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.
The Onion files an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in defense of satire.
Seriously.
Shine on you crazy diamonds!
“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,”
How hard is it not to link to a paywalled article? At the very least, use wayback machine so everyone else doesn't have to do the work of accessing the article that YOU posted.
What is the legality of writing US "formal" documents in a parodying and trollish style? is it always legal or just for the specific type of US supreme court document here ? was this even a possiblity entertained by someone in the US legal machinery or anywhere else ?
The article notes that
>Amicus briefs are documents filed by parties not directly involved in a case to provide the court with additional information.
But isn't starting a document that is supposed to provide the court with additional information with
>daily readership of 4.3 trillion” that has “grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history
gives legal justification for the judges to completely ignore all the document and possibly inflict some legal consequences on the writers ?
The judges would have to be able to hold two ideas in their head at the same time.
I think the court is up to the task.
The brief is demonstrating that no reasonable person would take the absurd hyperbole in a literal manner.
Stephen Colbert got in trouble on his Comedy Central program when a group of people took satire literally. He addressed the issue while holding up a copy of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal.’
Oh I'm sure the judges know how many people are on earth and would not eat the onion.
What I'm asking is, hypothetically, if a judge is too dim or spiteful or just bored, would law be on his/her side to come after the Onion in some way or another ?
If an actual party to a lawsuit tried to pull something like this, they would probably receive, at minimum, a dressing down from the judge. Litigation is expensive, and deliberately wasting everyone's time with jokes is not viewed kindly. Amicus briefs, especially before the Supreme Court, are essentially glorified op-eds, and you can get away with a lot that would never fly in a standard legal brief. The vast majority of amicus briefs that aren't written on behalf of a state, an important and influential trade association, or respected legal academics are simply ignored, but that's fine because most amicus briefs are written for the sole purpose of tricking donors who don't know what amicus briefs are into thinking your organization is making waves on big important issues.
I'm sure the Supreme Court could probably figure out a way to discourage people from filing these sorts of briefs if it really wanted to(though that potentially raises interesting 1st Amendment issues), but it's a lot easier to just not read the ones they don't think will be helpful.
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.
The best piece of advice I can give, that I probably should have taken more often myself, comes from Warren Buffet: “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.”
You probably should let the idea cook a bit more before you pull the pin.
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 - works very hard - made hard personal sacrifices - took scary risks - was smarter / more talented than most people- and got very lucky. You still need luck.
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.
Family chain should be dramatically reduced. There's no reason that "parents and family" should be a given, particularly not in in a case where Immigrant A marries citizen B and then imports her whole family, who then marries someone and imports that whole family, and so on like a Prell commercial. If an immigrant marries a citizen, that's the end of the chain with the exception of minor children that have to be supported by the citizen. No one else.
a) you're missing the endless ongoing chain of family green cards.
b) In my view, sensible immigration reform would be a complete pause for 40 years. Absent that, return all illegal immigrants, no asylum, and any refugees have to be paid for by the organizations that bring them here, including education.
c)Lots,lots less.
One really bad idea: points or "skilled" immigration. Whatever attribute we mandate, other countries will immediately start handing out that attribute (college degrees) like candy. We dont' need skilled immigrants and we're just creating a brain drain.
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."
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 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.
I'm a little disappointed that he didn't try to call their bluff and write "this research is not related to DEI" and force them to make their thinking explicit. He has far more insight into their thinking and milieu than I do, but for precisely that reason I'd like to see as hard evidence as possible that it's as bad as he says.
I really appreciated when Stuart Reges called the bluff on land acknowledgements, but it *wasn't* a bluff and his career has definitely suffered v. mouthing the right words. But if Haidt was going to loudly quit the SPSP over this anyway, I don't see much downside in making people follow through on their purported convictions.
Me too, but for a less presumed badness reason. I expect that they consider DEI things good, and want to promote them, but not that they intend to suppress any other research. As he points out in his article, most research doesn't have anything to do with DEI concerns. So my presumption is that the DEI statement is to allow them to highlight that sort of work. Whereas he seems to take it as a requirement to contort whatever work you're doing into that framework. It's like he missed that "whether" that he quotes right there in his article. It's weird.
I'd bet good money that if he stuck around and paid attention there would be no or at most very limited change from the previous status quo.
Sometimes merely playing the game is losing. You have to realize you're dealing with a religion here, an illegitimate new religion that is simultaneously in outsized control of administrativia and media, and yet stricken with an almost sexual persecution fetish. Engaging with them impregnates them with the illusion, a cruel false hope, that their ideas are worth the brain electricity that carries them.
It won't work too, they have no shame, they fear no contradiction, they're incapable of the faculties of abstraction and self-detachment which are necessary prerequisites to recognising hypocrisy. Their entire moral framework celebrates hypocrisy and contradicting standards, canonizing it as "Punching Up vs. Punching Down".
Paul Graham once wrote about Orthodox Privilege, the inability of the followers of an orthodoxy to understand how stifling their orthodoxy and its defenders are. I think about this a lot whenever I hear or read sentiments like yours.
I am no fan of wokies, but the triple-quoted statement of his seems very questionable:
> "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
I know this sounds like the start of a monologue by a mustache-twirling villain in a B-grade movie to portray wokism as bad, but it's the literal words of one of their lead grifters.
Top review by one "Ron Housley" on April 1 2022 (hehe) who gave the book 4 stars out of 5:
>Well, it didn’t take long for Kendi to get right down to his main point: “The remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination” and “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” (p. 19).
Has any country ever tried a parliamentary system- where the Prime Minister is not accountable to the people (i.e. the lower house), but instead a different body? Options could include a Senate/council of states, or another non-directly elected body of elites that's effectively running the country. As a fan of 10% Less Democracy, I'd be curious to see other types of parliamentary systems that are less populist- you'd get the benefits of a replaceable head of state, but it'd be less based on the whims of the larger population. You could use a Senate that is elected but just to long terms (like 6-8 years), so that they could take a more longterm view as to the direction of the country.
Relatedly, a surprising number of national Senates are still not directly elected. Canada's is appointed by the PM to a lifetime (!) term, the Germans Irish Spanish and I think a couple others have their state legislatures elect them like the US-pre 17th Amendment. French Senators are picked by some kind of weird electoral college of the whole country's mayors or something. Whatever the House of Lords is. Etc. etc.
The lower house isn't the people. The electorate at large wouldn't have picked Truss but a majority of the House of Commons (agreeing to honour the result of the leadership contest) did.
I'm not sure that somebody who can effectively exersise their powers without the consent of a majority of the legislature ought really be called a (modern) PM in a parliamentary system.
A hostile parliament could refuse to pass the PM's (and their ministers') bills and take away their powers to enact secondary legislation, leaving them with only Royal Prerogative powers
As far as Truss goes, interestingly, the Tories changed their policy and that isn't what happened. Normally they would have the House of Commons pick a new leader, but in an (idiotic) attempt to emulate American primaries, they let the rank & file Tory membership pick their new leader. Apparently the House would've gone with Sunak.
>I'm not sure that somebody who can effectively exersise their powers without the consent of a majority of the legislature ought really be called a (modern) PM in a parliamentary system
This is a fair point, but if you have an equally strong second chamber (like say Australia does), you could argue that you face the same issue if only one chamber is involved in picking the PM. If you required say the two chambers to come together to pick a leader, then they hopefully would have the confidence of both of them- while making the pick a bit less accountable to the lower house (which I think is a good thing)
A majority of the Commons decided to honour the decision of the rank and file membership but any MP can decide to vote with or against Truss. It's just that they might find themselves doing so as independants unless they obey the whip.
In practice, the font of the PM's power is their ability to get legislation passed, therefore the question of who decides the PM is intimately connected with that of who can block legislation (espacially confidence and supply).
A historical example somewhat along the lines you sketch would be how Sweden gradually reformed its executive power from an absolute monarch to its present parliamentary system.
Sweden has a long history of a strong administrative state, which was the first institution to constrain the monarch's power back in the 17th to early 19th century, that is prior to democratic rule. So although the monarch was the absolute executive, the aristocrats used the administrative state to put limits on the king, and occasionally the queen. When many countries experienced revolutions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Sweden rather reformed the government gradually. Between 1809 and 1905 Swedish rule changed and a lot of variants of governance was tried. The one that comes the closest to what you outline I think is from the 1870s until 1905.
The office of the prime minister was created in 1876 when the king no longer was the head of government. The king's power had already been limited when in 1809 the legislative powers and powers of the purse had been moved to a parliament (non-representative but where all estates of the realm were present, and which only convened for a few weeks at a time at irregular intervals). But in 1876 the parliament becomes elected, however, the prime minister is appointed by the king and the prime minister is taken from the civil servants, so ideally he is a competent administrator, and most of the time he had no party affiliation. The parliament constrained the government, but the prime minister formally answered to the king.
In modern terminology this was a kind of technocratic government, granted monetary means by an elected parliament and constrained by laws passed by the parliament, and where the king was the dignified element that in more enchanted times granted legitimacy to the executive. Hard to imagine in the West a dignified person to carry enough legitimacy to be the person to which the executive answers without a popular revolt.
As you can see from the years this arrangement only lasted 30 years after which the government was formed from the parliament and answered to it. One can debate why this arrangement ended since there are both domestic and foreign events taking place at the turn of the century. Ultimately I think demands for liberalization and representation of the urbanizing industrial worker provided the push in this direction.
The French Third Republic comes close, in that de jure it was a Semi-Presidential Republic in which the President (Head of State), the Premier (Head of Government) and Council of Ministers (Cabinet) were jointly responsible in different ways to both houses of a bicameral legislature.
The President was elected to a fixed seven-year term by a "National Assembly" consisting of the members of bother houses of the legislature voting as a combined unitary body (i.e. 500-600 Delegates and ~300 Senators meeting as a single house for this purpose).
The Premier and his Ministers were appointed by the President and served at his pleasure, but required continuous approval by majorities of both houses of the legislature, so defeat in a major policy bill in either house would oblige the Premier and his Ministers to resign and the President to appoint a new Government with the consent of the legislature.
The lower house (Chamber of Deputies) was directly elected on the basis of universal adult male suffrage for a term of up to four years (the President could discover the legislature and call early elections), while the Senate was elected to fixed nine-year terms through an indirect election system that was apportioned to overrepresent rural areas relative to population.
In practice, the President very quickly turned into a powerless figurehead. The Premiership changed frequently (about once every nine months), but most ministers would carry over into the new government, although not necessarily in the same position.
While the Third Republic is commonly viewed as having been deeply dysfunctional, there's a decent argument to be made that that impression is due to a misleading emphasis on its collapse in 1940 following a very shaky period in the later Interwar years and the crisis of France's rapid and shocking defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Weighing in favor of the Third Republic as a relatively successful (by French standards) Constitutional regime is its longevity: at 65 years' duration (1875-1940), it's still the longest-lived French regime since the Ancient Regime ended in 1792. Although the current Fifth Republic, at 63 years and counting, seems likely to overtake it soon. Other post- and para-Revolutionary systems have lasted much shorter periods. In reverse chronological order:
Fifth Republic: 63 years and counting
Fourth Republic: 12 years
Provisional Government (post-WW2): 2 years
Vichy France: 4 years
Third Republic: 65 years
Provisional Government (post-Franco-Prussian War): 5 years
Second Empire: 18 years
Second Republic: 4 years
Orleans Monarchy: 18 years
Bourbon Restoration: 12 years
First Empire: 10 years
First Republic (Consulate): 5 years
First Republic (Directory): 4 years
First Republic (Committee of Public Safety/National Assembly): 3 years
The United States tried a system where the President was elected by the legislatures of the states, through the Electoral College. This is not really a parliamentary system, unless you think of the set of all legislatures as its own sort of parliament. (In a way, the German Bundesrat has some similarities to that idea.) But in any case, it was effectively abolished by all states choosing to make their electors subject to direct election.
Yep, the patchwork cruft of the US system is a graveyard of approaches that seemed like a good idea at the time but ultimately gave way to political forces. See also: the 17th Amendment and direct election of senators.
Was this during the Articles of Confederation time period, or maybe immediately afterwards? I know even post-Articles they made several constitutional changes in quick succession
There was no President under the Articles of Confederation. (There was a "President of the Continental Congress", but he just ran the meetings.)
After the Articles of Confederation era, the Constitution said, and still says, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . . " It's just that every state legislature has decided to have a popular election to choose the electors. I think this happened pretty early on; Wikipedia lists popular vote totals for every presidential election, even the very first one.
Didn't the President of the Continental Congress also act as a caretaker head of government (i.e. executing the laws and resolutions Congress had passed) when the Congress wasn't in session?
One of the many problems with the articles of confederation was that the states were tasked with executing federal laws (and thus they ignored them whenever the laws were inconvenient)
So Elon M comes with new robot (barely walking) , Boston Dynamics has a robot that does parkour. It will be interesting to watch what they can do this time. Before he always jumped on industries that were non existent or barely existed. I will take my hat off to Tesla team if they can beat BD in their game.
I'm wondering what the problems actually commercially worth solving in robotics are. I'm not convinced that walking is one of them -- as Boston Dynamics has demonstrated, a robot that can walk but can't really do anything else isn't something that people want to buy.
I feel like the worthwhile challenge is cheap, easily programmable robot hands which can displace manual labour in factories. Give me a plastic device that can replace an old woman from Henan province, and make it cheaper than an old woman from Henan province, and you can sell millions of copies. It doesn't need to be able to move around, it just needs to be able to assemble cheap plastic toys.
I agree, but the hands are not the problem. Factories use lots of advanced robotics in production now. What's missing is a sensory system attached to the ability to react in multiple ways to fix a minor problem. If the widget you're assembling gets knocked out of place, it's easy for a human to identify that and put it back in place from a variety of slightly different placements. A robot would have to be programmed to see each and every potential and react accordingly, but that's very hard because the engineer would have to know every possible placement as well as how to fix it. That's millions of dollars to potentially build and program a robot hand, or just hire that old woman to do it for pennies.
Those sensory systems already exist. Robot vision isn't always as good as a human's, but "identify the position and orientation of a widget on a conveyor belt" is a relatively easy challenge that's been solvable for a long time now - the lighting is always consistent, the shape you're looking for is always consistent, you can easily add visual aids to make the robot's life easier, etc. etc.
Baxter is pretty close to OP's vision, actually (a general-purpose robot arm with a vision system, designed to be easily "taught" new actions), and it's over a decade old at this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_(robot)
The article says sales weren't very good, but doesn't go into detail why. My guess is that basic "widget assembly" tasks were already mostly solved by more simple robot arms, while the old ladies you're trying to replace are doing tasks that can't easily be broken down into step by step actions.
Looking at a Boston Dynamics video of their parkour robots, it struck me that they were trying *too* much to copy *human* locomotion. I noticed the robots swinging their arms for balance - but is this necessary? The 'arms' end in stumps, so it's not like they use hands or grasping implements. Do they need the arms, then? Couldn't they have a different balance system?
It does seem to me that they are so enamoured with the idea of copying a human perfectly that they are going down a blind alley. We already have humans, come up with a different bipedal motive design. Why does it need to be a gymnast on a balance beam, wouldn't it be better to have something stumpy and nearer the ground that is less likely to topple over and can just stomp over/through obstacles?
EDIT: And here is the problem: they spent years and millions developing a robot that could carry packs for the Army, but it got canned because it was too noisy. The simplest problem was the hardest to solve. So I think they have very fancy research going on paid for by the military, but it's going nowhere as practical use:
The advantage of a robot that moves like a human is that it can operate in environments built for humans without needing special accommodations. You don't need to build a special robots-only factory or pack your boxes in a special way for the robot forklifts to handle, just have it walk into the building and start doing stuff.
However, I do note that Spot, a BD robot that's actually being sold commercially, is kind of close to what you're imagining - short, four-legged, with one manipulator arm. It's used for remote inspections - basically just something that can go up and down stairs, open doors, and give you a camera view of whatever you're trying to look at.
BD's goal is not to create the perfect parkour machine, but to create what people envision as a futuristic robot. This is about PR - there's a reason we've seen videos of incredibly proprietary advanced technology instead of that being kept ultra-top-secret until they're ready to sell it for $$$. Maybe it's a funding issue, but they need to impress people more than they need to create a functional robot.
BD's approach is a dead end, and I think they have to know this. The robots use far too much power, so they are either tethered to a power supply or run a few minutes on a battery.
Maybe they're counting on a revolution in battery power, or maybe their goals are about the technology of automated movement and isn't intended to result in an actual independent robot. I could definitely see them selling advanced sensory and reaction technology to someone else who would use it in a completely different way (perhaps in a factory making widgets).
I don't know anything about Elon's robot, but if it's intended for a different purpose (for instance hours of use instead of minutes), I could see it being far less effective at what it does while still serving more purpose.
