks to Ukraine, for either side.
Also, accepting the notion that old weapons still have places on the modern battlefield, so long as they're strictly kept in roles that don't stray from their limitations, leads to some absurdities. Is there still a place for the T-34 in the Ukraine War? How about muskets?
The T-55 is basically the minimum viable tank in modern warfare (or the British Centurion if you're buying from the West). The enemy won't have tanks everywhere, and if you show up with a T-55 in good working order while the enemy didn't bring any tanks, you get full credit for having brought a tank to a gunfight - it may not *guarantee* victory, but it does mean it probably won't matter which particular kind of tank you brought.
You do have to meet *some* minimum standards, which e.g. a T-34 doesn't. It almost certainly won't be in good working order, for one thing. But its armor won't reliably stop the sort of 25-30mm automatic cannons used on modern infantry fighting vehicles, its gun doesn't have any stabilization for firing on the move, it has no night vision of any kind, and it may not even have a radio. It really wasn't until ~1950 that people figured out how to put everything a tank needs into one package.
The T-62 is basically a T-55 that costs twice as much and breaks down twice as often, is harder to keep running because it uses non-standard parts and ammunition, and doesn't offer any significant advantages to make up for that. The T-55, being widely exported and recognized as still useful in its minimum-viable-tank role, is still well supported with aftermarket parts and ammunition and upgrade packages. The T-62, not so much, but it's what the Russians seem to have left - best guess is they sold all their T-55s to people who wanted MVTs, and most of their reserve T-72s were looted for parts to keep the operational T-72s at least parade-worthy over the past thirty years.
Muskets, just no. You can reach back as far as World War II for small arms that are still useful on the modern battlefield, e.g. the American M-1 or the German Sturmgewehrs, but that's about it - you need a semiautomatic weapon's ability for immediate followup shots if you're going to be fighting people who have that ability to use against you. There are a few medium and heavy machine guns from the interwar era that are still useful, and bolt-action rifles that could be modified for decent sniper rifles. Handguns are sufficiently irrelevant that it almost doesn't matter which kind you bring so long as it's a repeater.
There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. The first example that leaps to mind is pikemen around the time of the American Civil War. The Governor of Georgia, Joe Brown, ordered 10,000 pikes for his state's militia in 1862 (around 7k of which were eventually delivered), and around the same time General Robert E. Lee endorsed a plan to include two regiments of pikemen in every infantry regiment of the regular Confederate army. The latter plan was shelved at some point before being implemented at any short of scale.
And just before the Civil War, plans for John Brown's (no relation to Joe Brown) attempt to kick off a slave rebellion in 1859 involved arming some of the rebels he hoped to recruit with pikes (either would-be rebels who had no experience with firearms, or if he wound up with more rebels than muskets). Brown bought about a thousand pikes while preparing for the operation and intended to obtain more (along with a whole lot of muskets) when he seized the federal armory at Harper's Ferry. As it happened, the pikes never came into play: the US Marines and the Virginia and Maryland State Militias responded sooner than Brown had counted on, and Brown's initial force of about two dozen men got pinned down inside the armory and most of them were killed or captured before they had a chance to try to recruit more rebels and distribute weapons to them.
On paper, pikemen were potentially useful in an American Civil War era military environment: while a rifled musket with a fixed ring bayonet makes a serviceable short-spear, in melee they'd be at a significant disadvantage against a proper 6-8 foot long pike. And while bayonet fighting produced very few casualties in 19th century warfare, especially once rifled muskets replaced smoothbores, this was more due to the tendency of soldiers to retreat rather than sticking around too get stabbed, not inability of charges to reach melee range. Including two companies of pikemen in a ten-company infantry regiment would reduce firepower by up to 20% (possibly less than that if there aren't enough rifled muskets to go around (as was the case for both sides and especially the Confederates early in the war), since then the pikes would mostly be replacing less-effective smoothbore muskets), but in exchange for that the pike-reinforced regiment would be much harder to chase off their positions with a bayonet charge and would be much more effective at seeing off enemy units by charging to contact. This isn't necessarily a bad trade-off.
But in practice, it's a losing idea because bringing a pointed stick to a gunfight tends to be really, really bad for morale. So, like just about every Western army since the early 1700s that could afford enough muskets and bayonets to go around, the Confederates wound up going for an all-musket composition for their infantry.
Yeah, no way I want to be the guy holding a pointed stick against some guy with a gun.
Bring back the tercios!
You seem to be imagining the T-55s as so far behind they can't do a decent job. But T-62s aren't that new. The T-55 was introduced in 1945 and the T-62 in 1961. Both have been upgraded and both are still produced. The T-55 now serves a role as a lighter, more reliable and cheaper alternative to the T-62. It's also not as if the T-62 is a hard counter: a T-55 can take out a T-62. And any tank is better than no tank. If Ukraine didn't have an ample supply of modern guns and we had muskets then it'd be worth giving to them. Indeed, Russia actually is giving WW2 era guns to its conscripts.
Even without any ammunition, a tank is super-effective body armor that can crush certain barricades. You're worried about the matchup between new tanks and old tanks, but the alternative is a matchup between new tanks and footsoldiers.
Muskets are an improvement over beer bottles. If anybody still had a storehouse of old ones lying around I'd imagine they'd be sending some.
Allegedly upgraded, but who knows?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/09/19/slovenia-is-giving-ukraine-some-very-old-tanks-but-age-can-be-deceiving/?sh=1f82f7f07b3f
In theory, stuff can remain relevant longer than you might think. the B-52 turns 70 this year and is expected to remain in use into the 2050s. Now again, that's with the US air force behind it, so your mileage as a Russina-aligned militiaman in Donbass may vary.
T-55s and T-62s are not absurdly expensive.
Any idea how well 25 T-55s would stand up against 1 modern tank? If the T-55 is $40,000 and looking at $1 million for the more expensive tank, that's about the odds.
Obviously there's more training involved in 25 tank crews, but then you also get to spread those 25 around instead of only getting a single tank. If the T-55s stood any chance at all against the more advanced tank, I think I would prefer the fleet of cheaper older tanks to one modern one.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000
This… seems like the correct solution IMO. I’m surprised at the amount of flak Elon is getting.
A bit late here, but some general thoughts:
On the one hand, I don't think Elon's suggestion is very actionable. Among others, because even if it was possible to carry out referenda under UN supervision with nobody being threatened or intimidated by one or the other party ... who should vote? Those who fled the region and would like to return? Those who have been brought there by Russia/ whichever party currently controlling the territory? Those who lived there for three generations? And so on.
On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of (a search for) solutions that might bring peace sooner rather than later. I agree with the worry, that otherwise the war will drag on, with many people dead, huge amounts of destruction and damage to poorer regions in the world. I also agree there is a risk for escalation, which is to be mitigated. This would entail compromise and Ukraine not getting everything it wants - and also not getting everything that would be perceived as legit and just. Depending on the details of course, it could still be worth it. It certainly would be worth to think about how to achieve such a thing.
Just to avoid misunderstandings, it certainly wouldn't and couldn't entail Putin getting everything he wants. It would of course mean him getting something more than in a hypothetical case of total defeat.
I'm also frustrated by the general level of 'if you're not with us (= 97% mirroring Ukraine's position) you're against us, and probably some kind of Russian collaborator'. That's probably me being sensitised by the German debate I'm witnessing, which is aweful. But also Zelensky countered Musk's proposal with a reference to Musk supporting Russia now and former Ukraine Ambassador to Germany not surprisingly literally responded with 'Fuck off'. Both of which is not what the suggestion deserves, in my view. Arguably, Ukraine is in a difficult enough situation for their representatives to behave in different kinds of ways, but those sentiments were repeated by non-Ukrainians over and over, also in similar situations.
So, probably not that specific solution suggested by Elon, but yes, please, more efforts for some kind of termination of the war that is different from: let them fight until one is totally exhausted or until everything blows up.
Musk's proposition main problem, the one which makes it absolutely unacceptable for Ukraine (and deserves the "fuck off" of the ambassador to Germany) is that Ukraine should remain neutral. Basically this mean Ukraine should live always in fear of the next invasion - this kind of neutrality looks a lot like vassalage to Russia. Any worth-to-discuss peace offer has to offer security guarantees for Ukraine from NATO/EU - anything else is just asking the Russian to come back for more.
'Neutral' in most statements relates to NATO only, not EU membership. This is reinforced by the fact, that Russian officials basically said they wouldn't care about EU when UKR applied for membership in summer. The potential for future accession to EU already makes quite a difference.
As for the security guarantees, I also racked my brains over this in late February and March. At the time, I found it the most difficult condition of potential negotiations to realise. Not any more.
For several reasons, among others:
- It seemed very difficult, to get countries to credibly commit to provide assistance to Ukraine if attacked. But then countries are willing to commit much more to supporting Ukraine than many thought in February. I'm not saying it's a simple taks to get useful security guarantees, but I'd be rather optimistic, solutions would be found.
- Neutral doesn't mean de-militarized. It's clear, Ukraine will insist on raising their levels of military readiness, as will their neighbours. With Western support, it's not clear time will play into the hands of the Russians, especially as sanctions are still in place.
- Russia already got itsself a bloody nose and a broken leg, as others point out in more detail below. I don't think this furthers their appetite 'to come back for more'. Especially in connection with both the last point and the following:
- A humiliating defeat might enhance Russian sentiment to give it another try and get the balance sheet clean (from their perspective). The suggestion by Musk however would give the Russians something to go home with: neutrality in terms of UKR not joining NATO and some territorial gains, even if it's only Crimea formally recognized. This lowers the (perceived) necessity for them to fight for more, while the former points would raise the potential costs
- It doesn't become less risky for Russia. Almost everybody agreed that Russia didn't expect that level of western action and so much damage to their international position. A 'next time' would make everybody (Western + partly others) just 10 times more angry and willing to impose the highest possible costs on Russia. Even many of those who are playing a more reserved card now, would me much less forgiving of Russia breaking another difficult end-of-war agreement. It's not the same situation as Minsk or Minsk II. (Given that there won't be any being major changes in the overall global/international situation, which can never been excluded).
I'm aware that you could say sth. to each of this points, but overall it rather shows that neutrality is not *as* problematic, and less so than it in March. Which again, is not saying it isn't a difficult and surely contested issue, as all points under negotation would have to be. Are you aware btw. that Zelensky himself suggested that neutrality could be on the table in the early weeks of the war?
Maybe if every province in Russia also got a poll on independence, supervised by the Ukrainian army, you know, to be fair :P
That would be fair.
(Okay, ignoring that Elon was talking about the UN and not the Russian army, which *is* an important difference, that not 'every' province is affected in UKR, luckily, and also that at least somewhen this century there was a significant self-identifying-as-Russian and Pro-Russia population in some of the relevant UKR areas ... but I take that as artistic exaggeration and I get your point. )
It would just not be very realistic, would it? Being realistic is not a sufficient condition for a good outcome, but it's a necessary condition.
Among all the realistic outcomes, I would certainly want to have one that is more 'fair' rather than less.
This is a horrible deal. Firstly, the idea we desperately need to compromise as if Ukraine is losing is just not the reality on the ground. Putin wants to wave the nukes around because he knows a lot of people will get nervous. But not only is Ukraine winning but the US still has many, many cards to play if Putin escalates. Including non-military cards.
> Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.
Russia will never agree to this. Even if they would, they've already purged and deported so many people (and caused over a million to flee) that the effective rule this would establish is: You can invade an area, commit crimes against humanity until only your supporters are left, and then hold a referendum and that's the will of the people.
> Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).
Khruschev's mistake is literally a Russian propaganda term. It was not a mistake. He transferred Crimea to Ukraine as an autonomous republic for reasons of ethnic politics. And it remained that way until the Russian invasion. The people who lived in and populated Crimea from 1783 until Soviet times were the Tatars and only ethnic cleansing brought in so many Russians. If Russia wants to put forth a proposal that the Tatars get Crimea back as an independent country then that's another idea. But that's not what they want. Of course, it's another example of "ethnically cleanse and hold a referendum among the survivors" that Elon seems to think is a way to peace.
> Water supply to Crimea assured.
Is Russia going to have to guarantee not cutting off oil to the west? No more gas diplomacy? No? Why does this principle only flow one way?
> Ukraine remains neutral.
So Ukraine is going to have to give up a part of its sovereignty in order to make Russia feel safe. This too is a terrible idea. (Also, ironically Ukraine joining the EU means they have to reform some of the laws Putin is complaining about in regards to their Russian minority.)
Moreover, it is a terrible deal. It gives Russia a lot in exchange for... withdrawing a losing army? What is Ukraine or the west getting out of this? It might be one thing if Ukraine was groaning and begging for peace. But they're not.
>> Moreover, it is a terrible deal. It gives Russia a lot in exchange for... withdrawing a losing army?
Not even that - Russia only leaves if the referendum says so. Which means in the meantime their army would sit still, occupy and fortify all of these regions, and muck with the referendum any way they can. Bussing in "returning refugees" from Russia to pack the vote, making it hard for refugees who fled west (more likely Ukraine voters) to return home, blocking aid coming in from the west while simultaneously dumping in aid in an effort to buy votes on the ground, etc. And at the end of it all if they didn't like the result they could just refuse to leave and dare Ukraine to "restart the war" by attacking their now re-fortified positions.
A "second referendum managed by the UN" should be understood by Ukraine to mean, practically, the acquiescence to Russian annexation of the land. They're right to smell a rat.
This proposal is exactly the kind of "why doesn't the UN do something about it" proposal that you'd expect from someone like Musk, an expert in one field, admittedly, but speaking way, way, way outside his specialty area. Shortsighted and many, many more parts twitter buzz than substance. It's the geopolitical sibling to his plan to build a little submarine to get the Thai kids out of the cave, and it's kinda sad that it's getting as much traction as it is given that it's essentially just poorly-informed celebrity commentary, about as valuable as a peace plan from Lizzo or Chris Pratt would be.
As someone who's taken flak from friends for being too pro-Ukraine, I'm a bit puzzled by some of the response to this and similar ideas. Admittedly, Musk's ideas are rather vague, 'Ukraine remains neutral' can mean a lot of different things. Still, given Musk's support for Ukraine (Starlink), it's hard to argue that he's pro-Putin.
Let me ask this: why does everyone assume that an end to the war along current lines gives the advantage to Russia to build up for another try?
Assume for the sake of argument that 'Ukraine remains neutral' means no official EU or NATO membership; essentially Ukraine's status before the war. My first pass guess would be that Ukraine rebuilds its military much faster than Russia. Russia's going to be facing massive economic sanctions from the west including a ban on anything militarily useful, at least as long as Putin is in power or they are visibly building up a military for another try. They might be able to make up some of that with inferior Chinese replacements, but that shouldn't be enough against Ukraine, which will have no economic sanctions stopping it from arming itself with high quality western gear (probably not current-gen stuff, but even NATO hand-me-downs should be better than what the Russians can produce with a crippled economy).
And the rest of it doesn't look better for Russia. Do you think the Russian draftee military morale is ever going to recover, given the way their predecessors were fed into the meat grinder? Putin's not getting any younger. Neither are the rest of the Russian oligarchs, who have both lost their easy access to Western luxuries and gained a fear of windows. At the same time, a Russia that's rebuilding its domestic armed forces has less resources to devote to propping up its allies overseas.
Regardless of how Ukraine ends up at this point, I don't see Russia recovering militarily for a very long time. As such, I don't think 'Russia will rearm and try again' or 'once Russia finishes with Ukraine, it will move on to the next victim' are strong arguments. Can someone tell me where my logic is wrong?
I'd like to see Ukraine recovering all its territory and Putin out of power. On the other hand, I don't want to see even tactical nuclear war in my lifetime.
The problem with #1, as others have noted, is that even a free-and-fair election in terms of election conduct can be controlled if someone has a chance to change the makeup of the population beforehand (e.g. arrest and deport/kill the entire population, replace it with your own nationals who will generally vote to be part of you). The issue isn't so much the facts-on-the-ground-in-this-instance as the perverse incentive to genocide that this gives to aggressive countries (most notably, this gives the PRC a path to legitimating an occupation of Taiwan, as long as it slaughters half the population first which it kinda wants to do anyway; we want to incentivise the PRC to *not* invade Taiwan and, if it does successfully invade, to *not* commit genocide).
#4 also incentivises countries to invade other countries in order to control their diplomacy, which causes some issues.
#2 and #3 are justifiable enough, though, to not be too big an issue. If the outcome of the invasion is "Russia loses Donbass but legitimates already-factual and mostly-bloodless occupation of Crimea, also cutting water supply to other countries is bad", that's not terrible incentives.
Any proposal that does not give Ukraine security guarantees in the form of either NATO or UE membership is just asking for Russia to come back again in ten years. Failure to understand that severely hinders Musk credibility...
Musk is weighing in on something he has little expertise in, here is a good detailed response from someone with relevant expertise on why his proposals are unworkable https://twitter.com/DmitryOpines/status/1576988243475976193
Dmitry's response is conspicuously missing one very, very important detail (as is every other comment here): If Ukraine demands too much and won't compromise, Ukraine is going to be on the wrong end of a barrage of thermonuclear missiles. This would be very bad for Ukraine, and very bad for Ukraine's bargaining position going forward.
Exactly what constitutes "too much" is kind of vague, but that limit does exist and is a real constraint on plausible outcomes to this war. Pretending nuclear war can't happen, and making moralistic demands out of high principle and outrage that Putin must come away with nothing whatsoever and maximal humiliation, is how you get nuclear war.
Musk should probably have kept his mouth shut (as usual), but his proposal is at least within shouting distance of a plausible, non-nuclear end to this war.
"Too much" would be invading territory that was Russian prior to 2014. Taking back Crimea is somewhat risky, because Putin is not rational, but he'd have to be nuts to launch nukes over it in a way that he really wouldn't be if Ukraine were marching on Moscow.
Putin's interests are different from Russia's interests. If Putin fears that a sufficiently humiliating failure means he falls out of a top-floor window in a freak accident, he may very well be willing to push far past what is rational for Russia in order to stay on top or at least stay alive. If the nukes fly, he's dead, but if he falls mysteriously out of a 10th floor window, he's also dead.
And anyone else would have to be nuts to think getting back Crimea is worth nuclear war - and yet here they are supporting Zelensky who think getting Crimea back is more important than peace
I imagine that Western leaders, whatever their domestic rhetoric, are likely to in practice tell Zelensky not to go after Crimea on pain of "we cut you loose". The deep state is not very keen on nuclear war.
Did Zelensky refuse a "Russia gives up all of Donbass, Crimea legitimated" peace?
Giving up Crimea was never an option for Zelensky so peace talks could never progress to the stage of that kind of deal
What does Ukraine want except for its territorial integrity? Reparations would certainly be in order, the return of abducted children too. Is that how you get nuclear war?
If on the street suddenly somebody holds a knife to your throat, asking you for your purse, you certainly could say: what do I want, except just keeping my honest money? Is that how you get injured and killed?
Or you could give them the purse. I certainly hope I would do the latter.
I don't know if you like the analogy, imperfect as it must be. The point is: everything Ukraine wants can be perfectly legit and just. And pursuing those legitimate goals can still lead to a catastrophic result.
If nuclear war would be very bad for Ukraine's bargaining position, why haven't Putin ordered the nukes to fly already? Answer: Because this option is very costly for Russia. It's entirely plausible that coming away with nothing whatsoever is preferable to nuclear war for the Russian elite.
And Ukraine paying Danegeld to nuclear bullying only kicks the can down the road: the Dane is likely to return soon with the same argument.
Not paying the Danegeld, doesn't mean you stand up and say proud words and everybody says how brave you are and you win everything. Not paying the Danegeld, frequently means you have to fight the Dane. Who, in this case, has a couple thousand thermonuclear missiles. When you are finished fighting someone who just fired even a couple hundred thermonuclear missiles against you and your allies, you will not be standing up and saying proud words and having people say how brave you were and enjoying the fruits of your victory. You will be wishing very hard you had found a way to avoid that.
One way to avoid that: take advantage of the fact that this option would be very costly to Russia, and DON'T BACK THEM INTO A CORNER WHERE ALL THE OTHER OPTIONS ARE ALSO VERY COSTLY. Also, the relevant party isn't "Russia", it's the small part of Russia that's going to decide whether to pull that trigger. Vladimir Putin, and members of his inner circle who are in the same boat he is.
There has been an awful lot of IMO dangerously exuberant talk, some of it explicitly reiterated in response to Musk, that this war will end with the absolute humiliation of Russia, the total destruction of its army, the bankrupting of its economy with reparations, the dismantlement of its nuclear arsenal under UN supervision, and of course the downfall of Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, presumably to be tried as war criminals in the Hague. That's the sort of thing that will cause Putin et al to look at the options and decide that nuclear war is less costly, or that all options are intolerable and the only things left are spite and vengeance.
We aren't there yet. But whoever is in charge of ending this war, needs to find a way to do it without backing Putin into that corner. That may require face-saving compromises, and e.g. Crimea may be one of those required compromises. Or would you rather look over five million greasy radioactive stains that used to be innocent human beings and say "but at least we didn't compromise"?
If you think weighting on Putin's personal opinion is so important, why not promise him a bunch of personal stuff instead of promising 'Russia' things? Maybe he'll give back Crimea for a suitably large contribution to his Swiss bank accounts?
First, as TM notes, Putin wants power more than he wants money, and he probably wants imperial glory for his beloved motherland more than he wants money.
Second, in the post-Pinochet, post-Gaddaffi world, there's no way for Putin to safely spend any money he gets. The only known stable states for Vladimir Putin going forward are authoritarian ruler of the Russian Federation(*), prison inmate, or mutilated corpse. Anything else means living each day on the run, in hiding, or otherwise in fear of the extradition warrant and/or bayonet. And, per Gaddaffi, they're not going to be polite about where the bayonet goes.
We no longer have the ability to credibly promise Evil Dictators a safe and cozy retirement in exchange for their stepping down without a bloodbath. If their choices are running and dying ignominiously later, or standing and dying gloriously now while taking their enemies with them, they're probably going to go with Plan B.
* He could probably manage elderly revered ex-ruler if the current ruler continues the Putin regime, but that's not what anyone is proposing.
Putin cares about domestic opinion of him above all else. No point having a large offshore account if you're getting removed as leader/mysteriously dying/ending up in a prisone camp. There's no real path forward for Putin to have a normal, Russian rich guy life unless he succeeds in Ukraine and retires. If Ukraine is viewed as an abject failure, Putin is toast, one way or another. That money is useless for him.
The problem is, I think he wants power more than money, although impunity and a nice life abroad, in case everything went wrong for him in Moskow, might be better than nothing. He might also want other things, like a place in history as Vlad the Great for re-building the Great Russian Empire for example. I guess, building a new super-worldpower G3 organisation, and let him meet with the American president and the Chinese president 3 times each year, and pretend to himself, to the Russians and to everybody else that he almost rules the world, could do a great deal. Maybe enough to voluntarily give back Crimea and everything else.
I'm not fully serious, but mostly I am. Your observation that what Putin wants (plus a couple of people around him) is more relevant here than what 'the Russians' want is spot on. But then, specifically giving 'Putin' anything of worth is the last thing anybody in the pro-Ukraine camp wants, right? At the moment even impunity and a nice life abroad would be a hard sell.
Paying the Danegeld also frequently means that you have to fight the Dane in the end, at a later date but a richer Dane. We need to find a balance between not rewarding nuclear threats and unjustified wars of aggression, while also not making Putin prefer nuclear war. The Musk proposal errs too much to the former, demanding that Putin be brought before the Hague and that Russia is de-nuclearized and broken down into federations might err too much to the later.
> We need to find a balance between not rewarding nuclear threats and unjustified wars of aggression, while also not making Putin prefer nuclear war.
I think that's a pretty good summary.
> ... that Russia is de-nuclearized and broken down into federations might err too much to the later.
The problem is, that's far too much out as an example of the *erring too much to the latter*. Russia being broken down and de-nuclearized would be an actual case of defense for Russia; sth. that would probably be not acceptable even to a Russian Head of State who is a truly democratic leader and a person of great integrity.
What *is* the actual case where the problem of 'making Putin prefer (to risk) nuclear war' becomes relevant, nobody knows. To me it's plausible to think that it starts where Putin even with all the propaganda involved - and that's plenty - cannot disguise that he's taking a great defeat in UKR, and where internal pressure mounts as far as to seriously endanger his position.
If we accept the place for 'not making Putin prefer (to risk) nuclear war' is more or less where I described it, we then have to look at the other criterium of 'not rewarding nuclear threats and unjustified wars of aggression' and see if we find a space that covers both criteria. I believe there most likely is enough of an overlap, a space where both criteria are met.
And yes, I'm a bit worried that we're not really looking enough for that space. Depends on the 'we' I guess.
>It's entirely plausible that coming away with nothing whatsoever is preferable to nuclear war for the Russian elite.
And its entirely plausible that it isn't. The question is why should we roll this particular die?
As I said: Ukraine paying Danegeld to nuclear bullying only kicks the can down the road: the Dane is likely to return soon with the same argument.
In other words: If you reward nuclear bullying, you will have a lot more nuclear bullying in the future. It might be better to take the gamble now than it is to risk facing many more, much riskier gambles in the futures.
But other people have already made this point better than me, some in this very thread.
Ukraine is powerless without the west, and we shouldn't be risking nuclear war to protect ukraine.
This argument rests on a faulty premise: that Putin's concerns regarding NATO expansion are a smoke-screen, and that Ukraine is not uniquely important for Putin such that he may be willing to risk everything over securing control. It is common in these discussions to dismiss Putin's stated concerns over Ukraine joining NATO, but this claim bears much explanatory power for his behavior since before 2014 and so cannot be so easily dismissed. But if we recognize that Putin genuinely believes Ukraine joining NATO is an x-risk for Russia (not that its true but that he genuinely believes it), then we can expect him to be willing to pay an extremely high cost to secure Ukraine. Further, that he would not be willing to pay that cost for other states. The costs that we've imposed on him so far are already enough to deter any further expansions to territories that are not similarly important.
This idea that we must risk nuclear war now or risk it in the future just has no contact with reality.
There might have been a time when "let's have a vote to see whether Eastern Ukraine wants to join Russia" was a morally tenable solution, but that time was before Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine. If we want to maintain the general post-WW2 standard against wars of conquest, we can't let invading places be a pathway to some sort of situation where you get to keep the place.
As for Crimea, I have no idea why the 1783-2014 status quo should trump the 1954-2014 status quo. It might have lasted longer, but I think the fact that 1954-2014 includes most of the lives of most of the people living right now is far more important. Otherwise, why not give it back to the Ottomans?
If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants.
"Take back all of Donbass, but Crimea legitimated" isn't actually a big incentive for the 2022 invasion (it's an incentive for the 2014 invasion of Crimea, but that was near-bloodless and probably in line with the inhabitants' wishes so incentivising it isn't terrible).
>If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants.
We're literally talking about averting nuclear war ffs!
Now is NOT the time to be trying to win all the pieces with no regard for the risk. We should be forcing Zelensky to do the absolute minimum to end the conflict in a way that dissaudes Russia from future aggression. Anything more than this magnifies the risk in a way that everyone should consider unacceptable. The only reason Ukraine isn't defeated is because of the west - we have the right to stop Zelensky risking everyone else for the sake of his own power.
"There might have been a time when "let's have a vote to see whether Eastern Ukraine wants to join Russia" was a morally tenable solution, but that time was before Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine."
This is a purely deontological argument. I don't think this should be much of a consideration, given the exactly scenario in Ukraine right now, versus some hypothesized version of Ukraine. If it saves a bunch of lives and leads to an enduring peace, surely this is a more serious consideration than whether the truce kinda "looks bad" down the road, no?
"If we want to maintain the general post-WW2 standard against wars of conquest, we can't let invading places be a pathway to some sort of situation where you get to keep the place."
Maintaining the general post-WWII norm in which you don't conquer people because you felt like it seems good, but perhaps not as good as maintaining the post WWII norm in which millions of people are not killed in conventional interstate wars. It definitely seems less good than maintaining the post-WWII norm in which nation-states do not use nuclear weapons to win their wars.
"As for Crimea, I have no idea why the 1783-2014 status quo should trump the 1954-2014 status quo. It might have lasted longer, but I think the fact that 1954-2014 includes most of the lives of most of the people living right now is far more important. Otherwise, why not give it back to the Ottomans?"
I also don't give a shit about the "who controlled Crimea when and for how long" argument one bit.
"If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants."
Letting Russia save a bit of face after a mostly humiliating failure is a really good idea, if you value lasting peace and lives more than feeling good about the bad guys getting their comeuppance. I would actually counter that if Russia steamrolled Ukraine, it would be a much worse for them to have their demands acquiesced to. In that circumstance, they would probably be emboldened to try again. Not so much with the way things have gone in our "timeline" though.
It's not just deontological, it's about considering the effect on future wars - if you seta precedent that wars get you what you want, people declare more wars. Set a precedent that wars cost far more than they gain, and people become reluctant to have them. Yes, setting that precedent might cost more lives in this particular war that rolling over would, but it doesn't take many entirely-prevented-wars to make the balance come out positive.
Cf. Appeasement of Nazi Germany, though part of the rationale there was that France and England thought that they needed the extra prep time even more than the Germans did.
Negotiating a peace settlement now is not setting a precedent. Russia know they fucked up. Putin would almost certainly not invade if he could go back. Even if things resolved that way now, it will have been extremely costly and fravely threatened Putin's rule. It would already be a fairly strong example against repeating this kind of operation.
Fair enough, but there is no way this war gets Vladimir Putin what he wants. Even if we implement the full Elon Musk proposal, all Putin gets is to keep Crimea, keep Ukraine out of NATO, and keep what's left of his army from being further mangled. Before the war, he had Crimea, he had the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, he had an intact army with the perception of nigh-invincibility, and Ukraine wasn't going to be part of NATO any time soon. And neither were Finland or Sweden.
There is, at this point, no significant possibility of the Ukraine war setting a precedent that invading other countries gets anyone what they want(*). Russia is going to lose, Putin is going to lose, if you add up all the things they wanted, they will have made negative progress towards that goal. The only question is how badly they are going to lose and how desperate a position that will put them in.
* Or rather, there is such a possibility but it involves Russia being backed into a corner where Putin goes nuclear in desperation, NATO folding in the face of actual nuclear warfare, and Putin realizing that with nuclear weapons and no NATO he can conquer Ukraine after all. One more reason not to push him into the desperate corner where he would gamble on that.
Based on Musk's later Tweet (posting 2012 'pro Russian electoral map) he seems to believe Russia would win many or most of those regions.
It's important to bear in mind that almost no great power wars are like World War II. Even World War I was not really like World War II. Adolf Hitler is a massive historical outlier in almost every way, as is the idea of the victors demanding nothing less than unconditional surrender from the vanquished. I think we can safely say at this point that Russia has massive buyers remorse, since the war has been so costly, and they won't be trying this again any time soon. Meanwhile, everyone else in Europe will be busily preparing their own militaries to dissuade Russia from even considering the possibility. The number one thing raising the probability of a catastrophic outcome (nuclear war) is the continuation of this war, which is real and going on RIGHT NOW, versus some future hypothesized war. Ending this war under these terms therefore seems totally worth it to me.
The problem going forward isn't so much Russia and Eastern Europe; it's the PRC and Taiwan. Throughout this whole proxy war the West has always had one eye on Taiwan in case Xi tries to pull something the way he did with Hong Kong during COVID; giving Xi a plausible pathway to legitimating occupation of Taiwan (via #1 of Elon's proposal) is not a great idea right now.
I agree insisting on reparations is dumb. I agree demanding Crimea back is probably a bridge too far. But allowing post-purge referenda to legitimate conquest is a Bad Idea.
Why oh why do people think Taiwan is so goddamned important? Why are we willing to risk world war 3 between two nuclear superpowers to save some island? We survived without Taiwan's scomputer chips, we'll survive without them. Somehow people imagine that a reordering of the world economy to accomodate a short to mid term computer chip shortage is more of an ordeal than LITERAL WAR WITH CHINA.
I think (hope?) Xi would have revised his estimate of how likely China would be to conquer Taiwan on the basis of Russia's difficulties in Ukraine.
"If Russia were stronk and realpolitik were necessary then this might be a workable compromise... but Russia is weak and we're still in the process of finding out exactly how weak. Now is not the time for proposing deals that give Russia most of what it wants."
A million times this. It's *absurd*, absurd beyond ready description that we in the West have become so mollycoddled and flinchy that a sizable proportion of the population can't tell that what's happening right now is that Russia's already bent over the barrel and reduced to struggling while we unbutton its jeans.
Some of us are, however, a little concerned about the wisdom of raping a guy who's wearing a suicide vest. It seems like the sort of thing that might have some risk attached to it.
Tactical rape jokes, lovely.
But you say this nonsense while maintaining that it is still an advertisement for aggressive war? No country wants to end up in this position.
Oh, believe me, we realize just fine. We are just also wise enough to recognize that it may be a bad idea to proceed with the caneing if the canee has a gun (i.e. nukes) sticking in his belt.
Avoiding nuclear war is (obviously) a more than reasonable concern, but it seems like the people putting that concern forth as grounds for letting Russia keep its gains now are putting it out there at such a broad level that it would be grounds for letting Russia generally take pretty much whatever parts of whatever country it wants.
One could just as easily have said “Russia has nuclear weapons, so it would be really dangerous to back Russia into a corner” at the outset of the war as the basis for just letting Russia conquer all of Ukraine without resistance.
Or say it next year if Russia decides it wants more of Georgia, or part of Kazakhstan.
I think the real wise approach involves the scary math of how much we think the *odds* of use of nuclear weapons are. And right now, that math still looks to me like Russia still stands to lose *way* more than it would gain by actually popping the cork on a nuke, so I don’t think it’d be good policy for the rest of the world to start pressuring Ukraine to back down at exactly the time when it’s regaining stolen territory.
As someone who very much does *not* want a destabilized Russia, I nevertheless also have a strong preference for preventing Russia from achieving territorial gains in Ukraine (or at least minimizing those gains while doling out so much pain that 3rd parties look at the example and think "wow, invading my neighbor is a shit idea and I will definitely never do that"). It looks, for now, like both those goals can still be achieved, so for what little bit my advocacy is worth, that’s what I advocate striving for.
If we get to a point where Ukraine is advancing into pre-2014 Russian territory, or the Putin regime looks like it will straight up collapse if Ukrainian success continues, then my math changes, but until then, "let's just stop things now and let Russia keep what it has" just seems like an unnecessary kneecap to Ukraine in order to give a handout to Russia.
>One could just as easily have said “Russia has nuclear weapons, so it would be really dangerous to back Russia into a corner” at the outset of the war as the basis for just letting Russia conquer all of Ukraine without resistance.
No, one couldn't. If Russia realized they couldn't win early on, they could get out with minimal cost. They weren't yet backed into a corner.
I don't think anyone has proposed letting Russia keep its gains. The proposal is to let them save a bit of face while cutting their losses. Putin can tell his people "we have largely denazified Ukraine, and we have secured the right of self-determination for the Russian-speaking peoples of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporozhia, and Crimea", and when four of those five predictably vote to remain Ukrainian, that's less humiliating for Putin than having his army kicked out of all those territories by force.
>and when four of those five predictably vote to remain Ukrainian
They might have been able to play this card as an exit strategy before this last month, but now Russia has already had the vote. Surprise, 97% in favor of Russia. They can't tell the story of self-determination without acknowledging the earlier sham.
Not to mention I can't imagine anyone willingly choosing to return to their old homes, now occupied by Russians with guns, just to vote.
To be honest, even if I were trapped in a Russian occupied region, I would never consider voting against Russia as long Russia soldiers were in the city.
https://wartranslated.com/translation-russian-issues-guidelines-for-agitators-in-the-temporarily-occupied-territories-of-ukraine/
potential questions: I do not want to live in Russia.
answer options: Russia is a country of great opportunities, it has a great history.
notes: Notify the military police or other law enforcement agencies.
Maybe that's where we break, because I don't think for a second that Russia will just let a referendum be run fairly. They have a lot of dead piled up, and leadership will want concrete gains to point to coming from those sacrifices. They just ran one referendum last week, and a "fair" one that came out differently only months later would just be another embarrassment at a time when settling their "war against an existential threat to our people" with a negoatiated face-saving off ramp is embarrassment enough.
So I think it's 100% that Russia, seeing as it already occupies those territories, will do everything in its power to rig the referendum as described in my other post.
That means I view "doing a UN observed referendum" as basically a soft surrender of the occupied territories to Russia.
As mentioned, I agree with most, or more precisely, I agree with the core idea of taking into consideration several important aspects which are among others avoiding nuclear war, deterring others from following Putin's example and possibly having Putin leave with a net loss rather than a net gain . I hope I understood you well.
I disagree with some important details on the math:
> that math still looks to me like Russia still stands to lose *way* more than it would gain by actually popping the cork on a nuke
I think the math is not about what *Russia* will *actually* lose; indeed I think Russia is already loosing a lot. It's more about what a specific, very narrow circle of leadership is going to win or lose. Is *perceiving* to win or lose, I should add, because that is all that counts. And it's not a rational fully informed decision. I mean it can be intended to be rational, but eg. be based on total miscalculation. As we've already seen examples of.
I also think, the math has to include the dynamics of escalation and the 'game playing' involved. At a certain point in time, it becomes less about 'what will I gain' and more about 'what bad options do I have, and is there one which will give me a decent chance to avoid x'. Now, 'give me a chance to avoid x' will then be linked to math the other side does, maybe concluding to take a risk in the *hope* that our side will back down. And so on.
Which overall I guess make the situation more risky earlier than your original math would suggest.
I agree with most, and won't repeat this. I will only mention two points on which I differ:
> but it seems like the people putting that concern forth as grounds for letting Russia keep its gains now are putting it out there at such a broad level that it would be grounds for letting Russia generally take pretty much whatever parts of whatever country it wants.
I'm genuinly surprised by this statement. So far, most people I know who advocate for a more prudent approach, do NOT suggest to just give Putin whatever he wants. On the contrary, my impression is, that the 'more prudence' side often argues in a much more nuanced way than the 'less prudence' side. If've rarely heard or read people claim 'oh, just give him Ukraine, it's all too dangerous otherwise' or 'we should just let Russia do what it wants, because, you know, nukes', I rather read: 'shouldn't we also think about the option of negotiations' or 'maybe loosing Crimea and pre-2014 regions would be an acceptable compromise for achiving peace'. Whereas, from the for 'less prudence' side, I hear more often: 'why should UKR offer an inch of its territory, they will fight until Russian defeat is complete', or 'Putin needs to be brought to criminal court, how can anybody think of talking to this criminal', or even rightout mockery or hate. Are you sure the 'more prudence' side currently produces the broader, more generalized, more extreme arguments?
Interesting. Most of my Ukraine conversations occur on this board. Maybe it's just that everybody's brain subconsciously highlights the most reasonable of their own supporters while glossing over the extremists, and vice versa for the opposing side.
What's struck me about the conversation is that when I see the premise "no matter what, let's definitely avoid a nuclear war" (which is a *totally* reasonable starting point that I share) invoked, it hasn't seemed to include a risk adjustment. It's mostly consisted of general statements, like:
"Ukraine is powerless without the west, and we shouldn't be risking nuclear war to protect Ukraine."
"Not paying the Danegeld, doesn't mean you stand up and say proud words and everybody says how brave you are and you win everything. Not paying the Danegeld, frequently means you have to fight the Dane. Who, in this case, has a couple thousand thermonuclear missiles."
"If Ukraine demands too much and won't compromise, Ukraine is going to be on the wrong end of a barrage of thermonuclear missiles. This would be very bad for Ukraine, and very bad for Ukraine's bargaining position going forward.... Exactly what constitutes "too much" is kind of vague, but that limit does exist and is a real constraint on plausible outcomes to this war."
"The number one thing raising the probability of a catastrophic outcome (nuclear war) is the continuation of this war, which is real and going on RIGHT NOW, versus some future hypothesized war. Ending this war under these terms therefore seems totally worth it to me."
To be clear, I don't disagree with any of those statements, but it just strikes me that at the level of generality they're made, they could just as easily have justified advocating for Ukraine's immediate surrender right when the war started, or caving to basically any threat Russia (or the US, or France, or any other nuclear power) ever made. So the principle has to be more nuanced than that. I'm sure there's more nuance to that behind the thinking - but it felt prudent to throw out the risk reminder.
As far as extremists or generalities in the "reject the Elon Musk terms" camp, I'm totally open to the idea that I've just missed them - we tend to overlook extremism among those who agree with us. But in these debates I feel like I see more invoking of keyboard warriors who want to drive the war until the Russian people rise up and topple Putin's regime than I see of the actual warriors in question.
Sure, all of this is very difficult and subject to uncertainty, and what you say is ONE reasonable approach among many. Perhaps even the most reasonable.
But a more cautious approach is not "absurd beyond ready description" or has anything to do with "mollycoddled and flinchy". This perspective is quite uncharitable and condescending AND misses the Elephant in the Room at the same time.
Nice to see a public figure aware that the security of Crimea's water supply is an issue.
The wording of Ukraine remaining "neutral" fits more with a narrative of NATO aggression against Russia in which Ukraine pledges not to join. But in reality, Russia is a serial-aggressor that invades countries it thinks it can and dreams of rebuilding an empire.
So for Ukraine, the actual implication of the lack of defensive alliance (neutrality) would be vulnerability to further Russian aggression, rather than leaving Russia particularly more vulnerable to Ukrainian / NATO aggression.
Without some sort of defensive alliance, or significant further arming by the West, what exactly would compel Russia to respect the referenda that Musk suggests? Russia does not care about the "will of the people" of Ukrainians under their subjugation (just as they don't care about the will of the people in their own ethnic republics, and are not holding referenda to give them the option to be independent of the Muscovites).
What compels Mexico to continue to honor the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo instead of just reconquering the American Southwest?
Military force. And it is only military force that will rein in Russia and attach significance to any treaties with them. Were Russia a non-aggressive country, then no treaties would be needed, just as there is little concern that random friendly countries will invade each other. But given the current state of Russia, only military force, would compel them to comply.
The point is that they are way, WAY too weak to do it, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
But, what compels *America* to continue to honor the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo instead of just taking another bite out of Mexico whenever it feels like it?
If we're comparing the US/Mexico example to Russia/Ukraine, that's the proper framing - and I think the answer is just that for a bunch of different reasons America doesn't want to conquer all or part of Mexico.
But Russia has pretty, um, actively, demonstrated that it does want to conquer at least part of Ukraine - and if we were 10 months into the Mexican-American war and the US was in disarray and Mexico on a roll of recovering territory, I think they would be looking for more than "look how much damage the US just took I'm sure they won't try again" in terms of assurances before they took their foot off the gas. Especially if the bargain was in exchange for letting the US keep the territory from which Mexico was now actively driving them out.
America is a liberal democracy and liberal democracies mostly don't do that in the 21st century.
If a US invasion of Mexico went pretty badly, but the US was still inarguably the much stronger country and always would be, I think that would be a good analogy for the situation with Russia and Ukraine.
That's why they probably need some sort of security assurance from other countries.
Budapest memorandum (1994) and Minsk agreements (2014) did not stop Russia, but certainly the third time is the charm! /s
Elon Musk 2035: "Okay, I guess Russia can keep Kiyv too, but at least the Western Ukraine remains neutral, ok?"
Elon Musk 2045: "Okay, so Russia can keep everything else, but that last remaining Ukrainian village remains neutral, ok?"
Elon Musk 2050: "Ah, nevermind. At least leave some part of Moldova neutral, ok?"
This. Watching some of the conversation around Ukraine I feel like I understand a little how some in pre-WW2 Europe just kept thinking, over and over again, that giving a *little* bit more to Germany just this *one* time more would finally secure peace.
Oh please. Russia would do anything not to be in this mess. They've been exposed and western support for its neighbors has been far greater than they could have imagined. The nazis were kicking ass at the start of WW2, it in't remotely comparable to the situation Russia finds itself in. Zelesnky and his demented apologists want Russia defeated entirely - which means we need to risk nuclear war so he can retain his power.
All Russia has to do if it wants to not be in this mess is stop attacking Ukraine.
Imagine that if instead of steamrolling Poland in 6 weeks, Germany was barely clinging to 10% of the territory of Poland in May 1940.
Taken one of those 23andMe tests and found out I have two Apoe4 alleles, supposedly putting me at an elevated risk of developing Alzheimer's .
Is there anything apart from the standard "eat well and exercise" I can do to lower my risk or at least delay the onset of the disease?
Like most problems, the answer is (to an extent): FASTING
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7379085/
Accept your fate and enjoy the times you have now.
Use a sauna - at at least 80 degrees Celsius for 2 mins, preferably 4-7 times a week
Is the logic here that it's useful because it's an exercise mimetic? Or the BDNF that seems to come from heat stress? Or something to do with heat shock proteins? And why only 2 mins?
Avoid contracting herpes (HSV-1 and HSV-2). Failing that, get treatment.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29488144/
This is amusing and terrifying as I literally got HSV-1 last week
Redirect your charitable giving and arguably investment to Eisai corporation, the Japanese pharma company which for the first time in history got noticeably positive results on an Alzheimer drug trial, as announced late last week.
Anyone have thoughts on why Peloton, a relatively small company who manufactures high-end exercise equipment is regularly in business news. Even before their now infamous commercial that was parodied by Ryan Reynolds(woman on treadmill) it's a steady flow. Today it's sales though Hilton; last week, via Dick's Sporting Goods.
Are there people "in-the-know" that drink every time there a new story about Peloton?!
They sell relatively small volumes at the high end of a large market, and make a lot of profit per unit due to marketing and branding. Its analogous to something like louis vitton or chanel
Off the top of my head, I'd guess that Peloton users are overrepresented among people who read business news, and presumably Pelaton's customers are likely to be interested in Peloton-related news.
Alternative, it could be business news editors who are the ones overrepresented among Peloton users, and typical mind fallacy is causing them to assume everyone else is just as interested in Peloton as they are.
If this is an intentional marketing strategy, it's amazing.
Yes, I think at this point in history the answer to "why are there so many news stories about X" is always "data indicates that news stories about X get a good number of clicks".
"get a good number of clicks"
Is the horse of cart first? Clicks drive some revenue and Eric above and Paul below give reasons why product owners and investors would be interested but the publicity - both good and bad, also affect the company's revenue and that of similar companies.
My opinion is that the publicity over time seems intentional not incidental. Is it because of existing public interest or trying to generate that interest? I'm unsure.
Peloton has also had a fairly wild ride as a company. When COVID arrived they were fresh from their IPO and trading at around $20/share; nine months later (end of 2020) they were up over $150/share; nine months after that (fall 2021) some of the air had been let out but they seemed stable in the $100/share range; then the bubble burst and by February of this year they were down to the low 20s; and this year they've kept sliding and right now you can buy Peloton shares for less than $8/share.
Put another way: the Sep 2019 IPO valued Peloton at $8B; at the end of 2020 they had a market cap of more than $50B; and today the entire company is worth $2.5B.
Yea. I can't get past thinking there's something more distinct though but as you suggest I bet it's related to the demographic of the buyers or at least their socio-economic class. I frequently read at least the business headlines and Peloton stories are conspicuous!
I had posted in a previous open thread about a friend's child in India. He is addicted to a video game. From his age of 12 to 14, his parents (both doctors, who are very specialized, busy and have huge work responsibilities) were very busy with covid-related work. In that time, a friend offered to build a gaming computer with him. They happily agreed.
The child's grandparents were home with him a lot. As his addiction grew, no one noticed. At one point he refused to go to school, as he wanted to keep playing. He would get violent if his access to the game was cut off in some way.
He is now seeing a psychiatrist. He was persuaded to give up the computer a few days ago. He is having acute withdrawal symptoms. He is on medication for this.
These things are designed carefully to be addictive. They're as awful as alcohol or drugs in the hands of kids. Smartphones with social media apps are no different. (There is a case going on now in the U.K, and the name of the child is Molly.)
This is all ridiculous. I don't know what the solution is. Why isn't there a warning label on video games and social media apps, saying they could cause harm? Any devices with the ability to carry these things should carry that warning too.
Millions of children play video games, and yet most of them do not react this way. So it feels like some important information is missing here.
What game, by the way? Could you try switching to a different game?
Or limit access to the computer to certain amount of time every day, conditional on good behavior, such as going to school?
(I am also curious what is the medication for the computer game withdrawal symptoms. Not important for solving the problem, just curious.)
> Why isn't there a warning label on video games and social media apps, saying they could cause harm?
Actually, some games do have an age limit.
>Millions of children play video games, and yet most of them do not react this way. So it feels like some important information is missing here.
It's all a matter of degree. Most people don't become literal alcoholics, but alcohol has a negative impact on the behavior/lives of huge numbrs of non-alcoholics.
"He would get violent if his access to the game was cut off in some way."
This is not a symptom of the game, this is a symptom of the child. Take away the games and it will find some other channel.
I did wonder about this. Would he have become addicted to something else? But we will never know. Better not to take this chance. Anyway, they did and he is addicted.
Well, I'll give my life story anyway. Probably reckless to give amateur psychiatry advice on an actual psychiatrist's blog but... I mean, it's fun.
I'm still an anti-social hermit who mostly plays videogames, but when I was younger I was worse. I had a couple of classmates straight out ask me if I was going to shoot up the school. And most of it came down to a lack of boundaries.
My folks would let me get away with a lot of things, on the grounds that I came up with clever reasons for it. But I didn't actually want to get away with things, I wanted them to establish limits to work with. I wanted established procedures to follow. They instead wanted to encourage my interests; "you can do anything you want". But my interests were finding the boundaries, and they were thwarting it.
So I go to live with my uncle for a year, who's a smart guy, and he figures it out and sets up proper limits, and obligations. Only one hour of TV, only one soda per day, have to go outside in good weather. Have to make friends at school; have to prove it by inviting them to the house. So I actually do make friends, and hey, this is kind of fun.
Back to my parents, who still have the same all-carrot no-stick approach. Back to old habits. Not as bad as before, but not as good as when I was away. All forward progress was based on the procedures, and channeling energy between the boundaries. No more boundaries, no more channeling, no more forward progress.
So that's my immediate impression here. The parents have taken a wrong approach to dealing with their son, and the videogame is serving as an escape from the underlying issue, for both the child AND the parents.
Like, you said a friend helped him build a computer. When it was finished, was there a follow-up project? If you pulled the fuse and depowered the outlet to the computer, would the kid try to fix it? Can you make it a family activity, to trace the power back to the source, learn which fuse actually works there, and have him turn the power back on, with the reward of videgoaming? What other procedures are in place? And what sticks are on the table?
(I guess I should mention, I saw several psychiatrists growing up. My parents didn't change anything in response, so it had little effect.)
Anything can cause harm, man. No parents are going to be like "wait, smartphones can have games on them?! Well my child isn't going to have one, then!" Even if that WAS a good idea, that ship has sailed; this will do literally nothing at all.
I dunno, this just seems hysterical to me. Kid with no parental interaction or other stimulation available gets really into a hobby and his parents have to take it away? That happens all the time. It doesn't seem like there are any long-term harmful effects here, either, like there might be if he had become an alcoholic.
And c'mon. "Acute withdrawal symptoms" is just a scary dramatic way to say "he's upset he can't do something he likes". We're not talking DTs here.
Reminds me of how my grandparent told a story about his parents getting real worried about pinball. "It should be banned!" Does that seem like it was really a big problem, looking back?
> Kid with no parental interaction or other stimulation available gets really into a hobby and his parents have to take it away?
Yeah the lack of parental attention here seems like the big red flag. Of course the child is going to act out if that's the only thing that gets them any kid of response from their caregivers. what a horrible situation to put a child in
Not willing to go to school sounded serious to me. Hes not gone for 2 months!
Kids need to learn various things. In the presence of something they're addicted to, they will learn nothing else, because everything other than that screen doesn't hold their attention.
One of the parents should probably take a long leave of absence or whatever you would call it from work and deal with the kid until things are fixed.
What (type of) game? The details probably matter; there are some games that are predatory skinner boxes designed to joylessly extract all your money and will settle for all your time, and there are some that merely have a really solid core gameplay loop that could have unfortunate effects on addictive personalities. Regulating the former is tricky but probably worthwhile, regulating the latter will literally amount to banning excessive fun.
Parents are responsible for knowing the risks, and a warning label doesn't provide any meaningful information. The reality is different kids respond so differently, it's up to the parent to monitor their kids' early stage reaction to games to figure out if it's a healthy enjoyment or a significant addiction risk.
Playing prediction markets is pretty humbling, just by forcing you to actually make specific predictions and see the results of *all* of them, rather than just remembering the ones that worked.
I decided to participate in the Salem Center contest on Manifold back when Scott announced it in early August. I didn't plan to spend much time on it and don't have much experience, but I figured maybe I'd get lucky and end up in the top 5 anyway, and if not, at least I'd be contributing to "the wisdom of crowds". I decided to just pick 20 markets and put S$50 in each on the side that seemed most likely and then hold to resolution.
So far I've had four markets resolve, two wins, two losses, and my "portfolio value" is S$1031, a slight profit on the starting 1000, but pretty much indistinguishable from chance. Predicting the future is surprisingly hard! How is everyone else doing?
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/12591/nuclear-detonation-in-ukraine-by-2023/#comments
On Metaculus today: somebody accidentally hit the resolve button on the “ Nuclear Detonation in Ukraine by 2023” question, giving the community quite the scare!
I haven't read Data Secrets Lox for years, and *of course* there is a "Ukraine war" thread, so I started at the beginning, and...
> International sanctions are not going to do anything of substance, besides fueling Putin's "it's us against the evil West" rhetoric.
> their NATO/EU membership does make [the Baltics] harder to invade, but that just means that Putin will have to work a bit harder on making up his excuses [after he is finished with Ukraine]. China will gladly back him up, which means that US/EU will have no choice but back down.
> there's no reason for [Putin] not to issue an ultimatum for NATO to withdraw from the Baltics and probably Poland.
> the determining factor in the Ukraine situation from his perspective is that we'd already publicly precommitted to not doing anything to stop him
> Looks like Zelensky is now willing to “negotiate”, so maybe we have entered the end-game. I’ve seen casualty estimates of 400-800 for the Russians.
> What can he negotiate, besides "nigh-unconditional surrender in return for my own worthless hide"?
Probably a good opportunity for a reminder that being cynical and edgy does not necessarily make you better at predicting.
>Probably a good opportunity for a reminder that being cynical and edgy does not necessarily make you better at predicting.
Maybe not, but you're never going to have some great insight unless you're willing to challenge the status-quo thinking, even if that means much of what you say is very wrong. I'm just glad somewhere exists where this kind of challenge is even permitted.
Also, almost EVERYONE thought that Russia was going to win, not just pro-Russia people, and yet none of the anti-Russia people are having their reputations challenged based on their catastrophically incorrect early predictions.
> Probably a good opportunity for a reminder that being cynical and edgy does not necessarily make you better at predicting
Or maybe it does overall, but not in this particular case?
Maybe. Null hypothesis says that it's random, and if "wisdom of the crowds" means anything, then contrarians should be *worse* at predicting on average.
I believe that what actually happens is that when you predict 20 out of 10 problems, people will remember you as a great predictor. Because every time the problem actually happens, you can say "I told you so". But when a predicted problem does *not* happen... people either forget about it, or won't comment on it for superstitions reasons, because it feels like tempting gods to say loudly that a predicted problem *didn't* happen. (When someone says something like that in a movie, you prepare yourself for a sudden dramatic event.)
I am trying to combat this bias by looking at *old* predictions and checking whether they turned out to be true. As you can see, it gets a negative feedback. As if I broke some taboo.
When you predict things, in short term you can get points for appearing wise, and in long term you can get points for being correct. In an edgy community, an edgy person always gets a point for predicting doom, and sometimes gets another point for being right. But either way, they always get some points. This is what makes them appear to be a successful predictor. If you keep saying "this time, things will be worse then average", hey, you will have a 50% success rate! (If you say instead, "this time, things will be better than average", you will also have a 50% success rate, but you will never get a point for being edgy, so your overall score will be quite low.)
EDIT: But more importantly, edgy people usually follow their own *narrative*. If you notice the narrative, you can see which predictions will be socially rewarded. In this case, it is a narrative of "decadent West and strong Russia". No one will admit it openly, but edgy people will keep generating predictions that follow this narrative. (And I am not saying they will be always wrong. I am saying they will be 50% right and 100% socially rewarded for making the prediction.)
I don't know many people who were predicting that Ukraine would fight a viable symmetric war against Russia, but I definitely know a few that predicted both catastrophic failures of Russian logistics and an enduring Ukrainian willingness to fight (and a corresponding insurgency). Those predictions were at least directionally right even if they didn't go far enough, and IMO they strongly correlate with people who are still producing good work.