I'm not sure that the two are comparable - purpose, economics, tech are all quite different. Comparing robots to robots is like comparing cars to cars. The car industry was hardly "barely existent". Also - one year of development versus decades...
It's a shame that the presentation led with the robot. All the really cool stuff came after.
I heard the difference is, that BD runs on hydraulics and drains batteries much faster and is not very precise. Elons robot uses motors for movement. It's a different approach, and hence different outcome.
They're more efficient but only by 50% or so. And the extra compliance hydraulics give you is incredibly useful sometimes. Some people are working on motors that combine the good points of each[1] but until then practical robots are going to be wheeled.
Fortunately, it looks like the days of Ukrainians needing to flee from their country are coming to an end. But they'll maybe be replaced by the Russians needing to flee from the Ukrainians' country.
And on a practical note, keep in mind that many of those fleeing Russia now were pretty OK with Russia trying to conquer Ukraine and are mostly objecting to having to do the dangerous parts themselves. It's a good thing to give those people an out, even if they are six months late in making the move, but if you're into helping refugees from this war, it's probably best to keep the Ukrainian refugees and the Russian refugees separate. Many of them will have friends and family who were killed by the others' friends and family, and they may not be in a forgiving mood.
One of each came to a local ACX meetup. While I didn't overhear their conversation, it appeared that the risk of bloodshed was minimal.
But this begs the question: should refugees be tested on the ferocity of their grudge, assuming that a grudge beyond a certain threshold becomes a liability to the host country.
Do you have any research to support the claim that many fleeing Russians are or were supportive of Putin? My prior is that the Russians who are sufficiently resourceful to flee to the west are resourceful enough to speak English and consume western media to the point of having a western view on the conflict. This is backed up with anecdotal evidence in the form of a Russian friend who has stayed in Russia until a few days ago, but has been vocally anti-war from the very beginning and claims his social circles have been the same. He only fled–by himself–a few days ago due to pressure from his wife after his friend got snatched by the draft. I suspect leaving your home, family, and potential pets behind is quite difficult for most people.
Probably wishful thinking. Many well-educated Russians may not be exactly pro-war but they often subscribe to the idea of Russian supremacy. They may be against Bucha massacres and still think that Russian state is better and Zelensky should just give up and accept neutrality and closer ties (whatever it means) with Russia to avoid more war casualties etc.
Russians living in Latvia had their own social democratic party (called Harmony). It recently experienced a split and most voters went with a newly formed extremist party (Stability) that clearly announced to be against the EU and closer ties with Russia. It is thought that the old party's condemnation of the war in Ukraine played a big role that voters deserted them. Sorry, but I just don't believe that most educated Russians even living in the EU are actually against Putin's ideology anymore.
An anecdote during my 2013 to 2017 PhD in Germany I met a Russian econometrics PhD student there who was very nationalist, supported (financially) the LPR and DPR separatists and called Ukraininans "peasants". Back then in 2014 she said that Ukraine belonged to Russia.
She did not in fact like Putin but only because in her eyes he was not nationalist enough (back then I guess).
Of the USSR she said that it was bad because it was made to support non-Russians against Russians.
She was clearly clever enough to do PhD level mathematics (maybe not the best student but good enough to get a PhD in maths, so I'd say definitely at least one standard deviation above the mean in IQ).
So, clearly education/above average IQ does not save you from propaganda.
I still think she was an outlier. But I also think that the decision of most central and Eastern European countries (Finland, Baltics, Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, maybe others) not to accept Russian tourists and screen refugees (people who are clearly persecuted in Russia may still come) might be quite wise.
Especially in the Baltics it is a matter of national security. During Soviet times, Russians purposely relocated hundreds of thousands of Russians there and created large minorities in those countries, likely with the aim to eventually replace the local population with ethnic Russians. They did and are doing the same in Crimea with the Tartars, tried the same in Finland before Finland became independent etc.
Russians had 6 months to leave Russia and I know a few who did that on week one. For example a Russian company our company did some consultancy for last year and early this year...they moved the entire company a few days after the invasion, including 40 or so developers. First to Turkey, Armenia and Georgia and since then they have been transitioning to the UK. They also cut ties to all Russian investors (one of Mikhail Fridman's companies held something like 20 percent of this company...but no more) and found investment in the UK....so I think it is a good heuristic to assign a prior to those who come now as being generally supportive of Russian imperialism and not permitting them entry unless evidence shows otherwise.
To play devil's advocate for a moment: would forcing the Russians to stay in Russia maintain an anti-war pressure on the Russian government? It's true that most of the 'resistance' we're seeing today is people trying to personally avoid the draft; neither peaceful nor violent resistance are that common despite the lurid stories they've generated. Still, it's not beyond imagining that denying those men a convenient out could hasten the sort of blowback that Afghanistan had on the Soviet Union.
Russia has no civil society able to exert political pressure as democracies have. None whatsoever. Hoping for a bottom-up, peaceful revolution is a total Western fantasy.
I think it's good for the West to be seen as the good guys in this conflict (and I think it's good to *be* the good guys). Presumably the Russians will close the border anyway when they realize that losing 10x more manpower through emigration than through fighting is unsustainable.
The extent to which Russians accept whatever Putin makes them do is unknown but surely looks like "being slaughtered in another country" is not something that creates a lot of anti-war pressure. And Afghanistan was a 10-year affair on top of the decades of the official ideology everyone stopped buying into long before that. Whether majority of Russians these days are really buying into "holy war against Western satanism" discourse is hard to gauge, but they buy into Russian jingoism and it's a way more powerful drug than the promises of "communism" always around the corner.
Been feeling down lately and this obscure band/song helped me through the worst of it, so here it is, in case someone else can enjoy it, as well. https://youtu.be/muemSk8WqNs
Well... not sure this is appropriate here, but the song made me think of the dreamlike melancholy of Silent Hill 2, so I figured I'd link a cutscene video. Content Warning, maybe? Probably.
Thanks! Cheery entertainment doesn't seem to work for me personally in that case, but it sure does for many. Last time I was down, it was Muse -- Dead Inside that helped. Rammstein is a good way to deafen your sad thoughts.
In May, I asked people on an open thread to take a short, unscientific survey. I then turned it into my bachelor thesis in philosophy on emotion, have since graduated with very good grades, and now you can read it here: http://killermilchschnitte.de/uni/BA.pdf. All 67 ACX responses as well as responses from other samples are in the appendix.
The survey questions were "How are you feeling?", "Are you experiencing an emotion right now?" and "How do you know?", I reference the answers when discussing theories of emotion. I'm exploring how emotion can be differentiated from other things and distinctions between different types of emotion.
I also wrote down some less academic observations of the responses, I collected those on substack.
Very cool! Congratulations on your degree! Obviously I haven’t had the chance to read your entire thesis yet, though I skimmed and found it very interesting. I remembered participating and found myself in the text: I’m “Perez,” quoted at 260. Happy to have contributed in some small way to your achievement.
I haven’t read the thesis yet, but checked the references and saw you cite LFB’s work on how emotions are made. What are your thoughts on her book & the theory? I’m finding it very satisfying but wondering how it might fail to satisfy someone who is heavily involved in your discipline.
It's on my reading list, that is to say, I have only read a few sections yet, as I discovered her relatively late into the writing process, but she is my favourite discovery. Since starting with philosophy, I've been asked a couple of times who my favourite philosopher is - some people get really, really into someone in particular - but it hasn't happened for me. Feldman Barrett, however, made me love every sentence of her I've read.
I don't feel heavily involved in the discipline at all - I barely scratched the surface, and in hindsight it was certainly a choice to pick a topic I hadn't learned anything at all about yet, so I had to start from scratch. I cannot meaningfully dissect or prop up any theory with confidence. But to the degree I can be, I'm a fan.
All of my substack eamails ended up in my trash folder. I've solved it by whitelisting them (no word back from support at panix). Has this happened to anyone else?
Why did this substack switch back to showing new first as the default comment display setting? I thought we had lobbied pretty hard to get that incredibly toxic default changed. Is there any way to fix this on a user by user basis?
also I am still getting horrible bugs that make comments practically unusable. Whenever somebody replies to one of my comments, it is inpossible to discover the context, I only get the choice of seeing their reply or the huge list. Substack generates permalinks but doesn't give us access to them. Comments aren't indexed by google. All of this makes it literally impossible to have a conversation that goes on for more than one or two replies, as soon as something is not ctrl+f-able from the main list i might as well just give up.
On top of that, trying to find specific things from the past is impossible because the 'activity' page that substack uses is one of those nightmare infinite-load-scrolling pages that doesn't save your position, so every time you click 'back' it resets to the top, then I have to spend about 3 minutes scroll-loading to get back to where I was. It's impossible to open a comment in a new tab, because right clicking in the 'activities' section doesn't actually treat the comment like a link for some reason.
Whatever substack is paying you scott, I would like the opportunity to outbid them for you to move back to a fucking WordPress please
I keep the open thread open in a browser all week. That lets you do a search for "new repl", similar to the old "~new" search. It works well enough. The only wrinkle is that you can't follow continue thread links, or when you come back, everything will be collapsed.
The e-mail I get with a comment always has a link directly to that comment, and another link directly to the one that it is replying to. Unfortunately, each of these links only works about 80% of the time.
To tack on an unrelated problem: This susbtack is the only one that does not show up in my Substack Inbox (desktop web UI). I got in contact with a support person through the substack subreddit, but they stopped replying without ever solving the issue.
I'm pretty sure that comment ordering defaults to new-first for open threads, and chronological for others. Which I believe is specifically how Scott wanted it and seems reasonable to me.
I do agree that it would be nice to have more functional context links.
I have a suspicion that it remains the top post on that substack not because of any particular transcendence, but because it contains the author's announcement of another high-profile project.
But I enjoy beans, and the author's attitude towards beans. So we shall see.
That seems very faint praise about the stew! I was intrigued because I love dill, but putting it with cabbage doesn't work for my mental taste buds. Has anyone else tried it, is it really "yeah it's okay but I wouldn't go out of my way to make it" recipe?
Cabbage and dill together in soup is a classic Eastern European combination (and something I've been eating my entire life). I don't know why it doesn't work for you, but it works for millions of people.
I think for Irish tastes, pickling cabbage isn't a thing, as is putting in strong herbs when cooking it. Traditionally we do it very basically: boil salted/smoked meat (bacon, corned beef) and then cook chopped up cabbage in the meat water, serve up with boiled potatoes and parsley sauce. Can use kale instead of cabbage, and if doing mashed potatoes, mix in the kale or cabbage to make colcannon. Everybody has their own family version:
The cabbage in this stew is white cabbage (I am presuming) which I tend to find somewhat bland, I prefer stronger-flavoured green cabbage (or cavolo nero which is gorgeous and I only found a year or so back in a local supermarket, it's hard to get it down here).
I do like pickles and vinegar and dill, I am indifferent about beans (I'd be more accustomed to using potatoes or pearl barley as the thickening agent), and the peasant part of my brain is going "where's the meat?" though I imagine it's the beans that act as the protein as well as thickening.
Looking at the recipe without the tiresome cookery blog talk, it's mostly the fried onions that add taste to this. Beans and cabbage are bland enough that it's the vinegar and dill doing the work of flavour, and then the onions (as well as whatever stock you use). As I said, I don't have the palate raised on things like sauerkraut or pickled vegetables (apart from pickled onions and mixed pickles) so the mental flavour balance in my head is see-sawing between "dill and vinegar, yes" and "cabbage???"
I think this stew succeeds or fails on how it is cooked, if you get the balance right - not too much salt - you need to be careful with the salt, the recipe calls for adding salt at every addition of ingredients and that could end up way too salty, not too much (or too little) vinegar depending on taste, what stock you use, and how well-cooked the cabbage is. Like all stews, it probably benefits from being allowed stand for the flavours to settle and might be better the day after. I might try making it, I don't know. I think this counts as "hearty comfort food" not "best stew you ever tasted", but this is the season for "comfort food like your mother used to make".
Simplified recipe (without cookery blog talk):
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion
Salt and black pepper
2 15-ounce cans white beans such as navy, butter, cannellini, drained and rinsed
4 cups vegetable or chicken stock
¼ of a head of cabbage, core removed, coarsely chopped (roughly 8–10 ounces)
1 tablespoon white distilled vinegar
1 cup dill, coarsely chopped
1. Heat butter and olive oil in a medium pot over medium–high heat. Add onion and season with salt and pepper. Cook until browned, 5-8 minutes.
2. Set aside ¼ of fried onions for topping.
3. Add the beans to the pot and season with salt and pepper. Using a wooden spoon or spatula, smash some of the beans into the pot, breaking them (this is what will thicken your stew).
4. Add the broth (or water + bouillon) and bring to a simmer. Simmer 15–20 minutes or so, depending on desired texture (thicker or more liquid). Add the cabbage and vinegar, stirring to wilt. Simmer until the cabbage is tender, 10–15 minutes. Season with salt, pepper, and more vinegar to taste.
5. Remove from heat and stir in half the dill. Divide among bowls and top with more dill and reserved onions. Top off with small amount of softened butter and black pepper.
FWIW, I think I didn't do a good job making the stew, but I'd be a little surprised if its substantially better when well-prepared. My guess is that a bunch of people just really like dill (and vinegar and beans). [I was expecting maybe ~16 people to come, and so I made a 4x recipe, which, combined with the other food, meant I wasn't paying close enough attention, and oversalted half of it.]
I am just out on cabbage as a whole in anything. One of those things I think people would never start eating if it wasn’t already something people were habituated to back in an era when they had no choice.
It's not my favourite vegetable, but I'll take (green) cabbage over lettuce of any variety. I suppose that's penny-pinching mindset though: it's not so much that the taste or texture are incredible (they're fine), more that a single good-sized head lasts me for days. Sometimes a whole week if it's big enough. That's very efficient use of my leafy-vegetable dollars, and chopping hassle is minimal. Whereas a bag of spinach or whatever...paying so much for so little, sigh.
Of course, it's all just poor Western substitutes for the Asian vegetables I grew up with...but I refuse to pay American-grocer prices for things I know I can get 2x (usually even more than that) cheaper at a proper Chinese grocery. I have a bitter little laugh inside every time I sell a precious little bag containing maybe 4 "baby" bok choy to some poor rube customer. Almost a dollar each...
Yeah and cabbage is the litteral worst par tof brassicas. Look at what people are tlaking about here. Surkraut? Pickle cabbage? Those are punishments not foods.
You’re crazy man. Cabbage is really great. I never ate cabbage as a kid, just wasn’t on the menu, but when I learned to cook as a young adult I fell in love.
Nah, most things with cabbage are better if replace it. No reason to be tradtional with food in 2022. A little bit of cabbge can be ok, but if cabbge is a main element in your dish it probably sucks.
In Roald Dahl's marvellous boyhood autobiography "Boy", young Roald's Maths Master, Corkers, objects to the boys' flatulence but blames the school for feeding them cabbage.
Trevor Klee recently wrote a critique of the FTX Future Fund, and in particular the Clearer Thinking regranters, for giving out too much money too quickly and creating bad effects for the EA community:
I think Trevor has quite an interesting point: "the insane amounts of money they’re spending is changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money, to being one where you expect to get money." And this might attract grifters and rent-seekers.
There was lots of good discussion on Reddit and I'm interested in hearing more views. My own view is that it might be OK for most of the grants to be wasted if a few are hugely successful, but from what I've seen of the Clearer Thinking finalist list, it seems like there could be better ways to allocate money. In other words, Trevor pointed out:
"When you start giving out millions of dollars and ask for it to be used ASAP, there will be very few “shovel-ready” projects that can use the money. Concrete ideas are difficult to implement, take time to plan, and need and use money in stages. You know what doesn’t take time to plan and can use a lot of money quickly? Hiring a bunch of people to write think pieces."
The idea that prescience and free will were incompatible always struck me as nonsense.
Free will is a property of the actor's perception, not that of an observer.
Postulating a universe in which free will was real, and a person had their entire life observed and recorded, a person in the future watching that recording would be able to "predict" what the person in the past would do at any point. That's not a paradox, and it's not a disproof of free will, it's pointing out that it's a language game masquerading as profundity. See also: The Chicken and The Egg.
Can we get some discussion going about Joseph Henrich's book _The WEIRDest People in the World_?
Quick summary: Westerners are very psychologically unusual compared to other societies throughout the world, and this is responsible for the incredible success that western countries have experienced. The usual psychological outlook of westerners was caused by the Catholic Church's ban on cousin marriage during the middle ages, which had the side effect of breaking European clan hierarchies, and forcing westerners to adopt more a more individualistic mindset.
I find the theory fascinating, but I'm not completely convinced. I'm waiting for more evidence. (Maybe someone in this thread can provide it.) But this is one of those things that is "huge if true", so I keep thinking about it.
One counterargument that I've never seen brought up is that Hinduism has also forbidden cousin marriage, and for longer than Catholicism.