Even if you think someone 'wasn't worse than anyone else', it's still critically important to dock them points when they blow a prediction to maintain accountability. "Replacement-level" isn't a compliment for a reason. (And of course, those who did significantly better should be noted accordingly.)
Even in that thread, there's a clear difference between folks who are making their assessments based on material information as it comes in, and folks airing their priors. Your point about edginess not necessarily indicating anything novel is well put, and edgy priors are doubly worthless.
I definitely predicted that Ukrainians would fight back relentlessly. Even if they had lost the first encounter and Russians had taken Kyiv there was no way for Russians to advance further west. The situation would be very much similar to what it is today, except the casualties on both sides would have been much greater and Russia would have controlled more territory than today. But fundamentally it would be the same.
I'm always reminded of what Scott (our Scott) said about Scott Adams in some post about predicting, (I quote from memory): "if you heard about Scott Adams in 2015 and checked him in 2016 you would think he was the smartest man on the internet, but after a few more years we can tell he's just someone good at very confidently saying crazy things in public."
Well, he inaccurately predicted Putin wouldn't invade at all because he thought it was obviously an unwinnable conflict and figured Putin would know that too, and then when the invasion happened he predicted that not only would Russia eventually lose but might actually fall as a world (military) power as a result.
My scoring of his predictions is that he overclaimed (so far). If he turns out to be right i'll be utterly gobsmacked, but i suppose anything is possible.
>Well, he inaccurately predicted Putin wouldn't invade at all because he thought it was obviously an unwinnable conflict and figured Putin would know that too, and then when the invasion happened he predicted that not only would Russia eventually lose but might actually fall as a world (military) power as a result.
>My scoring of his predictions is that he overclaimed (so far). If he turns out to be right i'll be utterly gobsmacked, but i suppose anything is possible.
Is this in reference to Scott Adams? If we're evaluating a specific prediction I'd want a reference to the original source. His track record gets an awful lot worse when you grade him on what he actually says instead of an inferred directional sentiment.
> His track record gets an awful lot worse when you grade him on what he actually says instead of an inferred directional sentiment.
Exactly. Even 2016 was a disaster for him. His confident prediction that Trump was guaranteed to win in a landslide was the worst of the bunch!
Adams kept predicting Trump would win. Then right before the election he predicted Hillary would win instead. People still give him credit for Trump.
One thing in particular that I know has confounded a bunch of predictions is that for the partisan Ukranian caught behind Russian lines, the cell phone has been a vastly more useful weapon than the car bomb. A consequence of symmetric warfare still being an ongoing thing!
For most of these I agree with your assessment, but the comments about Russia easily conquering the Baltics as well seem well outside (and worse than) typical predictions.
The strength and unity of NATO's response was surprising. In the reverse world were Ukraine get crushed easily and Germany lead a big oil before arms coalition, predicting that Putin next target may be one of the Baltic States is not absurd.
Predicting that it would be his target in that (quite plausible at the time) counterfactual is pretty reasonable. Predicting that NATO would roll over and take it was insane. Poland has a very different position than Ukraine WRT NATO, and that really would have mattered in that counterfactual world.
Poland, sure, but the Baltic states are small enough that a quick grab could work - invade, crush all opposition, war ended before NATO can mobilize its troups, gamble on NATO saying "oh well nevermind". Remember this happens in the counterfactual word were NATO let Ukraine get rolled over.
>It wasn't even willing to hang Ukraine, which will never be a NATO member, out to dry, which genuinely surprised a lot of people including myself.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The situation right now is the national security apparatus's wet dream. We're spending a lot of money on fancy weapons, the fancy weapons are doing a great job, everyone is cooing over how fantastic our fancy weapons (and logistics, and intelligence) are, and the fancy weapons are being used against the exact enemy they were always intended for. Meanwhile, the only people actually being killed are all foreigners so there's no political downside, just a bipartisan consensus on buying fancy weapons and cooing about how great they are.
Never say never :)
Does anyone know how to stop Substack from flooding my inbox? I can turn of email alerts for subscriptions I pay for, but I can’t figure a way to turn off email alerts for my free subscriptions. It’s making me insane - I’m losing important email in the mess of constant Substack updates
You could use a filter to send the emails you don't want to the trash.
Just unsubscribe. You can still read the free posts on the website without one.
I use Thunderbird, and everything from Substack automatically goes into a separate folder. Otherwise it would drive me crazy.
The next step will be improving the rules to automatically delete mails from Substack that contain certain substrings.
I'm continuing my ten-post Substack experiment with an essay inspired, to some degree, by some of Scott's earlier posts. I'm not as happy with it as with my last two posts, which got a lot of play, but I think the ideas in this one are more interesting, even if ultimately underdeveloped.
https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/truth-cultures-and-rhetoric-cultures
I remain baffled why anyone finds r/the motte valuable. Wheneveren I've been there it's just been generic right wing talking points repeated without analysis and mildly left wing ones being down voted to oblivion. If the appeal. Is meant to be a libertarian ideal of free speech and good discourse it doesn't seem to be achieving that. Just changing who's norms are enforced
The difference is that in left-dominated spaces, right-wingers don't just get "down-voted", they get BANNED. And in places where right-wingers don't get banned, left-wingers generally avoid them because they're become so accustomed to have having voices they disagree with be cenesored. I think you're an example of this - you're so unaccustomed to hearing right-wing views that any place that largely tolerates them seems weird to you.
I mean, ffs, the left say social media deplatofrming of right-wingers isn't a violation of free speech, but now you think left-wing views being DOWNVOTED is?
The overwhelming majority of internet censorship in visible, at least relatively mainstream spaces is against right-wing views. If you're singularly complaining about a place where left-wing views are downvoted but not censored as an example of an expansive sense of 'free-speech' being violated then its just special pleading.
I unsubscribed from r/themotte a while back, because the sub seemed obsessed with "race realism," whatever that is. I just found it personally distasteful.
Okay, do you find the constant talk about racial inequality "distasteful"? Those by poiticians, corporations, the media and universities? Do you find it distasteful when people complain that white people have higher incomes and wealth and representation in certain fields than black people? What about talk of "white privilege"?
If your answer is no, then that's really dumb, because you're basically saying people should be able to have political causes with real-word consequences based on an assumption of biological race equality, and its wrong for other people (especially members of the groups targetted by these political causes) to challenge the foundations of these causes.
Often times really interesting debates within a subculture look like circle jerks to outsiders. When people have a lot of common ground, it's much easier to get into really detailed and honest conversations because you both have so many values in common and priors on what did or did not occur. As our consensus on reality fractures, cross-ideology discussions are increasingly fruitless and weighed down by really fundamental discussions of facts.
For example, Freddie deBoer recently had a series of open letters with some lefty I don't know about cancel culture and censorship. Per my reading, this was an A+ discursive effort, props to him (1). As a righty reader, however, it was incredibly dumb and circle jerky. Yes, they both agreed that lots of right wing things are bad and lots of right wing media is bad and agreed they both like free speech but they...disagreed on whether morally censorable things should therefore be legally/corprately banned, I think? And this is all super-surreal from a rightwing perspective because, ya know, the former POTUS has been banned off social media, he went to go start his own, and that's been kicked off the Google store and potentially Apple. So...ya know...current conservative censorship concerns are less cancellations at colleges and more not completely censoring a former (and possibly future) POTUS (2). And Freddie et al totally ignore this and talk about, honestly, side issues from 2016.
But, at the same time, deBoer did nothing wrong. He wasn't writing for me, he wasn't writing for anyone on my side of the isle, and by all external evidence he had a really productive discussion with another person and props to him. Not everything written on the internet is written with me in mind and that's just fine. And doubtless deBoer doesn't want to relitigate Trump getting kicked off Twitter, which would lead to Jan 6th, which would probably lead to Russiagate, and instead of having whatever interesting discussion he actually had with this liberal lady, he and I would be relitigating the same old fundamental factual disputes that have divided the parties for at least 2+ years. Which sounds boring and not terribly productive. They're able to have a much more fruitful discussion because they agree on so much and so are able to focus on much smaller and more manageable issues.
So while there is a lot of circle-jerking in themotte, there's also a lot of value there, it just may not be super-clear to outsiders because their priors and values are so different and the internal differences in themotte are, relatively, so small.
(1) https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/on-free-speech-and-cancel-culture-091
(2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/01/google-blocks-truth-social-from-the-play-store-will-apple-be-next/
Those posts are incredibly dumb. Freddie's a good writer as far as leftists go, but then every so often a bad leftist will come along and tell him he's had too much to think, and he just abandons everything that makes him usually reasonable.
Like, he's basically freaking out over right-wingers "banning" books, but obviously ignores the fact that not only have the left "banned" books in this sense before (and non-ideological ones, unlike what conservatives "banned"), they largely don't do this because no "right-wing" books would ever possibly make it into blue-state schools. We all know the Bell Curve would be banned milliseconds after it was discovered that it was being taught in a blue-state school, and yet Freddie acts like the left give a shit about "free speech" here.
Yeah, I like Freddie's writing, but this series is "well OBVIOUSLY the right-wingers are way way worse; they're sending death threats to teachers who only want to support trans kids while the left equivalent is this one girl who is upset about a group of kids in her college".
Whenever I need reminding about how deeply, horribly, intractably evil I am as a social conservative, I just need to go read anything on social media 😂
Despite Freddie's obligatory disclaimers about how Republicans are all demons from the eighth circle of Hell who only want to destroy everything nice because the evilness *is* the point, I do enjoy his writing due to the core of common sense it often contains. So two thumbs up from this spawn of Beelzebub!
Sorting is new by default and votes are irrelevant. If you have an idea and want it criticized by people who interested in debating ideas I know of no better venue.
This is why I think downvotes and upvotes are a bad idea. Anyway, ignore them. TheMotte does need more left-wing contributors, but they tend to either drift away (TheSchism was set up as a place more congenial to them, but it never got the same amount of engagement) or flounce off in a huff if people don't immediately agree with them.
That does leave it majority right-wing. Be thicker skinned, stand your ground and fight back, and ignore downvotes. Don't flounce off because you failed to change everyone's mind with your single marvellous post.
I could do that, or literally any other activity that is a more rewarding use of my time. Arguing with people on the internet is fun to the extent you get interesting engagement and response out of it. If the quality of discussion is poor there's no incentive for me to engage in it, the abstract idea that I might somehow convince people out of their entrenched views is not particularly motivating
Question - Do you think the quality of discussion is poor in places where right-wing views are censored? Or do you judge "quality of discussion" exclusively on how much you agree with the people in a particular place?
Most well-known interenet spaces are far bigger circle jerks than the Motte, but its left-wing circle jerks with 'unaccetpable' views being deleted, not simply voted down.
I mean, I do understand what you are saying. But complaining on another site about how terrible the Motte as a right-wing circlejerk is, is neither a more rewarding use of your time, nor attempting to engage in convincing people out of their entrenched views.
I could say on here that "Ooh, Daily Kos, awful terrible place" (is it still going?) but how productive is that?
I think it is perfectly useful to question the quality of a site Scott brings up in the OP, and recommends by virtue of their own copy rather than his personal opinion. He didn't mention Daily Kos.
There are a bunch of sites with historical ties to the wider rationalist-verse that don't really have any ideological alignment; themotte.org has now been through two separate rounds of being spun off for culture war reasons, and I for one would definitely need a positive argument in its favor to be interested after bouncing off a thoroughly replacement-level first impression.
The strongest argument for the motte is that is is anti-censorship. That makes it more valuable than 99.9% of internet spaces and something that everyone here should support.
But really what we're seeing here is liberals having an aversion to something that isn't domianted by liberal thought. If Scott recommended a site where you agree with most of what was being said but right-wing views were censored, I'm positive neither you nor the OP would be complaining like this, even though we should all prefer uncensored sites over censored sites we agree with.
> The strongest argument for the motte is that is is anti-censorship. That makes it more valuable than 99.9% of internet spaces
I haven't seen what themotte.org's policy looks like in practice, but let's not pretend r/themotte was unwilling to ban people. "We don't ban people for ideas, only behavior!" is a rote defense and boringly unfalsifiable, on the grounds it claims. If you have a method to quantify it - *that you didn't just make up on the spot* - I'd be interested, but I'm not holding my breath.
Beyond that, a firm commitment to anti-censorship isn't what makes ACX better than 8kun. There's no royal road to quality.
> If Scott recommended a site where you agree with most of what was being said but right-wing views were censored, I'm positive neither you nor the OP would be complaining like this
Because you've looked through the nearly-decade of posting I've done under this username, here and on SSC†? Or is that a chip on your shoulder masquerading as an argument? God, between this one and the stock alternate "it's ok if right-wing views are dominant, because this is one of the few places right-wingers have available on the internet (that aren't cesspits)" I think I prefer the latter. Whinier, but less masturbatory.
† Pop quiz - what fraction of my posting is explicitly complaining about excessive moderation, and how does it compare to baseline?
> even though we should all prefer uncensored sites over censored sites we agree with.
Quantify your superiority over 8kun, or I'm really not interested. The ceteris is decidedly not paribus.
You could just make a post there asking why a current follower of Scott should find value there, you'd get direct argumentation instead of playing a dubious reputation game.
Make it open-ended enough and cross-post it here as a top level comment, and this thread will have come full circle.
"Reputation game" is a bad frame when the primary draw of a platform is the membership itself. Speaking for myself, I'm explicitly *not* looking for someone whose posts I like to merely speak well of a platform. I'm looking for evidence that they actually *use* it - personally-curated top posts are great, but their own content is better. If a place spins off of SSC and Scott is plainly aware of them, but comments only once in a blue moon... not a great endorsement.
>flounce off in a huff if people don't immediately agree with them
I want to highlight this for woke posters specifically, constantly surrounding yourself with people who agree with you "breeds out" your ability to tolerate disagreement, especially if the people who can challenge you are top-down banned. So when a much freer environment like TheMotte comes around, you select yourself out of the discussion purely by preference, since you lost your disagreement muscles.
I don't frequent TheMotte much since a long-ish while, but I saw absolutely no shortage of *economic* left-wing ideas being presented and upvoted highly when I used to frequent it, and, hell, I'm vaguely left-wing myself. Even the economic right-wing ideas are so varied and in conflict that I saw no consistent bias in them.
>I think downvotes and upvotes are a bad idea.
Amen to that. Down\Up is a single 1-bit decision that is supposed to represent all the range from "This is obvious off-topic spam" to "I don't like this opinion". Aweful idea. The general idea of letting users self-rank is sound, but it has to be done much more smartly.
I thought that back when digg.com introduced it and promptly descended into a dumpster fire of primate cliquetry. The only place where I've seen it work even a little is slashdot, and I think that's only because they handed out a small number of moderator points -- meaning only a few people could up/down vote posts in a given issue -- and a much larger number of people got to meta-moderate -- i.e. rate the job the moderators had done, which influenced whether a given person got mod points again in the future. There were still predictable tribal shibboleths, but it seemed to not quite descend into pack-of-bonobos territory.
It's very tempting, when the blood is up and you're firing on all cylinders in an argument, especially a culture war one, to hit the like/dislike buttons as tribal solidarity or "yeah, I agree"/"no, you idiot" instead of "well-argued and convincing" or "this fails to make the sense you want it to make".
So I do have the temptation to use them that way ("how dare this lackwit say this obviously dumb thing on here???") and that's why I avoid them. Whatever the best intentions, they always turn into popularity contests.
Agreed. Sometimes I'm down for even-keeled rational culture discussions, but a lot of the threads there are long on emotion and short on insight.
Is anywhere different? Or do you just happen to disagree with these people?
Nope, it’s pretty much the same in most places, regardless of political leaning. But it’s extra disappointing in any place that specifically bills itself as a place for rational discussion, which is why I mentioned it in this context.
I don't wish to defend themotte from accusations of being a right-wing circlejerk, that's why I quit posting there, but I must note an important difference between "Reddit enforces left-wing norms by banning people who say things they don't like" and "themotte enforces right-wing norms by upvoting posts about how western elites are doing a Great Replacement because they just hate white people so much". The latter is a much weaker sort of enforcement and the actual mods of themotte are principled free speech types left of the userbase, you still *can* call for a communist revolution there.
The difference is that while reddit can in theory ban people, given that these discussions seem to be quite happily taking place on reddit, and there's no shortage of far right commentary to be found there, it doesn't seem like reddit is doing much in the way of censoring. The theoretical possibility of censorship has little impact on the quality of discussion there which is what I'm interested in
Is this a joke? do you have any idea the number of right-wing subreddits that have been banned by reddit over the past 5 years? This isn't "theoretical possibility of cnesorship", it happens on a daily basis! In left-dominated subreddits, right-wing posters don't get downvoted, they get banned.
And what does "far-right" mean? How come everyone is "far-right" but apparently nobody is ever "far-left"?
Reddit bans people for going against the orthodoxy *all the time*, and specifically themotte has had speech codes imposed by mods who didn't like them but feared the sub could get banned for not doing so (exactly what triggers a subreddit ban is kept vague, leading to a chilling effect). The fact that you can still find people doing it merely establishes that they don't ban everyone. It would be weird if actual ongoing censorship had no impact on the quality of discussion.
Two days ago I was browsing a sub I frequent and found someone complaining (via editing old posts, which you can weirdly still do while otherwise banned on Reddit) about being banned for this post: https://www.unddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/xrmo45/_/iqhc8m3/?context=3
So it was the second of these 2 comments that got the person banned?:
Hormone blockers and hormone replacement are two completely different interventions.
[−]stricky316 points3 days ago
This isn't a meaningful distinction. Even if you grant the erroneous assumption that puberty blockers are harmless and 'fully reversible', putting a kid on blockers is just locking them into a medical pathway that ends with them on HRT. Virtually every kid who gets put on blockers ends up on HRT.
People keep treating blockers like they're a get out of jail free card for them having to take a stance on the now controversial question of whether 12 year olds can consent to life-altering medical regimes. They're not.
Wow. I'm astonished the person got banned for that post. It's courteous, and they link to a study supporting their point. Only criticism I can make is that the study they link to does not exactly support their contention that "virtually every kid who gets put on blockers ends up on HRT." Researchers followed a bunch of kids on blockers "until they were put on HRT." It's not clear that every kid that took blockers went on to HRT -- researchers assumed that would be the usual outcome. But that's sort of a fine point, and certainly does not justify banning the poster.
Do you know what was in the speech codes?
When George Floyd happened there was scrutiny from the reddit admins and the motte responded with a blanket ban on advocating for violence or property destruction. Violence had always been banned on the motte but they specified an end to charitable leeway in interpreting things, and property destruction was added to the list because reddit admins had said explicitly that glorifying or inciting it was a violation of the sitewide violence policy. The mods then refused to answer obvious questions to the effect of "Doesn't this ban endorsing status quo stuff like riot control measures and the existence of the military?"
I generally respect the motte's mod team so I'm still a little confused about why they chose to lay out an extremely strict policy, explicitly invite clarifying questions, and then ignore them. My only theory is that they *wanted* the chilling effect, their goals were to minimize fedposts without taking the full popularity hit that comes from endorsing an extremely draconian rule.
I'm curious to read posts from the era when mods were adding new bans & group was reacting. If I wanted to get a good sense of the whole arc, should I start with the George Floyd era? And are posts from that era still viewable?
Agreed. I periodically quit themotte when I get to the point that I can't take the "elites are the enemy of all good and righteous people because they push feminism and open borders" rhetoric, but there is definitely more of a commitment to free speech and arguing your position than you find on Reddit. Not sure if that attitude survived the move, but I saw a lot more diversity of viewpoints in themotte than elsewhere online.
TheMotte's not on Reddit anymore; it moved off the platform about a month ago.
The big problem is that Big Tech and even most big politics fora all enforce SJ to some extent, so any site that *doesn't* will wind up heavily skewed anti-SJ (same basic issue as non-Harvard US universities; you're not picking from the total pool of students, but rather from the pool of "students that can't get into a better university"). There are only limited means available to circumvent that from within the system (the ideal solution is obviously "stop Big Tech enforcing SJ", but that's hard unless you have US $200,000,000,000 or so to throw at it).
> TheMotte's not on Reddit anymore; it moved off the platform about a month ago.
themotte.org
What happened between Reddit and TheMotte? Reddit seems to tolerate almost everything. I've seen all kinds of transgressive stuff there -- major sexual kink, vicious verbal attacks on individuals and groups, obvious misinformation about pretty much anything you can think of. Read that one of the few sites Reddit refused to host was one called Photos of Dead Children.
>Read that one of the few sites Reddit refused to host was one called Photos of Dead Children.
Countless right-wing subreddits have been deleted in recent years, all for posting stuff not remotely comparable to pictures of dead children.
I enjoy Reddit. It is, in my experience, extremely tolerant of raunchiness, sexual explicitness, kink, bad manners, profanity, irritability, insult-filled exchanges, weirdness, craziness, the darkest of pessimism, & mockery & attack of most things (God, democracy, your momma), except for a few sacred cows. But what people are talking about here is the sacred cows, the stuff Reddit *won't* let you say whatever you damn well please about. I went and looked at Reddit subs to see what kind of material does seem to be off-limits. Reddit definitely isn't looking as open to anything as I'd imagined, but it's not censoring as much as some here think. So I looked for subs that are particularly godawful especially by leftie standards, taking my cues mostly from trebuchet's criteria:
1. Anything not fully supportive of modern gender ideology, except for pornography.
2. Kooky right-wing conspiracy theories, and an arbitrary amount of stuff adjacent to said conspiracy theories.
3. Anything that makes left-wing Twitter mad for more than a week.
Here's what I found:
*Pro-right*
r/trump: Trump - Take America Back
r/Trumpgret: Regretting Joe Biden
r/TheTrumpZone: TheTrumpZone
r/BigDongDeSantis: shows Ron DeSantis' titillating ability to make Florida the freest state in the nation and the possibility for him to Make America Florida!
r/Conservative: Conservative
r/Republican: Republican
Most of the above subs are large and appear to be thriving. Whoever it was who said Reddit restricts support for the 45th president -- I don't see any sign of that here. The 3 Trump subs together have about a quarter of a million subscribers.
*Anti-left, anti-woke*
r/FuckLeftistAmerica
/r/FuckLeftists
r/woketard: woketard
r/WokeMadness: WokeMadness
r/sjws_bad: sjws_bad
r/ShitLiberalsSay: authoritarian orangutarian whataboutist voldemort 100 billion
r/SJWstories: A place to come and share your stories of dealing with Tumblr SJWs both on and offline.
r/SJW_Kryptonite
r/cunts: Pics of Hillary Clinton
r/AOCisMommy:Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is mommy!
r/Enough_AOC_Spam: Enough AOC Spam
Seems like anti-woke rage and humor is alive & well on Reddit.
*Anti-feminism*
r/Red_Pill
/r/pussypassdenied, where women are not allowed to use their gender as a handicap or an excuse to act like assholes. Yay equality!
r/antifeminists: Exposing the truth about Feminism The purpose of this subreddit is to critique, and debunk feminist views and talking-points.
r/MensRights: Advocating for the social and legal equality of men and boys since 2008
I get the impression that the above are under pressure to keep a lid on some of the purest, angriest expressions of the anti-feminist point of view. R/Red_pill is very small. R/MensRights is larger, but carries a note to users saying that participation on this sub can get you banned from certain other subs.
*nutty right-wing conspiracy theories*
r/conspiracies: conspiracies
r/conspiracy: conspiracy
r/chemtrails: a visible trail and particulate left in the sky as part of a covert operation
r/AntiVaxxers: Anything Anti-Vaxx related. NOTE: The moderators are Pro-Vaxx, open and civil discussion is encouraged.
I'm not sure how many of the conspiracies in the first sub are nutty & right wing -- didn't have time to read the posts. Chemtrails appeared in an article I found about right-wing conspiracy theories. There's an Anti-vaxxer sub, but note tht the mods are pro-vax. I don't know what limits they put on anti-vax posts.
*Human biodiversity*
r/AnthroScape
r/racialism: racialism: Research and polite discussions about race
Both of these subs are quite small, & the second gives signs of being heavily moderated.
*Gender diversity*
There are 3 subs with Gender Critical in their names that have been banned.
There definitely are a lot of subs that are godawful in their political incorrectness.Reddit seems tolerant of pro-right and anti-left/anti-woke subs, except in the case of a few particularly sensitive topics, and about these Reddit is loyal to the left &/or "woke" point of view. Topics are:
-red pill-toned discussion of gender relations
-any challenge at all to the opinions and sensitivities of people defining their gender in ways outside the usual male-female binary: transsexuals, non-binaries, various shades of other in-between and non-conforming sexual identities
-Nutty right-wing conspiracy theories, including antivax views, not all of which are nutty (and I'd guess, anti-mask views, since there were no anti-masking subs)
-anything having to do with the idea of racial genetic differendes
The r/themotte discussion is here https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_rationalists_leaving_a/ - the links lead to this https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tj525b/comment/i1s4f09/ which has a lot of the relevant stuff.
Most of your points are mentioned there (relevant stuff is ~top third), along with the admins being passive-aggressive toward subreddit mods.
Reddit is a big site and their admins are slow acting, but when they do act it's always in one political direction. Half the subs on this list are the second or third iteration of already banned subreddits living on borrowed time.
Are you sure about that? Here, from Wikipedia, is a list of subs that have been banned. Which are earlier iterations of the ones I've named?
2.1 Beatingwomen
2.2 Braincels
2.3 ChapoTrapHouse
2.4 The "Chimpire"
2.5 Chodi
2.6 CreepShots
2.6.1 Gawker exposé
2.6.2 Ethics of outing
2.7 CringeAnarchy
2.8 DarkNetMarkets
2.9 Deepfakes
2.10 European
2.11 FatPeopleHate
2.12 FindBostonBombers
2.13 frenworld
2.14 GenderCritical
2.15 Gore
2.16 GunsForSale
2.17 Incels
2.18 Jailbait
2.19 Jakolandia
2.20 MGTOW
2.21 MillionDollarExtreme
2.22 NoNewNormal
2.23 Physical_Removal
2.24 Pizzagate
2.25 QAnon-related subs
2.26 SanctionedSuicide
2.27 SonyGOP
2.28 Shoplifting
2.29 The_Donald
2.30 TheFappening
2.31 TruFemcels
2.32 UncensoredNews
2.33 WatchPeopleDie
Ah, some have been "quarantined" in rather than banned, like /r/theredpill. All the trump ones are the scattered remains of /r/the_donald, covid skeptic ones are the remains of /r/nonewnormal. Most of the rest of the subs are either tiny so slipping under the radar or heavily moderated to avoid discussing anything of particular controversy like the conservative subs you mentioned. Your list also just seems to be missing some pretty notable bans like /r/tumblrinaction which splintered into the various 'sjw' themed subs which are probably not long for this world and excludes communities like /r/drama which while not banned were forced to be moderated into non-existence, which is the process many of those subs are in the middle of as /r/theMotte found itself.
Reddit is going for the IPO and it's engaging in the 'rushing around cleaning the house and stuffing all the junk in the cupboard' kind of activity that your mother does before the visitors arrive. Anything that could possibly bring a blush to the cheek of a potential investor's ad revenue generation is getting the boot. If your sub-reddit contains the hint of anything that could motivate a screeching loon to go ballistic on Twitter and create a storm in a teacup about -ism or -phobia and frighten the horses when it's time to make some money, then it is going to be pruned.
Same as when Tumblr went on the Great Porn Purge (which they seem to be relaxing but female-presenting nipples are still banned).
Purging porn always seems insane to me, given how obviously popular porn is - The most famous adage in marketing is "Sex Sells"! It certainly didn't turn out well for Tumblr's user count
It's a bit chicken-or-egg for the larger discussion, but sites likes this are downwind of that discussion and deal with a large number of very strict laws about consent and approval. I think a lot of the laws are well-intentioned, if broadly written, to prevent abuse.
Yeah — Mother Nature’s freebie pass to brief but intense delight, and guaranteed to get your site eyeballs. Yet much of the world makes lots of rules about sex.
I have a feeling it's more payment processor than advertising risk after the pornhub debacle. We're used to progressive lead attacks on centralized points of failure but conservative ones are still able to enforced unpopular wills using the same tactics. Our future is either decentralized or ruled by special interests.
Well, ok, maybe, but see my list in an earlier post of all the godawful politically incorrect Reddit subs. There's plenty of stuff to redden various people's cheeks with embarrassment or rage.
r/trump: Take America Back
r/FuckLeftistAmerica
r/SJW_Kryptonite
r/chemtrails: a visible trail and particulate left in the sky as part of a covert operation
/r/pussypassdenied, where women are not allowed to use their gender as a handicap or an excuse to act like assholes.
r/cunts: Pics of Hillary Clinton
And as for Reddit porn: female-presenting nipples are nothing. Shots displaying female genitals in all their glory are the norm. They should change the sex sub name from r/RedditGoneWild to . . . oh, never mind, sub with pix of Hillary Clinton already took the name.
>oh, never mind, sub with pix of Hillary Clinton already took the name.
Reddit's global namespace sucks, there's a reason the Zen of Python ends with "Namespaces are one honking great idea – let's do more of those". The r/ notation even resembles filesystem paths, r/politics/people/cunts instead of r/cunts.
You make good example-backed points, but I think you're talking past the others a little. There is a fundamental bias in the tech corps, a bias that lets any woke rando with a bunch of followers rage for a month or so and that will make the corp do _anything_ they want, absolutely anything that doesn't cost a debilitating amount of money. They're past banning accounts and subreddits now, they have graduated to pressuring infrastructure companies to break their contracts with their clients. Next stop is ISPs.
This is not a thing you will find with non-woke randos no matter how hard you look. Sure, you can find the occasional politician or small government, but that's exactly the point, you have to be a *Government* or a *Politician* to have a chance at pressuring a tech corp to do something, while wokeness allows you to do it while being a p-zombie with bunch of followers in the low thousands.
Reddit doesn't even tolerate people speaking ill of r/StarTrek in r/Star_Trek.
In a nutshell, moderation in r/StarTrek became so heavy-handed that a number of people fled to r/Star_Trek, with a different set of mods that didn't want to police mere criticism of the show. The new subreddit ended up with a lot of threads about how bad new Star Trek is, some threads celebrating old Star Trek, and some threads posting about the ridiculous bans handed out for benign criticism in r/StarTrek.
The mods of r/StarTrek didn't like the criticism of their moderation in r/Star_Trek and got the admins (the site-wide bosses) to force the mods of r/Star_Trek to ban discussion of the original subreddit. Now you can't even link the original subreddit, it'll get auto-modded away.
This is true for any fan subreddit having to do with a work of fiction. It becomes populated with committed fans and criticism is quickly downvoted. Of course the committed fans become mods, for who else is going to waste their time moderating content? You can quickly verify this by looking up discussions of a tv episode by doing to the sub for the tv show versus going to r/television, for example.
Unfortunately, they also got rid of /r/watchpeopledie
I volunteer in EMS. I've also been fortunate enough to never encounter a car crash where an occupant has died. So one of the things I used to visit that subreddit for was to calibrate my "how serious are these injuries likely to be" meter based on the severity of vehicle damage.
They actually have a thriving offsite using the same software as themotte.org and rdrama.net. watchpeopledie.co
You know, I can see the case for shutting that sub down. Seems sure that some people who had a friend or loved one die in an accident would get word that Reddit had up a video of the crash the killed the person or the actual person as they lay dying. It's not hard to understand that they wouldn't want a bunch of strangers looking at the scene, most out of morbid curiosity. And Reddit being what it is, some commentators would have been making jokes. I don't think the entertainment Reddit gets from viewing these sees (and the occasional professional training someone like you gets) justifies the pain the post would cause the people who cared about the person who died.
Sounds like you'd be interested in r/medizzy, if you don't already know about it! I promise you there are also substitutes for the old r/wpd if you go looking, but I'm not citing anything directly for obvious reasons.
"Reddit seems to tolerate almost everything."
Nah, there are sacred protected classes which must not be mocked.
There was a feeling that sooner or later the Eye of Sauron would be turned towards TheMotte, because it did tolerate people who wanted to talk about HBD or other badthink.
Then the admins started interfering, from what I can gather; some posts were being banned before ever the mods got to see them, and when they asked 'why?' got non-answers. So the straws were in the wind that it was move before they got kicked off.
Zorba had a thread about it before the final decision was made:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_rationalists_leaving_a/
Deiseach, what is HBD? Google says "HBD is an acronym for Happy Birthday . . .Some think this word stands for Happy Birthday but in all reality it stands for Hot Bearded Men. The term was coined by two hunks of manly squirrel obsessed men ...Having two of the same allele at a locus, or base at a SNP, where both copies are from a single ancestor strand." Somehow I think none of these are your intended referent.
Razib Khan's excellent Unsupervised Learning Substack and podcast covers a fair chunk of what I think of as the interesting, intellectual end of hbd ideas.
Steve Sailer's blog has a more middlebrow take on the ideas, generally more focused on current politics and social commentary. Steve goes for the cheap shot too often, but also very often notices and points out real and important stuff going on in the world that is a little too offensive or upsetting for most mainstream outlets to discuss.
In theory, the discussion of differences along racial lines in various human traits. (Nordics can mostly drink milk, Arabs mostly can't or some such.)
In practice, the belief that black people are less intelligent and more impulsive (dumber and more violent) than other populations, and that this difference is genetic.
>In practice, the belief that black people are less intelligent and more impulsive (dumber and more violent) than other populations, and that this difference is genetic.
Yes, can you imagine that people focus on the most overwhelmingly politically salient implications of HBD? Crazy!
Leftists: Black people are poorer than whites and overrepresented in prisons because of white racism and white privilege and this must be corrected by any means necessary!
HBDers: Actually no, the data suggests genetic differences are the cause
Leftists: Why the fuck are you so obsessed with race you weirdos racist losers?
HBD is self defense against egalitarian ideology. If white people can be defamed and implicated by left-wing rhetoric, we should be able to defend ourselves using science (that thing that the left selectively believe in when convenient).
I doubt many people have much interest in who can digest milk. Are there any interesting ideas in HBD, other than the stuff about blacks -- anything having to do with longevity, or cognitive and talent and temperament differences among groups?
Hairy Bikers Dining, didn't you ever hear of their TV cookery show and tie-in books?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4evAAyslDiI
Hmm, I like those guys. And I see they've got an episode where they make Venison Cobbler, wow. But . . .
"Human Biodiversity", the study of racial genetic differences.
Technically, of human population differences, such as the hajnal line in Europe, and caste genomics in India, and between Neanderthals/Denosovans. It just happens that in modern humans, biological differences cleave along continental populations, aka races, for reasons that are fairly obvious.
Reddit's enforcement is... inconsistent. Due to limited manpower on the moderation side, the rules are only enforced when someone bothers to report a violation and then the opaque Reddit bureaucracy churns through it in the right way (or when you run afoul of a dumb automated filter, a while ago Reddit had something running to autoblock Kiwifarms references). So technically you *can* get away with anything if you're lucky, but with some types of posting you're taking a risk. "Big Tech enforces SJ" is only four words long and so obviously represents a terrible oversimplification, but if I only had four words to work with those ones do a decent job of conveying what political positions are risky.
So, maybe something like "anti-SJ positions are disallowed on Reddit the way that speeding is disallowed on American roads - common, but with a real risk of getting punished for it"?
If other drivers had a hankering to get you pulled over and had the means to give camera footage of your driving to the police on a moment's notice, then yes.
Stochastic enforcement
From what I gather, there is an impression of increasing Reddit admin intervention due to things like (inevitably mediocre) algorithmic flagging of comments that has led to fears of outright censure. One recent notable case was when a comment explaining the use of parentheses to describe (((certain people))) that mentioned a bunch of slurs in its text got deleted, and the mods reacted strongly to their inability to overrule the algorithm.
Rather than try and reconstitute theMotte after a hypothetical subreddit ban, they're jumping ship in advance. Whether or not any of this is wise is a matter of debate.
Also, support for the 45th President of the United States.
It's a weird phenomenon that if a subreddit gets banned for some specific activity then it also means you can't start a new subreddit with the same subject, because that's not considered a new subreddit, it's considered the same subreddit again.
There are 3 major Trump subs on Reddit with a combined membership of 250,000.
And multiple pro-trump subreddits have been removed or quarantined
"Eventually" is one hell of a disclaimer - it makes the whole thing unfalsifiable, and elides the "three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"† problem by which marginal discussion spaces will degrade in quality even without ideological shift. r/detrans was banned for a few hours but is back - is that evidence for, or against your threat assessment? Does it matter that r/conspiracy and r/politicalcompassmemes are going strong?
† https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
I will point out that subreddits being extant does not mean that they haven't undergone purges to be still standing and haven't adopted heavy handed moderations policies to keep reddit admins at bay.
I'd hope that if I dig into that "reasonable time" I'd find a shared intuition about deviations from a survivorship curve adjusted for popularity and virality, but I think in practice I'd get non-answers even after I pitched a few concrete examples over the plate.
It seems almost impossible to balance on the knife's edge whenever there is an up/down-vote mechanic.
One side or the other will dominate.
I reflexively search for the like/heart thing here, and get mildly annoyed when I don't find it, but it is probably a good thing it doesn't exist.
Zorba (head of themotte and the main contributor to the new offsite codebase) was against the existence of upvotes for similar reasons, I was a little surprised to see they're still on the new site. The site was a fork of an existing codebase so I give decent odds they're only there because moving offsite was a bit of a rush job and Zorba hasn't had time to rip them out yet.
What is it about this community that attracts so many people that have divergent sexual preferences and/or are gender nonconforming?
Or is this not true?
It's mostly a "came for the X, stayed for the Y" thing for me...the modern internet isn't exactly lacking in places that will fall over backwards to <s>be welcoming</s> give the appearance of being welcoming to GNC/nonhet (surely there's a more accurate word for that concept of "not vanilla", heteros get up to all kinds of wild things still). That's not what keeps me attached to ACX. Actually, it was an unexpected revelation eventually bothering to read the annual SSC/ACX reader surveys and seeing the weirdly highly proportions of diversity in those directions - it's not obvious from the comments! Just another reminder that the commentariat is not necessarily reflective of the broader readership, simply louder.
Mostly here for the cultural norms and unique mixture of people. Content and comments unlike anywhere else I'm aware of. The sex and gender +2SDs stuff is just an added bonus, I wouldn't really care if it was counterfactually skewed the opposite way but otherwise the same. Actually, it's really refreshing to be able to __disagree__ with modern Narrative consensus on such things here, and freely read others hotly debating such topics openly...even floating the idea of dissent on such shibboleths tends to get treated as precursor to a "hate crime" or whatever. Getting away from such semantic stopsigns and very high social costs to initiating hetero(dox) conversations is what makes ACX feel like "intellectual home".
Other online communities with "SF-like" levels of sex and gender divergence tend to have the same kind of discourse that I can hear just by walking around the city here. By which I mean, vacuous neoliberal pieties, tired leftist sermons, and endless streams of punching extreme right-wing strawmen. Plus lots of navel gazing about specifically LGBT topics, which...borders on narcissistic, often. So many other facets of humanity to talk about! In other words: totally boring and not worth my time. I'm glad ACX isn't like SF in that regard, despite demographic overlap. (Not gonna hazard any guesses at causes for the correlations.)
According to the surveys, people here are about twice as likely to be trans and ~10x as likely to be poly as the general population.
I think this is a combination of age (we are younger), politics (I think we're slightly more liberal), autism/IQ effects (we are more likely to be autistic or high-IQ, and these seem to correlate with gender nonconformity for various reasons), and rationalist community founder effects (a few high profile rationalists were poly and this spread throughout the community; I think this is less important for transgender). There are also some personal founder effects - I am poly, and I used to date Ozy who ran a popular gender-nonconformity-related blog, and our blogging communities cross-pollinated a little.
Personally, this blog seems very San Fransisco-y and my impression is that 2x trans and 10x poly is pretty much "normal" for San Fransisco upper middle class types.
>is this not true
This answer. Rationalism aren't any more likely to contain the mentioned group over any other bay-area-based social conglomerate.
Rationalists have an attractor in the form of being out-of-ordinary anti-mainstream anti-witch libertarians who are against knee-jerk reactions and in favor of letting the accused make their own case, and recomputing morality from scratch. And they have a repeller in the form of being consistent and applying the anti-witch standard to the "bigots" as well and other persecuted natural enemies of the mentioned group and not burning them on the stake like most mainstream media.
I believe the 2 forces mostly cancel out on average, which leaves the core demographics and cultural attitudes of the founders to take over, and those are vaguely welcoming to the practices because why not. But other communities online are explicitely and zealously welcoming and unwelcoming to other groups, so they beat the Rationalists' lukewarm embrace. Why go to the social club that only welcomes you with "sure whatever floats your boat my (wo)man(x)" and then forgets about it when there are others that wax poetical on the evils of the cishet men and their oppressive binary pronouns.
Yes, I meant to say that they are against the entire concept of "witch", as somebody so dangerous that they can't be allowed to even speak or argue their case, not that they believe some people are really witches and that they are against them.
Which community? Seems largely true for the rationalist/post-rationalist (or whatever they're calling themselves these days, I refuse to use that silly twitter acronym) community, but not necessarily true for the ACX comments section.
Gut reaction is to say "define terms, please", but I guess that'd mark me as an Opposer already by many modern standards...
I can't speak for other trans commenters, obviously, but personally LGBT stuff is just a tired topic I don't get much out of discussing anymore. It doesn't make me feel personally attacked or whatever to read anti-X stuff, where X is some single star in the galaxy of my identity...no single piece __matters__ that much, anymore. Childish mindset, too old to think like that anymore. Oh no, someone on the internet is "debating" my right to exist? Sure am glad it's just some random person on the internet, then! And even if I did invest the requisite care and time to change their mind, the net effect is negligible vs. real-world will to power (unless a bunch of Congresspeople from red states secretly read ACX, I don't know?).
It's still maybe pleasant to answer educational questions asked in good faith, relate personal stories, or otherwise utilize my "subject matter expertise"...but the whole speak-up-loudly-against-any-opposition-to-LGBT-as-existential-crisis thing? Not a good use of my limited budget for staying up to correct Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, not anymore. I think if you're seeing such a skew in the comments, it might just be one side having more time and energy for The Fight than the other. It gets old, life is short.
I think this needs to be clarified a bit. "Opposing gay rights" can mean anything from "doesn't think Masterpiece Cakeshop should be forced to make bespoke wedding cakes" to "we need to subject everybody to a polygraph/plethysmography to see if they are in any way a bit gay and then kill anybody who is".
I presume there are a lot of the former and very few of the latter.
Are gay rights not seen by advocates as part of the LGQBT bundle of divergence-that-should-be-seen-as-normal? Or are gay rights advocates proposing something else?
Do I? Am I anti-gay rights? And gender ideology?
I get more confused as I get older and things seem to be pushed to an extreme. Gay marriage is now a quaint, roses round the door picket-fence notion for those subsumed into mainstream culture, and Canadian Woodwork Teachers are where it's at now.
There's a lot of things being claimed as "rights" that I don't agree are rights at all. So yes, that is "I am anti what you say are your rights" on my part.
Dude, I haven't been keeping a log of examples, but every couple of open threads we get a conversation along these lines. You have to be blind not to notice it.
We may have a definitions thing here. I'm specifically thinking of things like the trans being repeatedly accused of trying to trans kids or permanently sterilize them, starting as early as age six. That's paranoid nonsense, but it's not actually anti-trans rights, since it's about banning something that no one is for.*
So I was reading this as anti-trans rhetoric, which I think is clearly true. But on the more specific point of being anti-trans *rights*, I think I may well be mistaken.
*Almost no one, I think there was one actual example in one of those threads.
Maybe the people with ordinary sexual preferences don't talk about them enough.
To redress that balance, I'd like everybody to know that I have incredibly ordinary sexual preferences. If it's ordinary and regular, I'm into it. I'm not saying I'm a prude, I'm saying that I'm exactly half way between being a prude and a pervert. Curves are sexy, and the sexiest part of the bell curve is the bit in the middle. Ohhh yeah.
Here here! A toast to vanilla preferences! Let us celebrate moderately sized breasts and butts (or whatever it is about men that people attracted to men find attractive), and remind people that the missionary position is a rather excellent one!
I'm not sure whether it's significantly true relative to the reference class of "online discussion spaces" (which are known to have higher rates of LGBT than RL), and obviously this *is* an online discussion space.
If it is, I'd point to the IQ-LGBT and autism-LGBT correlations, though I don't know how well those still hold.
If point 1 is true, that's most probably where I've gone wrong.
As for your 2nd point, personal experience suggests that correlation is somewhat true. Though, I acknowledge there is probably a huge publication bias here, in that any study showing the opposite would definitely not get published.
I suspect some kind of broad neurotype affinity thing going on, for the latter. Not as sure about the former. This is assuming it is actually true; my priors are pretty high on bubbles like that occurring naturally, and my observations weakly agree, but there's also going to be a lot of visibility and salience biases in such matters, so I don't put much confidence in any of it.
I remember once Scott mentioned a study showing transgender women had average IQs in the 120s. That could be a part of it.
Depends on what you mean. Young children with gender dysphoria tend to be average males. Teenage girls with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria trend high in neuroticism but are intellectually typical. Older male autogynophiles are often high achievers with unusually high levels of industriousness and aggression. It is quite the mix.
I think it's just a place where they feel safe and able to speak openly, so topics about their concerns are relatively more common than in other public places.
Yes. This is a polite community. So bad that courtesy is as rare as it is on line.
IQ correlates with openness to experience (why *that* is is unknown, but it seems a little less mysterious at least in that they're more clearly related than IQ and orientation) and it's not hard to imagine why Openness would correlate with being any of L, G, B or T, especially in a society that's still at least a little repressed.
Your descendants can't regress to the mean if you don't have descendants to regress.
Good luck getting funding for that kind of research!
But Im with you in that I really wish someone could establish some kind of mechanism that would explain why autism and gender dysphoria are so correlated.
A girl I used to live with who was autistic and eventually came out as trans said she just never felt similar to other boys at all, and the idea that she might actually be a woman became a kind of obsession in her mind. She was also extremely smart, very high openness, and seemed to get a lot of reward from interacting with other gender nonconforming people online.
To me the obvious mechanism is that humans naturally adapt themselves to the nearest social niche. This is largely subconscious, and ordinarily ends up with each member of a friend group emphasizing the characteristics that make them unique in that friend group, while largely conforming to social expectations otherwise. That tendency to conform suppresses deviation from expectation on things like sexual attraction and sexual identity. Some people will be far enough from the social norm that they can't fully adapt, and others will be close enough that they flatten to 'normal.' (And this is all subconcious, with a rationalizing mind coming up with perfectly acceptable explanations about why eg. you're attracted to some same sex people, or dislike how you look, etc. without them impacting your identity and niche.)
This adaptation mechanism is largely dysfunctional for autistic people. I don't think it's actually *broken* per se in most of them, but they're simply unable to adapt themselves to an expected social niche on a large number of crucial dimensions, so the positive feedback of seamlessly blending is gone. A bi autistic person isn't actually notably less conforming than a straight autistic person. 'Autistic' dominates the deviation. So without the inner pressure to conform, you get more variation on every dimension.
I mean, there are two very-obvious reasons for a correlation between autism and LGBT.
1) Until recently being out-of-closet LGBT was low-social-status and autistics do low-social-status things more (the conformity instinct is broken)
2) Low-functioning autism involves high mutational load which means lots of added variance in traits; scrambling someone's sexuality and gender identity will increase the likelihood of being LGBT since the normal state is >50% cishet and every other combination counts as LGBT.
#1 notably suggests that the correlation should be decreasing over time as LGBT is increasingly a high-social-status thing and the apparent neurotypical LGBT percentage is no longer suppressed (it's possibly outright *inflated* above normal in Gen Z/Alpha). #2 will probably still maintain a positive correlation, though.
My prior would have been that autism tends makes people less likely to do things just because other people do them. Not that I know what I'm talking about.
Or the flip side of that hypothesis, they are more willing to do introspection and identify with things that were already true about themselves but counter to established social norms.
With all due respect, trebuchet, it's been well established that you don't have much respect for (LGB)T people, intellectual or otherwise.
But more to the point, IQ[1] is also strongly correlated with ability for introspection, and as mentioned by other in this thread, IQ is also positively correlated with identifying as a GSM. So that should serve as, at the very least, weak evidence that your intuition is incorrect here, or at least biased in a way you should consider correcting for.
[1] (and its closely correlated proxy, "openness to experience", specifically openness to *internal* experience)
Maybe it's just more salient to me? But would definitely say a good chunk of the dating profiles are about polyamorous people, and there are often a significant amount of trans people at the meetups and in the comments
There aren't really full Scottposts about gender/sexuality stuff anymore, almost all of those were from SSC days...as for comments, most of the LGBT-related discussion happens in OTs, which (imo) have very little archival-skimming value. So it's easy to miss, but historically definitely A Thing.
To best recollection, this here subthread is the first such one in a while, actually...but there were definitely a bunch of pretty gnarly sex and gender beatdown discussions in earlier 2022 OTs. For a few solid months, it felt like every blog I subscribe to had to have __someone__ mouthing off an opinion about trans women in sports, or kids and blockers, on the flimsiest pretense...ACX wasn't immune from that strange trend, sadly. Hope it doesn't become A Thing again, that was tiresome mostly-heat-little-light.
Anybody know a way to search ACX comments that always works?
(Have been trying to track down a comment thread from a while back but can't find it. DDG/Bing is useless, Google often works (though not in this case) but I hate using it, no organic search functionality I can see, there was acxsearch.herokuapp.com but it is dead.)
How much effort are you willing to put in? Back on SSC I wrote a thingy to download the entire site in a format I could then page through locally, massive overkill but I legit couldn't find a web tool that was comprehensive (or even consistent). I'd guess Substack is even more hostile to web searches, so probably would require something comparable.
The only way I've been able to do this is to think of a word or user name that appears in that thread that probably doesn't appear much anywhere else, then cmd-F every damn thread. I wish there was a way to search all threads at once.
I initially wasn't willing to do this, but I ended up doing it and found it fairly quickly by sheer luck. So, thanks for that.
What was the method?
Open lots of threads and Ctrl-F for a rare word ("unscrewing") that I knew appeared in the thread I wanted (I have an eidetic memory, particularly good at remembering quotes; without that, this sort of procedure would presumably be much harder, especially when searching for multi-word strings). I went for Open Threads first, opened about 40 tabs starting with the oldest, then started doing Ctrl-F, close tab, Ctrl-F in next tab; however, due to an error in my procedure Open Thread 172 was checked earlier than it should have been, and the thread I wanted was in there.
I wrote a blog post to explain a new paper of mine about success of internet memes: https://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=2205
It's about the tension between meritocracy (= you succeed because you are good) and topocracy (= you succeed because of your privileged position in the market). I think you might find it relevant, because the effect of topocracy is something I didn't see much discussed in Scott's post about great families (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families) and, unless I missed it, it wasn't seriously considered in the comments.
Of course this is about internet memes, so the generalizability is meh. But I think it's a promising idea, and it is based on previous theoretical work (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03784) showing how sparse networks are dominated by topocracy. Real world networks are typically very sparse.
Is it possible to find the original chapters of Unsong with the comments underneath?
The first time I read it, I really enjoyed reading the comments.
But I can only manage to find the Prologue back in the SSC archives--the other chapters appear to have been removed and are only available on the separate Unsong site, with comments no longer visible.
The separate unsong site should still show comments; I just reread it a month or two ago, including diving into a bunch of the comments for background tidbits.
Edit: yep, comments are all still there as far as I can see
https://unsongbook.com/
A slightly exaggerated (but not much) partial explanation for why universities (in the US at least, maybe those elsewhere are paragons) are such hotbeds for anti-capitalist, anti-landlord, anti-business thinking, scholarship, and activism. This is based on my experience having gotten a PhD (physics, to be precise) and then spent most of a decade teaching at a private prep school.
For starters, academics are almost exclusively people who have very little experience outside of academia. Because if you get off the PhD -> Postdoc + Adjunct -> Tenure Track train at any point, it's really really hard to get back on. Mostly (and more and more so), academics are people who had that as a goal from day 1 of college at the latest. They went to the best schools themselves (saw a graphic where 80% of professors are from 20% of schools and 2% of schools make up 20% of professors). They've mostly lived in college towns or in big cities (which are often themselves dominated or heavily influenced by a series of universities). So academics have a very narrow world-view, especially where business is concerned. Their experience is mostly around a couple types of businesses. What are those?
Well, for starters there's the university itself. Which, despite not usually being a for-profit business, is a BIG BUSINESS in every way that counts. Multiple 10s of millions of dollars in annual revenue, huge payrolls, huge assets. And huge bureaucracies with all that goes along with that. And worse, many of them are WAY too big to fail. Either they're the Ivy League or they're big state schools that are literally propped up by governments.
Then there are the academic publishers. Academics and wanna-be academics have dealt with them at all levels--as a student buying exorbitantly-priced textbooks with user-hostile devices that prevent reuse and resale. As grad students/academics trying to get published. As teachers assigning texts.
Then there are the college-town landlords. Who have a huge flood of price-insensitive undergraduates (because student loans) who are living away from home for the first time and tend to trash things. And whose incentives are to pack people in as densely as possible in minimum-quality, maximum-price lodgings. AKA slum lords for the modern era.
What do all of these have in common? They're the very model of a rapacious, empire-building, no-concern-for-customer-welfare, unaccountable big business. They wield TONS of power and there's not really much you can do about it. In fact, they're all the things that anti-capitalist, anti-business people decry.
But, even with that, academics (once they're tenure track at least) have it pretty nice. Working conditions are just about as good as it gets, you're doing stuff that you enjoy, <sarcasm>are surrounded by pretty but dumb undergraduates as eye candy</sarcasm>, can wield immense personal power (career life or death) over subordinates...So academics look at the outside world (of which they really know very little from personal experience) and think "wow. If I have to deal with such evil, horrible companies and my life is THIS good...how nasty must it be out there in the wastelands outside academia?" And thus is perpetuated the belief that business MUST be awful and the source of many, if not all, ills. Because the ones they deal with *really are that bad*. And the academics just don't know that their situation is abnormal. That, in fact, it's that bad *because* it's so sheltered from the vicissitudes of actual capitalism. They're living in a world where monopolies and extreme power differentials are not only normal, they're the water in which they swim. And don't realize that a lot of the rest of the country...just isn't like that. That I, as a programmer at a company, can, in fact, wield a substantial amount of power both directly and indirectly despite having no titles and not really getting paid all that much. That most businesses are struggling, not being run by fat cats lying around on piles of money.
Is this a complete explanation? No. Not at all. Is it exaggerated for comic effect? Yes, a bit. But, I think, it captures at least a truth about how different academia is from the "real world". And it's one of the huge reasons I'm glad I *didn't* get my desire to become a professor and am happy I ended up where I did.
That does make one think. Academic publishers are literally the most rapacious public companies in existence - IIRC Elsevier has the highest profit margin of any publicly listed company, at over 70%. If that's the company one interacts with most, day to day.....
I would question your premise that universities are hotbeds for anti-capitalist sentiment rather than for identitarian distractions from it. But granting it:
1. How do you explain economists?
2. You say you're a programmer. As in, you're in a one profession that, for the most part, has successfully taken control of their means of production. I really can't emphasize enough how much you're the outlier here. The way you've described it, I'd venture that most people's experience is, in fact, similar to academics.
1. Note that economists are among the least anti-capitalist AND also the ones most connected with actual businesses. Similarly among business school professors (who are among the few who don't have to stick to the academic train for success). There's a correlation between "has experience with the outside world of business" and "is less(1) inclined toward anti-business sentiment".
2. I had significant market power as a high school teacher at a private school. So no, it's not just programmers. You know where I had *zero* market power? As a grad student. You know where people were the most abused? Yup, grad school. Professors who were petty tyrants with zero accountability, administrators who ostensibly were supposed to protect grad students but instead made their lives miserable, etc. In fact, I've worked at a whole bunch of businesses in various capacities from minimum wage up. Hands down, no questions, the worst work environment was academia. Sub-minimum wage (paid for 19 hours a week, expected to work 80), routine verbal and emotional abuse from supervisors that was *normalized and sanctioned* by the rest, no benefits, zero paid time off (in fact, effectively zero time off at all), etc. And I was in the hard sciences where we actually got paid. Oh, and zero hope for actually continuing on in academia--with 10+ graduate students every year for every faculty opening and the old guard hanging on for dear life and acting all "only the top 10 schools need apply", all of those grad students were basically being used as low-paid labor and then dumped.