Starting from the Gautama Dharmasutra (600 BCE-200 BCE) and reaffirmed in the Yajnavalkya Dharmashastra and all subsequent legal authorities, marriages between descendants of a 7th-degree ancestor on the paternal side and a 5th-degree ancestor on the maternal side are forbidden.
(The Manusmriti only forbids marriage between those sharing a 3rd-degree maternal ascendant, but traditional commentaries on it say that the 5th-generation rule overrides it.)
The Yajnavalkya Dharmashastra says that this rule applies to all four varnas—unlike the much-better-known ban on marrying anyone of one’s father’s gotra, which only applies to the twice-born castes.
This rule appears to have been--and still be--observed in practice among North Indian Hindus, although South Indian Hindus allow and indeed encourage marriage to cross-cousins. There was a fascinating Quora post asking whether Hinduism forbids cousin marriage with North and South Indians duking it out on this issue.
This is just a bad summary of the book. Henrich finds a correlation between WEIRD traits in populations, prevalence of cousin marriage and years of exposure to the Church, and theorizes a causation, but if someone demonstrated that this is just a coincidence and the causal mechanism was entirely different, it wouldn't much affect his overall argument or the about 95% of the book that's about other things.
And I have yet to see a criticism of the book that points out a different causal mechanism or disputes that the correlation exists; the complaints they do have strike me as more or less irrelevant.
"How people think is shaped, in large part, by culture, and people in western societies are markedly unusual compared to the humanity at large - highly individualistic, analytic and systematic. This seems to be because sometime during the middle ages, its former larger tribal/clan/family structures based on kinship, interpersonal relations and roles and group loyalty have been gradually replaced by (increasingly) voluntary associations of individuals/nuclear family households, based (necessarily) on universalist principles and the rule of law. Those have subsequently proven highly adaptive. (And are now spreading throughout the world, but culture changes slowly and the spread is uneven, mostly concentrated in globally-connected urban centres, so psychological differences between societies remain high - unfortunately it's the urbanites who are most likely to be tested by psychologists, which may create a false impression that western personality traits are a human universal rather than culturally acquired.) They (paradoxically?) increase cooperation and social trust, in particular within groups in the presence of inter-group competition, but also in general, by raising the importance of individual credibility, replacing socially-enforced conformity with intentional morality, and discouraging zero-sum games and risky all-or-nothing behavior. They also facilitate specialization (as the people need to distinguish themselves from the crowd), innovation (as individuals are quicker to adapt to new technology than groups), and spread of knowledge (through long-distance networking in voluntary societies of self-selected like-minded people).
That change, in turn, seems to have been facilitated by the moral package spread by the Catholic Church (likely in self-interest, as it depended on donations from wealthy individuals) - which includes, e.g., individual ownership, monogamy, and a ban on cousin marriage."
This (slightly) downplays the space the discussion of cousin marriage is given in the book, but I think correctly represents its (marriage's) importance to its (book's) overall thesis. Certainly more correctly than (disappointingly common) takes that focus on cousin marriage as a single explanatory factor and ignore the important parts discussing the much more direct causes (and effects) of the western societies' uniqueness.
(Also, sorry if my earlier post sounded harsh, I was not necessarily reacting to your words in particular, but to the whole thread that resulted, and the familiar missings of the point it contains.)
That sounds like one hell of a just-so story but a fundamentally wrong way to do history.
The question of why Europe at first lagged but eventually overtook civilisations further east is a good question, but the answer is always going to be ridiculously complicated, you're not going to get something that fits on a t-shirt. There's vast numbers of advantages the West had over the East, just as there's vast numbers of advantages the East had over the West, and what happened in history is that the advantages of the West just happened to outweigh the advantages of the East.
Banning cousin marriage _might_ be a factor that helped out the West, but I really doubt it's a significant enough factor that without it we'd all be speaking Chinese or Persian. I don't think any one factor is nearly that strong with the possible exception of climate, or the economics of wheat vs rice.
Book recommendation: Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: the West vs the Rest. Tries to identify some of the important factors which led to the victory of the West over the Rest. Certainly doesn't capture everything, but is more extensive than "partial ban on cousin marriage".
I think it provides a very convincing argument that you are wrong. Simpler explanations are always going to be more likely than complicated explanations. If you disagree with this, could you explain why?
I have that Niall Ferguson book in my reading queue! I'll have to move it up in queue now.
However I don't think it applies in this case, that argument applies when we're looking at changes in a single system, not when we're comparing two very different systems. Comparing the pre-1994 US to post-1994 US, single-factor explanations make more sense than multi-factor explanations because, as is argued, "If ten different factors caused the decline in crime, that would require that ten different things suddenly changed direction, all at the same time in 1994. That’s a pretty big coincidence". I accept this argument.
But if we're comparing two very different things, then this argument doesn't apply. Comparing (say) England 1-2000AD to Persia 1-2000AD, there's clearly very many important differences between the countries, so the "coincidence" argument doesn't apply.
Alan Macfarlane, less well-known, wrote a book titled The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition. Here is his journal article with key findings: https://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Origins_HI.pdf
I keep looking for someone to offer an intelligent summary of all of these theses. Anyone, please let me know if you know of such.
"While the church did indeed attempt to influence the marriage rules in Europe, its obsession with regulating the institution was not, contrary to what Henrich claims, a Christian invention. The Romans did the same, attempting to control various minutiae of how people married, as such examples like the lex Papia Poppaea, a 9 A.D. law, show. In fact, Christianity owes many of its precepts on marriage to Roman law, in which polygynous marriages were already prohibited. While the centerpiece of Henrich’s thesis, first-cousin marriages, were permitted, they were actually rarely practiced. If Henrich’s team had consulted a historian, they could also have learned that just because a church figure said something in the Early Middle Ages didn’t mean people obeyed—or even that it represented the opinion of the whole church. The historian Peter Brown has coined the term 'micro-Christendoms' to describe the stunning diversity of views and interpretations that permeated the first millennium of Christianity. Most of the promulgations cited by Henrich as examples of a unifying program are local synods, letters directed to local rulers or ecclesiastics, and only a handful had even a pretense of being widespread. Paradoxically, at the point when the church started to appear more universal, the strictest prescriptions against cousin marriage were already gone. What unites Henrich and many others is confusing prescriptive sources for reality. What is forbidden is rarely banished, and what is permitted is not always practiced. Medieval sources are particularly tricky in that respect."
"Henrich's explanation for this European divergence is that starting around 500, Western Christianity adopted rules about marriage that resulted in the 'dissolution of intensive kin-based institutions', thus singularly transforming European society by 1250 or so. Henrich designates this intervention as Western Christianity's 'marriage and family program', or MFP; its core element, he tells us, was the banning of 'cousin marriages' extending as far as the sixth degree. In terms of the MFP's social consequences in these centuries, Henrich foregrounds Europeans travelling beyond their own villages to find a spouse who was not a cousin, thus making Europeans more worldly. Yet rather than supporting this claim about travel with social historical data, Henrich provides the calculation that 'someone looking for a spouse in the 11th century would have had' to exclude some '2,730 cousins'--a figure based on including all cousins up to the sixth degree, as if people followed Church law to the letter, even though such genealogical knowledge must have been extremely rare. By Henrich's own model, moreover, changing the limit to cousins of the second degree would reduce the number of persons to be avoided to a seemingly manageable 10, even without much travel. Henrich also seems to shield the claim about increased travel from evidentiary testing by allowing that the Church was 'likely' indulgent of elites and indifferent to popular strata, meaning that this impact of the MFP would have emerged 'from the middle outward'--thus limiting the impact to a very small stratum for some unspecified span time. And this narrower claim also exceeds any evidence Henrich provides. What in any case is more important for Henrich are psychological changes he claims were induced by the MFP's un-kin-ing of Europe. The MFP made Europeans, he says, more individualistic because they were unfettered from kinship groups; more analytical because they saw themselves apart from larger wholes; more interested in producing outcomes beneficial to others because they had to form social ties for themselves; and more drawn to universal laws because they were less anchored to a kin group. Henrich again provides scant historical evidence for these claims."
Have you tried finding five people in the West and telling them that Protestants or Pagans are clannish and hierarchical but Catholics are free-thinking and individualistic? How long did they laugh when you did so? The stereotypes run the other way, though I've seen no convincing evidence that the stereotypes are true either.
The hardest part to stomach about the WEIRD argument is that it's hard to square with the West's history of the West. Despite having funded Copernicus's research that lead to De Revolutionibus, the Church would eventually dig in hard against the Scientific Revolution. They even made an example of Galileo, and while he was a dick the whole episode was really about establishing the Church's originalist credentials in the face of Protestant critiques that were landing with the general public. The Church became one of the arch-enemies in the eyes of the Enlightenment; the French Revolution threw out the monarchy AND the Church. The story we tell ourselves is that the Enlightenment is the foundation of who we are, the idea that one of its chief opponents is somehow its architect is ... suspicious at best, and requires some very strong evidence.
It also doesn't account for us Jews. We did not pay much heed to the dictates of the Catholic Church. We are to this day proudly clannish in some ways, but fiercely individualist in others, and have won ourselves an outsized role in science and culture despite prejudice.
>Have you tried finding five people in the West and telling them that Protestants or Pagans are clannish and hierarchical but Catholics are free-thinking and individualistic? How long did they laugh when you did so?
When you put it like that it sounds silly, but if you were to instead find people and them that people in countries that were at one point Catholic are free-thinking and individualistic, and that people in countries that were never under the control of the Catholic Church are clannish and hierarchical, the result is more ambiguous.
Sure, the time period of the WEIRD argument is mostly before the Reformation, but it would be strange enough to demand an explanation if the Church somehow lost the thread. If all that was keeping people WEIRD via abstaining from cousin marriage was the Church, wouldn't it be strange if after the Reformation the WEIRDest people weren't the most Catholic? Are France, Italy, and Spain significantly WEIRDer than the US, Britain, and Germany?
Now, sure, it's hypothetically possible that the same individualism that the Church allegedly nurtured pushes people away from Catholicism and towards Protestantism, and therefore the Church doesn't get credit for work it did, but that's a pretty big claim that would require pretty big evidence.
After all, these effects could be pretty fast from a historical perspective. In America, some communities in Appalachia were isolated by the evolution of railroads and for a century or some became notably inbred. Morgan County, Kentucky, for example, had around 7.6% consanguineous marriages in 1830, 18% in 1850, a peak at 21.2% in 1870, declined from 1890 to 1930, and leveled off sometime between 1930 and 1950 at around 8-9%, and then dropped to 3.6% in 1970.
So if the Church had been enforcing these policies for a millennia, and consanguinity matters and can change significantly in under a century, why did Europe only start to catch up and pass the rest of the world with the Age of Exploration in the mid-1400s? And why do the areas of the strongest continued Church presence not continue to dominate the WEIRDness charts?
>that's a pretty big claim that would require pretty big evidence.
It doesn't seem that big of a deal to me. History seems full of instances of an organization naively promoting things that would later lead to the downfall of said organization.
>So if the Church had been enforcing these policies for a millennia, and consanguinity matters and can change significantly in under a century, why did Europe only start to catch up and pass the rest of the world with the Age of Exploration in the mid-1400s? And why do the areas of the strongest continued Church presence not continue to dominate the WEIRDness charts?
There's a difference between "Some people in Kentucky married their cousins." and "You live in a clan based society where all marriages are arranged marriages with someone in your extended family, and there is no one outside of this system."
Culture takes a very long time to change. How long has the developing world been taking to develop? This is not a change that happens in a generation. And this is not even taking into account that the church wasn't always able to successfully enforce its marriage rules. The theory, if true, involves a long, slow grind over centuries.
Historically, the big European powerhouses were...kinda backwaters. Britain and Germany were the literal edges of the world during Roman Times and they weren't big powerhouses throughout the dark and medieval ages. No one from China or the Middle East or India, the big historical power/science centers, cared what Alfred the Great or his cohorts thought and they certainly weren't afraid of them militarily. For context, William the Conqueror invaded England with 7-10k dudes and the height of military tech was calvary and chainmail, while in the Jin-Song wars 70 years later in China, both sides would regularly field armies of 100k+ using proto-firearms.
It's hard to say when this flip happened but the flip was probably sometime around the Siege of Vienna in 1529. It's not like European forces were obviously better than Islamic or Chinese counterparts but they were comparable. I couldn't tell you exactly when the flip happened but...I don't think the English were hugely ahead of, say, the Qing Dynasty during the English Civil War, but sometime in the 1700s the balance of power flipped and it flipped hard. British forces were wrecking the Indians and the Chinese hard during the early 19th century.
And that's where this feels wrong. If there's a cultural effect here, and there probably is, it feels really weird to point to Catholic teachings since those teachings didn't really have positive effects in the 800s or the 1200s. Instead, the cultural trends we tend to see in Europe from, say, 1500-1800 are Protestantism, secularism, and science. To be fair, a lot was happening then and there's a ton of debate about which of those mattered, but Catholic marriage practices that had been in place for at least a millennium feel off.
TLDR; Europe didn't matter historically until the 17th-18th century and the cultural changes we saw at that point aren't Catholic.
"I don't think the English were hugely ahead of, say, the Qing Dynasty during the English Civil War, but sometime in the 1700s the balance of power flipped and it flipped hard. British forces were wrecking the Indians and the Chinese hard during the early 19th century."
Well, look at the Jesuits in China. They got great influence with particular ministers because they had access to The Latest Shiny Tech And Theories when it came to astronomy. They were producing better calendars and predicting eclipses more accurately.
And for a combination of reasons, the opposition very much did not like the influence these foreigners were gaining in the court, and trying to convert the Chinese to their strange religion. So they threw the baby out with the bathwater - they didn't kick out the Jesuits and Christianity but keep the science, they threw out this foreign nonsense as well and compelled adherence to traditional Chinese methods - which had fallen behind badly by this stage, and were getting more and more incorrect.
The Pope was able to correct the calendar in Europe and get most of the Catholic nations to adopt it - the Protestant ones were slower because "the pope is not the boss of us" and the Orthodox church territories were also "the pope very much is not the boss of us" so they stuck to the Julian calendar. But the reason you, me and everybody else uses the Gregorian calendar is because of Pope Gregory XIII, and it was motivated by religious reasons - to calculate and fix the date of Easter, which was being celebrated at different times in different places.
From what I've read, the timing doesn't work out; the breakdown of clans and end of cousin marriage happened during or after the Industrial Revolution. In the U.S., the advent of rail initially increased cousin marriage because men who had moved far away for work were able to get wives sent from back home instead of settling for a local wife. (Personal anecdote: my grandfather's family was known for their distinctive ears, and he inherited this trait from both parents.)
I wrote a short post riffing off the WEIRD theory. What's most interesting to me is not cause but what we have gained and what we may have lost by the end of kinship in the WEST.
Surely there were a lot of areas where there were a bunch of competing states. Why didn't the enlightenment happen there?
I wonder if we could prove or disprove the clergy thing? Were there areas that were Catholic, but that still had no "clergy"?
If you come up with an alternative theory about how the enlightenment was caused by something the Catholic Church did, I think there is a lot of overlap with Henrich's theory, and you could use all the evidence that he gathered about how the enlightenment happened in Catholic areas.
Any home energy geeks want to give me tips on hunting a stubborn energy vampire?
I have a Tesla system with solar panels, a Powerwall, and a "Home Energy Gateway" box that ties the whole thing together. In the Tesla app I get a "real time" view of how much energy the house is using, how much the panels are producing, whether energy is going to/from battery or grid, etc. And there's a stats tab that gives readings of home energy use in an every-5-minutes timeseries, rounded to the nearest 0.1 kW, as well as daily, weekly, etc total usage in kWh.
I noticed from looking at these stats that even when I turn off "almost everything" to go on vacation, the house still uses 7-8 kWh per day, and the 5-minutely load never drops below 0.2 kW even in the dead of night. Now some of this is the largish built-in fridge and chest freezer, but they'd have to be reeeeally inefficient to account for that much usage, and more to the point, those are intermittent and not constant loads. I wanted to know what else was going on; I don't mind using a lot of energy on actual useful things, but I hate wasting it, and I like understanding my house better as a system even though it'll likely not save enough to be "worth my time".
So, one recent weekend, I did some experimentation with "really turning off everything." I got smart plugs for the appliances I know use standby power, and turned those off, after verifying that the power usage measured through the plugs wasn't anywhere near sufficient to account for the observed load. I turned off all lightswitches and thermostats, of course. And to catch the remaining stuff I went to the breaker panel and turned off almost all the breakers (exceptions discussed below). And still the real-time and 5-minutely load did not fall below 0.2 kW.
I'm now stumped. Here are my remaining hypotheses:
1. It's one of the exceptions, such as:
(a) the Internet router, which I can't turn off because then the data reporting would stop-- but the smart plug on that power strip shows a ~20W steady state draw, not nearly enough.