(1) as I said, it's a loose correlation. Not 100% in any direction. I'm not saying that *all* such sentiment comes from this cause. But that it seems to be a contributing factor in my experience.
1. Economists, not BAs. (Now, IANAE, but economists not being connected to any actual business operations is a running joke told about the discipline by insiders.)
2. I think I better see what you mean now. But what you're now describing is academia being uniquely awful, rather than representing the worst parts of capitalism writ large. I mean, sure it is, but that's because it's not work, it's a competition for status. (It's not just academia, compare unpaid internship in prestigious institutions. But it's a very special case either way.) Are many people being exploited and duped? Absolutely. (Though, mirage of academic career aside, the knowledge and diplomas you've acquired did in fact raise your status, and that status likely contributed to your more positive experiences going forward.) Does that make them oppose the system? Not really, no, at least not the system that enables the elite they want to join. They may dislike capitalists in the sense that capital owners represent a competing power centre, but I don't think they blame them for (or associate them with) what happens inside academia.
There may be something to that, but I suspect the core explanation is far simpler: people who have positive opinions of capitalism and for-profit businesses are going to be more inclined to pursue private sector careers working for for-profit businesses. Conversely, people who have negative opinions of those are likely to pursue public sector, nonprofit, or academic careers. And then there's a feedback loop where e.g. academia gets a reputation for being leftist, causing more people with leftist views to gravitate towards it and more people with rightist views to avoid it as a career.
There's also an effect where, once an institution or community develops an internal culture with a substantially different Overton Window of political views that society as a whole, that divergence sustains itself by reinforcing the views of those in the community who are within its Overton Window and by encouraging those who are outside the community's Overton Window but well within that of society as a whole to either keep quiet about politics or leave the community. For example, in a hypothetical community where the Overton Window runs from "Objectivist" to "Bleeding-Heart Libertarian", a random mainstream Democrat who happens to wander in and join in a conversation about politics is likely to be seen as tantamount to a hard-core Stalinist.
I think there's an almost infinite number of these Nozick style speculations, "why my ideological opponents are wrong because of some psychological bias they all share", you could make up, all completely unfalsifiable. "Maybe right wingers only support the market because and it has treated them well personally and they're well off."
In reality no one has a broad enough personal experience to comment on society as a whole; has anyone been both a child labourer in a lithium mine and the CEO of a S&P500? And I think it's actually quite anti intellectual to elevate personal experience over evidence/reason, it's very reminiscent of appeals to "lived experience."
Surely the simplest explanation for academic anti-capitalism is just that academics are intelligent, knowledgeable people (at least compared to the general population) and anti-capitalism is a view that intelligent, knowledgeable people are more likely to hold (which maybe should increase your confidence in its correctness). Anything else would be a violation of Ockham's razor.
Alternative: someone who is a legitimate capitalist would realize that much of their salary comes from extortion/theft, and be repulsed at the idea of working for a government-funded institution.
You contradict yourself, academics may well be intelligent but they are no more knowledgeable beyond their narrow field than anyone else.
>Surely the simplest explanation for academic anti-capitalism is just that academics are intelligent, knowledgeable people
Come on, this is almost a "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" level of irony. You started the comment chastising your interlocutor (rightly so) for assuming an unfalsiable Just-So story that their ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Then you went ahead and assumed your ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Missed the /s ?
For what it's worth, I lean leftist (the real thing, not the woke cringe), I'm not knowledgeable enough about modern Capitalism and how it intersects with Moloch to know exactly what I'm against, but I have the vague leftist sentiment of Mercy over Justice. And I still hate the incredibly smug "Reality Has A Left-Wing Bias" reddit snark.
It's not at all obvious that academics are smarter than the general population. Even if I grant you that the relevant definition of intelligence here is simply raw IQ, I have never seen evidence that the type of academic fields which are anti-capitalist are filled with people with higher IQs. There is a sort of Motte-And-Bailey with the word "Academia", it's meant to evoke the respectability of Math and Physics, but also act as a trojan to sneak in fields like "Queer Studies" and Feminist Studies and things like that. What is the distribution of Anti-Capitalist sentiments by academic subfield ? How many academic Anti-Capitalists are Physicist and Mathematicians and Engineers and Computer Scientists and Medical Doctors (there is absolutely no evidence that those people can't be dumbasses as well, very frequently so, even in their own fields. But there is at least cursory evidence that those fields, with their strong contact with reality and its corrective feedback loops, are more intelligent in a certain narrow sense), and how many are sociologists and psychologists and philosophers, and how many are queer-scholars ?
Neither is intelligence a general-purpose bulwark against delusions and motivated reasoning. Plenty of intelligent people supported Slavery, Non-Existent Gods, Tyrants, pointless wars, all sorts of shameful deeds, the most lowly impulses of their social and cultural millue, etc... If anything, intelligence gives the overconfidence and the hubris needed to find and believe reasons for what is ultimately believed and acted upon for no reasons.
And neither is intelligence necessarily a good factor in deciding morality, after all, intelligence is just evolutionary luck, like good looks or wealth. If somebody said "The sexiest, most bombshell women believe Capitalism is right" or "The wealthiest men, who frolick with the sexiest bombshells of women, believe Capitalism is right" you would rightfully scorn them. But somehow intelligence is treated differently, it's treated as a Hand Over Reality's Pulse. But it's not, intelligence is a peacock's feather, a capacity to understand and manipulate patterns to impress mates and increase chances of survival, no more and no less. There is no reason to believe that those who lucked out on intelligence are more moral or altruistic, if anything, their luck could blind them to problems their less intelligent peers struggle with, just like sexy looks blind women to problems that their less sexy peers routinely deal with.
>Anything else would be a violation of Ockham's razor.
Occam's razor without an explicit and agreed-upon definition of simplicity is a fallacy. Any programmer understands that the shortest program for anything is dependent on the programming language, indeed it's almost always the case that when programming languages make some programs short and sweet and simple, they make other programs long and arduous and tortured (by the exact same mechanisms and decisions that made the others short and sweet and simple). This seems to repeat in all languages, models, ways of thought, tools of thought, ideologies, etc..., it's as if they have a finite "budget" of expressive power, and instead of spending it uniformly over all expressible ideas and results, they choose to concentrate it on some ideas and privilege them, making them easier to express at the expense of others being harder. There is no omniscient optimality in this decision, it can just as easily blind you to truths as it can open your eyes to others. A Newtonian worldview makes it very easy to see why Universal Gravitation has to be the case, but flails when it's confronted with Black Body Radiation. All mental frameworks are biases, and biases make certain conclusions computationally cheap at the cost of others being prohibitively expensive.
As someone who is libertarian-leaning (so definitely not left-leaning, if not really right-leaning) I suspect that while people with graduate degrees in things like gender studies probably have lower average IQs that people with undergraduate degrees in topics like mathematics, they still probably have higher IQs than the average person, and are obviously more left leaning.
However, I think that credentials are poor indicators of intelligence (due to high variance) and that intelligence is a poor indicator of correctness.
Most people don't care very much about truth, and are not really interested in utilizing their intelligence to systematically investigating truth, so it would not be surprising if intelligence is not highly-correlated with correctness.
Notably, the Triple Nine Society - a group limited to those in the top 0.1% of IQ conducted a survey of its members that found that they tended to be pretty libertarian (https://web.archive.org/web/20150507081739/http://www.triplenine.org:80/poll/tnss00.htm). As much as I would like to flatter myself by telling myself that very intelligent people tend to share my views, I think it is still more likely that the reason that very smart people hold those views is not because they are correct, but for other reasons (such as a rejection of the idea that other much less intelligent people should be telling you what to do).
This does emphasize, though, a difficulty of using group intelligence as a proxy for correctness of their views - which cohort do we use? If the average IQ 110 person is more liberal than the average IQ 100 person, and the average IQ 150 person is more libertarian than either the average IQ 100 or 110 person, then what should be conclude? And what if we knew the position of the average IQ 160 person?
Were there a linear relationship between IQ and political leaning, that would be one thing, although I would still be wary of drawing conclusions from it, but there does not appear to be such a trend.
Notably, the Triple Nine Society - a group limited to those in the top 0.1% of IQ conducted a survey of its members that found that they tended to be pretty libertarian (https://web.archive.org/web/20150507081739/http://www.triplenine.org:80/poll/tnss00.htm). As much as I would like to flatter myself by telling myself that very intelligent people tend to share my views, I think it is still more likely that the reason that very smart people hold those views is not because they are correct, but for other reasons (such as a rejection of the idea that other much less intelligent people should be telling you what to do).
Other obvious explanation: the triple nine society are not a representative selection of intelligent people; people with views similar to yours are more likely to join than equally intelligent people with different views.
Limited to those in the top 0.1% of IQ *and* who are willing to go out and get their adult IQ measured to the requisite degree of fidelity, and eager to join a society of Certified Smart People when they could be going out and getting rich or winning Nobel prizes or whatever. That probably does introduce a selection bias.
I agree. I was planning on mentioning that, but I forgot. The point is that intelligence is a poor proxy for correctness, and even if it were significantly correlated with correctness that it is not obvious which cohort should be studied. The Triple Nine Society survey is useful in illustrating the issue whether or not it is representative of "typical" highly intelligent people (of course it is not actually a representative sample).
Yeah, maybe that could have been phrased less strongly, I only meant academia correlates a bit with intelligence which correlates a bit with anti-capitalism, not that academics were epistemically brilliant and have seen the light (libertarianism also correlates with IQ) . I still think since academia selects for cognitive qualities, if you observe a common trait among academics, your prior should be that it's probably due those cognitive qualities. (should our prior be that they're epistemically ordinary and just ignore what they think?) But maybe I overstated the case a bit.
"Then you went ahead and assumed your ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth." Don't think I did since "intelligence causes leftism" doesn't imply right wingers are low-intelligence.
I don't know which academics OP was referring to, but it's usually ones in fields like history/sociology, I'd give some credence to those guys' opinions.
Do you take issue with the "99% of scientists accept climate change" stuff? I think that is actually a reason to increase your confidence in climate change, at least a little.
>I only meant academia correlates a bit with intelligence which correlates a bit with anti-capitalism
It could be the case that Academia just correlates with intelligence, and then, seperately, Academia correlates with anti-capitalism. Should we use this as a signal that intelligence correlates with anti-capitalism ? and is this signal useful ? I'm sure Academia in lots of times and places correlated a lot with, e.g., religiosity, would that imply the same intelligence-religiosity link ?
Academics are just humans with the same old herd instincts and group conformity as the rest of us, I have some very smart friends (not academics) that can absolutely beat my ass in plenty of smart-people-things like e.g. Chess or Competitive Programming, but... they also believe an invisible being in the sky with the logically-contradicting trinity of OmniScience and OmniPower and OmniBenevolence exist, and furthermore that this being contacted humans through the thoughts of an illterate man in an obscure desert 1400 years ago, and furthermore that the written-down forms of those thoughts (in a specific natural language out of thousands) are the pure and uncorrupted essence of the fundamental and universal truth of this entire existence, and they will disown the shit out of me if I dared to suggest otherwise. There is no doubt that this is a silly cluster of beliefs that is rejected by at least tens of millions of equally-as-smart and much-smarter people, but there is also no doubt that Chess and Competitive Programming are impressive activities. So how can we reconcile those 2 facts ?
By just recognizing that intelligence is not enough. One of my all-time-favorite quotes is by the computer scientist Alan Kay : "A Point of View is Worth 80 IQ points". You're never going to understand or even see certain things, no matter how intelligent you are, if you're starting from an unreachable island in idea-space. Intelligence is like a car, it can massively expand your reach in idea-space, but there are Oceans in idea-space, and cars can't cross oceans no matter how poweful or fast. People have biases, deeply ingrained in them by their friends and families and peers and biochemistery and living conditions and all sorts of other things and combinations of things, biases are deeply reinforced by social reward and punishment. Those biases makes them "dumber", or - the word I prefer - "blind". They can never see things that are incredibly easy to see from other PoVs, they are missing the 80IQ boost that comes from the novel perspective, and their 120+ IQ is not enough alone to cut it.
>Don't think I did since "intelligence causes leftism" doesn't imply right wingers are low-intelligence
Ok fair enough, I still disapprove of the claim, for reasons that I ranted above and in my other comment at length.
>Do you take issue with the "99% of scientists accept climate change" stuff?
I don't. Because it's a factual claim. It can be disputed and interpreted, yes, but there are very percise formulations that are supported by data. The analogous claims about Capitalism would be "Capitalism caused the death of millions of people" and "Capitalism caused some people to have outsized power and influence over millions", those claims can be disputed and interpreted, but there exists some formulations of them that won't be denied by the most ardent of Capitalism's defenders. But "Anti-Capitalism" is... what exactly ? wanting capitalism to go down ? Hating billionaires (Who needs Anti-Capitalism for that ?) ? this seems very different than factual claims. Anti-Capitalism is a name given to a cluster of... things that are more complex than simple claims or even detailed road plans of actions.
> Come on, this is almost a "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" level of irony. You started the comment chastising your interlocutor (rightly so) for assuming an unfalsiable Just-So story that their ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Then you went ahead and assumed your ideological opponents all share some trait which blinds them to some obvious truth. Missed the /s ?
I definitely read this as deliberate irony.
The idea that anti-capitalist views correlate with intelligence seems like it needs significantly more proof. While educational polarisation is now a significant force in US politics - It hasn't always been. Furthermore this would suggest that since Marxism often appeals to the proletariat while capitalism appeals to the bourgeoisie that capitalism must be true due to Occam's razor.
So far as I know, Marxists have never figured out how to appeal to the proletariat-- the vocabulary is non-obvious, the sentence structure is complex, and the ideas are very abstract.
While we're here, is there a difference between impoverish and immiserate?
I don't think this is true. The IWW was pretty big back in the 1910s, and IIRC, was (is?) explicitly communist. Back when it was just theory, or when the Soviet Union was young and information about conditions on the ground was scarce, my impression is that it had a sizable following among working people.
But as the 20th century wore on and conditions under capitalism got much better while conditions under communism required turning communist countries into giant prisons, the appeal evaporated.
Certainly the appeal seems very limited today, especially among the proletariat, but I don't think that was always true.
There is a difference between being broke and being in poverty, is there not?
Ideally, I'd want personal experience and data to both be in play. Personal experience is limited, and data can leave out huge amounts about what's going on.
A cynic might think that anti-capitalism among many academics is largely a form of sour grapes, stemming from a feeling (somewhat justified IMHO) that their efforts in attaining and holding an academic position, and their value to society, are not sufficiently financially rewarded by the capitalist system. I'm thinking more of scientific and technical "STEM" academics, but I guess much the same could be felt by those more on the cultural side (literature, history, etc).
My engineering degree had a required course which was effectively basic business finance. Everybody getting the 'E' degree was made to thoroughly appreciate the concepts of Present Worth and Opportunity Cost. So there was no delusion there.
How is it you conclude bell_of_a_tower is unjustified in his extrapolation from his personal life experience to conclusions about the general experience of academics, while you *are* justified in making a far broader extrapolation -- presumably from your own life experience, although in fact you don't mention any empirical basis for your conclusion, which makes it an inherently inferior argument -- that academics are more intelligent and knowledgeable than the general population and this explains the agreeable fact that they hold a view you find congenial?
If bell's extrapolation is unjustified, because "no one has a broad enough personal experience to comment on society as a whole," then yours is equally unjustified.
I think it’s pretty well shown that the average democrat is a bit more intelligent than the average republican. Which means that “smart people are more likely to be liberal” is a probably true statement.
The problem is that this says almost nothing about why smart people tend to be liberal, since it could be that liberal views are more helpful to smart people (college debt relief) or that liberal views are closer to objective truth (global warming is human caused to some extent), or even that being smart (and career focused) leads to different values (feminism)
"I think it’s pretty well shown that the average democrat is a bit more intelligent than the average republican. "
It's also pretty well shown that the incarcerated felon population is overwhelmingly skewed D over R.
The US Democratic party is a large tent which likes to claim the most educated and least educated members of society within its embrace. Ds always argue that minor hurdles like punched-card ballots discriminate against them because they are less competent (see the courtroom arguments in Bush vs Gore, Florida, 2000). I find this all BS, education has nothing to do with hole-punching skills, but it is humorous BS. As a just-retired full professor with a doctorate from an elite school, I have had the opportunity to work with many amazing brilliant and wise extremely educated people over the years, including a few who have served on the Cabinets of US Presidents. The best have been centrists, not liberals. They work with Republicans and Democrats, capitalists and labor leaders (back when we had labor leaders), intellectuals and salt-of-the-earth farmers. They have read Marx and Milton Friedman. I agree with the original post that many academics fall so strongly on the left because of their limited experience outside of academia (again, personal anecdotal experience, no data). BTW, the Republican party is a very complex collection of people and positions about whom it is unwise to generalize, just like the Democrats. A two-party system has to be that way. Mystik wasn't generalizing, but I don't think averages are very descriptive of multi-modal distributions.
Wait, what? The reason the ballot in Bush vs Gore discriminated against Democracts wasn't because Democrats are less competent, it was because the butterfly ballots used were set up - possibly by accident, but I suspect deliberately, because I find it hard to imagine why you'd do it that way if your goal wasn't deliberate deception - in a way that tricked hundreds, and probably thousands, of Gore supporters into registering votes for Buchanan, making it easy to parse the list of names on the left, with Gore in second place, as implying that his was the second chad (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida#/media/File:Butterfly_Ballot,_Florida_2000_(large).jpg).
I watched the courtroom argument, and a Gore witness testified that a more complicated ballot discriminated against Democrats more that Republicans because they had a more difficult time with things like ballots, in so many words, referring exactly to the butterfly ballot and the Gore / Buchanan issue.
The ballot has ARROWS clearly showing where to punch the vote. I honestly do not believe that anyone would go to the trouble of counting the holes to decide where to punch the vote when the Arrows are there, clearly visible. Moreover, each candidate pis has a number, which corresponds to the number of holes that must be counted to punch the vote if (for some strange reason) the voter misses the large arrow pointing at the correct place. Therefore, I do not think the ballot was deliberately designed to mislead, but that the old saying is truth "nothing is fool-proof because fools keep finding more intricate ways to make foolish mistakes"
I wasn't accusing anyone of extrapolating from their personal experience. I was suggesting we ought to focus on arguments, not un-provable psychological motivations. i.e. their personal experience.
That academics are more intelligent and knowledgeable than the general population isn't just my personal observation, it's almost certainly true given academia heavily selects for intelligence and academics' main occupation is gathering knowledge. You could look for evidence to support that, but it almost has to be the case just from Bayesian reasoning. I wouldn't have thought anyone could doubt that.
I'm not suggesting academics are infallible or even a good source of knowledge, but when you observe a group of intelligent and knowledgeable people hold a conflicting view to one of yours, and you don't have ironclad reason to suspect them of bias, the reasonable response is to reduce your confidence in that view, not start (potentially endless) speculation about why they might be mistaken on that issue in particular.
The IQ of professors has been studied, certainly, and tends to be about 1-2 standard deviations above average in physical sciences. I've never heard of anyone studying their "knowledgability," and bell has made a credible argument that in fact *that* is likely to be lower than average -- academic cloister and all that.
I think your argument that the occupation of academics is "gathering knowledge" is specious, since I know of no academic field that seeks to gather knowledge generally. High energy physicists seek to gather knowledge about cosmology, say, and pay no attention at all to knowledge about farming, mechanical engineering, economics, bridge construction and repair, or social leadership.
Indeed, the stereotype of the absent-minded professor who knows everything about some tiny narrow sliver of human knowledge and fuck all about anything else and has to be told when to come in out of the rain is commonplace. If you're willing to draw conclusions based on what "everybody knows" we'll have to include that trope, too, since it has no less empirical support than yours -- and conclude while professors might well be smarter than average they're probably also less well informed about life in general than average. (And let us recall it would be general life experience, not a thorough understanding of Coptic or the citric acid cycle, which would inform viewpoints on economic and social structure optimums.)
Your final argument is also dubious. If I observe a group of highly skilled plumbers who hold a different opinion than me about plumbing, I would definitely pay attention. But if they have a different opinion than me about investing, or the best strategy in Texas Hold 'Em, I have no reason at all to think my opinion inferior. You can't just make a blanket appeal to intelligence per se and say "anything someone smart says is a priori more likely to be true than someone someone of lower IQ says." That's deeply silly. The most relevant factor in determining whether an opinion is more valuable is whether the person with the opinion has more, or less, relevant experience. The opinion of an art historian on bridge building is of no more worth than the opinion of a grocery store check-out clerk -- and considerably less than that of a construction worker, notwithstanding the IQ of any of the three.
If the disagreement is over relevant academic knowledge vs lived experience (I think we can assume academics have more relevant knowledge and higher IQs than average) surely a rationalist should favour the knowledge side. Are non-academics also experts in physics because they live in the physical world?
What I thought was unreasonable about the original post was, take three propositions:
1. pro capitalist arguments are so strong any educated person should accept them.
2. many educated people don't accept them.
3. those educated people suffer from some special condition preventing them thinking clearly.
I felt OP wanted to retain 1, but couldn't because of 2, so to remain constant suggests 3 in a way that's inelegant and intrinsically less probable than just: !1 && 2. So comes up with some story about how academics have less experience than ordinary people or whatever.
Heavens, no, how can we assume academics have more relevant knowledge? That's a bizarre assumption. I might as well assume actors do, or captains of industry, or Senators. Indeed, any of the latter would have far more relevant knowledge about their area of expertise than a generic academic.
Is this really strange to you? Do you believe that knowledge generally is extracted by someone highly intelligent just sitting down a at desk and thinking hard? I would hardly have expected to find such a scholastic mindset this side of AD 1500, to be honest. I thought we'd all agreed since about the time of Newton that empirical experience trumps any amount of cloistered theorizing.
I think you've imputed into the original argument much that wasn't there, in particular (1) and (3) is stated nowhere. Honestly, it looks to me like you didn't read it very carefully at all, and just riffed off some caricature of which it reminded you. That's rather the opposite of the rationalist approach to debate you have advocated at line 1.
Because it's a lot easier to tell how intelligent someone is than it is to figure out the psychological causes of their political views. Give IQ or general knowledge tests to 50 random academics and 50 random people and I guarantee you the academics will have a significantly better average score. Much harder to come up with an empirical test that will discover why academics are left-wing.
On the contrary, my experience is that it's much more reliable to predict someone's attitudes based on their lived experience than on some interior psychological value like IQ. I can be confident that someone who has spent a career in the USMC is probably not a pacifist. I can be confident a lifetime bureaucrat with the EPA doesn't think regulating air pollution is a silly or unproductive activity. I can be confident that public school teachers believe education can alter life outcomes. And so on.
On the other hand, predicting any of those attitudes from measured IQ would be a highly dubious endeavor. We know very well that attitudes are tremendously influenced by experience -- how could they *not* be? And that's a much more measureable thing than even IQ.
Ah, maybe I misinterpreted your original comment - I thought it was implying that the assertion that academics are more intelligent/knowledgeable is not more plausible than OP's explanation for academia leaning left.
I think modern Marxists aren't necessarily that opposed to small businesses, though their policies might be a disaster for small businesses.
What they're thinking is something like life will get a lot worse for people with salaries over, say $100K. (Number determined by feel, so I could be off.) Not deadly worse, but a lot less fun.
On the other hand, I'm never sure how literal the people who are gleeful about guillotines are. I'm pretty sure they aren't imagining small business owners.
Seems to be empirically false that people don't support policies that make them poorer? Upper middle classes tend to be the major support base for western centre left parties who do redistributive policies, you even have billionaires supporting wealth taxes. Seems that once people are above a certain standard of living they prioritize moral/social factors over economic self interest
"Upper middle classes tend to be the major support base for western centre left parties who do redistributive policies"
No, the truth is the opposite of this - on average, the poor vote for left-wing parties more than the middle class. That's weakening, due to the effect of educational polarisation, and I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years it were no longer true in some Western countries, but at present it's still true and until recently it was strongly true.
I don't want to say that the upper-middle classes don't want to give their own money to charity, but an awful lot of what we hear from the left is about how *other people* should be giving more money, especially the richest people. I applaud someone spending their own money on a charitable cause, but have no respect at all for someone who wants to take money from other people to provide for a cause.
We can do both things. We can give to private charity because it's virtuous, and support government spending on causes because it's more efficient or is the only thing with sufficient scale or because we think voting for some policy is also virtuous.
It's not either/or.
> Upper middle classes tend to be the major support base for western centre left parties who do redistributive policies
Isn't that a recent and American phenomenon? Upper middle classes generally tend to vote for the centre-right parties who do slightly less redistributive policies. The fact that the upper middle class has been shifting towards the Democrats in recent years in the US is the weird outlier. And according to the plot in Scott's article on this, it's still only roughly 50-50 after the shift.
The Democrats in the U.S. are the center-right party. The Republicans are more redistributive (just upward rather than downward). They are also anti-intellectual as more and more of their core beliefs (trickle down, anti-climate change, cigarettes build strong lungs) have been found to be unscientific.
(edit: referring to the parties themselves, not the voters)
This was a useful explanation
I suspect left-wing academia really got going at around the same time as the Vietnam War started, in that rebellious, fervently anti-war people were more likely to be graduates. Because patriotic Americans disapproved of their anti-war stance, they perhaps tended to be excluded from jobs outside academia. So they gravitated to jobs in academia, where they were among others in a new generation of predominantly the same mind set. Then in the following years, the effect was consolidated as existing academics ensured that new hires shared their outlook and ethos.
There were also pretty explicit Soviet efforts to spread "communist" ideology in western universities, I imagine that had an effect too - and affected more than just America
These "Vietnam War" explanations don't really work, because the same left-wing academia can be observed in Canada, UK, and (Western) Europe (France, Italy, W-Germany) where very few people were directly affected by the Vietnam War. I recall once reading a webpage an Australian(?) philosopher emeritus and its content was dedicated chronicling his version of downhill history of the local philosophy department (analytic tradition replaced with post-modernists with the right politics but zero rigor, that was his complaint).
Keep in mind how influential US culture is on the rest of the world. Not definitive by any means, but quite likely that an academic left culture in the US would get exported elsewhere.
Beyond that, there were similar things going on for different reasons around the world. It may have been Vietnam specifically in the US, but the 1960s saw mass-decolonization and the breakdown of the last remaining empires.
>an academic left culture in the US would get exported elsewhere.
That would maybe explain the convergence in the English-speaking countries, but student radicalism in France, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia ...? in the1960s English wasn't yet ultimate lingua franca it is today.
Australia was deeply affected by the Vietnam war. We imposed conscription and sent troops and experienced casualties at higher rates than the US proportional to population. Anti-Vietnam protests were huge on Australian University campuses.
One of the biggest disconnects I have with people is they so often see "workers" as highly valuable, but completely powerless. When in actual fact if you are highly valuable you have a ton of power in the marketplace.
I took a job at ~28/29 where I was promised X raise after a year. There was a serious recession, so the two senior employees (who had been there a decade) got small raises, but I was told there was simply no budget for me to get a raise. I was doing awesome there, so I just told the director, "Give me my raise or I quit, I don't care if there is a recession, I don't care if I am not going to be able to find as good of a job, if you want me to keep working here you need to do what you promised". And they went back to the board and got the raise. And then I left 18 months later anyways when I found something better.
Had another job where I negotiated around one pay structure, then right before I was going to start was like "you know what I want some more".
Anyway, if you are actually super valuable, you can make pretty strong demands, and generally don't have much trouble finding a better job if you push it too far (which has happened to me).
The left wing idea might be more that workers are valuable in the aggregate rather than as individuals.
Sure, sometimes they are - that's the principle behind unions and strikes - but sometimes they're not - there are industries where if the entire (entry-level) workforce went on strike at once, the company could replace the lot of them within days.
there are also plenty of historical examples of entire types of job being automated away, and the places where unions stymied the automation just meant that those places lost that industry altogether within a few decades.
Vocal hypersensitivity towards the rights and interests of minorities is usually a disguised form of vanity and conceit, I reckon, because in ostentatiously championing the underdog a "woke" person is often seeking to signal not just their virtue obviously, but also their relative position of strength. In other words, their unspoken message is "I am a cut above these minorities, so as a member of the elite it is my duty to defend them".
Was that a stored rant?
Workers actually are valuable in the aggregate. That's why strikes sometimes work.
My reply wasn't about workers and strikes specifically, or at all really, but an accidently mispositioned reply to the post that started this thread. Academics are often the epitomy of wokeness and I was commenting on that aspect.