(b) An old security system control box, the kind that calls out to a company, which I inherited from the previous owner and haven't used in years, having installed modern DIY security instead. I can't tell which circuit that's on-- but it's hard to believe it would use a lot of standby power.
(c) Something else I'm just forgetting. I turned off the hot tub, heat pump, and EV charger all at the breakers, so it's not any of those, for example, but maybe I'm overlooking a common cause.
2. It's the Tesla system itself using all that constant standby power. I asked Tesla support about this and they couldn't give me a quantitative estimate for their system's standby usage-- not "that's confidential" but "we don't know"-- which surprised me.
3. It's measurement error.
Anyone have any ideas on which of these is most likely, whether there are other possibilities, and how to do better tests to find out? I could get a Sense or similar home energy monitor, but it's not clear what that would give me that I can't find out by turning breakers on and off and looking at the Tesla app stats.
Several things could be contributing to this - for one, the Powerwall storage is DC, and to power your house it has to pass through an inverter to become AC, which represents an efficiency loss, sometimes quite a substantial one. I have a non-Tesla solar charging/battery backup system, and the wattage it reports being used tends to be 30 - 50% higher than that reported by a killawatt type power meter. So 20W being used for the router might represent 30W coming out of the battery. Add up 20W for the router, another 20W for the home security system, another, say, 50W for stuff you're forgetting, or that uses standby power even when "turned off" (eg smart LED bulbs, which consume power even when "off", etc), multiply by the inverter losses, add in the usage of the powerwall itself, and 200W doesn't seem out of the question.
Has it never occurred to you that the Tesla "Home Dashboard Box" might be the culprit? Either using that much energy itself, or misreporting loads in some subtle (and likely non-malicious) way.
Auto mechanics know that when chasing down "parasitic drains" aka battery-killing gremlins, trust and assume NOTHING. Disconnect everything while watching your own meter all the while. This becomes nearly impossible when Auto Manufacturers have built-in monitoring and status systems that are either hidden, or carry Dire Warnings to Never Disconnect. What is Tesla's main consumer product?
My bet is system overhead from the Tesla system. Of course, if the solar panels are producing, easy to cover the 7-8kWh every day....
These hidden systems are why I drive a 50-year-old truck. No electronics, no invisible smog sensors, no completely changing my vehicle over wi-fi.
I've seen too many default backdoors and secret surveillance systems working in the software/networking space, to EVER trust a "networked" consumer product to do ANYTHING vital, or life-sustaining.
I went through something like this when I got my house. The most exciting part of the adventure was finding a live wire just sitting in my attic not connected to anything, laying in some batting. Anyway...
What about a pipe heater? Switched on for winter once but then forgotten about?
Alternatively, a dehumidifier in your crawl space? Or a burned out sump pump that's running continuously?
Ancient security systems can have a lot of weird behavior. The one at my mother's house started randomly chirping once every 1-3 hours before we realized where it was coming from. Seems like its backup battery died and it was telling us about it. Of course my mom didn't know anything about this so she just lived with it for about 4 years before we found a switch hidden in some closet that ran up to it in the attic to turn it off with.
Regarding measurement: can you read your power meter directly? I have a digital one so it's pretty easy to see the 0.1 kwhs tick by.
You may want to take one of those electrician's wands, turn off every breaker, and see if you can find anything still live. Maybe experiment with turning on a breaker at a time and confirming it only lights up the things you expect, as well.
Do you have any outdoor lighting? An outdoor light that got left on is easy to overlook during the day, and unless you change the fixtures or bulbs in the last few years, they're likely to be incandescent or halogen. A pair of 100W halogen floodlights would work out to exactly the 0.2 kW minimum usage you're seeing.
Similarly, a light fixture that got left on in a rarely-observed utility space (attic, garage, basement, etc) could also be using a substantial amount of energy.
For measurement error and baseline usage, you can try turning off the system at your breaker box (there should be a breaker where it feeds into your main power, if it works like my Sunrun system) and manually reading your electric meter at timed intervals.
You may already know a lot of this, but here is some information for anybody else who sees this comment and is interested in learning about energy efficiency.
Electricity has two major parameters. The first is current (I, measured in Amps) which is a flow: charge per unit of time. The second is voltage (V, measured in Volts), which is energy per charge. Multiply the two together and you get power (P, measured in Watts), which is a flow of energy per unit of time. In order to get to energy, you need to multiply power by time, and the standard unit of energy for utility power is the watt-hour.
Utility power comes in AC, which means both current and voltage are sine waves that vary with time, so in order to get power, you have to multiply (instantaneous) current and voltage and also integrate with time over a full cycle, which in the US is 1/60 of a second. To make things easy for users, most power meters will report a number for current and voltage that has been scaled by just the right factor so that the numbers that they report for current and voltage can be multiplied to obtain the power, no integration required. But for the following discussion, it is important to think in terms of the instantaneous current and voltage.
A resistor has the property that the current it draws will always be proportional to the voltage applied across it, so a resistor given electricity will always draw power.
Inductors and capacitors have the property that the current they draw is proportional in magnitude to but ¼ cycle out of phase with the voltage applied across them, if that voltage is an AC sine wave. So when an inductor or capacitor is exposed to AC, half of the time, the instantaneous voltage and current it is experiencing are in the same direction, meaning it will draw power from the source, and half of the time, the instantaneous voltage and current it is experiencing will be in opposite directions, meaning it is actually sending power back to the source. So inductors and capacitors do not consume power, but they do temporarily draw, store, and supply power. Even though the net power is zero, they still have power flowing through them.
At least, that is true for ideal, perfect inductors and capacitors. Any real device (not made from a superconductor) will have some internal resistance, so any inductor or capacitor connected to an AC system will waste a small amount of power
Many household appliances have transformers, which convert the relatively high voltage that outlets provide to a smaller, safer voltage that is easier to handle inside the appliance. A transformer is two inductors connected together. When the appliance is not on, the second inductor isn’t doing anything, so there is just the primary inductor connected to the outlet, not drawing very much power except for the small amount it dissipates due to it’s internal resistance. When the appliance is turned on, the second inductor starts interacting with the first inductor in a way that beings the voltage and current of the primary inductor more into alignment, meaning first inductor starts drawing power from the outlet, which is fed into the appliance.
The important thing to realize is that, even though the appliance is off, if its transformer is still connected to power, even though it is drawing only a very small amount of power, it is still drawing large current. The inductor is connected to the power, meaning it has an AC voltage applied to is, and an inductor with an AC voltage will draw AC current. The current and voltage are out of phase, so little power is consumed, but there is still current flowing through the wires between the breaker box and the transformer – nearly as much current flows through the wires as when the appliance is on at full power. The wires between the breaker box and the appliance are probably not superconductors, so they will have a small but noticeable resistance, and the current flowing through them will dissipate power. Remember, current and voltage across a resistor is always in phase, so current flowing through a resistor always consumes power.
This is one of the major reasons appliances subtly waste energy. If they have a transformer connected to voltage, they will draw current, and waste a small amount of energy in the resistance of the wires. In order to not be a power vampire, an appliance with a transformer needs to have needs to have a switch break the circuit between the plug and the transformer. This switch needs to be large enough to handle the full power demand of the appliance; a dinky push button on a washing machine isn’t enough – it needs to be more like a light switch. Or, the dinky switch needs to trigger a relay that breaks the circuit to the transformer. You might be able to hear the relay click as it turns on, so if you appliance emits a clicks when it is turned on, or if it has a big chunky switch, it is probably not a power vampire. If it doesn’t you could check to see whether there is any small box or component on the power wires between the plug and the transformer, but it could be difficult to tell for sure if you aren’t experienced with electronics.
There is another, smaller cause of power vampirism: any and every wire connected to AC power will emit electromagnetic radiation / radio waves, simply by virtue of being connected to AC power. Just like any real inductor, capacitor, or transmission wire will have a small amount of resistance, any wire will also have a very small amount of unavoidable self-inductance and a small, unavoidable amount of capacitance between itself and everything else. This happens whether or not the wire is connected to anything on the other end. So simply having outlets installed in your house will draw a tiny bit of power as long as the breakers are closed. I suspect this amount of power is so tiny as to be completely relevant to household usage, relative to the transformer passive draw, but I don’t know for sure.
So to actually answer your question:
1) Check whether there are any transformers still connected to power, on the circuits you haven’t turned off at the breaker. The transformer for your fridge will most likely always be connected, so that is a candidate for your power sink. If the transformer is warmer than its surroundings, it’s drawing power.
2) .2 kW is a pretty small amount of power, so it would not surprise me if the computer on the Tesla system along with your other monitoring hardware is using that much constantly.
3) The batteries have some internal leakage current, which wastes power. Totally plausible to me that they would leak this much power. I don’t know if your monitor would be able to pick that up. If it is measuring on the input side, measuring power being sent to the batteries, then it would probably pick up and report that as a source of power utilization, though I don’t know if it would sense battery leakage if it is only measuring the power output from the batteries.
kW are SI. Hours aren't strictly SI, but everyone uses them anyway because of a combination of tradition and being more convenient than kiloseconds. kWh also aren't strictly SI, but they're similarly much more handy for home energy usage than megajoules.
The Imperial or US Customary units of energy are foot-pounds, BTUs, or horsepower-hours.
The Hour is an officially sanctioned convenience unit under SI. Not a base unit or a standard multiplier, but it's on the same level as liters and degrees.
I’ve worked with commercial HVAC application engineers that like to bandy that term about.
Mostly it was the older guys though. The ones that had their own sling psychrometer and plotted Dry Bulb and Wet Bulb temps on a psych (romemtry) chart.
It's a system agnostic unit! My favorite of those is specific impulse, a measure of rocket efficiency given in seconds (of gravity). The common interpretation is "how many seconds can this engine with that propellant accelerate its own mass at 1g".
I've heard it attributed to Werner von Braun, who apparently got quite fed up with conversions between his team (German, Metric) and the Americans he then worked for (US, US Customary). Everyone agreed on seconds and the force of gravity, so he factored it into those units.
What is the point of foreign development efforts? They clearly don't work and in fact often make things worse, and unless done in some precise and yet unknown way, they are inevitably referred to as "neo-colonialism". So why bother, honestly? White guilt?
Though, not trying to help will receive similar criticism, and obviously if today's exact policies actually worked, they wouldn't be called "neo-colonialism", it would be "obviously they worked, white people just needed to give us wealth back after stealing it during colonialism, duh", which is to say that accusations of "neo-colonialism" are entirely opportunistic. But why help people who spit on you for trying or not trying to help? What is it going to take for you to realize this doesn't work? Some bright spark has some great theory about why previous efforts have failed but this new fangled approach is going to avoid the errors of all previous attempts at helping, and then this inevitably fails and a new theory comes along explaining why and the cycle seems to repeat indefinitely.
ISTM that if you can make a convincing argument that foreign development efforts are on net not helpful, you can probably also convince most people to stop supporting them. But what's the evidence that they're on net not helpful? (I know nothing about this topic, so for all I know this is a nice high softball pitched right over the plate.)
My impression is that foreign aid is very often used as a kind of formalized bribery--don't annoy us too much with your actions and the cash will continue to flow. And also that it's often a kind of laundering of a subsidy--the US government gives your country money that it's pretty-much obliged to spend with a particular US company, say. Those would be reasons people would want to keep it around even if the development aid part of it did little good overall. But how do we determine whether it's doing any good or not?
"Clearly don't work" and "inevitably referred to as "neo-colonialism"" sound like good rationalizations someone might make, assuming a definitive answer to two controversial thoughts, so that you can take away the two main sorts of justification that are claimed.
You might ask, what is the point of school, since it clearly doesn't educate anyone and inevitably just makes parents mad. Or what is the point of taxes, since they clearly don't lead to effective governance.
Describing "foreign development efforts" as an interaction between white colonisers and non-white ingrates is somewhat imprecise, given that Japan has long been a massive donor of development assistance, vying with Germany for second place behind the US. South Korea is getting up there, as well.
Also, in addition to what Duarte wrote about the EU (to which I'd add that non-EU Balkan countries and e.g. Moldova receive a lot of help) there is a fair bit of non-OECD South-South development cooperation (obviously China and India as major players, but also many smaller countries) benefiting Africa in particular.
As far as ambassadorship of white rage goes, this is exceptionally poor grist for the mill.
We will see after the West starts helping building up Ukraine. Btw, no it works. It may not work as good as western institutions claim ( because depending on countries, especially in most corrupt ones, portion of money goes to government officials pockets, otherwise, you cant do international development effort there) but it helps a lot.
Foreign development and foreign aid are very different things. The former clearly works, in fact you could state the entire EU is a project to facilitate international co-operation in Europe, and that includes FDI and development funding.
Foreign aid also clearly works. In the sense that "working" means "making massive transfer payments to the elite of that country, thus buying loyalty".
What's the evidence they don't work? Obviously not all undeveloped countries are now developed, but is there evidence showing that they haven't helped some medium amount? Most countries are richer now than 10 or 50 years ago - do you have specific reason to think development efforts haven't contributed?
Historically, foreign development aid was based on theories of the 1960s, which held that newly-independent states could catch up with the West in a couple of generations, by moving from subsistence economies to cash crops and exports of raw materials, and then using these earnings to fund industrialisation, whose benefits, in turn, would enable them to import the food they used to grow from elsewhere. (Somewhere in all this was an economist with an assumed can-opener). It worked tolerably well in the 70s, with fixed exchange rates and raw material and food prices, but fell apart totally in the 80s, when all these prices were deregulated, and their income fell catastrophically. Many such countries had to borrow from the IMF to pay to import the food they used to grow. The person to read on this is the Cambridge economist Ha-Jun Chang, who uses, in part, the experience of his own country, to demonstrate how misguided these ideas are. As he points out, there isn't, a single case in history of a country achieving economic takeoff through foreign aid or foreign direct investment. The recipe seems to be autarky, strict import controls, and careful adoption of foreign ideas and technologies where they seem useful.
Much development assistance today is a scam, and it's hard to believe how much of a scam it is until you see it in action. Typically, it involves organisations like the EU/UN or donors like Canada, Japan or the Nordics doing social engineering to make other countries seem more like us. So if you have a city in Africa with a high crime rate and an ineffective police force, they'll give you a million dollars or Euros to set up an NGO to create police monitoring units around the country, organise seminars on community policing and human rights, and send promising price officers to Stockholm or Ottawa on all-expenses paid anti-corruption training with generous per-diems. Meanwhile, the police themselves aren't paid, and have no working vehicles or radios. This kind of thing creates a parasitic, pro-western elite (that's the idea) and is often bitterly resented by the locals.
"As he points out, there isn't, a single case in history of a country achieving economic takeoff through foreign aid or foreign direct investment. The recipe seems to be autarky, strict import controls, and careful adoption of foreign ideas and technologies where they seem useful."
I agree with the recommendation of Ha-Joon Chang, but this is a bit apples and oranges. You can have a high degree of state control (including state guidance of private industry in the style of Park Chung-hee) and import, capital, and foreign loan controls *in addition* to foreign development assistance. The latter isn't supposed to catalyse economic take-off simply by dint of its existence.
Of course, cynical Western "privatise everything! even utilities! that's how you get rich!" strings attached make this difficult, which is partly why South-South efforts involving less neoliberal orthodoxy (and, to be fair, less progressive didacticism) have been welcome. And there's some promise in the creation of special economic zones (e.g. in Tanzania) which Japan and South Korea have been pushing.
The countries that have developed the most are the ones that received the least aid. Even within Europe, the UK got more aid after WW2, but Germany had the economic miracle rather than becoming "the sick man of Europe".
You would expect donors to give the most aid to the poorest countries, and least to countries doing well on their own. Is there some analysis that has controlled for this?
Good arguments against the effectiveness of hospitals have been made by people like Robin Hanson :) More seriously, we treat health as the natural state and lack of it as a deviation (indeed, Greg Cochran argues that the "placebo effect" is just regression to the mean). But countries don't start out as rich as the first world and then stumble somehow.
There was a "Spanish miracle" after the war (and Franco replacing Falangists with Opus Dei members). But Spain had also been poorer than Germany for a long time.
Those reforms took place in 1959, by which point Spain was no longer isolated and had begun to receive American aid and direct investment.
The German economic boom as well as the French Trente Glorieuses came into full bloom by 1950, during the Marshall Plan years. By contrast, between 1950 and 1959 (and certainly between 1950 and 1956), Spain's economy performed quite badly in terms of GDP growth and trade. And just about everyone except the UK did well in the early 1960s. Even the Soviets.
I'm interested in having my whole genome sequenced in order to figure out possible causes of my chronic health issues. Does anyone have a recommendation for which service to use or other advice related to genetic testing?
The services I'm currently considering are Nebula Genomics, Dante Labs, and Sequencing.com, which all seem roughly equivalent from what I can tell.