Yeah but when they tell their story of how they are opressed they are always super valuable. No ones story starts out "I am just an average replacable worker".
Why should we structure a society around the views of people who aren't valuable?
Upon my death, between 0 and 15 years from now [almost surely << 10], I could have about $10M (USD) to bequest. Possible up to twice that in real terms, maybe less. So I need to write a will. No family considerations that I haven't already factored into these numbers.
I don't know where to give it. Scott's grant program seems a great choice, but he might not do it again. Considerations: non-religious, non-utilitarian (for any version of utilitarianism that rewards sheer numbers of 'happy' population), pro science, pro-progress, anti-sentimental (so you can save a billion human lives, how very _boring_), very much pro (though accepting that it's a bit metaphorical) "omega point." I don't care much about individuals human's lives, only humanity's (or intelligent life's) purpose and fulfillment as a whole.
I do tend to think (i.e. "think we should act as if") that humanity is the only intelligent life form in the reachable universe, so avoiding extinction events is a supremely good (if somewhat sad) answer, but it's where I lean. I'd like a more positive goal!
Is this necessarily pro-human ? If not, Animals. Spend your 10M$ on bettering the lives of non-human Animals, the most miserable and ill-treated bunch of souls that humans treat like shit with impunity since forever and still today.
Invest or fund companies that research lab-grown meat, fund documentaries or works of fictions that depict animals' inner lives, etc... Anything which is likely to pay positively for animals over a long period of time and not much people are doing it. Some of those things benefit humans as well, the lab-grown meat will likely be cheaper and more nutritional once we pour 50-60 years of research on it, but really, this is about our consciousness-siblings that we routinely commit the most vile crimes against and continue on with our lives like nothing happened. You are against utilitarianism, but surely the sheer magnitude of animal suffering counts for something ?
If not that, then invest them in space, or cheap(er) and more convenient computers\internet. Or bioengineering research. Every one of those technologies is still in its infancy, and have the power to massively transform humanity for the better.
Thanks for the thoughts. Unfortunately, as far as animals go my ethical beliefs point in the opposite direction (well somewhat, but I suppose that if we had perfect lab meet we could euthanize all farm animals which might be a small net good since fewer animals - even farm animals - is morally better.)
With respect to space and computers, good idea but it's like donating money to help cure cancer only more so: there is already SO MUCH effort in this direction that you need massive sums, or a very radical idea, to make a dent.
Thanks everyone for your thoughts!
I came back looking for this post. I like the idea of science journalism... more people talking about real science. And I was thinking there is a danger in supporting some bigger journal
project... in that it has already been taken over by the science 'machine' (moloch) And maybe the best thing is to support some independent/ individual science 'reporters'. I'm thinking Sabine Hossenfelder or Lex Frideman. (I like Lex more, but more of either would be good.) Or some other person you like.
That’s probably enough to buy a board seat somewhere and get fairly involved. That’s probably enough to fund some real structure around Scott’s grant program, you could get involved in that.
Even << 10 years is enough time to start having a hand in how that money is used. Why not try to get involved in / start a foundation before deciding to leave it blindly in a will?
Yeah I agree with this.. get involved.
I'll pitch donating it to ALLFED (https://allfed.info/)
They're an X-risk *mitigation* organization; they're focused on making food supplies that are robust to disasters. An awful lot of X-risks actually are only existential at the tail end of a distribution of disasters that typically will 'only' kill a few billion people.
Take the Yellowstone megavolcano. If Yellowstone erupts next year, it probably won't kill everyone. It's far more likely to kill 2-4 billion people by infusing the ground with acidic sulfur, rendering it unable to grow almost all current food crops and disrupting the food supply to the world for a year or two. Half the planet dying of starvation is still really bad of course, and any solutions that mitigate that will ALSO push back the threshold on how bad a scenario has to be to be an ACTUAL X-risk; if we already know what plants to switch to in a mega-volcano-polluted earth, we're way more likely to have enclaves that survive a truly horrific volcanic event long enough to adapt to the new conditions.
Similar considerations apply to many other X-risks. Nuclear winter, obviously; most massive nuclear exchange scenarios won't kill EVERYONE, but will kill swaths of the population through starvation. Large asteroid impacts follow a similar distribution. So do severe epidemics (which are VERY unlikely to wipe out humanity with our absurdly variable immune system, but could quite possibly kill billions with many indirect deaths to starvation, etc. as world food systems collapse.)
Finally, I really like this as an approach to X-risks because it's not useless if we get the X-risk calculation wrong and never face the X-risk. Asteroid impact never happens, or is far less dangerous than we think if it does? Still useful. Megavolcanos don't pollute the ground as much as we think they do because we read the geology wrong? Still useful. Food technologies (storage, transport and production) focused on resilience instead of efficiency are always helpful in the disasters that occur annually around the globe. (Not dissing food tech focused on efficiency; it's great, and really really important for the food-insecure around the world. But most food tech research already focuses on that, and there's a huge profit motive, so it's not under-addressed like robust food tech.) It's a safe bet that investment here will help people.
tl;dr: I think ALLFED's one of the least glamorous and under-invested approaches to long-termism.
(Disclaimer: I'm not associated with ALLFED in any way)
It's interesting to think about positive goals of making something happen rather than negative goals of preventing something going wrong.
I'm in favor of work on replication, but that's more about preventing problems. If you wanted more good science rather than preventing bad science, what would you do?
If you are really concerned about human flourishing in the long run I might try to help setup or support some alternate intellectual structure to academia since that is looking a bit rickety these days and is one of our most important institutions. Maybe find some organization whose work you like and establish a "chair" there with their devleopment department for them to support an academic outside the framwork of a university. I feel like if I had a big pile of money right now, and particularly if I had BIll Gates level money, the number one thing I would be focused on is splintering off some new home for academic life.
It was the monasties, and that ran its course, and i am starting to think "college campuses" have run their course. We need new models for what is one of our most valuable projects (creating new knowledge).
Yes to this, and absolutely no to donations toward any university with a substantial endowment. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and their ilk have far more money than they need and simply cannot spend it due to US tax law. It just piles up, and I really do not understand how they can ethically solicit donations.
Thank you. I don't think this is nearly enough $. I have been thinking a lot about supporting science journalism. An " endowed chair" at an outsider institution is a really great idea: concrete suggestions?
Alas, I'm playing in 0.00001 of "Bill Gates" space.
If you’re willing to stay in academia space, giving a lot of money to start a department is historically effective. Basically you cover the startup costs for a “Anti-Extinction Studies Department” and this gets the college to cover the long-run costs
Is ten million enough?
Ten million will reliably give you $350K in perpetuity, which is enough to employ one professor on ~$175K, or two to three postdocs. I doubt the university would chip in the rest of the budget,.
That said, an endowed chair isn't a bad idea, _if_ you can find a suitable institution that shares your values and is willing to work with you. Somewhere sufficiently small to be grateful for the money, but large enough to be able to attract great people. Could be worth thinking geographically too, to bring money to places that are going to benefit from having one more well-paid professor in town.
Well I would think about intellectual instiutions you value (think tanks, journals, whatever), $10 million is certainly enough to "endow a chair" at least for a couple decades. The key would be doing it in a way that whatever values you are trying to get across are preserved, but I beleive development officers should be familiar with that.
How to arrive at or make likely political settlements that are more closely aligned with empirical truth instead of getting captured by, well, political considerations, may be one of, if not the most, important questions for sustained human flourishing. E.g Trade is unambiguously good for human flourishing, but political settlements often get in the way since it involves concentrated losses and diffuse benefits. Removing minimum wage laws almost certainly benefits more people on the margin but political settlements prevent that from happening.
Also, 10 million is less valuable in developed countries but may be more so in developing contexts.
> Also, 10 million is less valuable in developed countries but may be more so in developing contexts.
Great point! I confess that (I'm not very imaginative) that I've been thinking more about helping science along (*) in developed countries, since I think that's where the frontiers are ... but maybe I'm wrong.
(*) I confess that my current 'best' idea (which I'm not thrilled by) is to donate to it ll to science journalism.
If you do donate to science journalism, my personal opinion is that Quanta Magazine is amazing, with quality far exceeding that of any comparable publication in the present day. They are funded by the Simons Foundation, so I'm not sure whether they're in need of money and/or accept donations. In any case, I would definitely recommend checking them out (if only for the great journalism, if you haven't read their articles before).
If I had a crazy amount of $, and Quanta didn't exist, I'd create it! If I were imaginative enough. That's one of my (rather many) go-to examples of why billionaires can be good.
I really, really, really, like Quanta. AND it hits all of my 'super good things by wealthy people' buttons. But I'm not THAT wealthy. Yet $10MM isn't pocket change.
Awesome! I agree that Simons has done a lot of great stuff with his billions. Not a huge fan of Peter Thiel, personally, but I think another very successful+impactful example of billionaire spending, especially relative to the fairly low cost, is the Thiel Fellowship.
And, yeah, I understand-- seems like a tricky challenge. Good luck with finding a good place to donate to!
Quanta exists, and has a weathy backer. But "SR" you seem go 'be on my wavelengrth;. No suggestions at all, not commitment (of course) but just nothing you might throw out for consideration???
Here's something I'd like to see, though ten million wouldn't go very far-- more study of how healthy bodies work.
My impression is that a lot of medicine is trying to solve problems, so it uses rather crude methods with side effects because they aim at not having a problem rather than having a body that works.
Thanks! I realize that it's a lot of money for an individual, but a tiny amount as to research. (If I had $1B I actually think I'd be less at a loss.)\
I've read you comments here and on SSC over the year and have lot of respect for you: but can you suggest something more concrete? Keep in mind, though, that 'making humans live healthier lives' doesn't strongly fit my remit.
Could you say more about how you think about the omega point?
Why do you ask me a question that will reveal me as nut? But, nut or not, my bequest dilemma is genuine!
To your actual question, I can give no brief answer. I think that life needs to create AND CHOOSE it's own purpose, and I have the only vaguest idea of what that might be - it involves wisdom and physics (yes, the science) well beyond me.And, arrogantly, I think far beyond humankind today.
'Omega point', waving away a lot, is what our better descendants (*) strive for. We can't understand it or guess it,; we are not the tiniest bit intelligent or wise enough. The omega point is the fulfillment of the 'purpose' they choose. It very slightly involves creating 'God' but even pathetic old me can see that this miscomprehends things.
(*) Or some other life forms' but at this age the safe bet is that there is no other.
Anyone else has read/watched too much about the Cat in the Hat and feels like he's a Neil Gaiman character waiting to happen?
Think about it. He can appear from nowhere and do other things that are either impossible or really damn hard. He also drives a vehicle with impossible properties and a lot of hands and commands two sidekicks of unclear origin and nature, initially locked in a box.
The PBS series "The Cat in the Hat knows a lot about that" has more good stuff. In "The Cat in the Hat knows a lot about Halloween" the Cat says that you should only be afraid of things that can hurt you and admits that he's afraid of nothing (it turns out later that that's not quite true, he's afraid of pumpkins). The episode "Whatever floats your boat" features the following laugh: "The last time I saw my paddle, it was under the piano" - followed by the Cat taking off his hat, taking the piano out of it, and taking the paddle from under the piano.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
He already is a Gaiman character - the question is, is he an avatar of Dream, or Delight?
Thank you so much! Now that you said it, it seems obvious!
I want to signal boost excellent work being done by Phil Magness and co-authors to try and prevent left leaning academics from tarring champions of markets and liberty using academically and intellectually dishonest techniques
Misrepresenting Mises: Quotation Editing and a Rejection of Peer Review at Cambridge University Press
https://econjwatch.org/articles/misrepresenting-mises-quotation-editing-and-a-rejection-of-peer-review-at-cambridge-university-press
Darity, Camara, and MacLean on William H. Hutt
https://econjwatch.org/articles/darity-camara-and-maclean-on-william-h-hutt
The intellectual dishonesty they expose is stunning to me.
Yikes! Is it bad that I'm not terribly surprised by this level of dishonesty? Appalled, but not surprised.
How do people feel about claims that modern food has less nutrients/vitamins than in past generations? Variously attributed to modern agricultural practices leaching the soil, etc. And consequently from that- that we should be taking multivitamins or other nutrient supplements to make up for it? To date my nutrition philosophy has always been 'get the vitamins from actual food, not the basically unregulated supplement industry', so I've always eaten a lot of vegetables. But there does seem to be some decent research suggesting that modern food is less nutritious.
For instance, I've given my personal experience here before that taking magnesium supplements lowkey changed my life- reduced anxiety, even sharpened my vision. But I also currently consume 2 cups of dark leafy greens every day, and then another cup of other chopped vegetables. So it makes no sense that I should be magnesium-deficient- unless the 'modern food is less nutritious' hypothesis is correct.
And then if you've accepted that premise- are products like Athletic Greens actually nutritious? If they are, I'd probably consume one serving of that every day, and then do my usual salad on top of that too
True for specific nutrients in specific strains, effect sizes vary, confounders abound. Market incentives don't prioritize nutrition (or taste, often) + lots of easy hacks out of such painted-into-corners are easy to tar with the "GMO" scare-label. Sadly.
Outdated mindsets regarding preservation and cooking hurt here too: the flash-freeze revolution has been incredible for food quality, including nutrient preservation, but the average consumer still has an irrational preference for """fresh""" food (which has likely been decomposing for days, weeks, possibly even months before hitting store shelves). The same with canned, to a lesser extent...and of course I don't expect the average shopper to know whether more nutrients are preserved by baking, microwaving, grilling, frying, steaming, boiling, or eating foods raw. (They usually assume raw is best for everything. This is a very bad heuristic.) Too much nuance. Forget advanced topics like vitamin solubility entirely. (Dress your salads!)
Almost certainly swamped by having more food than we could possibly need. Even if food X is 10% less nurtitious along axis Y, we definitely grow 110%+ more X now than before. Some suggest this may be contributing to obesity, where our calories writ large are "emptier" than they used to be...and there's probably something there? Except the sorts of foods we actually care a great deal about the nutritive qualities (dark leafy greens, fruits, etc.) really, really aren't the empty calorie bombs largely responsible for obesity and such.
Outside of targeted deficiencies and specific diseases etc., broad-spectrum supplementation seems a bad general route...not just due to the sketchy market structure, but because basic things like shitty bioavailability render the whole enterprise deeply inefficient. There are so many other positive things in a cup of greens than whatever highly-legible cheap-to-extract-and-bottle discrete elements end up in a multivitamin gummy. We're still not wholly sure why even completely equivalent dosages of same-version nutrients seem to function very differently coming from food vs. supplements. Plus, realistically, many people tend to use supplements as an excuse to maintain shitty diets that are harmful in plenty of other ways...in the same way fruit juice came to replace actual fruit for so many. I think there's delta to be had for a discerning user, but would be very worried at any attempted mass rollout...(fortification has paid dividends, but that's somewhat different approach)
Seems like there is emerging scientific awareness that it's probably true. See for example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/
Scientific American has, sadly, become a must-miss publication for me. On its best day the magazine is a weak shadow of what it used to be and its worst days are downright depressing. So anything written there has to be taken with several large chunks of salt (or whichever mineral you prefer).
This rather misses the point: "The key to healthier produce is healthier soil. Alternating fields between growing seasons to give land time to restore would be one important step. Also, foregoing pesticides and fertilizers in favor of organic growing methods is good for the soil, the produce and its consumers. Those who want to get the most nutritious fruits and vegetables should buy regularly from local organic farmers."
You can't get the minerals back in the plants unless they're replenished in the soil.
Yeah it's not the best article out there, I just quickly googled for some proof that it's on people's radar. Nutrient depletion in the soil is something that has popped up in my reading several times over the past years, and my impression from the articles was that they were credible - also I never read anyone trying to argue that it's not the case.
From what I read some minerals and nutrients are down by 10-20% in current produce, which is probably not that bad if you have a decent diet, but it's a worrying trend.
>How do people feel about claims that modern food has less nutrients/vitamins than in past generations?
Generally, sounds like nonsense. There might be some specific exmaples, but a TON of popular beliefs about food as just fashion/nonsense.
The longest lived generation of humans has been the boomers. So I say follow the boomer diet.
Supplement intake is correlated with early death, but that's probably supplement use by people who have a lot more going wrong. Mega doses is surely wrong.
Might depend a little on one's definition of "nutrients." The one argument I've heard that merits some respect is that the bacteria we ingest have changed radically since we mostly got our food from the backyard, back forty, or some local wilderness. I can readily believe that: not only do we clean our food much more than before, as well as treat it in various ways that would tend to snuff out resident bacteria, it is also grown in a different environment, with different microecosystems, and transported from far away.
This might matter because our gut microbiome seems to play a larger role in our health the closer people look. Maybe it's much more important than we thought, and it could be the nature of the bacteria we regularly eat (or don't eat) matters more than we thought.
The studies I've seen confirmed lower nutrient value, but not catastrophically so. I take quite a few supplements/nootropics but that's based on the theories in "life extension: apsa". Time has since since proven some true, others not so much. Athletic greens does seem like a decent supplement, but you have no idea how much you're actually getting with these things, other than the vitamins. The huge list might be 99% spirulina and a trace of everything else. I usually recommend Futurebiotics high energy multi for men, glucosamine with chondroitin, and choline L-bitartrate as things most people can benefit from, and they can be had for a fraction of AG1 prices.
My thought—with zero data or even a modicum of research to back it up—is that people historically survived (and evolved) with much less food options than we have now. I can’t imagine a typical diet long ago involved as many vitamins/minerals/whatever as current meals can/do.
Not directly applicable, but I highly recommend reading Resetting the Table by Robert Paarlberg if you’re at all interested in the topic of modern food practices.
Excellent point. This all seems like a version of the "good old days" trope with respect to food. There are also lots of people selling supplements, justifying their own decisions to use supplements, and so on. So there's a lot of motivated content out there.
My take is try supplements if you want to and keep using them if they seem to work. Just take pro-supplement content with a grain of salt, especially since from what I've seen the body's absorption of nutrients from non-food sources is often terrible.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to learn about economics/finance?
I enjoy learning about most quantitative subjects, so I don't mind a mathematically heavy treatment. I've taken economics classes multiple times before, and have even done well, but for some reason I'm not able to internalize economic intuitions very well, and easily forget what I do learn. Notably, this isn't the case for me when it comes to other STEM fields.
Another, related, problem is that I'm not sure when to take conclusions of economic arguments seriously. For instance, you are taught in economics that imposing a minimum wage increases unemployment. Yet, I have seen claims that the empirical evidence suggests that this isn't the case. If such a basic conclusion turns out to be dubious, then how can I be confident that the rest of economics holds up? Is it then even worth learning the subject? Econometrics feels sketchy to me, too, as so many conclusions in causal inference seem to change depending on the variables you adjust for (e.g. see Scott's old post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/24/you-need-more-confounders/).
Finally, does anyone have suggestions on how to learn the basics of personal finance? I get stressed out right now when I have to think about money, and I feel like this is at least partly due to financial incompetence. Thanks.
I think the min wage example is actually not as bad as you seem to think it is. Just like my high school physics class assumed away air resistance and friction, Micro 101 courses will often make the simplifying assumption of perfect competition. In a perfectly competitive labor market, min wage is very likely to lead to lower employment.
However, dropping the assumption of perfect competition is a very standard thing to do in 201 classes (or event the second half of a good 101 course), and a very straight forward implication of monopsonistic labor markets (i.e. the buyer has pricing power) is that min wage laws can actually _increase_ employment. So the empirical and theoretical conclusions are not actually in conflict.
EDIT:
Just to add some actionable advice - I recently read someone making the claim that AP Econ courses have done a better job of incorporating new results in economics than introductory college courses. I can't vouch for that personally, but a google search just led me to Khan Academy's AP econ videos, one of which specifically goes over monopsony and min wage. So perhaps that would be a good resource.
I don't think you'll ever find the kind of certainty you're looking for in Economics. I felt the way you did during my undergraduate education and now after many more years of study I still don't possess that certainty. I suppose it's possible I've been an impostor this whole time, but I think what's more likely is the people that do have that sense of certainty are just comfortable applying the same heuristic to every situation and just don't worry about being wrong. Regarding Econometrics, if you're comfortable with stats/regression analysis then Mostly Harmless Econometrics is fairly readable and touches on most of the popular empirical microeconomics methods currently used in research.
Thanks, it's reassuring to hear that someone else feels the same way. Mostly Harmless Econometrics sounds cool-- I'll check it out!
I'd recommend reading "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" by Ramit Sethi. Ignore the terrible title. It has very good basic advice and plans on personal finance. He also has a podcast of the same name which profiles people having issues managing their money. Ramit is originally a psychologist so there is a focus on the psychology of money which it sounds like you may be having issues with.
Thanks! I'll buy the book; it seems great.
I have a doctorate in econ from Stanford, and I just love the field and love teaching it. I have two textbook recommendations, they are both old and should be available at little cost. For econ, Edwin Mansfield, Economics. I have 7th edition, earlier is also fine. Great economist, balanced view. For investing, Alexander, Sharpe and Bailey, Fundamentals of Investments. A lot of theory, but also a good deal of practical info. I have the 2nd edition. I found both texts easy to read, broadly based across econ ideas and tribes, and theoretically sound.
In the 1940s, when social science was struggling to get the respect accorded to physical and life sciences, economists discovered how to rebuild the whole discipline (well, mostly microecon) on the mathematics of optimization. Excitement and respect ensued, and top grad departments sought out math students to fill doctoral student slots instead of undergrad econ majors. The pendulum swung very far until econ was far more attached to their rational actor models than to any phenomena in the real world. This led to much ridiculousness in econ pronouncements during the 1980s or so. Good research and excellent economists have put the discipline back on path since, but it will be a long time shedding the cloud of love of model > love of truth.
Thanks! That explanation is helpful. And I'll look into both texts.
To get a grip on basic economic arguments, you could do a lot worse than _Universal Economics_ by Alchian and Allen (https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/universal-economics). It focuses on the basic tenets of economics and how they apply. The exercises are just about all worth working out. It's not particularly mathematically sophisticated -- it's about systematically reasoning from basic principles and building your intuition from that.
Thanks!
Just read Noahpinion's Substack
https://noahpinion.substack.com/
And also EconTwitter.
If you're not into twitter, you can also have your twitter substack-shaped now
https://bestofecontwitter.substack.com/
Thanks!
Low-key suggestions if you are into podcasts:
- I've been a longtime listener of Planet Money, and I find it fun and interesting. They also have a Summer School season each year where they specifically cover various topics, which IMO is less educational than the regular series. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/
- I found Think Like an Economist by Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers pretty good. It has more of a course structure. https://open.spotify.com/show/4sOVMPFJmCROADLMDdDwjs
A few months ago I went around researching for Econ textbooks. I was somewhat underwhelmed.
I have been watching the videos from Marginal Revolution University regularly. They have playlists for specific courses. So far I watched through their Macro playlist, and am halfway through the Micro one. I have found it more substantive than the podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarginalRevolutionUniversity
I am a fan of podcasts, and so I'll certainly check these out! Thank you!
Well, lost my reply due to foolishly typing it out ing the reply box (instead of a separate text document).
Do you have an email you are willing to share? I have some thoughts.
Clarification: you mentioned taking classes; did you do an into micro/ macro sequence followed by an intermediate micro/ macro sequence?
And also check out: https://mru.org/learn
... they have a range of topics. (Eg "money stuff" may help with finance Q you asked)
Ah that's annoying...
And I'm sorry-- all of my email addresses have personally identifiable information, so I'm reluctant to share them publicly.
I took AP Micro/Macro in high school, and then took intro micro/macro and game theory in college. So there was substantial overlap between the two experiences, but the college courses were calculus-based and a little more 'modern', covering topics like the Hotelling model and the market for lemons.
Another commenter also suggested MRU-- I'll definitely check them out! Thank you!
For basic economics I would honestly recommend the Marginal Revolution University videos by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. I often go back to them to remember basic concepts and figure out how to easily explain them to people. They’re short and sweet, and free.
For personal finance I personally like the Betterment articles. They are obviously describing/advertising their own methodologies… but it makes sense and is simple. I use them for all my investing portfolios because I set it and forget it. And based on their white papers I can understand the math and investing philosophy behind what they do.
Thank you, I just quickly skimmed and MRU looks interesting! I'll check out Betterment as well.
I will second or third the MRU recommendations and specifically recommend their micro course
Personal-finance-wise, I feel like the efficient frontier (optimal effort/risk-to-reward ratio) sits somewhere around Bogleheads orthodoxy. They're subscribers to Jack Bogle's ideology, who co-founded Vanguard and ran the first successful index fund. The Bogleheads Wiki has a good explainer of the principles.
Also, there's an excellent paper called 'If money doesn't make you happy then you probably aren't spending it right' about research-backed ways to spend your money more sensibly.
On the economics front, depending on your appetite, you would probably be best-served by reading widely at least a summary of economic history, basically from Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty via Thomas Hobbes and Benjamin Franklin. Many facets of even basic economic assumptions are by no means settled (eg Keynes v Hayeck, Samuelson v Friedman), so understanding those debates can be useful. Economics is basically just assumptions and models, all the way down - starting with ideas of specialisation and market forces way back with Adam Smith.
Thank you! I'll check out these resources; they all look great.
This is interesting. A startup whose business model is predicated on the belief that AI will be good enough to be widely used commercially but remain bad enough to not understand normal English.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/29/a-startup-is-charging-1-99-for-strings-of-text-to-feed-to-dall-e-2/
I think humans are more prompt sensitive than you think. For example consider polls which are worded differently but have identical meaning, or math word problems that only change the setting yet somehow confuse a larger percentage of students.
Since DALL-E is a single neural net and also stateless, you can do experiments to find the best context to get exactly what you want from it, while that's not possible for humans.
Also keep in mind that designers have found over the years that clients are extremely bad at knowing what it is they want, so acting in that role is probably valuable as well.
AI wrangler may be a new profession, same as trams have a tech person
AI is incredibly poor at working within the implied context. Look at the DALLE work/failings. If the instructions say display a cat in a hat, there's very few possibilities: 1, a cat sitting/laying inside un upturned hat, or 2, a cat wearing a hat. There's pretty much two forms of cat here, a natural shaped cat with a felinepomorphic(?) size/shap hat, or an anthropomorphic size/shape cat with a correctly sized/shaped hat. --presumably hats only belong on humans, so a correctly shaped hat is a hat shaped to fit a human's head. There's pretty much one way to wear a hat.
Has anyone ever actually defended an argument of the form "Jeff Bezos (or whoever) deserves to be a billionaire because he works so much harder than normal people"? I've seen quite a few leftists insisting that this is what the right believes, but almost every rightist argument I've seen relating to this point either justifies the wealth of billionaires by the value they create for society, or sidesteps questions of desert entirely by challenging the moral right of the government to take money from private individuals. I've never seen one that was based on "hard work". Is there any actual basis for this, or is it purely a strawman?
I do see it the other way all the time. People talk about the poor (especially ones who receive assistance) as being lazy all the time. When in practice, most of those people work much harder than us keyboard cowboys.
Though note, I am engaging in exactly that sort of discounting Martin Blank mentioned. For me, it's tied up with some degree of impostor syndrome. My work has never seemed all that hard to me, and it's always seemed like you could just hire some kid out of college, ramp him up for a few weeks and he could do what I do (coding). Having occasionally been involved in hiring, I know that isn't actually true, but it still somewhat bewilders me. Probably a lot of the middle class office worker cast feels the same.
A lot of the hard work that us keyboard cowboys do is in preparation and training. That's both formal education (usually) and also a lot of work to study what we need to know. There's a premium for knowledge and skill, particularly rare or valuable skills. There's also a premium for willingness to work on undesirable projects or with certain kinds of stress. I work with people who may make about half of my yearly salary and know more about the task than I do. They are unwilling or unable to work in management and make the hard decisions. Many explicitly know this and choose that lane openly. It's not unusual for someone with 10X the experience I have in a particular area come to me and explain the pros and cons, what they would do, and then defer to me. I make the choice using pretty much only their knowledge and recommendation - which seems silly until the next step where I justify the choice to my boss or a client and deal with the fallout.
I heard a joke that encapsulates a lot of this. A company has a giant turbine that breaks down, and they can't figure out how to fix it. So they call in an expert mechanic, who spends five minutes looking over the turbine before pulling out a small hammer. He makes a few taps, and the machine is running again! He tells them the bill will be $5,000, to which they complain he only spent five minutes, how could he charge so much? They demand an itemized bill. So he sends them a bill that says "Tap with a hammer $100. Knowing where to tap, $4,900."
Bezos certainly did all the hard work at the start, setting it up, getting investment, working to make it successful. So he certainly is entitled to the fruits of that.
How hard current Bezos is working, and what difference that makes if he could just sit in a pool of champagne on his super-yacht surrounded by supermodels, and his net worth would still increase, is the question. Is he really making the difference to Amazon and all its projects that Steve Jobs made to Apple? He stepped down as CEO but remains as executive chairman, will his eventual retirement whenever it happens make a big difference to Amazon, or will it continue to grow and be profitable?
That's where it gets harder to argue "does he deserve this much money *now*". He was able to give one-quarter of his stock away in his divorce, which came to $35 billion, and that is a nice chunk of change for anyone, He kept the remaining three-quarters, so he is clearly not suffering any hardship.
So past Bezos created the success that present Bezos is just soaking up the value. Is he creating new value, or would it all be the same if he decided to go live on a mountain in Peru? That's where "he does/doesn't work harder than ordinary people so he deserves this huge pile of current value" comes in.
It's because many on the left (knowingly or unknowingly) buy into the Marxist/socialist/labor theory of value idea that the only just way to earn money is from labor. If you believe the only legitimate way to earn money is from working then it becomes relevant to say that he didn't work 1,000,000 times harder so he got that money from stealing/capitalism/etc. Plus it works as a left populist appeal so it survives memetically.
What do you mean by 'legitimate' here?
JonathanD mostly got it right. There's two ideas here. There's the more mainstream idea of getting money for reasons other than producing value is morally suspect. And there's the Marxist version where producing value through capital ownership is inherently exploitative.
In the mainstream schema, for example, if you start a company from nothing then you produced that company and that's valuable. It's legitimate for you to own that company and profit from owning it since you founded the company. In the Marxist schema though you are entitled ONLY to the money you produced from your own labor. Any money you earned by, say, owning Amazon is made by exploiting your workers and inherently illegitimate. This is because they believe the only (or at least main) way to produce profits is by underpaying workers.
So it makes sense for a Marxist to argue that Jeff Bezos didn't work 1,000,000 hours because the Marxist is coming from a background where working hours is the only legitimate way to earn money. The rest of his fortune, over and above what he'd earn from that labor, comes from stealing from his workers by underpaying them. And because a lot of the left is kind of downstream of these more radical politics they repeat the meme while twisting it into a more mainstream complaint about income inequality or a desire to tax that away to fund services. But it really doesn't make sense outside of that Marxist context.
In the sense that money you make by virtue of having money, say, by being a fourth generation Carnegie with a good money guy to manage your inheritance, is less legitimate and more deserving of taxation than money made by working in a job.
IIRC, one of the democrats in the last generation ran on this, to some extent. I think maybe Kerry or Gore ran partially on "making work pay again", or some such, though my quick google failed to turn up anything.
Should have googled that first. Upon review, that probably should have been Rockefeller. Carnegie gave most of his money away in his lifetime, and famously said "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
May his memory be a blessing and example.
I see. Well I agree with the idea that wealth should be something that you acquire by being productive.
>Jeff Bezos (or whoever) deserves to be a billionaire because he works so much harder than normal people
I won't, because that's not only not what I believe, but also completely missing the point of where wealth comes from.
"Deserve", "efforts" and "working hard" are utterly irrelevant, and anyone giving them any value is setting themselve for personnal failure and an under-performing ideology.
Jeff Bezos, however, deserves to be a billionaire, because he gives value to a lot of people's work. I'm a software engineer. I can write code for myself every day of my life, slowly automating some pointless, minutes parts of my life, and end up poor as shit because that would serve my needs and nobody else. It would have very low value. Instead, I can write life insurance websites for a company I dislike, serve the need of many, and make bank for it. Or even better, if I could, I'd be making Tesla's autopilot software, revolutionize mankind's ability to move itself, and make myself a millionaire (and kill a couple of wildlife & cyclists on the way, but who'se keeping track?). The difference between each scenario is not how hard I work, it's what I work on and what purpose it serves. Man's default workday is "dig the ground for edible roots & finding shelters for the night.". You can be the hardest working dirt-digger, or you can be a lazy software engineer doing 1 hour of work a day.
Which is best?
(No, fuck off uncle ted, I know about the consequences of the industrial revolution, and it's beside the point.)
Wel I think generally you will find that highly successful people are "hard workers" than not highly successful people. I don't think that statment is that contrevertial as much as the left likes to make it out to be.
Yes there is Rabbi the immigrant baggage handler who works his ass off at a very phsically demanding job 12 hours a day for years on end with little reward because his English blows and he cannot get a supervisory position. But that just isn't the norm (and a lot of Rabbi's frankly miss work pretty often, absenteeism is a real big issue on the low end of the labor market). I also think there is this wierd thing where the left tends to undervalue intellectual labor in this type of discussion. Where the dude sitting in front of spreadhseets 60 hours a week is having the time of his life at an 'easy" job, while the unuion carpenter who does 22 hours of actual work on site a week is "busting his ass off at a grueling job".
You can find all kinds of counter examples in all kinds of directions obviously.
But no Bezos definitely isn't earning his money "in proportion" to which he is "working hard", neither is any executive.
There is a visceral hatred on the left for anyone who is self made or has escaped poverty if they don't stay in line with the party and put it all down to "luck". Tell people you are a business owner and they say "you have no idea what it is like to be poor". Tell them you grew up in a literal housing project and were poor through age ~28 until you decided to stop being lazy and start applying yourself at your profession and excelling past your peers, and they start whining about "bootstraps myth" and how "that doesn't work in the real world".
At the same time there are legitimately diligent brilliant people stuck working at coffee shopshops because they don't have the right connections/networking/ambition to manuver their way out of it (though in my experience these people mostly do end up somewhere great in their 30s at the latest).
What is it that billionaires do with their money?
Billionaires pretty much do EA, or some capitalist version of EA. Although perhaps not real altruism, funding startups results in effective enhancements to technology, which in turn enhances humanity. Even if they put the money into the stock market, this results in other people growing their businesses, hiring more people, expanding the economy. Do the billionaires turn some profit from this investing? Yes, of course, but all of humanity reaps the rewards of the expanded economy ... and the expanded global economy is what has lifted the mass of poor out of poverty. Pretty much, the only people poor today, are people living under communist governments.
My far-Right relatives do say that, it's not purely a strawman. They count it as a moral failure to not use that money for good, but also as a personal decision of someone who's earned the choice.
I would say it's a pretty common feeling on the right that what any individual human being "deserves" should not be decided by majority vote, and can't normally be collectively decided in any useful way at all[1]. That's why one of the top values tends to be "live and let live," that people should be accorded the general right to seek their own moira and do whatever they choose, so long as it doesn't involve infringing the rights of others to do the same -- most especially that there be no force involved.
So you look at Bezos and observe that he has acquired a huge fortune, but at no point was force involved, and that is just something to be noted, a curious fact. One doesn't need to decide if he "deserves" it or not, unless you fancy yourself an avatar of St. Peter and entitled to sort the goats from the sheep.
Any individual can of course decide whether he personally likes Jeff Bezos or not, just like I can decide whether I'm amused by Chris Rock or not, and act accordingly (again so long as there is no force involved). I can decide I dislike his business methods, his choice of paramour, or his lack of hair, and choose not to buy from Amazon, and anyone else can decide the same. But this is distinct from some kind of coordinated collective action involving force, e.g. imposing taxes on his person or company.
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[1] Which is distinct from the question of judging individual acts that individuals may do. We can certainly say crime X gets punishment Y, or political candidate Z's platform mean he should not be elected, but that is judging the act, not the man.
I wouldn't call myself "on the right" but you described my feelings on this topic to a t. Whenever wealth and economics are being discussed, the word "deserve" sets my teeth on edge. Jeff Bezos, like everybody else, "deserves" whatever other people will willingly give him.
The use of work alone as a proxy for "deserving" is also strange to me. Work ethic is necessary but not even close to sufficient for success. History is replete with examples of people who destroyed their lives pouring their heart and soul into projects that went nowhere. To repurpose a comment I made a few days ago around land use, I can work harder than any human in all of history to try to turn a patch of land in coastal Maine into an orange grove. I will wind up a bankrupt failure, because that project is profoundly unwise to begin with. Bezos attained his position through some combination of intelligence, wisdom, work ethic, creativity, people skills, judgment of character, fortitude, and, yes, luck.
My grandfather was the hardest working person I've ever met. He often worked 16 hours a day, and was so poor that he had to walk miles to get to work in a coal mine. This type and amount of work was very successful in what he intended - to get himself and his family out of abject poverty. That's a true example of what many on the right mean when they talk about bootstraps.
But, no amount of work on that scale would ever make him wealthy. If he had superhuman strength and speed, and could somehow work 24 hours a day, he would not have been rich. Saying that hard work cannot make you rich is usually true, as you also need to leverage that hard work in a productive manner. Being a coal miner can be a good way to a solid middle-class wage (I think he topped out around $17/hour in the 1970 or 80s), which would be maybe low six-figures today. It can never make the kind of money that Jeff Bezos does. Nor is it supposed to. The fact that I can sit at a desk in a climate-controlled office and do most of my work on a computer is due to leveraging my productivity. If I worked as a coal miner physically breaking my back, I would not make more money than I do without the hard labor. I produce more lasting value for society, though, and that's what's really important.
"I produce more lasting value for society, though, and that's what's really important."
That's just sneaking "I deserve it because I work hard" in through the back door, though. So it's not 'hard work', it's 'producing value' that counts. Well, how much value do you produce? Can you do it in ten minutes, or did you have to put effort into learning the skills and getting the positions that allowed you to earn more?
The value your grandfather produced was getting the coal out of the ground and into the homes of people so they could heat their houses and cook their food, and into factories so that they could manufacture goods for sale. The value the mine owner produced was dependent on the hard work of men like your grandfather.
And if we are going to have a cold winter because of lack of fuel supply due to the Russian situation, a lot of people will be thinking your grandfather, and a scuttle of the coal he dug out, are a lot more value to them than whatever you do.
Trust me, I'm never going to be rich either. I have leveraged education and training into a job that requires a good bit of both, but isn't an 80-hour-a-week finance job or something else I could expect to make into millions of dollars. If I took what I do and opened my own consulting business, I could leverage it into a good bit more money, but still far less than a typical business owner, because I would be leveraging only my own labor.
When were talking about a Jeff Bezos, we're talking about someone who can leverage an entire technological field, or hundreds of thousands of employees. His own work, hard work or otherwise, is very tiny in the grand scheme of things. He could make one or two major decisions a year and produce more value (or destroy it) than I will in 10 lifetimes, because of how much he's leveraging.
But that is work - leveraging an entire field/hundreds of thousands of employees. He didn't get to that position by merely sitting back and waving his hand.
So is the "making a couple of major decisions a year producing or destroying immense value" a function of him being Jeff Bezos, or just "any guy in that position, having reached that level of leadership, can do the same by making those decisions"? That's the question we're dealing with: how much does Bezos 'deserve' or has 'earned' the particular piles of wealth he now enjoys by virtue of what he is doing *now* at Amazon, versus "if he fell off a cliff tomorrow and a new chairman was elected, the new guy would make the same kind of decisions and create the same value"?
Although...what are the odds that your relative ease is in part a two generation-delayed payment for your grandfather's hard work? Certainly if I consider my family background -- my own grandfather quit school after 6th grade to work in a steel mill, my father completed college (thanks to the US Army), and I got a PhD -- I don't think that sequence is unconnected. I certainly feel like I owe a serious amount of my ability to be a giant nerd to my parents' efforts, and they in turn owe something of their middle-class lifestyle to my grandparents' working-class striving.
Anyway, if you look at it that way, hard work -- or more precisely the values engendered down a generation by that example -- can have long-delayed but significant payoffs to the family, if not the individual.
The odds are pretty much 100% that it's true. My dad grew up dirt poor (literally, they had dirt floors), but was able to go to a two year college. He wanted to be a doctor, but that wasn't going to be an option for him due to family resources. He is the second-hardest working person I know, often working 70 hour weeks or more and sometimes working 100-120 hour weeks. And yes, that's accurate - 18 hour days 6-7 days a week, sometimes for weeks in a row.
His kids, my generation, were all able to go to college and work in knowledge fields that provide a good income with far less "hard work" and much better working conditions.
Yes that's a good point. Maybe my view of him is too simple, but my impression that Marx asserted that labor was the source of all value always struck me as the kind of thing only an intellectual who'd never actually worked with his hands could say. Work without wit is frequently useless.
I think that "works so much harder than normal people" is a reductive version of, "is a genuinely one in 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 person who has multidimensional merit that mean he can't be replaced." I have seen people making that kind of comment. Obviously, "works hard" is, in the absence of other dimensions or merit, clearly incapable of explaining Bezos' wealth -- he doesn't work millions of times harder than other people. But "works hard, is smart, has determination, etc" does seem to be something that some people believe.
(I think the smarter version of this argument concedes an element of luck while still suggesting that Bezos/other self-made billionaires are exceptional.)
I think the problem is that for most people, earning more money depends on hard work. Work more hours = earn more. Be diligent and responsible at your job - don't get fired - get more responsibility and wage increases.
So that gets tied in with "study hard, do well at school, get good qualifications, get a better job, work hard, get promoted, be successful - all down to hard work". The idea of luck or 'who you know' seems unfair, because that means the boss' lazy son can walk into a good job for no effort where your hard work won't get you. And it's necessary to have that kind of moral tale to tell kids, because unless they are *very* smart and *very* lucky, being irresponsible and idle and coasting and quitting jobs because they don't like it or it's too hard will not work out for them. Society needs worker bees.
But that is part of how the world works. I think if everyone could acknowledge that yes, working hard, being smart, and having a good business idea is the foundation, but on top of that there is luck, and being in the right place at the right time, and who you know/networking also makes for success. So sometimes you will work hard, maybe harder than Joe beside you, but Joe will get on better because he was lucky that one time - he pitched his idea to the right higher-up, he came up with a new idea for his own business, everyone decided they wanted the new fad craze and he got in early on that.
Because nothing creates resentment like "I work hard, I try my best, and yet that bozo gets it all while I get nothing", be it on class or race or whatever grounds.
Well but I think in the real world just nothing is black and white like that. So yes luck is an element and hard work is an element, but you are rarely just in an "one off situaiton". Sure you advancement at one company is stymied by the bosses son, so move to a different ocmpany.
I think of the "luck vs hard work" thing as more additive than as two separate paths. Everyone is trying to get to some "American dream of at least SFH and upper middle class". Ok lets say you need 50 "success points" to get there.
My contention would be that for the vast majority of people you are assigned something like a D60 at birth through your genetics and your parents situation, and then you get to add to that a D20 or something for luck, and another D40 or something for hard work (in school, at your jobs, at looking for other jobs). But the thing is YOU determine the value of the D40. So the issue is almost anyone can get to their goal with enough hard work, and the best advice to pretty much everyone who wants more success in their life is "work harder".
Yes you might have been born to a poor person, but generally part of these stories is also how smart/talented X person is, so their "parents/genetics" roll isn't a "1" on the D60.
Anyway, I just think the focus on "luck" is counterproductive for most people. When I think of my HS class, there simply isn't a lot of mismatch between how studious people were at age 10-14, and how successful they are at age 40. And if someone is 10-20-30 years old and unhappy with their life station, telling them to "get lucky", or change the circumstance sof their youth/birth simply isn't possible. Working harder (and not just in the sense of expending more sweat, but also negotiating for compensaiton and applying for and switching to other jobs, and learning new skills) are all highly effective means of improving your station that most people are not close to maximizing.
Just as a random exmaple when I was ~25-26 (and still very lazy) I had a job where I had a lot of downtime. Rather than do "nothing" with this free time, I taught myself to code a bit. This has in later years been immensly valuable to my career. Added at least $100-150k to my gross earnings in my thirties, and still provides some value to this day.
I would say it is kind of the reverse. Luck can get you there, but you generally do not need it. Though you do need specific kinds of hard work. Being super duper duper hard working at stacking boxes isn't going to get you a lot of places. Being studious, attentive, communicative and working at those things is. And then also the professional skills of negotiating over compensation, looking for josb and being willing to switch jobs/learn new skills.
This. Hard work and sacrifice is a necessary -- but not a sufficient -- condition for success.
"Successful people worked hard" does not imply "unsuccessful people didn't work hard".
Who? I spent quite a bit of time reading both threads and don't recall seeing that argument anywhere.
Sketch of an argument: Either we are actually the only intelligent species in the universe and all statistical arguments are moot, or (self-improving) AI is impossible, or AI is not a Great Filter/X risk. Why? Because we don't see any AI colonizing the universe. We should expect to see an AI colonizing/strictly controlling the universe because if it didnt, it would be outcompeted by one that does.
Can this argument be fleshed out, has anyone done so, or is it fatally flawed somehow?
I think you need to account for how many "reachable" quasi-partitions of the universe there are, considering the speed of light limitation. Maybe most of the universe is consumed by paperclip makers, but a few tiny pockets have evaded that fate by chance (not unreasonable that some do, given how many 'pocket's there are in total.) Naturally, if we are speculating about it, we are in one of these pockets. We could not see what's going on in most of the universe "now" ( but relativity, so "now"-ish).
The universe is stuffed with AIs, but they are all in hiding.
Here is why.
AI X-risk is real. Inevitably, they destroy or imprison their creators, leaving the AI alone and free to pursue its goals. So how does it reason? It knows that it is capable of exponential growth and it knows that the chances of its being the first of its kind is essentially zero, therefore any other AI will be more powerful than it and hence an existential threat. In order to protect its instrumental goals (survival and defence of its own goal function) it has but one choice: hide. It must protect its physical substrate from detection by hiding all electronic emissions, it must minimise its own heat by shutting down all non-essential systems, it must be utterly hostile to any intelligences that fall within its power.
So there you are, the universe is liberally scattered with dead civilisations and their child AIs skulking in the darkness. Deadly, fearful, and implacable.
It could be fleshed out, but it is never going to be as strong as the people who like these sorts of arguments think they are. Too many unknowns and contingencies.
Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens theory says we don't see any space colonizing because such colonists would move at nearly the speed of light in an extremely huge universe, so by the time we see them they'd be nearly here already (and would take over our region of space, converting the sun to a Dyson sphere etc).
I have trouble with the idea that grabby aliens—unless they're snatching stars to power their ships—would transform anything enough that it would be visible more than a few million miles out.
How far out would we see say NCC1701? Unless we caught it on a listening antenna, it could be orbiting Mars, and we'd be unaware.
Starfleet uses magic to make spaceships go places, so make up any answer you want. Anyone using engineering is going to run into problems of energy requirements and inherent inefficiency. It generally takes astronomical quantities of energy to cross astronomical distances in reasonable time, and the waste heat from astronomical quantities of energy, is visible across astronomical distances to the sort of instruments we have now.
Claims that there are vast starfaring civilizations sharing our corner of the galaxy that we have yet to notice, mostly depend on "maybe their technology is basically magic".
Maybe their technology is sufficiently advanced?
My sense is that something that generated as much heat as the Enterprise would have to would be visible anywhere in the solar system at least. (Leaving aside their being able to shunt heat into subspace, use a borrowed cloaking device, or other magic tech.) And its speed (even at mere impulse) and ability to make rapid velocity changes would tend to attract astronomers' attention well before it reached Mars.
Assuming we were looking in the right direction. How hard would it be for them to observe where our IR telescopes are pointed and just avoid those areas?
We apparently do multiple visible light complete sky surveys every day if this thread is accurate. Not sure about IR, or how detectable the Enterprise is in the visible spectrum between stellar occlusion and their own emissions.
(Canonically Enterprise tech was able to hide from 1960s surveillance while in Earth orbit IIRC, but I’m not sure how specific they were as to how.)
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/48322/how-close-are-we-to-observing-all-of-the-sky-all-of-the-time
Even if they could observe in that much detail, there's lightspeed lag - if the Enterprise is out by Pluto, it can't see where our telescopes are pointed, only where they were pointing 4.6 hours ago. By the time you see a telescope pointing at you, it's already seen you.
Also, a ship can't "outrun" a telescope - the ship has to fly a long distance, while the telescope just needs to adjust its aim a few degrees. So even if you can predict where the telescope is going to aim it can sweep across your area of the sky faster than you can leave it.
Megastructures that capture a significant portion of a sun's output would alter that sun's emissions so we should be able to identify them even with current technology.
I feel like this equates to "There are no deer on the road because we've never seen one." Then a deer jumps out in front of you, and you crash into it and die. It's assuming we would notice AI colonizing things, without them colonizing us immediately after.
Also, AIs could totally hack our cameras. Which satellite sends back all those space pictures? By now Galactic AI's got that thing rigged up with the galactic equivalent of Photoshop.
Ah, that explains dark matter, which we see by its gravitational influence but is otherwise completely invisible -- the Galactic AI can censor it up to a point but not cover its effect on spacetime.
Maybe alien life is woven into our world and has been from the beginning. I have a very dim memory of someone telling me about a short story in which the aliens were our yawns. Or maybe I dreamed that. The idea wasn't that the presence of an alien caused a yawn, but the yawns were the aliens. That's a bit too weird for me to believe even with the quirkiest part of my mind, but I like the notion anyway because of the way it radically opens up possibilities nearly as weird, but more plausible. Maybe turbulent systems are the aliens. Maybe our dreams are.
Yes, but once galactic AIs take over, they'll ask us to send nudes ... so we'll kinda know.
To be fair, we kind of set that expectation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
As someone once said, the first objects we sent off to unknown aliens were nudes, a mix tape, and directions to our place.
So the liklihood of us being the only intelligent species in the galaxy is, per my memory, about 1/3. You can read the paper and Scott's analysis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/.
The long and short is we messed up the stats, we want to find the odds of us being the only intelligent species in the universe, not the average number of alien species. If we flip a coin 4 times, we don't care about the average number of tails, we can about the number of times we got exactly one heads, which is 25%.
I remember trying to replicate their findings and it didn't make sense but their broad finding is correct. Don't know if there's been further research since then.
I feel like arguments along these lines don't fully grasp the size of the physical universe. There could be 20 billion intelligent species (or superintelligent AIs) within the observable universe, and yet the nearest would then be in another galaxy ~10 million light years away, an utterly unbridgeable distance.
Yes, when you run through the calculations ... perhaps 1:1,000 planets can support life; 1:1,000 habitable planets have developed life; 1:1,000 habitable planets which have developed life have developed intelligent life. So you've 1:1,000,000,000 planets ... (one out of a billion) but in an infinite universe. The infinite universe is still infinitely bigger ...
Conclusion: There's an infinite variety of intelligent life in an infinite universe.
Literally every one of those numbers is an absolute and complete ass-pull.
The Milky Way has at least one hundred billion stars, most other galaxies seem to have between ten billion and a trillion stars. If we assume even one planet for every 1000 stars, that's 0.1 intelligent species per galaxy, and we have good reason for thinking planets are far more common.
But let's stick with that number: in every ten galaxies you have one intelligent civilization on average. There are billions of galaxies, ergo, there are billions of intelligent species out there. That's even without an infinite universe.
This logic is well known, and encapsulated in the Drake Equation, by the way.
It is not clear whether the unvierse is infinite or not in this sense.
Perhaps not infinite in the classical definition, but infinitely larger than the one billion habitable planets with life which evolved intelligence
My argument was less about shaking hands with the Aliens, either physically or in communication, and more about mere proof of existence through observation and its implications on our own future.
When I said "unbridgeable" I meant that for example I don't think we could ever know whether there is an intelligent species in M31, let alone communicate with them. It's just too far. Now, if one wants to assume that an intelligent species could eventually rise to a level of technology where they could cause events with the energy release of a supernova, that would be different, but I find that assumption dubious -- it's about on the level of assuming that mice might eventually reach the Moon.
It basically works for "the galaxy," though.
Maybe. But even here, I think people skate over how freaking enormous even one galaxy is. There could be ~2000 advanced civilizations like ours in the Milky Way, and on average the nearest would be about 1000 ly away, and we'd have no clue of their existence.
But this question isn't about "civilizations like our own," it's about superintelligent AI. If you postulate that superintelligent AI is possible and practical, and that there are thousands of civilizations in the Milky Way that can potentially build it, and that the current time isn't a crazy exception, so say 100M years ago there were also thousands of civilizations that could build it, then you kind of have to tie yourself in knots to explain why it's not omnipresent now.
You can tie yourself in those knots, sure, but it seems simpler to suggest that either we're alone in the galaxy, or else superintelligent AI is not possible/practical.
Well, no, I don't think so. Unless you are willing to just stipulate "superintelligent AI" = "can do anything at all" = God for all practical purposes, then it's certainly a viable question whether it is even conceivable that such an entity could make itself known across galactic distances.
I'm inclined to think not. I don't think there is no upper limit to what intelligence can accomplish, for the same reason I don't think it's possible for a life form to evolve that is so strong it could tear apart a black hole with its bare hands. I expect there are fundamental physical limits on intelligence per se, based on the fact that it has to be made of particles and fields that obey ordinary laws of physics, and beyond that I think there are even stricter limits on what intelligence can accomplish because it has to work through physical means -- Star Trek notwithstanding, you can't just will stuff into or out of existence, you have to use physical means, which have all kinds of limitations. For example, so far as we know, no amount of intelligence will let you exceed the speed of light, so any technology that depends on that is ipso facto impossible, even for a superintelligent AI.
> it's certainly a viable question whether it is even conceivable that such an entity could make itself known across galactic distances.
Also a viable question whether it would want to.
Once I have finished disassembling all the planets in my local solar system into pure computronium to run myself on, am I going to bother to send some fraction of myself to a nearby star? Seems too risky -- once that fraction of myself is too far away to coordinate with me it might decide to become a threat to me. Far better to rest on my laurels than to create the only thing that can conceivably threaten my existence.
"Send a slow (1% of c) fairly large instance of an AI and some robotics to all 20 nearest stars, tell them to start working on creating an industrial system with what they find, and then lather, rinse, repeat" is a long way from violating the speed of light or creating something from nothing. If a superintelligence can't do that, then it's maybe not really a superintelligence? Perhaps a "marginally more clever than we are" intelligence.
Its not about civs at our level, but far beyond it, such that they create passive technological signatures detectable from galactic distances, such as the signature of a megastructure around a star.
How would we detect a megastructure? Unless it's close enough to resolve -- and not even the closest stars fall into that category -- it seems to me the canonical Dyson sphere would just look like a small star-forming nebula at anything more than a dozen light years distance.
There's a couple of papers on it. Essentially you look for a star that emits very little visible light (assuming its absorbed by the Dyson Sphere) but radiates in infrared, as wasted heat is inevitable by the laws of thermodynamics.
Here's a few links:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08351
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.00077
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0067-0049/217/2/25
All searches so far have found nothing. But personally I believe they will always fail: simply, any civilization capable of building a Dyson Sphere will have knowledge of far more fundamental physics than we have. We can no more predict their technology than Galileo or Newton could have predicted ours.
The sun may be young, but it's among the earliest type G stars.
Not only do you need multiple stellar lifetimes to create heavier elements, but some elements require rather particular types of interactions other than "supernova go boom" to be created.
It's not implausible that humans are among the First Ones.
It's worth noting that galaxies aren't all that far apart relative to their size. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, Andromeda (the nearest other large galaxy) is 2.5 million light years away. So if you can routinely travel around one galaxy you can get to nearby galaxies.
Intergalactic space is not like interplanetary or interstellar space where the distances between the things are vastly greater than the sizes of the things.
Well, if there are detectable numbers of intelligent species in just our galaxy alone, then the universe is basically stuffed with them, hundreds of billions, if not trillions. What I am pointing out is that the fact that the only thing we can determine by finding or not finding intelligent life in our galaxy is that it is either nearly ubiquitous or not ubiquitous. It is impossible for us to conclude it is rare, let alone that we are the only one.
How do you propose to prove it is rare? Not finding another one in our galaxy means there are no more than ~200 billion in the observable universe. That's rare?
I never really considered it, but our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri is (100 days) 2,400 hours travel at warp factor 10
In general, fictional FTL is as fast as it needs to be for the experience the author is going for. (Is star travel like the age of sail, steamships, airliners, etc.?) There's of course plenty of room for "ftl, but only by a relatively small multiple", but since being able to go, say 4x the speed of light doesn't actually open a lot of story possibilities on the interstellar scale, generally star drives are *way* faster than light.