If you are looking for specific variants which you know are linked to conditions you have or suspect you have, then that's great. If you happen to have a well-studied variant, then you will be able to find out about it. If not, what you will end up with is a list of VUS - variants of uncertain significance. If you don't have a control (ideally sequence from someone as closely related to you as possible who does not have the conditions you are dealing with), you have very little chance of working out which variants are actually causal and which are not. Especially because most variants are in non-coding sequence, and we still aren't very good at working out what they do.
And all of that's before you get to the challenge of working out what the specific variant does to the gene and how to treat that therapeutically, which is a whole separate set of difficulties, I'm afraid. I don't want to put you off, and I don't know your background or how much you know about genetics, but this is in no way a simple thing to do from a single sequence, and there is a very good chance that you will end up with a long list of potential candidate genes/variants, none of which are particularly promising and none of which have therapeutic potential.
I ran my 23andme raw data through Genetic Genie, which identified a lot of useful info. I don't know if Genetic Genie will do that with other labs' data as well.
I did Dante, my girlfriend did Nebula (which I bought for her). I trust Dante a bit more on privacy (Nebula outsources sequencing to China) but they're equivalent in data quality.
Mainly that we're not at risk of any disastrous monogenic diseases. No APOE4, BRCA mutations, etc. We also learned that she's a carrier of colorblindness.
It will be more useful once we want to have kids and do embryo selection (knowing parents' genomes helps with imputing variants).
In my work I'm often trying to help people think about jobs and career, & I'm always wishing there was a list to consult of all the possible jobs there are. Is there anything like that? There are a few areas of life where I actually have a sense of what the various ob possibilities are, but regarding most I'm pretty ignorant. For instance, take the movie industry: Reading about Alec Baldwin's accident gave me a lot of new information about jobs on a movie set. For instance it had never occurred to me that there must be people who are specialists in firearm management on a set.
So anybody know of a book or an online database with this info?
Check out the NAICS - in the reference files header you can download an Excel spreadsheet. It's more industry than job, but there's a lot of overlap and may be what you're looking for. There's more than 1,100 listings.
80000 hours blog has ones that might be of interest, but I think jobs are changing so rapidly it's hard to know. You used to be able to scrape LinkedIn for data like this, but I think they blocked this kind of data mining.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US Department of Labor maintains an occupational outlook handbook that might be a start for what you are looking for https://stats.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm
In any discussion on here about national differences and their causes, there's almost always multiple people coming in and saying it's "good institutions" that explains why some countries are more successful than others (most recently, last open thread, but virtually any time such discussions arise here).
I always find this very irritating, because "good institutions" is a very high-level fact about a country that is going to be driven by much more fundamental factors, but the concept is talked about as if it were akin to the country's natural resources or climate.
It's really only just a bit better than saying China produces more cars than Brazil because China has more car factories. Of course, building more car factories will allow you to build more cars, but if that's all there were to it, why doesn't Brazil just build more car factories? That true cause of the difference are much more fundamental than this. "Good institutions" is actually worse than this in a sense because there isn't some explicit "good institution" policy that a government can pass that neatly explains the differences between countries (the way a national economic policy aimed at expanding car production can). It isn't even "democracy" - China is much more functional than a great many "democracies" in the world.
> It's really only just a bit better than saying China produces more cars than Brazil because China has more car factories.
I don't think that's a bad answer at all, if the alternative were not understanding the relationship between cars and car factories.
"Just get better institutions, bro" isn't a solution in itself, but it's a way of focusing attention on the problem that needs to be solved. "How do we get better institutions?" is an excellent question that deserves more attention.
Of course it is - it has only the most superficial of explanatory power. Differences in car output are overwhelmingly driven by fundamental economic factors, not whether a country has decided they to build more car factories. Nobody doesn't know that you need factories to make cars - the real insight comes from explaining why countries build factories or they don't. The alternative is not that you think that you don't need factories to make cars.
>"How do we get better institutions?" is an excellent question that deserves more attention.
This is why "good institutions" isn't a good explanation of national differences because whatever is causing the differences in institution quality is what is actaully driving the difference between countries.
There's a fundamental difference between "institutions that look good" and "institutions that work well." Afghanistan until last year had the first, without ever having the second. On the other hand, there are plenty of places in the world where you find formal institutions that receive low marks from western political scientists but work well because people find ways to make them work. It also depends on what your objectives are: in Lebanon, for example, institutions work quite well as a way of funnelling wealth to the leaders of the various political clans, for downward distribution. In other countries, institutions work well because they ensure that all parts of society and ethnic groups are able to feel represented in some way.
In general, well-functioning institutions are a result, not a cause. They arise when the main players in a society agree that they have an interest in making the country work well, rather than competitively looting it. This may be linked to the rise of a professional middle class (as in Britain and Germany), to survival in the face of foreign threats (as in Japan) or for many other reasons.
Greg Clark is also skeptical of using institutions to explain differing outcomes between countries... but he also there are clear cases like North vs South Korea or East vs West Germany where different systems in otherwise similar places led to very different outcomes (he just thinks that's atypical as normally a place as dysfunctional as North Korea would get taken over).
The reason that's the only answer you see is that "why do some countries have better institutions than others" is an open question. You are entirely correct though that "institutions" is not a very helpful or informative answer on it's own.
It's probably down to a whole host of complex historical reasons, some of which are likely lost to time.
With the caveat that I’ve not seen these threads, when I see the term good institutions, I take that to mean social capital and trust in government institutions and other behavioral heuristics, not firms and levels of production. More specifically I think about Robert Putnam’s early work on social capital comparing southern Italy and northern Italy and asking why the levels of efficiency were higher in the north, and the levels of corruption were lower in the north. His conclusion was social capital and trust. So if you go to the DMV, you trust if you show up, you’ll be offered a test, and when you pass the test and pay the fee you’ll be given a driver’s license, no bribes or “who you know” required. There’s a lot of work built on top of this original work and assumptions about social capital and heuristics in the fields of political science and microeconomics. I think if you start there, you might find thinking that helps you sort through your question.
Building on this, I think there's two major requirements to begin building trust:
1. That there are escalation mechanisms in place to take a grievance and get resolution. If the DMV required a bribe in order to do their function, you could complain to [their boss, a politician, the police] and expect reasonably prompt corrections to be made.
2. The people communally agree to norms that are both legally enforced and socially enforced. The Bill of Rights in the US is a prime example - the courts will enforce them, but so will the people. Where they are not enforced, people lose trust.
I think it's both, although I think the government has an extremely strong role to play in enforcing trust and trustworthiness in the rest of society.
For instance, in the US I can trust that the food I eat is safe, that the vehicles I travel in are roadworthy, and that if I pay for something at a store I'll get what I paid for. I have this trust largely because the government makes laws about these things, enforces them properly, and the people who enforce them generally don't take bribes. On the other hand I don't trust that I can leave my bike on the street unlocked because the US doesn't do a sufficiently good job of enforcing the rules against petty theft.
That's a good point, it's both. That's what heuristics are, an assumption about how people will behave. So you trust that drivers will drive on the right-hand side of the road in the U.S. and thus don't worry about the rare instances when it doesn't happen. You assume people will behave in certain ways or that there are certain codes of behaviors in various professions. That on average most people follow those unwritten rules of behavior creates social trust within a society/group of people because it reduces the occurrence of stochastic shocks/makes untrustworthy behavior stand out. Social capital is more or less a society/cultural thing that then informs institutional behavior, thereby creating trust in the institutions, meaning it has to come from something within a group and isn't something that typically can be imposed from the outside (e.g. see failures to impose American-style democracy in Iraq, etc.).
I have a couple of questions on American habits. Firstly, why do they peck at their food with just a fork, instead of using a knife and fork like normal human beings? :-) The only advantage I can see is that it saves washing up! Also, why do they hold torches back-handed, pointing down at the floor like some ham actor holding a dagger almost backwards, unless they raise their arms vertically like a telegraph arm? It seems a most cumbersome, unnatural way to hold a torch.
I suspect that in fact most Americans use a knife and fork, and hold torches properly, and the bizarre habits we see in films are mostly a Holywood affectation, rather like the way incoming meteors in films have to look like burning smoking toffee apples even though everyone these days knows they actually glow steadily with a bluish white light.
Never learned how to wield a knife to *eat* food effectively, only prepare it. But then, I'm only -American suffixed, tacked on to Chinese-. The only utensils I own are chopsticks and Asian soup spoons. Anything that might normally require a knife - is already gonna be in bite-sized pieces, ideal for chopsticks or spooning, because how else to ensure fast even cooking?. Can't remember the last time I used a fork at someone's home, honestly...all that to say, I wasn't raised to gain proficiency with either of those bizarre weapons, so on the rare occasions I do get stuck with them - yeah, you'll see me do the hunt-and-peck thing. Perhaps it's the same for others of Asian descent? (Genetic influence too, maybe: my dad used to practice picking up marbles using chopsticks. In both hands at the same time.)
Flashlights: I've never gripped them that way, did not even know it was A Thing. The dagger comparison is apt, the whole design of the grip and weighting seems to "want" me to hold it rightways up. Easier to swing that way too. (I miss the old-fashioned heavy-as-shit truncheon-like Maglites. Modern aluminium just doesn't have that same...heft. Ah, the weird objects that persist from childhood memories...)
Personally I hold the flashlight that way - it means that the default direction is down (which, if you're walking around at night and care about what you're stepping on, is where you actually want your flashlight pointed anyways), rather than forward and up. Where is most of -your- light ending up? Why? Are you concerned about vampires hiding in your ceiling corners?
Also, when there are other people around, it makes it harder to accidentally shine the light in their face - it takes a deliberate act.
As others here have touched on, the flashlight (torch) thing is an outgrowth of techniques designed to use a handheld flashlight alongside a handgun. Most famous is probably the Harries Technique, if you've seen a police-themed show you've probably seen it [1]. There are certainly other ways to use a handgun with a handheld flashlight, note that 3/4 techniques in this article use the "back-handed" grip [2]. I would guess that all of this was Hollywood-ized into the depiction you've seen.
The fork thing is a bit weird. I'm first assuming you are living in the UK, which makes it complex to talk about.
A fork is a device designed with multiple tines meant for impaling food, and a shape meant for allowing the food to be inserted into the mouth while still on the tines without hitting the roof of the mouth. At some point, the UK decided, semi-randomly, not to use forks this way; what they'd do is use a knife to sort of scrape the food up onto the back of the fork, and balance it precariously on a rounded surface instead of using the tines.
In the case of someone saying "why don't they have a knife", we might be talking about "why aren't they holding a knife meant for cutting the entire dinner". That has reasonable explanations that don't devolve into a fight. But we also might be talking about what I described, which is something like "We adopted an absolutely bonkers misuse of a tool on par with using a drill by taping a nail to the handle and twisting the entire drill around until the nail bores a hole in the wood. Why don't you join us in this insanity? Don't know it's uncultured?"
> At some point, the UK decided, semi-randomly, not to use forks this way; what they'd do is use a knife to sort of scrape the food up onto the back of the fork, and balance it precariously on a rounded surface instead of using the tines.
That's not entirely true; the fork is used for stabbing and picking things up. You only load stuff onto the back of your fork if it's too small or too mushy to be stabbed, e.g. peas or mashed potatoes.
I do admit that flipping the fork over and loading the concave surface with food is a faster way to shovel food down your gullet, but table manners have never been about the fastest way to shovel food down your gullet.
I do want to push back on this a little, because I've seen multiple instances of a UK person looking down on a US diner for, say, eating salad with a fork in a sane way. From the linked article:
***I will never forget the time my British friend, we’ll call her Sara, looked across the table and declared dryly, “Americans eat like animals.” My mouth dropped. I peered down at my plate. Everything seemed tidy enough. There was the salad, albeit slightly overdressed, there the herbed potato cubes and a small squirt of ketchup, there the flaky salmon filet. Was my back hunched? Had ketchup crusted on my chin? Was I grunting with each bite?
“You stab your fork into everything,” Sara said, demonstrating by jabbing a bed of spinach. “You’re meant to scoot food onto the back of the fork using the knife in your right hand. Look! It even works with salad.”***
It's not the only example I've seen, I've had this conversation several times where US people are apes for using the tined spear designed for spearing food on foods designed to be speared. I know cultural bubbles differ, but I can't see it if it doesn't exist - it's the whole reason I know about the difference.
On the other note - that I'm supposed to use a utensil wrong because it's culturally superior - I push back in the sense that we could just as easily agree it's polite to use a fork in a way that makes sense. I can eat slowly or show restraint in either way; if unnaturally gating eating speed is what's desired, why not just give me a match-stick and a feather or something?
Ironically, sole use of a fork has gone a full circle, well semicircle more like, from medievil times, when people used just a knife at meals, as someone else described in this thread.
Old timers back in the 1400s or whenever (I think it was around then) must have chortled at finnicky youngsters starting to use "miniature tridents" to avoid having to touch their food or stab at it with their knives!
> On the other note - that I'm supposed to use a utensil wrong because it's culturally superior - I push back in the sense that we could just as easily agree it's polite to use a fork in a way that makes sense
No we couldn't, then it would be useless as a class signal. Something has to be a little bit silly to be useful as a class signal, otherwise low-class people would happen upon it by accident.
My understanding is that the British style of eating with knife and fork together is closer to the historical roots, while the American system of mostly only using the knife to cut is counterintuitively amore recent elaboration.
Specifically, the traditional eating methodology in British cultures (probably most of Western Europe, but I'm playing it safe by saying British since I'm most confident of English and Scottish practice) in Medieval and Renaissance times was to eat with a belt knife, dirk, or dagger (whatever general-purpose cutting tool/weapon you habitually carried around with you) in your dominant hand and the fingers of your off hand. The knife would be variously used to cut up food into bite-sized pieces, to stab morsels to transport them to your mouth, or to scoop up food with the flat of the blade. Your off-hand would be used to hold food steady while you cut or stabbed it, to tear up chunks of bread and use them sop up sauces and whatnot, or just to pick stuff up and eat it directly.
A bit later, the fashion changed to use special-purpose eating knives (still with sharp tips like a dagger), and to use a pair of knifes with one in each hand. Similar to the previous system, one knife would be used to steady food while the other cut it, one would be used to spear bits of food with the tip to pick them up, or they'd be used together with one pushing food onto the blade of the other to help scoop it up.
Over time, the two knives evolved in design for specialized purposes, with the dominant hand knife being specialized for cutting, scraping, and pushing (losing the pointed tip, only being sharpened on one edge, and becoming serrated so the edge would remain useful despite being abused by scraping it against a ceramic plate) while the off-hand knife was specialized for steadying, scooping, and stabbing (losing the sharpened edge, splitting the tip into two or more points for improved spearing and holding ability, and broadening and cupping the blade just behind the points for improved scooping ability). Until eventually the two knives evolved into the familiar modern dinner knife and fork respectively.
If you're using both a knife and fork to eat everything, you no longer have a free hand for under-the-table slapfights.
That's honestly the basic reason; if I don't seriously need a knife, I'd rather keep my hand free for my drink, or my napkin, or the dog, or whatever a free hand is good for.
The flashlight thing is specifically a cop thing. Normal people don't hold their flashlights that way. Maybe it's specifically a hollywood cop thing, I don't know.
It's also much simpler to manufacture a tube and drop things into it, and you already need to complete the circuit on that end so you might as well put the button there.
Just to clarify for everyone, the continental custom is to hold a fork in the left hand with the tines point down and a knife in the right hand and use them simultaneously to cut and/or move food onto the fork and into the mouth. The American custom is to use a fork in the dominant hand to hold food stable while (not whilst!) it is cut with a knife in the opposite hand into a bite-sized piece, and then the knife is set down on the edge of the plate and the fork is then used with the tines point up to bring the piece of food to the mouth. No need to cut anything smaller? Then only the fork is used, hence the stabby, pecking movement referred to in the OP’s question.
Why this difference In comportment? Idk. Is one better than the other? Idk. Is one posher than the other? Idk. Can you pick up a single grain of rice with your chopsticks? That’s the real ticket!
Wouldn't using the offhand for cutting lead to inferiour cut results versus knifing using the dominant hand? That's how I was taught to do it, the few times anyone in my family bothered to attempt Western table manners. I'm pretty sure we got most of the table-setting placements backwards too, in hindsight. Though I suppose the arbitrariness is half the point, it's about setting rules and following them, more than efficiency in eating...
Yes, I can pick up a single grain of rice using just a single chopstick and some electricity. If it's properly cooked, anyway. Sometimes less is more!
I was taught (as an American), that "proper manners" are to hold the fork in your left hand (or non-dominant hand, for me they are the same) while cutting, then to switch the fork to the right hand (or dominant hand) for eating. Which I found cumbersome, and adopted the European style.
Disagree, prescriptivism is the whole point of table manners. Using appropriate table manners is a way of saying "I was raised in a household of a sufficiently high class to know about this sort of thing, and I understand how the world works sufficiently well to care about this sort of thing".