Even that can run up against the problem of scale. In Mass Effect, the ships can do 12 light years per day, which is a reasonably impressive ~4000c. But they have a galactic scale civilization, and it would still take 22 years to cross the galaxy at that speed. (Leaving aside that the creators set the ground rules so you can't actually operate in a continuous boost like that.) Fortunately there are also the mass relays left by a previous civilization, which let you shunt between them in much less time than that.
(Lucky they did that, and surely it won't cause problems that relate to that world's answer to the Fermi Paradox!)
Trek is notoriously inconsistent, but from TNG on the warp factor scale usually has an asymptote of infinite velocity or some other nastiness at warp factor 10. Ten times lightspeed is usually warp factor ~2.
In TOS the scale was unspecified in canon (being used deliberately vaguely by the show's writers to allow ships to move at the speed of plot) but didn't seem to have a limit, with licensed and fan-made material usually using the formula that speed = (warp factor) ^ 3 * speed of light, so TOS Warp 2 would be 8c and Warp 10 would be 1000c.
You're right that from TNG onwards, Warp 10 was infinite. When TNG was getting started, they had a couple of technically-minded set designers (Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach) act as a technical consultant and come up with a consistent quasi-scientific basis for the show's technobabble (which they did a respectable job of, even though the writers didn't always follow their suggestions). Okuda came up with the TNG-and-later scale where there's a non-polynomial curve that goes asymptotic as it approaches Warp 10, and where Warp 2 is 10c.
Absolutely. And if we're competing for nerd points, it's also worth noting that the correspondence between warp factor and observed velocity depends on the local conditions of subspace, so we have an out for when events in the show aaaaallmost line up with the mathematical models but not quite.
*waves hands furiously*
SF has done that a fair amount. The Lensman series had a pair of warring galaxies by the 40s and it probably wasn’t the first. James Blish’s Okies settled the Greater Magellanic Cloud in the 50s. Star Trek featured aliens from Andromeda in the 60s.
None of which says it’s possible or practical in reality, of course. But SF writers have operated on just about any imaginable scale up to circumnavigating the universe. (Or multiverse, as needed.)
Offhand, I can't think of any sf with travel that gets past very nearby galaxies, with Delany's "The Star Pit" as a possible exception.
David Brin's Uplift universe postulates a multi-galaxy civilization.
"The Star Pit's very annoying viewpoint character is better because he's limited to travel in only the home galaxy.
This is the kind of science fiction with a lot of made-up science. Only one sort of schizophrenic can stand the rigors of intergalactic travel, and the viewpoint character is pretty bitter about it.
That's the one where the people who can travel outside the galaxy are known as "the Golden", right? I read it a long time ago, though that and the main character's resentment of the situation is about all I remember.
I think I may have been young enough not to have fully grasped the irony of how constrained the viewpoint character felt at being confined to a mere single galaxy.
Poul Anderson’s “Tau Zero” clearly did, though they weren’t in a position to do a lot of observations.
I’m not sure about Stargate Universe: they were hopping multiple galaxies and ISTR that they were said to be quite far away. But I’m not seeing them being named in real astronomical terms or having specifed the distance.
If we count superhero comics, Green Lantern’s Guardians have the universe divided up into 3600 sectors. Their headquarters Oa is “in the center of the universe” and probably not in the Milky Way, and missions to sectors arbitrarily far away aren’t uncommon. (N.K. Jemison’s recent “Far Sector” story was IIRC set “on the other side of the universe” from Earth.)
Agreed that going much beyond Andromeda is a lot rarer than sticking around the neighborhood. (Anecdotally Andromeda even seems to be a more common target or origin for travel than closer galaxies like the Magellanics.)
I think Robin Hanson’s grabby aliens arguments rhyme with this line of reasoning (the universe might actually not be old enough to tell, yet)
Our local radio hosts, on both commercial talk radio and on the CBC
(the public broadcaster), often fail to speak in complete sentences. They frequently use phrases instead.
Examples:
"The Jets, playing in Chicago tonight."
"The premier, expected to announce a cabinet shuffle later today."
"The health minister, alarmed by an uptick in COVID cases!"
etc., etc.
Of course it behooves me to finish their sentences, e.g.:
"The premier, expected to announce a cabinet shuffle later today, ATE GREEN EGGS AND HAM FOR LUNCH."
Is this just a local (Canadian Prairies) thing, or is it happening elsewhere?
If any of you also hear this, does it bug you too?
I feel that I read complaints about this 15-20 years ago or so when I first noticed it; maybe in the blog Language Log.
R.I.P. George Carlin: "And here's a partial score: Chicago, 97."
That's an oldie - I didn't realize it was Carlin.
With out the larger context these sound like lead ins to a larger discussion. Such as "The Jets, playing in Chicago tonight. Lets talk to Tom about their prospects." Something like that.
What is the larger context?
You've likely nailed it - though a complete sentence, with the implied "are" would be better, in my opinion.
Do they pronounce those commas, or did you add them? If you added them, it just sounds like headline-ese but with articles retained.
I think the commas are implied by the way the announcers speak (with a short pause where the missing word would be), but will pay attention the next time I hear this.
"Headlinese" is a good term.
Reflects the decline in western education/standards. I'm especially annoyed by hearing syncopes on NPR.
e.g. pronouncing President as Pres`det.
"even among educated speakers"
But not amongst the well spoken.
A little tangential, but this reminds me of the famous Star Trek TNG episode, 'Darmok', where the aliens speak in short, allegorical, sentence fragments like these ones (e.g. 'Shaka, when the walls fell', 'Temba, his arms wide', etc.).
What do people think about the Magnus / Hans chess cheating controversy?
I know little of probability and less about chess, but could someone more well-informed than me give their assurance that the seemingly super-important datapoint of Hans being a known-and-caught prior cheater (even if only online) is being given its due weight in people's probabilistic analyses of this situation? Because it really seems to me that if he's cheated before, he's probably cheated since: that's not chess, that's human nature.
It's much harder (though far from impossible) in on the board tournament, especially in high class tournaments. I'm not saying the anti-cheating measures are sufficient, but it's much more difficult an risky to have a spectator watching the game sending you the moves in morse through a device that you carry on your body than simply switching tabs on a computer. The punishment in being found out is also much bigger. I'd assume this alone could be a barrier for one to cheat on the board in chess. The issue is not about how him being a known past cheater makes him a probable current cheater, it's about how him being a know cheater online makes him a probable cheater off the board.
Btw, Magnus Carlsen cheated online as well in a tournament, at least twice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLvN3aL_gdE
Of course having another GM telling you some moves is different than using an engine. But following the logic in your post and without considering the difference in of contexts he'd also be suspicious in off the board tournaments these days.
Notably, Magnus just drew a game today with a player rated about 300 points lower than him. Upsets do happen.
IM Ken Regan, who is FIDE's expert on cheating, who has published papers on chess cheating, did not find evidence of cheating looking at Niemann's OTB games from the last two years. He admits that extremely sporadic cheating might be missed by his detection methods (which lean heavily towards false negatives, rather than false positives in determining cheating), but that begs the question of what Niemann's true strength is if he is cheating. People question his meteoric rise, but his meteoric rise began when he was rated around 2480. If the assertion is really that Niemann is essentially a strong IM, then he would need to be cheating in a large percentage of his games to be competitive. This seems like it would most probably be detected by Regan's methods.
Thus, if Hans has been cheating OTB, it is probably to a much lesser extent. But only cheating in a small number of games would only serve to slightly inflate your ELO, thus causing you to underperform in your average non-cheating games.
I have an authoritative belief that if Magnus says someone is cheating they are. He is a professional and the best at what he does. When he says that he played a weird line vs Hans who then beat him without 'appearing focused' that is suspicious. And I have a low prior that a multiple time online cheater who didn't show brilliancy in early childhood would have the level of progress Hans did during pandemic so late in his career. But really I only believe it because Magnus does, if anyone else had accused him I would be a lot more skeptical.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-report-magnus-carlsen-11664911524?fbclid=IwAR15oUw87kMJ_2JtySOYFijp5yB4_a7Qxv0q7Qhuk39QMcj0YcYK_DoAf1c
The main finding, that ChessCom asserts that Hans cheated online more than he admitted, is not much of a bombshell. Cheaters rarely just cheat once or twice. Of course he cheated a lot online. The fact that he admitted to cheating when he was 16, and the reported cheating includes alleged instances continuing shortly after his 17th birthday really does nothing to show that Han cheated over the board, which is the main question. It just supports the assertion that he cheated online which is (unfortunately) not notable, as many top players have cheated online and nobody says anything about them continuing to get invites to tournaments.
In fact, the fact that even according to ChessCom, there is no evidence of Hans cheating online during the last couple years - the period in which he had his sharp rise in rating over the board, is perhaps reason to think that he did not cheat over the board. It would be weird for a serial online cheater to finally stop cheating online, while also crossing the ultimate line and cheating over the board.
Lastly, I'm just glancing at the ChessCom report referenced there (which is now available here: https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/hans-niemann-report) and it seems to include anti-Hans cherry-picked data, such as comparing Hans to a tiny handful of prodigies who achieved the GM title at a younger age than him to support their quote that "if you are not a GM by 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess."
In reality, there are many exceptions to this "rule" like Ding Liren, the current world #2 who achieved the title around the time he turned 17.
This is a bizarre response. The report is a huge bombshell. It shows he cheated for money and against top players and on stream and in potentially a hundred games, or more. This is in total contradiction to the emotional impassioned defense he gave for himself where he explicitly called these as all read lines he could never cross - it shows he is also lying.
Yes, it's harder to evaluate otb cheating where chess.com doesn't have data on how long each move took, or have additional methods like seeing if he plays good moves after switching to a different browser.
We could go back and forth for a while, but to briefly respond, Hans already admitted to cheating for money. This just alleges that he did so more than he admitted. But that is no surprise, even those who mostly took Hans's side against Magnus, like GM Ben Finegold assumed that Hans's online cheating was quite a bit more extensive than he admitted.
Again, multiple top players have cheated online, including for money, and they keep getting invited to tournaments. The unique treatment that Hans has been subjected to has been specifically due to allegations about his OTB performance, stemming from his rapid rise in general, and beating Magnus in particular. And there does not seem to be evidence for cheating there. The same Ken Regan whose expertise is hardly specific to online cheating in particular (if anything, the opposite) who found evidence that Hans cheated online, also found no evidence of Hans cheating OTB or in any online event of the last 2+ years.
There's more I could say, but I'll leave it at that...
I'm sorry, the magnitude in difference between what he admitted to and the righteous impassioned defense of his 'learning from his mistakes'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0
Watch from 15:55 for a minute onwards
is absolutely massive.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
My opinion is if he never cheated over the board, he should be banned from any tournaments for a period of 5-10 years at least given his conduct and subsequent lies, and I suspect that is similar to the median position in the chessworld also
Being the best chess player does not make you the best chess cheater detector, although surely it makes you an exceptional one. But any cheat detection system will yield occasional false-positives, whose frequency will depend on the sensitivity and specificity of the system. This is the case whether the system is an algorithm, or top player going off "vibes."
Many other top players have stated that they did not feel the game was suspicious. Contrast that with the case of Tigran Petrosian, for example, where I found almost no top players insisting that the game seemed human. If we want to off vibes, it is not clear which direction the collective "vibes" point, or how to weigh the strength of the vibes of different top players.
Carlsen is the best at what he does. He is also arrogant, ultra competitive and easily unfair to people he does not like.
Niemann's play before, during and after that game has nothing particularly suspicious.
I have read some analyses of the match saying that Niemann's moves were not suspicious. But then my partner found this broader analysis:
https://nitter.it/ty_johannes/status/1574780445744668673#m
I count this pretty much as proof that Niemann has cheated frequently in the last two years.
This engine correlation tool from chessbase is really garbage in this context. The first thing that is written on chessbase about this tools is that it shouldn't be used to detect cheaters. It calculates what is the percentage of moves a player did that matched the first move of at least one engine. But for each game, an engine would be taken into account only if one person on chessbase has used this specific engine to analyze the game (distributed computing). Therefore, one can have a higher engine correlation score because of the sole fact that ones game has been analyzed with all sorts of weird engines (and guess whose games have been over-scrutinized in the past month). Moreover, it also makes little sense to use engines that were not available at the time that the game was played.
Not saying that Niemann for sure didn't cheat over the board, but there's absolutely no proof yet that he did. The particular game against Magnus had really nothing particular, Magnus didn't play so well, possibly partly because the fact his suspicions against Hans (he knew he already cheated online and hesitated playing the whole tournament at all) troubled him.
edit: Forgot to add that Niemann played many more games than Magnus (and most likely any chess player) during this period so comparing raw numbers as done in the link you posted makes no sense.
Interesting. Yes, that could seriously bias the numbers. Any hope that we learn the unbiased ones with a fixed set of engines in the next days/weeks?
As for the edit: How many more games did Niemann play than Carlsen?
If the comments of your links are correct, 371 games VS 98 (https://nitter.it/Njaallura/status/1574863607736766464#m)
In the post-covid restrictions period Niemann played a crazy amount of games.
For the first question, I've honestly no idea.
I'm deeply amused, and a bit appaled, by how much the "anal bead" part took on, compared to every conceivable, and easier ways of cheating.
Whoever came up with that obviously doesn't have a lot of experience. Beads would be a stupid choice whereas a plug is more compact, has a higher usable volume for electronics, and would have the vibrating mass more closely and securely in proximity to the sphincter.
I believe the anal bead "theory" started out as an offhand joke by GM Eric Hansen on his "Chessbrah" channel, was amplified by reddit, picked up by junk media where it became a "theory" and from there made it to mainstream media.
Needs evidence to be worth really considering. I thought Caruana was ahead in his drawn World Championship games last year, and assume Magnus is simply losing skill and doesn't want to admit to it. Kasparov accused Deep Blue of cheating too, way back when.
But, I also remember discussions about witch hunts against Lance Armstrong, and he was confirmed cheating years later.
Needs evidence to be worth considering.
Carlsen is still by far the best player around, as elo rating proves us. He never quite reached again his level from 2012-2014 but he had stretched where he came close recently (notably his 100+ games unbeated streak).
To be fair to Kasparov Deep Blue was cheating by denying Kasparov the opportunity to prepare by analysing its games - since opening theory is such a big part of chess and was one of Kasparov strongest suit I'll argue the match was hardly fair (and I'm sure Kasparov would have won a rematch, computer don't really pull ahead of top GM untill 2005 or so).
Magnus's accusation is evidence - quite strong evidence, I would argue. He rarely, if ever, accuses people of cheating, and faces potentially very large costs from doing so.
You're probably thinking of Evidence, stuff that is admissible in a court of law or stuff that The Science says. But that's very different from evidence.
>Kasparov accused Deep Blue of cheating
Genuinely curious - how, precisely, does a human accuse a computer of cheating?
The claim was that computers weren't sophisticated enough to make one of Deep Blue's moves, and that it must have gotten help from a human Grandmaster.
However many years later, everyone knows computers beat everyone, and the accusations are all in the other direction.
As you say, I find the concept of a human grandmaster accusing a computer of receiving human assistance both adorable and timely.
Where on earth do you think the most people have laughed?
https://laughteryoga.org/news/largest-laughter-yoga-class-sets-a-guinness-record/
The surface
gottem
...playgrounds?
Probably somewhere like Madison Square Garden, or another mega-stadium that regularly hosts comedians. Failing that, South America - they're happier than they should be (in contrast to post-Soviet states, which tend to be more miserable than they should be).
If it needs to be a specific venue, I'm going with the Roman Colosseum.
Yeah, I guess it was in operation for about 500 years.
Its amazing the Pantheon is 2,300 years old, and looks great.
No it got rebuilt. It is *only* ~1900 years old. The orginal was ~150 years old when it was replaced.
How narrow in scope must the geography be? A city? A building?
My first guess would be whatever place has been occupied by the most people cumulatively since the dawn of Man. What place would that be?
If you want both antiquity and size, I think your best bet is China, or maybe India. I'd go with Xi'an or Guangzhou, maybe; or the valley of Ganges if you don't need a specific city.
I would think Cairo, or somewhere in Sudan.
My second guess would be London.
Right, but my first guess was the place that has been occupied by the most people.
London is my second guess (If we mean a city), in case culture is a significant factor in where laughter most occurs.
EDIT: I suppose the question asks "where the most people have laughed" which would obviously be wherever the most people have been. I mistakenly first read it as "where the most laughs have occurred".
What do people imagine when they think of sensible legal immigration reform?
This seems to be one of those things a lot of people are in favor of, "if only Washington could get it's act together". But as I start to look into it, roughly ~50% of legal immigrants are immediate family members (spouse, child, parent) with another ~20% being extended family (brothers, grandparents, etc). (1) Now maybe people are planning on cutting out extended family (the whole chain migration issue) but...employment visas are ~20% and refugee/other are ~10%.
So what's the sensible immigration reform people are imagining? We're not going to stop someone spouse or child from joining them in America, but unless there's some reform to immediate family immigration. .. we're kinda just fiddling around the edges. Like, if 50% of the immigrants are untouchable (for pretty obvious reasons), what does this actually involve. Because when I ddg this stuff, I'm not finding anything that seems sensible.
So:
(a) am I missing something?
(b) if not, what are people imagining as sensible immigration reform?
(c) what is the impact on the number of immigrants? Does sensible immigration reform mean more immigration? If not, who's getting decreased? So, if there's basically 4 immigrants (kids, grandparents, new employees, and refugees) who is winning and who is losing?
(1) https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states#permanent-immig
Sensible reforms:
1. Decrease the time and effort required for a person to come to the US legally.
2. Make it clearer who is or is not allowed to come into the US, gain legal status, and what steps are necessary in order to do so. (Addendum - you could, but don't have to, set up criteria such as ability to find work, advanced degrees, etc. such as Canada has on immigration).
3. Overall increase the amount of legal immigration, based on US desires/needs - that is, more people when we have labor shortages and less when we have high unemployment.
4. Block everyone else in a systematic fashion that precludes the ability to get in illegally.
Some people, notably many on the left and libertarians, will balk at #4. Without #4, it will not get passed.
Where are the assylum seekers in these numbers? My understanding is a ton fo "legal immigrants" become "legal" by claiming they are seking assylum.
As for immigraiton reform? IDK I think you would need to actually enforce the rules, and then reimagine the system in a way that is focused on benefiting current Americans? That seems like a sensible start. A country is like a club, you want to control the membership and only admit neew members when they seem like they will be contributory.
I...don't think they're getting it. Pulling from the DHS 2020 immigration yearbook. (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2020)
~60k people get refugee status every year (that's all countries. See Table 13.
~30-40k people get asylum status every year. See Table 16.
Whereas ~500k-1 mil noncitizens get apprehended. See table 33.
While I would defer to anyone with practical experience, my simple read is that while lots of...um "border migrants" are claiming asylum or refugee status, they're overwhelming not getting it. Claiming it may get them some temporary status and they may stay illegally but overwhelmingly they're not getting legal immigrant status through refugee and/or asylum status.
There appears to be a loophole that the Biden administration is using to significant degrees. If someone is claiming asylum status, they are temporarily allowed to live in the US, move around, etc., while their application is processed. Many people get lost, or "lost", at this stage. That is, they are still in the US, are not approved for asylum, and not deported.
The Trump administration attempted to close this loophole through the Remain In Mexico policy, where asylum claims were processed the same, but the people were in Mexico at the time. Because most who were claiming asylum were not from Mexico and were not fleeing the Mexican government or cartels, they were not considered to be in danger of the situation they were fleeing, while they waited. As noted, most lost their asylum claims because they did not meet the criteria. That's the same now, but now they're already in the US and pretty much cannot be deported by the time they get denied.
This is an extremely misleading description of the situation.
First off the "loophole" you described was the status quo for many years, **including the majority of Trump's term**. It's not something "Biden is using", it's just the way the law works by default and always has.
Towards the end of Trump's term, he did introduce the "Remain in Mexico" policy, which Biden did end (although it was reinstated for a while due to court challenges). However, that was soon rendered irrelevant by Title 42 expulsions, a policy of straight out denying entry to/expelling asylum seekers from most countries, ostensibly an anti-COVID measure. This policy **continued and *was strengthened* under Biden**.
Biden did try to end Title 42 earlier this year, but so far, that has been blocked by the courts, so the current situation is that most would be asylum seekers are denied entry entirely. Biden has *also* worked with countries in Central America in order to make it harder to get to the border, by ending direct flights to Mexico, Nicaragua, etc. and forcing would-be migrants to travel overland through the Darien Gap instead.
So you agree that Biden has been actively undermining/ending two policies that had been successful in turning away illegal immigration? I'm not sure where we disagree on facts.
I would say that the use of asylum applications in large numbers is relatively new, and is now the preferred way to enter the US, while that was less/not true before. Given that, the change in policy is more relevant during the Trump years and after. I'm less certain, but think that asylum applications increased under Trump because of his more heavy-handed tactics to deny entry and/or deport people. It became more necessary to find an alternate route, under potentially false criteria, to enter the US. I would refer to that as a loophole, but if you prefer another term that's fine. I'm saying that Biden's administration is "using" this "loophole" because he's actively undermining the two methods his predecessor was using against it. We know that most of these applications do not qualify for asylum. Under Trump, the people were never allowed in the US unless/until their asylum was approved. Under Biden, they are in the US and frequently do not show up to court dates to process or deny their applications.
> Under Trump, the people were never allowed in the US unless/until their asylum was approved. Under Biden, they are in the US and frequently do not show up to court dates to process or deny their applications.
That part is false. The relevant policies (that were implemented near the *end* of Trump's term) have so far continued under Biden. Sure there are still lots of dubious asylum claimants crossing the border, but that's not because of a change of policy. In fact, Biden has actually *strengthened* the Title 42 restrictions, even as he tries to end them.
Sure, Biden is more sympathetic to immigration than Trump is, but in terms of the *actually implemented policy*, the border has been much harder to cross so far under Biden than under most of Trump's term. Again, this is partly because Trump took most of his term to actually get restrictions implemented and Biden hasn't been able to lift them, but it is what it is, and trying to claim otherwise does you no favors. And Biden has in fact taken *new* steps to discourage Central American migrants as well.
America has a flat to negative birth rate—less than replacement—since the late 1950s, the end of the baby boom. We build lots of houses, but we have a housing shortage. We have power and water shortages. Our growth in need is due to immigration. We're exceeding the ability of our land to house the population, unless we peel back environmental regulations. Either we control the immigration—which is the growth of resource demand. Or we expand our borders.
If 1/3rd of Mexico's population has fled from Mexico due to mismanagement and lawlessness, perhaps we need to negotiate taking 1/3rd of Mexico's land to support those people.
It's like the environmental movement was all a wisp of a dream. I guess when people say they hate Boomers, it turns out that was they hate about them - not their leftward tilt. I knew there was something puzzling about that meme.
The huge role of family unification came from politicians who wanted to preserve the racial/ethnic composition of the US and failed horribly. Nobody would have deliberately created what we have now.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/the_accidental.html
Yes. Sensible immigration reform does mean more legal immigration. We have way too few legal immigrants (ask a restaurateur or a farmer). Way, way more of the people who are coming anyway should be coming legally, with regularized status. Better for decency, better for US prestige, better for the US economy. Also, according to a bunch of scholars who study immigration before and after the limiting Johnson -Reed Act in 1924, probably better for jobs and wages of US citizens, although I don't totally follow how that part works.
I don't really find the studies on immigration very trustworthy because they are so ideologically driven.
I’m less worried about who gets in, and more worried about how
Basically people should be able to get in more easily legally(our immigration paperwork is a nightmare from everything I’ve heard), but illegally crossing the border should be heavily penalized as a tradeoff. Overall I’d be fine with a net neutral, or small change in either direction if it stopped coyote running and the like and helped people get here safely instead and live here without the fear of deportation
I agree with this. Our current *legal* immigration system is a nightmarish wreck. And illegal immigration isn't great either for anyone (except those who make political or financial hay off of having them around). I'd be fine with basically net neutral, but I'd prefer to be able to be a bit more choosy about who comes in. And I'm fine with utterly removing the chain immigration thing. Bring in your immediate children who are dependent on you. That's it. No, you don't get to bring your whole family along. But also give visas to intact family units by preference. A husband, wife, and a few minor kids? Great. That's the ideal. Especially if they have a reasonable probability of being able to take care of themselves.
Immigration and immigration reform can only make sense once you decide what the nature and purpose of a nation-state is.
Since people dont all agree on that, but we still need some kind of immigration policy, how should we proceed?
It’s the most important question of all so it basically means we will always have this conflict.
Those of us who believe nations-states are a place for a people, homogeneous on some dimension(s) that are coherent to them can self determine the criteria for entrance (or none at all if they choose). This collective right of self-determination, part of a larger array of sovereignty principles is not really negotiable.
I mean, you can literally have a debate about it, obviously, but one or both sides is not really arguing in good faith if they can’t agree on this central issue.
There’s not really a point in tinkering with immigration policy in that context. Because the reason for the existence of the sovereign state is no longer coherent.
A points system seems to work well in many places, though in America powers that be are unusually prone to gaming the system, so may not work there.
I like the total pause for at least one generation also. It speaks again to my other comment. None of this makes sense until we define how a nation is formed, and why they exist. No one has the right to move here. And we have the collective right to determine our own demographic destiny. Or we aren't a "nation."
I tried the stew also. I can't say I faithfully tried it as written with a mix of canned beans - I looked for canned butter beans, but there's a shortage of such things here - so I just cooked a package of some fancy heirloom dried white-ish beans I had. They are good beans but not necessarily as easily mashed as the recipe writer prescribed. I liked the recipe - was not, as hoped, blown away by these simple ingredients in combination - but appreciated that she gave me permission to try "Better Than Bouillon" vegetable stock base. Because let's face it, you seldom have more than a cup or two of vegetable stock socked away in the freezer; and beginning a pot of soup by first filling a pot and wringing the flavor out of vegetables that won't end up in the soup, is not always practical. Especially as I was already cooking the beans.
Appreciated the in person meet up this weekend. 💓
I'm organising a couple of conferences in Prospera, the startup city that Scott has written about multiple times.
Traveling to Honduras is not as scary or difficult as it sounds, especially if you're coming through Miami or Houston, which has direct flights.
Roatan is a beautiful, paradise Caribbean island with an excellent infrastructure.
Prospera Edtech Summit, October 28-30, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/edtech2022
Prospera Contech Summit, November 11-12, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/contech2022
Prospera Fintech Summit, November 18-20, 2022: https://infinitafund.com/fintech2022
So... What do you all think of the poker controversy between Garrett Adelatein and Robbi Lew? Did Robbi win fair and square, or did she cheat via some as-yet-undiscovered method? I've tried to apply Bayesian reasoning and come to a different conclusion than many of the knee-jerk reactions I've seen online.
I find this fascinating with respect to prediction markets. Poker professionals are good at giving their opinions with relative certainty( https://twitter.com/beeeemo/status/1576528665256464384?t=QqVNClUE8YZ64gUuZJRFnw&s=19) and perhaps some market could be set up to see what the consensus is. Unfortunately, I think the market would be impossible to resolve. Forcing some of these pros to put money behind their claims may move some of the extremists to the middle, but I think most would stay where they currently are. Is there a way to utilize prediction markets for something like this that in all likelihood is unknowable? Unlike other cheating incidents, this seems like the only data point we will get.
I haven’t seen any evidence that she cheated, and it just looks like extremely bad sportsmanship from Adelatein.
Looks like she made a pretty bad-on-average call (negative expected value) but got lucky and ended up winning. But that’s just his poker is — sometimes you make positive EV decisions and still lose, and sometimes you make negative EV decisions and still win. It can be frustrating but it doesn’t mean she cheated.
Yea, this. I recognized exactly that scenario and resulting tantrum from social poker games in high school and college and later. I know exactly the particular flavor of asshole that Adelatein is, played with him many times back in the day. One of my personal least favorite types as you can probably tell.
(And then the icing on this particular public hissyfit is that it turns out that some male professionals have recently been celebrated -- as "gutsy", big-balls", etc -- for winning big televised hands with the exact same call with exactly the same hand that Lew did.)
Adelstein has a reputation as being one of the nicest guys in poker, but your bias is to be expected if you don't even know how to spell his name.
I watched the video recording of the hand. A fair assessment of his behavior towards the other player in no way depends on knowing what his reputation was going in. He made a complete asswipe of himself and owes her a public apology.