Modern America is moving away from irrational etiquette as a class marker, and is instead adopting irrational opinions as a class marker. I prefer the irrational table manners.
This is interesting, because I, as a European, eat in the manner you describe as the American custom. I'm aware that table manners prescribe the continental custom but I find it too awkward to use a fork in my non-dominant hand to want to eat that way, and I'm not high class enough that anyone cares about which hand I use to hold a fork.
The back handed torch holding is to provide a stable rest for the pistol in your other hand. See Mulder and Scully enter a dark scary place in just about any episode of the X Files.
The cutlery thing is kind of curious. It might explain why people take me - an American - for a Brit so often when I vacation in Europe.
The torch/flashlight thing is totally a Hollywoodism. The fork without knife thing is real. I speculate that it's because the food we eat is overall more likely to be tender enough to cut with just the side of the fork, and safetyism makes us reluctant to give sharp knives to kids early enough to develop table knife use as a consistent habit.
Sharp knives? Are you giving your children steaks to eat?
Table knives are fairly blunt yet serrated enough to saw through food. A child would have to be pretty determined to injure themselves with one (more than they could with a fork).
Right, but most food tender enough to be cut with a table knife, is tender enough to be cut with the side of a fork. If we encounter food that needs a table knife, we'll use one, but that's usually not the case.
> Right, but most food tender enough to be cut with a table knife, is tender enough to be cut with the side of a fork
I was about to respond with a list of foods that are too tough for a fork but too soft for a steak knife, and I suddenly realised that most of them are things that Americans don't eat that much of, like roast beef or sausages. (I know you eat sausages but you don't eat them as a plated meal all that often.)
I feel like I understand American cooking a lot better now if everything either needs to fall into the category "soft enough to eat with a fork" or "steak". This is why you get a perfectly normal cut of beef and cook it for twelve hours until it's falling apart, it's because you want to eat it with a fork.
"This is why you get a perfectly normal cut of beef and cook it for twelve hours until it's falling apart, it's because you want to eat it with a fork."
I find that the real killer app is heterogenous foods, like sausages*, battered fish, botanical fruits etc. where the decreased cutting area and serrations of the knife allow you to cut or carefully saw through the tougher parts without making an awful mess of the squishier interior.
* especially the Weißwurst, which must be peeled before consumption
I think cops often do the backhand thing with flashlights to hold them higher, but maybe it's just a Hollywood invention. After all, we also say goodbye before hanging up a phone and order at the bar more specifically than just "beer please".
Not sure what you mean about knives. I haven't noticed people in other countries using knives more than we do. If food needs to be cut, we use knives. If not, not. ANd I dodn't remember noticing this in movies either. Is there a movie scene you had in mind?
Knives can be used to push food onto the fork. In Portugal it's custom to always hold a knife on your main hand and a fork on your off-hand while eating, regardless of whether the food needs cutting. The fork is used both as a shovel and as a skewer. The food does tend to need cutting, though. Cultures that use chopsticks seem to serve food in bite-sized pieces, which is extremely uncommon around here. Still, if I'm eating, say, Chinese food around other people and not using chopsticks, I'm using both the fork and the knife (by myself I usually put it in a bowl and use only a fork, but this feels a bit rebellious).
It seems counterintuitive to use your dominant hand to do something needless (cut off a piece of lasagna with a knife) and your less deft hand to bring it to your mouth. Especially if the non-dominant hand is accustomed to holding the fork pointing downward. I don't know that it's hard? But maybe it does slow one down. Perhaps this is why among our many other much-discussed failings, Americans tend to bolt their food.
Cutting lasagna with a fork is messy. It's usually possible, it's just that you tend to squish the saucy layers all over the place while you hack through the pasta layers. I'd much rather eat my lasagna with a knife and fork.
I think maybe American lasagnas tend to be different, though.
Hmm. Since we always use the fork on the non-dominant hand, that's the hand that is used to manipulating a fork. Also, we use the fork as a shovel (not pointing downward) plenty of times, including to eat lasagna. The thing I have no experience with is using a fork to cut anything at all, even though I get how to do it.
LOL! Two examples of tomarto vs. tomayto I guess. :-) Now you mention it, I should have realised "washing up" is a Britishism, although it also includes saucepans and cutlery! But torch vs. flashlight is a new one on me. I sometimes think a British person would make the worst possible spy in the US, because they would trip up with something like those and give themselves away in no time!
There's a scene in the third Alex Rider book where Alex (a british boy) will be posing as the son of a couple of American spies. When they first meet him, they ask how "the maths classes" are going to try to test him and he responds "nice try, but they say "math" in the US."
Well, there is the older term "washerwoman", whose implied job would be doing the washing (using a washing board, of course). I also notice that indisposed clothing is said to be "in the wash" rather than "in the laundry", and we do call it a "washing machine" rather than a "laundry machine" (although the commercial version is a "laundromat", not a "washingmat"). I think the verb "launder" is also rarely used outside of the crimey-deception context, too, although maybe that's regional...everyone says "wash".
But, yes, the exact permutation "doing the washing" isn't one I've heard before, despite those points of similarity. American English is strange.
I've had more than one person adamantly insist that "cutlery" refers specifically to knives, ("you know, like Cutco[TM]!") which seems simply wrong. None of them were cutlers, clearly.
"Flatware" is a designation I see more and more on product listings and other copy, but people will refer to the components of a flatware set as "silverware" still. Or more commonly, just the catchall "utensils". It's sort of confusing having three different reference-pointers that all aim at slightly different sides of the same table-elephant.
Actually, I'm having trouble even picturing the various techniques described here. Personally, I just use the fork in my left hand and the knife in my right when cutting, and put down the knife but keep the fork in the left for eating.
I filled it out, but you could do a better job specifying what each option means. I don't know what qualifies as 'niche' or 'mainstream'; percentages might help, like "roughly 1% of the population would share my interest" or examples, like "Neutral (?): model train set building, crochet, performing in an orchestra".
How much detail are you after? "Luck + Connections + Working really hard + being good at what you do" is the usual formula, though depending on what you mean by "succeed" having only 2 or 3 of the 4 might suffice.
Studying VC investments is going to look very different than studying cafes and lawn-mowing companies and self-employed tradesmen etc.
That description of the very different theories on how inspiration works is a pretty good start. Its super complex and has huge implications downstream in terms of hermeneutics, pedagogy, exposition and application.
Most Christians in the west fall into some version of verbal/plenary/inerrant as a function of the (controlled in some way by God) life context of the person writing the assumed inspired text. They don't really think about it much though.
The food article "Twenty Twenty Stew" was probably her top-ranked post not because it's the best stew ever, but because in it she offhandedly announces that she's releasing a TV show on CNN+.
I'm posting on behalf of a friend in Russia, originally an Iraqi refugee from Baghdad, who is currently on his 3rd year studying medicine there, but urgently looking to transfer to a Western university in order to escape the local.. mess.
Is anyone here familiar with any university that accepts transfers, has classes in English, and a non-humongous tuition?
You can email me at kerrofelia (at) gmail (dot) com. Help is appreciated!
Hello! Has he considered going back to Iraq? Iraq is actually in a better place than Russia right now and it will buy him the time to get to a better country. As far as western universities the previous destinations for Russian students are mostly shut off as I understand it. I do know something about applying to American universities from abroad for whatever that's worth. I also know that the Biden administration recently said they would open slots for refugees from Russia and being a religious and ethnic minority helps. So he might have a refugee claim. I admit this isn't the strongest help I can give but let me know if any of that sounds helpful or promising!
Actually, the money is the main problem. I'm 21. I live in Russia. I'm a programmer (C#, .Net) but never worked. I'm freelanced for about year and a half. Because I can be drafted into the army at any time no one want to hire me (lack of experience also not helping, and no one want to hire Junior specialist when only god nows what the president's next move will be). Even before the war I didn't wanted to go to the army. But now, since after 4 month of training they can send me anywhere... So I have no money to flee the country. Not that I'm worrying about where I will sleep and what will eat. No - I don't have the money to get to the border. So maybe anyone can help with a job? Or, maybe you are Russian and can help me get to the Georgia, or Armenia, or Kazakhstan.
Here's my friend's Telegram channel with comprehensive guides on how to get to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Mongolia, etc + first steps re settling. https://t.me/zzuurrrr
As I understand it, you don't have this kind of spare money. This presumably means that if someone were to give you the money to get to the border, you would end up in either Vladikavkaz or Yerevan without a place to live, money for food, or particularly better employment prospects. Can you estimate how much money you would need in order to get across the border and then last long enough there to plausibly become self-supporting? I don't think it would be unprecedented for this community to sponsor someone out of your kind of situation, and if you double down that you just want a ticket to wherever I can personally offer that kind of money (assuming we can get it from the US to Russia), but dumping you penniless across the border doesn't obviously seem very helpful.
I believe Erusian has said in the past that they end up knowing about a lot of remote work opportunities, perhaps they can chime in here?
"Snowflake is a pluggable transport available in Tor Browser to defeat internet censorship. Like a Tor bridge, a user can access the open internet when even regular Tor connections are censored. To use Snowflake is as easy as to switch to a new bridge configuration in Tor Browser.
"This system is composed of three components: volunteers running Snowflake proxies, Tor users that want to connect to the internet, and a broker, that delivers snowflake proxies to users.
Volunteers willing to help users on censored networks can help by spinning short-lived proxies on their regular browsers. "
Just install an extension in Firefox or Chrome. Or leave a snowflake tab open. (The counter on the extension badge will not show much traffic; don't expext dopamine rushes.)
The Ukrainian government continues to try and keep its economy afloat. By and large what they need is money to buy weapons and keep services running. You can of course donate. But they're also looking for foreign direct investment and trade relationships. Both to bring in money for the war and as part of their long term economic strategy. Because the hryvnia is inflating and general economic woes everything is quite cheap right now. But they're very bullish on a post-war economic miracle that involves hugely expanded economic relationships with the west.
If you happen to know someone who'd be interested in such opportunities I know where to find them. They're looking mostly for things in the millions to tens of millions euros range. Which is more than I've got certainly. But figure I'd throw it out there.
PS: Ukraine has a startup city program if you want to include in your next thing Scott.
I don't think anyone's going to invest tens of millions of euros into postwar Ukraine until we know what the security situation and treaty alliances are going to look like. Which is what (among other things including corruption, yes) hurt Ukraine's economy so much prewar- investors were skittish about investing a ton because the security situation was unstable, which of course ended up being very accurate.
That's why they want to be in NATO so badly- if they're not, why would foreign capital build factories and such in Ukraine? They could always be invaded again
Post-war Ukraine maybe. But they're looking for investment now. And I agree it's not likely to happen. Still, I figured I'd pass it along. All that political risk is making assets very cheap.
Syndicated deals would be fine I assume. They're pretty proud of their open investment environment. And it's very rare for deal size for anything but the tiniest deals to be lower than a million. Even setting up a single McDonalds takes more than a million dollars. What opportunities would you expect to be around that are significant enough for Ukraine to put effort into closing them and yet would involve less effort and expense than a McDonalds?
I have a friend in Russia but I am afraid to reach out to them on open channels because I'm not sure if/how their communications are being monitored and I don't want to get them in trouble. I haven't heard from them in months. I know they have my signal number, but I do not have theirs. Is there anything else I can/should do?
Gmail or Facebook should be be quite safe for reaching out. Unless their devices get stolen or confiscated, the chance of these channels being monitored are low. You can just ask for a Skype or Signal call to be even more discreet.
I would recommend writing them in open channels with surface level questions, such as "how are you doing, let's get back in touch, perhaps on another app" or so, and if they are tech savvy enough to have Signal, hopefully they get the hint to write there too. Just being in touch with foreign people won't get them in trouble, I don't think.
I know a lot of people are fleeing to Belgrade or Serbia. If you wish to come and need help, I am no expert and can't help with money, but I speak the language and am physically here so I can help you orient or advise you on where to go or how to find something. You can reach me at dusan( A T )dnesic( D O T )com
Hey. I don't have anyone specific but I've been reaching out to contacts in Turkey, Armenia, etc to try and establish places I can send people to. Are you willing to temporarily house people and help them get jobs/find accommodation? If so would you mind if I reached out just to add you to the list? I don't know too many Serbians unfortunately and a lot of Russians want to go there because they see the country as friendly.
I've filled my house to capacity, so I cannot host personally, but there are telegram groups that people should join with plenty of people willing to help:
Most of what I would call "reasonable" conspiracy theories operate in a grey world where some facts they posit are true, pointing at some goal that is likely true, and filling in the rest with some parts non-sense and some parts clever guesswork.
Take a "conspiracy theory" that the CIA would use US citizens to conduct medical experiments without their knowledge or consent, including causing significant medical problems with almost no ethical safeguards? That's about as bad as it gets in terms of wacky "conspiracy theory" territory, but it turns out it's true. https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/history-of-mk-ultra
If someone in 1970 posited a theory that the US government were experimenting on US citizens, but got some of the facts wrong while getting the overall direction and seriousness right, would that be a "conspiracy theory" or the primer for a federal investigation?
Some more recent examples: Was it a "conspiracy theory" that elements of the government tried to shut down discussion of gain-of-function research and also the potential that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab? There were a decent number of additional unverified or false "facts" that were brought up under the same umbrella (and some less believable things, like the Chinese government releasing Covid on purpose), but the core "conspiracy theory" was true.
In a more controversial sense, you can also look at the "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was "stolen." Obviously stronger versions of this idea are wrong/not supported by the best evidence. What many people meant when they say the election was stolen were less strong claims. For instance, that improper and unapproved voting mechanisms were implemented (due to Covid) that allowed more people to vote by mail, or drop boxes, or through collection by a political operative, with less oversight. There were states that had explicit rules that said how voting needed to happen, that the election officials changed without authorization. Is that a "conspiracy theory"? Yes and no. The idea that Democrats fabricated completely illegal votes (graveyards voting) is not supported by the facts. That thousands of votes were counted that didn't meet the legal criteria as devised by the state isn't even controversial. Most people just accept it because of the nature of the Covid shutdowns.
When you get into what I think of as "non-reasonable" conspiracies, that's the kind of stuff that is almost completely fiction, maybe loosely supported by circumstantial or misleading facts. This is often people suffering from schizophrenia or otherwise mentally unstable, though certainly not exclusively. If you take something that's true but hard to believe (like MK Ultra) and add a bunch of random-but-possibly-connected ideas that would necessarily be hard to prove, you can come up with a lot of weird stuff that's hard to plausibly deny. If you don't trust the official sources (maybe because they actively lied to you about this or similar things in the past - like MK Ultra or the Lab Leak theory), then it's really hard to settle on an explanation of what really happened.
Take the pizza-shop-child-slavery wacky story. This story posits that political and economic elites were running a child-sex ring out of a pizza shop. This included the Clintons specifically. Take the pizza shop out of it, though, and it's actually a true story, if you make it far less grandiose and make the powerful elites the people using the sex slaves instead of running it. Jeffrey Epstein was absolutely running a child-sex-slavery ring for elite people. By all accounts, Bill Clinton probably really was actively involved and went to the island a number of times.
I'm not terribly impressed with a take on this that leaves the discussion at "haha, those dumb rubes actually believed that powerful people were running a child sex ring out of a *pizza shop* hahaha," when the reality was really really close to that, except for the specific fact of the pizza shop.
Of course, I'm sure you have an extremely narrow conception of "conspiracy theory" and think all your political views are just the truth. Its funny when leftists who literally theorize that the powerful are conspiring to "oppress" certain groups of people point at everyone else as "conspiracy theorists".
You're coming close to assuming bad faith; there are definitely people who believe a whole lot of actual conspiracy theories (walk into a mental hospital and talk to the patients if you don't believe me - not all mental patients are schizophrenic, of course, but there are generally at least a few).
There are also things like Capitalised Important Concept rants, which I'm pretty sure are written by schizophrenics (they're not always paranoid, though).
There aren't "actual" conspiracy theories, then things that leftists believe. *They're all actual conspiracy theories!* But OP is (literally) a marxist who think that their beliefs are the truth, so they don't register as "conspiracy theories" to them. So "conspiracy theory" is being used as a propaganda term here to make their outgroup seem crazy.
I have a large extended family that is prone towards conspiracy theories and also happens to have multiple schizophrenics. Perhaps the tendency towards conspiracy theory is the soft-core version of schizophrenic apophenia.
The stuff I have to Google to follow what you say. You keep this up and I’ll start nagging you to dedicate one single lousy bit to represent positive _and_ negative numbers.
Positing a conspiracy is the easiest way to make any hypothesis fit any data.
JFK was killed by a Freemason laser beam? How do you explain the autopsy that says he was killed with bullets? Clearly the coroner was in on the conspiracy. What about the Zapruder film that doesn't show a laser beam? Conspirators must have obtained the originals and edited the laser out. Early 1960s lasers weren't nearly powerful enough to kill a man? I guess there was a conspiracy among laser physicists to hide their progress and pretend to be decades behind where they were.
Well, there are a lot of things that if you have a little bit of them are fine, & maybe even offer some advantages, but if you have too much they interfere with life -- being tall is a simple example. There are psychological things that are like that too. For instance, most people are distressed by the idea of having a serious illness, and others mostly see that as a reasonable attitude. Also, not wanting to become seriously ill motivates people to avoid doing various things that put their health at risk. But if someone is *too* preoccupied and worried about the possibility of serious illness, to the point that the worry makes them miserable and interferes with them getting on with life, then they have a diagnosable illness: hypochondriasis. Or take bipolar disorder. People who have the full syndrome are greatly disabled by it, and get a diagnostic label. But people who have bipolar in their family but do not have the full syndrome have something special about them: They tend to have playful, hyper-fluent minds -- they are often witty and inventive. And there's research supporting that clinical impression: relatives of people with bipolar disorder score higher on tests of creativity, and ratings of how creative they are in their hobbies and their work.
So maybe it's the same with autism: A little bit is fine, and has some advantages. A lot is disabling.
Some people with particularly severe autism pretty much need to be kept drugged and/or locked away of mental hospitals for long periods of time, or they will visibly suffer things that most people will see as intolerably worse than being kept in the locked ward of a mental hospital. And the last thing the "neurodiversity advocates" want is for these people to be out in the world, visibly suffering, as example for neurodiversity.
Hopefully these mental hospitals will be safe and caring places, hopefully their patients will eventually move on to someplace better, and hopefully nobody who doesn't absolutely need that level of treatment will be forced to endure it. But it's going to be a thing that exists. And for it to exist, for people to be treated in mental hospitals, there has to be a medical diagnosis that says what they're being treated for.
I'm certain there are some neurodiversity advocates who are so ignorant of this reality that they would deny the existence of any autism patients who actually need medical treatment, but that level of ignorance correlates closely with not knowing how to go about effectively challenging the contents of the DSM.
Bit of a Fully General Response for all things DSM-classification-related, but: when X isn't in the DSM, it instantly magically loses credibility as a Real Disease/Syndrome/Disorder/whatever. This has reputational effects, and because of our sane and well-run healthcare system, also makes it much harder to secure proper treatment and accommodations. Sort of the equivalent of "well the FDA doesn't say the drug can be used that way, so I can't prescribe it/insure it/whatever". It's a balancing act between not pigeonholing people to a caricature diagnosis for the sake of legibiliy, and not removing often-necessary scaffolding for securing other needed resources. Autism's been a particularly difficult one because the extremes on "the spectrum" are so wildly far apart...you've got people like the Autism Speaks activists who function highly enough that they're mainly concerned with eliminating the stigma of "really a disease". And you've got...like...the unfortunate dudes who try to bite their own appendages off. Worrying about second-order stigma is the last thing on those guys' minds. DSM classification clearly, obviously matters for them. (This is a big part of why a significant fraction of the ASD community was unhappy with Asperger's being folded up into the greater spectrum, incidentally. Competing goals.)
C.f. history of GID -> GD. Less so for being a related condition (although there's oddly high comorbidity), more that that's fairly recent history and there's a lot of well-publicized argumentation from both sides regarding said change. Chasing normal is like the dog chasing the car and finally biting it, sometimes...
Generally I'd summarise the aspie-pride viewpoint as follows:
1. Autism *per se* isn't bad
2. ...but a decent chunk of autistics get it from de novo mutations
3. Because some parents get much more mutated than others (mutagen exposure varies by orders of magnitude + parent age), de novo mutations correlate with other de novo mutations
4. A lot of de novo mutations cause low IQ
5. Low IQ is bad
6. Because autism is pervasive, low IQ has different symptoms depending on whether you're autistic.
The relevant prediction is "autistics from families with lots of autistics perform much better than autistics from de novo mutations", which there's some research behind (though obviously psych research, shaker of salt, etc.). High-functioning autistics do on average still have crappy life outcomes, but given the nature of the syndrome at least a large chunk of that and possibly all is due to external factors i.e. neurotypicals detect us as weird and getting shunned for being weird has negative effects.
The real test would be to populate an island with supermajority-autistic, removing the external factors, and see what happened. Good luck getting that past IRB, though.
The main reason I am ambivalent is that the diagnosis of autism is helpful to alert parents to the cause of children's abnormal behaviour (which can help to head off parents becoming hostile to their children over persistent autistic behaviours, although there's also a quack-autism-cure community so this isn't a pure positive), to explain to the kid him/herself why he/she's not like other kids (relevant for things like self-esteem), and to give parents something to club teachers over the head with if the teachers don't do something about the bullying (there is usually bullying at school because autistic kids are ideal targets, and in my experience because it's usually almost-everyone vs. autistic kid the teachers often decide said autistic kid is the problem).
The first and second don't require that autism be listed as a mental disorder per se, but they're reasons to make sure doctors know about how to figure out if a kid is autistic which is not all that different. The third can theoretically be fixed without the disability club if bullying is sufficiently brought under control in general; I'm not super-up-to-date on the state of that at the moment since I haven't interacted with the school system in a while.
The old DSM *did* distinguish between Asperger's (high-functioning autism) and autism-per-se, with the latter requiring low IQ.
Autism is obviously more "mental" than homosexuality, in the sense that homosexuality just makes you... want to fuck people of the same sex... and that's it. Autism makes you quite different mentally -- this is what both autists and non-autists would agree on.
The question of "illness" is complicated by the fact that autism can mean many different things. The people who keep banging their heads against the wall, obviously are ill. The argument is that the people who merely enjoy math a little too much, are not. So the category that includes both is... what? We do not really want to remove the former from the DSM, even if the latter want to be removed.
In my opinion, the proper solution would be something like classifying autism of the math-liking type as a "mental type" or something, and autism of the head-banging type as a "mental illness" within this type. But finding a consensus is difficult and updating the definitions will take years.
"Autism is obviously more "mental" than homosexuality, in the sense that homosexuality just makes you... want to fuck people of the same sex... and that's it."
Be thankful you've clearly never been exposed to the social media "only joking but serious" posting about how being queer is so much better than boring old cis straightness, LGBT+++ people are so creative and colourful and fun and generally more amazing than straight people, and queer culture is separate from and of course superior to straight culture, and being queer is not at all the same as being straight but you just want to fuck people of the same sex (see all the stuff about Pete Buttigieg being the 'wrong' sort of gay).
A lot of that is, of course, just cope: well maybe I don't fit in around here and I'm different from everyone else and I feel outcast, but that only means I'm *special* and *better* than them, so there!
Yeah, there was a separate community and culture built up around being gay when it was something that had to be hidden, could only be referred to in code words not openly, and people gathered in small groups concentrating on this one key element of who they were.
Now that it's all out in the open and there is no stigma any more (at least in theory but increasingly in practice), there's the tension between the old culture, which made a virtue out of necessity and embraced outsider status and developed political thinking around challenging the status quo, and the new environment where it's "Joe is the same as Jack, only gay, but that has no effect on how he behaves except that he's married to Bill, not Sally". Hence the accusations of being 'the wrong kind of gay', that is, assimilated into mainstream society such that there is no visible difference between you and one of the straights, or the discussions around "Pride isn't for families, keep Pride kinky":
> I think the issue is that nobody is in charge of classifying "mental types"
Yeah. Just like nobody was in charge of classifying sexual orientations, and as Deiseach mentions, leaving this responsibility to social networks perhaps wasn't the best idea.
So I guess it's like: "These are not illnesses, but we want someone to provide an official definition, on a professional level comparable to DSM." It's an adjacent territory.
Is this useful for some therapists/doctors/parents to be able to seek treatment/help for their Aspergersy kids? My understanding is that there are therapies that help with figuring out social cues, but I will admit I am pretty ignorant of that world, so maybe I am just wrong.
Turbulently. Real economic hardship and a highly unpopular government are an explosive combination. Truss is unlikely to last beyond Christmas, there are likely to be U turns or backbench revolts. But the argument for welfare increases and tax cuts for the poor is mainly political, it's not a solution to the basic economic problems, and it's hard to see what is.
(A tidbit on the subject of protests: the government have passed legislation lessening the right to protest, particularly giving the police the power to break up protests that are "noisy". But at the ongoing party conference in Birmingham, the police ignored the new legislation).
I don't think there's anything approaching a political crisis.
To the extent there's an economic crisis, it will go the same as the rest of the world's. Things will get worse for a while then they'll get better. For a while you'll think that this time is different and the world really is going to end this time, and then two years later you'll be kicking yourself for not buying at the bottom.
I don't think there's much doubt who's going to win. One party holding power for over 14 years is pretty unprecedented, all the signs of a senescent late phase government are there, and labour have an enormous lead (25%-34%).
Labour has a serious habit of punting "unlosable" elections in the past.... Look at all the elections Corbyn was leader for - I think Labour would have been a favourite in any of them with a bland moderate leader
Its amazing how easily it seems Labor should have been able to win past elections. If they had taken the American approach of electing a Joe Biden like figure instead of an ideologue, they surely would have won at least one of these elections.
2. Not exactly. They are both agonists at the GABA-B receptor. But GHB is also an agonist of (I believe) an excitatory GHB receptor. And phenibut is an antagonist of a certain subunit of voltage gated calcium channels. This is probably phenibuts primary mechanism of action, as it's affinity for these binding sites is much higher than its affinity for GABA-B. Also, phenibut is an antagonist for TAAR-1, although it's unclear how relevant this is to its effects. It would explain the pro-dopaminergic effects though, since taar-1 antagonism is known to negatively modulate D2 autoreceptors, and positively modulate postsynaptic D2 receptors.
I find phenibut to be vastly more euphoric than benzos, to the extent that it's hard to believe they're chemically related. I'd compare phenibut to mini-ecstasy, especially the first dozen or so times that I did it
I mean you could microdose a tiny amount and see how it goes. I used it to get high (just being honest), in quantities ranging from 1000-2000mg. On average I did 1500mg at a time, and I don't weigh that much for a man, and have no benzo tolerance.
Buy a digital scale and try 100mg or something, see how it goes. I've heard stories of people microdosing to reduce anxiety, improve performance for presentations, socialize, etc. etc. Obviously, do not use it regularly. I stuck to a strict 'once a month' rule and never deviated
When I play chess, I can sometimes predict what my opponent will do. That doesn't mean, as far as I'm aware, that I have any control on what they will actually do.
A human with a good enough model of an other human can predict their actions in some cases. God just happen to have a particularly good model.
(Also imo he does not live time in R but in some p-addic space which explains a lot of the difference)
There's a novel called _The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen_ (1963) which includes the idea that God can only know the past and present, not the future. I've asked around, and it doesn't seem to be an idea in Judaism.
There are no Platonic forms of religions, so one cannot definitively speak of what is or is not an idea in "Judaism," but the idea that God does not know the future was advocated by some famous medieval Jewish philosophers like Gersonides.
Pretty simple: God created you, and you have free will, and He knows your will. No contradiction there.
It would be a contradiction to say that God created us *without* free will and yet we’re responsible for our sins.
I guess the problem you’re running into here is that you have some idea that free will means that the future is unwritten, but even if your will is totally free it is certain that you will make some arbitrary choice—God just happens to know what that choice is, that doesn’t mean He chose it for you.
If I put a cookie on the coffee table and walk away my wife will definitely eat the cookie. I know this for sure, but I definitely didn’t make her do it and didn’t want her to. (I mean really, I don’t care, but go with the hypothetical.)
At the risk of rehashing the standard compatibilism debate with a new (old) flavor, what exactly is free will doing in this formulation, other than opening one up to responsibility for sin? What would be different about a person who didn't have free will?
You’re right, I think this question isn’t very good because it essentially asks to rehash the definition of free will. “How can free will exist if people with free will can’t choose anything other than what they chose” is insensible; the difference is they have choices, but it doesn’t mean they can illogically defy causality by choosing something they didn’t choose. Ultimately they will choose something and that thing will happen, which means all the other choices don’t happen. If you want to know how this differs after the fact of the choice, you are begging the question.
"It would be a contradiction to say that God created us *without* free will and yet we’re responsible for our sins."
Oedipus is responsible for his sins despite not choosing them. That guilt requires volition is a modern belief not a logical formula etched into the fabric of reality.
I agree that other frames have this idea. I don’t agree that it makes any sense. If you’re pointing out that there is an opinion amidst my opinion, yes, I agree.
For any crime, there must be some action that can be taken to avoid committing the crime, because the purpose of punishing crimes (or sins) is to incentivize people to choose otherwise. If you cannot choose to not commit a sin, there is no point in punishing you and no point in you feeling guilty. It would be like punishing a rock for being influenced by gravity.
>the purpose of punishing crimes (or sins) is to incentivize people to choose otherwise
Oedipus blinds himself to punish himself for his guilt. That doesn't fit your model.
>For any crime, there must be some action that can be taken to avoid committing the crime
Oedipus flees his home in order to avoid committing the crimes he is prophesied to commit and, because of this action, unwittingly commits those very crimes.
That's nonsense. The fact that Oedipus *feels* guilty does not mean he *is* guilty, or that justice is served by whatever self-destructive acts he chooses to do out of a sense of guilt.
There was no point in Oedipus blinding himself. Doing it won't un-fuck his mother, and there is no moral lesson his story can teach anyone besides "if the Oracle makes a prophecy about you you might as well just lay down and die right now because that's going to be less painful." No restitution, no rehabilitation, no deterrence - Oedipus's "punishment" doesn't fit any theory of criminal justice, it's purely to make himself feel better. And I would argue that therapy is a better route for that than self-mutilation.
(Of course, if free will is a lie, then I can't hold Oedipus responsible for how he reacted, because that too was foreordained. But that just makes the whole affair even more unjust, IMO.)
Yes. "Things should be fair." seems to be a Christian idea, although I'm no religion expert and don't really know. The Old Testament doesn't appear to have much interest in portraying things as fair.
It's not just a Christian theory, it's most modern theories of criminal justice. Our legal system is not big on punishing people for things they had no choice but to do.
I would think any God worth worshipping should be at least as moral as the human legal system.
A caveat'ed Open Theism sounds correct to me, the various prophecies I've heard from people are extremely If-Then things; If you continue building this thing, Then tragedy will befall your loved one.
So here's my caveat; the outcome is pre-determined except when God intervenes. Free Will comes down to: listen to the intervention, or don't. If you don't listen, then you get the predetermined outcome. After listening, there's the second Free Will choice of acting or not acting. Don't act, pre-determined outcome.
So at the end of the day there are exactly two possible outcomes; the Pre-determined outcome, and the Backup outcome.
Maybe we should start with an easier one: if one believes the universe operates deterministically, how is *that* consistent with free will? I suppose one could join Roger Penrose and assert consciousness is an inherently quantum phenomenon, and has some heretofore unsuspected ability by some unknown mechanism to collapse wavefunctions in its preferred direction.
But otherwise, resolving a deterministic universe with free will poses a prior philosophical problem that we'd need to solve before we can productively address the question of what it would mean for an omniscient being (or superintelligent AI) to know the (deterministic) future.
If the argument is so subtle that it requires my reading a whole paper written by philosophers, I'll pass. That much logic is certain to contain several major errors, the same way 100,000 lines of code is certain to contain several bugs.
The incompatibilist agrees it is incoherent, and follow that to a fairly simple conclusion. Can the compatibilist come up with a meaningful definition of "free choice" that doesn't have that issue?
Justice comes from rewarding the good and punishing the bad. If you want to increase the total amount of Justice in the world, the easiest way to do it is to create a whole bunch of simulated people, put them through some series of moral tests, and reward those who do well whilst punishing those who do badly. To squeeze out the maximal amount of justice, it's best to make the reward and punishments infinite.
In this particular conception of justice it's irrelevant whether or not you know in advance which of your simulated people are going to get the reward and which are going to get the punishment. The important thing is to just keep cranking them through the simulation, rewarding the good ones and punishing the bad ones. It is insufficient to create only good people and reward them all, you need to punish bad ones too.
If God is maximally good then he must be maximally good on some specific metric. And the only way to be maximally good on some specific metric is to Goodhart the heck out of it. So it's not surprising that God in His infinite wisdom is busy creating evil people just to punish them, just as Columbia University or D. E. Shaw encourages vast number of applications just to reject them.
That would be double predestination, that God not alone chooses those whom He wishes to save, but chooses those to be damned. I think modern Calvinists have soft-pedalled on that a lot, and instead concentrate more on "God chooses the Elect, and *you* might be one of them, so you need to hear the Gospel preached!"
They go heavy on St. Augustine with regard to this, and (naturally) Catholics disagree with them:
(1) If the future is set in stone - for us humans, it is not, because we don't know with certainty what will happen or how it will turn out. To take a recent example of a local accident, someone driving home in the early morning from doing a work shift and getting killed in a crash on a pretty empty road, just because they met up with a lorry turning out of a side-road at the exact wrong moment. Nobody expected that the person alive at 8 o'clock would be dead by 9 o'clock.
(2) God can see the future - does this mean that God creates the future? That's the whole crux here, with Calvin taking a very strong position on God's sovereignty, omnipotence and omniscience. His argument being that what God wills *must* come to pass, otherwise God is not omnipotent. God must be able to see the future, else God is not omniscient. If God can see the future, then that future *must* happen, else God is wrong, and God cannot be wrong. So God knows who is saved and who is damned, and by knowing, causes it to be, and this cannot be changed, or else God does not have absolute sovereignty:
Sovereignty of God was a big deal to the Reformers, in greater or lesser degree, because they were building their faith on the bare word of Scripture and if you cannot believe or trust that God can do what He promises, then you are hosed. Anyway, this is above my pay grade, I don't even play a theologian on the TV 😁
(3) Therefore God has created people to be damned. Now the hardcore Reformed were willing to bite the bullet on this, but us namby-pamby Catholics said this was wrong, since God does not desire any of His creatures to be lost or damned. God's knowledge of the future comes from being outside of time, not in it, so cause and effect are different. God knows the future, but also knows the possibilities for each of us if we freely choose to accept the gift of faith, to repent, and to seek salvation.
God *is* free, that is the whole point, Neither is God conscribed to damn people, even if He can choose whom He will to be saved. That's the point of the book of Jonah: Jonah is disappointed when God spares Nineveh, after all the travails he went through to get there and warn them they were damned. God says 'what, I can't change My mind?'
From the Catechism:
"Providence and secondary causes
306 God is the sovereign master of his plan. But to carry it out he also makes use of his creatures' co-operation. This use is not a sign of weakness, but rather a token of almighty God's greatness and goodness. For God grants his creatures not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of co-operating in the accomplishment of his plan.
307 To human beings God even gives the power of freely sharing in his providence by entrusting them with the responsibility of "subduing" the earth and having dominion over it. God thus enables men to be intelligent and free causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbours. Though often unconscious collaborators with God's will, they can also enter deliberately into the divine plan by their actions, their prayers and their sufferings. They then fully become "God's fellow workers" and co-workers for his kingdom.
308 The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator. God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes: "For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Far from diminishing the creature's dignity, this truth enhances it. Drawn from nothingness by God's power, wisdom and goodness, it can do nothing if it is cut off from its origin, for "without a Creator the creature vanishes." Still less can a creature attain its ultimate end without the help of God's grace."
The overarching point is that our creation is an act of freedom and gratuitous love. We were made in love, for love, by love - not to be damned.
It does so notably *less* from inside the religious house, honestly. If you a dyed in the wool atheists's atheist, you might say "Explain to me exactly how free will works, and if you can't, I might decide it doesn't exist". As pointed out by others in the thread, this actually complicates free will before you even get to religion; nothing about our current understanding points strongly to "free will is even possible" - most arguments about it end up devolving to someone eventually saying "Well, maybe there's something we don't understand in quantum physics that interacts with choices and elevates them above RNG. Let's hope!"
I often use the phrase "magic" to talk about various aspects of Christianity, mostly to tell someone I believe things that they will find silly. But a lot of religion posits magic in the sense that there are elements of the religion that transcend physics - i.e. that this is more than just a very powerful alien with a very good understanding of physics, but in fact something that can break some of those rules.
Once you are at that point of believing in the supernatural in the way a lot of Christians do, someone comes up to you and says "Aha! I have developed and ascribe to a system of completely secular belief in the implications of physics! And within my-system-not-yours, I feel there's a conflict between a belief you hold based on a belief in the supernatural and my system, which takes as an assumption that nothing like you believe is possible from step one!"
Basically it's in the vein of a pro-life person coming up to a pro-choice person and saying "Taking as a given that I'm right and that abortion is the unjustified murder of an infant, doesn't that make you a horrifying homocidal monster? Defend yourself, murderer!". It starts too late in the argument to be productive - you can't just handwave away the most fundamental aspects of the disagreement (in your own favor) and expect to get very far.
I think people instinctively understand this coming from another direction - like, if I went up to a very confident atheist and said "Hey, I've decided that for the purpose of this argument that we should use my system's assumptions, not yours; given that, how can you justify your disobedience to the sovereign king of the universe?" he'd basically get why my argument wasn't great. But it's easy to plaster over that flaw going the other direction.
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.
The Onion files an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in defense of satire.
Seriously.
Shine on you crazy diamonds!
“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/10/04/onion-amicus-brief-supreme-court-anthony-novak/
How hard is it not to link to a paywalled article? At the very least, use wayback machine so everyone else doesn't have to do the work of accessing the article that YOU posted.
My understanding is The Post allows 10 articles a month before the paywall comes up.
The link to the brief itself doesn’t have a paywall.
Thanks to Matt.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf
What is the legality of writing US "formal" documents in a parodying and trollish style? is it always legal or just for the specific type of US supreme court document here ? was this even a possiblity entertained by someone in the US legal machinery or anywhere else ?
The article notes that
>Amicus briefs are documents filed by parties not directly involved in a case to provide the court with additional information.
But isn't starting a document that is supposed to provide the court with additional information with
>daily readership of 4.3 trillion” that has “grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history
gives legal justification for the judges to completely ignore all the document and possibly inflict some legal consequences on the writers ?
The judges would have to be able to hold two ideas in their head at the same time.
I think the court is up to the task.
The brief is demonstrating that no reasonable person would take the absurd hyperbole in a literal manner.
Stephen Colbert got in trouble on his Comedy Central program when a group of people took satire literally. He addressed the issue while holding up a copy of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal.’
Oh I'm sure the judges know how many people are on earth and would not eat the onion.
What I'm asking is, hypothetically, if a judge is too dim or spiteful or just bored, would law be on his/her side to come after the Onion in some way or another ?
If an actual party to a lawsuit tried to pull something like this, they would probably receive, at minimum, a dressing down from the judge. Litigation is expensive, and deliberately wasting everyone's time with jokes is not viewed kindly. Amicus briefs, especially before the Supreme Court, are essentially glorified op-eds, and you can get away with a lot that would never fly in a standard legal brief. The vast majority of amicus briefs that aren't written on behalf of a state, an important and influential trade association, or respected legal academics are simply ignored, but that's fine because most amicus briefs are written for the sole purpose of tricking donors who don't know what amicus briefs are into thinking your organization is making waves on big important issues.
I'm sure the Supreme Court could probably figure out a way to discourage people from filing these sorts of briefs if it really wanted to(though that potentially raises interesting 1st Amendment issues), but it's a lot easier to just not read the ones they don't think will be helpful.
I don’t think there will be any problems. The briefs are usually read by clerks who are pretty sharp and not at all literal minded.
I think that the actual justifies have had a peek at the brief by now. It’s an interesting event involving them after all.
I suspect they have a sense of humor too. Remember John Roberts asking “Is saying Okay, boomer ageist? I’m asking for a friend?”
That's great!
Here's the link to the actual brief:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf
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.
The best piece of advice I can give, that I probably should have taken more often myself, comes from Warren Buffet: “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.”
You probably should let the idea cook a bit more before you pull the pin.
Good luck. I hope things work out in your favor.
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
I dunno. I take anything I see on Reddit with the same grain of salt that I take with news items from Pravda dot Ru.
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.
Yeah if things are set up so that everything is about dominance, it sucks to to give your enemy a reason to do an jeering end zone celebration.
IMO It shouldn’t have to be that way though.
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 - works very hard - made hard personal sacrifices - took scary risks - was smarter / more talented than most people- and got very lucky. You still need luck.
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
Family chain should be dramatically reduced. There's no reason that "parents and family" should be a given, particularly not in in a case where Immigrant A marries citizen B and then imports her whole family, who then marries someone and imports that whole family, and so on like a Prell commercial. If an immigrant marries a citizen, that's the end of the chain with the exception of minor children that have to be supported by the citizen. No one else.
a) you're missing the endless ongoing chain of family green cards.
b) In my view, sensible immigration reform would be a complete pause for 40 years. Absent that, return all illegal immigrants, no asylum, and any refugees have to be paid for by the organizations that bring them here, including education.
c)Lots,lots less.
One really bad idea: points or "skilled" immigration. Whatever attribute we mandate, other countries will immediately start handing out that attribute (college degrees) like candy. We dont' need skilled immigrants and we're just creating a brain drain.
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."
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 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.
No it was definitely remote controlled anal beads.
Jonathan Haidt, prominent psychologist and author, quits an academic society due to forced wokery.
https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-statement-drives-jonathan-haidt-to-quit-academic-society/
I'm a little disappointed that he didn't try to call their bluff and write "this research is not related to DEI" and force them to make their thinking explicit. He has far more insight into their thinking and milieu than I do, but for precisely that reason I'd like to see as hard evidence as possible that it's as bad as he says.
I really appreciated when Stuart Reges called the bluff on land acknowledgements, but it *wasn't* a bluff and his career has definitely suffered v. mouthing the right words. But if Haidt was going to loudly quit the SPSP over this anyway, I don't see much downside in making people follow through on their purported convictions.
Me too, but for a less presumed badness reason. I expect that they consider DEI things good, and want to promote them, but not that they intend to suppress any other research. As he points out in his article, most research doesn't have anything to do with DEI concerns. So my presumption is that the DEI statement is to allow them to highlight that sort of work. Whereas he seems to take it as a requirement to contort whatever work you're doing into that framework. It's like he missed that "whether" that he quotes right there in his article. It's weird.
I'd bet good money that if he stuck around and paid attention there would be no or at most very limited change from the previous status quo.
Sometimes merely playing the game is losing. You have to realize you're dealing with a religion here, an illegitimate new religion that is simultaneously in outsized control of administrativia and media, and yet stricken with an almost sexual persecution fetish. Engaging with them impregnates them with the illusion, a cruel false hope, that their ideas are worth the brain electricity that carries them.
It won't work too, they have no shame, they fear no contradiction, they're incapable of the faculties of abstraction and self-detachment which are necessary prerequisites to recognising hypocrisy. Their entire moral framework celebrates hypocrisy and contradicting standards, canonizing it as "Punching Up vs. Punching Down".
Paul Graham once wrote about Orthodox Privilege, the inability of the followers of an orthodoxy to understand how stifling their orthodoxy and its defenders are. I think about this a lot whenever I hear or read sentiments like yours.
http://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html
So, is that true of, say, Freddie DeBoer? Andrew Sullivan? Jesse Singal? Sam Harris?
As an anti-woke, I will only come after you for things you DO, regardless of "control" you may or may claim to have.
Kind of ironic to start your comment with mentioning the Outgroup Homogeneity Bias and end it by practicing the bias.
I am no fan of wokies, but the triple-quoted statement of his seems very questionable:
> "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
I know this sounds like the start of a monologue by a mustache-twirling villain in a B-grade movie to portray wokism as bad, but it's the literal words of one of their lead grifters.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Antiracist-Ibram-Kendi/dp/0525509283
Top review by one "Ron Housley" on April 1 2022 (hehe) who gave the book 4 stars out of 5:
>Well, it didn’t take long for Kendi to get right down to his main point: “The remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination” and “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” (p. 19).
That's a quote from Xendi.
Its hard to avoid the weakman fallacy when the other side puts their weakmen at the top of their movement....
I loved his statement. They asked him to Violate a "quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth". 😘👌
Thank you for this. I went to his page (the one he says he actually reads) and emailed him in support.
Has any country ever tried a parliamentary system- where the Prime Minister is not accountable to the people (i.e. the lower house), but instead a different body? Options could include a Senate/council of states, or another non-directly elected body of elites that's effectively running the country. As a fan of 10% Less Democracy, I'd be curious to see other types of parliamentary systems that are less populist- you'd get the benefits of a replaceable head of state, but it'd be less based on the whims of the larger population. You could use a Senate that is elected but just to long terms (like 6-8 years), so that they could take a more longterm view as to the direction of the country.
Relatedly, a surprising number of national Senates are still not directly elected. Canada's is appointed by the PM to a lifetime (!) term, the Germans Irish Spanish and I think a couple others have their state legislatures elect them like the US-pre 17th Amendment. French Senators are picked by some kind of weird electoral college of the whole country's mayors or something. Whatever the House of Lords is. Etc. etc.
The lower house isn't the people. The electorate at large wouldn't have picked Truss but a majority of the House of Commons (agreeing to honour the result of the leadership contest) did.
I'm not sure that somebody who can effectively exersise their powers without the consent of a majority of the legislature ought really be called a (modern) PM in a parliamentary system.
A hostile parliament could refuse to pass the PM's (and their ministers') bills and take away their powers to enact secondary legislation, leaving them with only Royal Prerogative powers
As far as Truss goes, interestingly, the Tories changed their policy and that isn't what happened. Normally they would have the House of Commons pick a new leader, but in an (idiotic) attempt to emulate American primaries, they let the rank & file Tory membership pick their new leader. Apparently the House would've gone with Sunak.
>I'm not sure that somebody who can effectively exersise their powers without the consent of a majority of the legislature ought really be called a (modern) PM in a parliamentary system
This is a fair point, but if you have an equally strong second chamber (like say Australia does), you could argue that you face the same issue if only one chamber is involved in picking the PM. If you required say the two chambers to come together to pick a leader, then they hopefully would have the confidence of both of them- while making the pick a bit less accountable to the lower house (which I think is a good thing)
A majority of the Commons decided to honour the decision of the rank and file membership but any MP can decide to vote with or against Truss. It's just that they might find themselves doing so as independants unless they obey the whip.
In practice, the font of the PM's power is their ability to get legislation passed, therefore the question of who decides the PM is intimately connected with that of who can block legislation (espacially confidence and supply).
A historical example somewhat along the lines you sketch would be how Sweden gradually reformed its executive power from an absolute monarch to its present parliamentary system.
Sweden has a long history of a strong administrative state, which was the first institution to constrain the monarch's power back in the 17th to early 19th century, that is prior to democratic rule. So although the monarch was the absolute executive, the aristocrats used the administrative state to put limits on the king, and occasionally the queen. When many countries experienced revolutions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Sweden rather reformed the government gradually. Between 1809 and 1905 Swedish rule changed and a lot of variants of governance was tried. The one that comes the closest to what you outline I think is from the 1870s until 1905.
The office of the prime minister was created in 1876 when the king no longer was the head of government. The king's power had already been limited when in 1809 the legislative powers and powers of the purse had been moved to a parliament (non-representative but where all estates of the realm were present, and which only convened for a few weeks at a time at irregular intervals). But in 1876 the parliament becomes elected, however, the prime minister is appointed by the king and the prime minister is taken from the civil servants, so ideally he is a competent administrator, and most of the time he had no party affiliation. The parliament constrained the government, but the prime minister formally answered to the king.
In modern terminology this was a kind of technocratic government, granted monetary means by an elected parliament and constrained by laws passed by the parliament, and where the king was the dignified element that in more enchanted times granted legitimacy to the executive. Hard to imagine in the West a dignified person to carry enough legitimacy to be the person to which the executive answers without a popular revolt.
As you can see from the years this arrangement only lasted 30 years after which the government was formed from the parliament and answered to it. One can debate why this arrangement ended since there are both domestic and foreign events taking place at the turn of the century. Ultimately I think demands for liberalization and representation of the urbanizing industrial worker provided the push in this direction.
The US used to have senators appointed by the state governors.
Alas, not quite; that might've stuck around. They were *elected* by their respective State Legislatures.
The French Third Republic comes close, in that de jure it was a Semi-Presidential Republic in which the President (Head of State), the Premier (Head of Government) and Council of Ministers (Cabinet) were jointly responsible in different ways to both houses of a bicameral legislature.
The President was elected to a fixed seven-year term by a "National Assembly" consisting of the members of bother houses of the legislature voting as a combined unitary body (i.e. 500-600 Delegates and ~300 Senators meeting as a single house for this purpose).
The Premier and his Ministers were appointed by the President and served at his pleasure, but required continuous approval by majorities of both houses of the legislature, so defeat in a major policy bill in either house would oblige the Premier and his Ministers to resign and the President to appoint a new Government with the consent of the legislature.
The lower house (Chamber of Deputies) was directly elected on the basis of universal adult male suffrage for a term of up to four years (the President could discover the legislature and call early elections), while the Senate was elected to fixed nine-year terms through an indirect election system that was apportioned to overrepresent rural areas relative to population.
In practice, the President very quickly turned into a powerless figurehead. The Premiership changed frequently (about once every nine months), but most ministers would carry over into the new government, although not necessarily in the same position.
While the Third Republic is commonly viewed as having been deeply dysfunctional, there's a decent argument to be made that that impression is due to a misleading emphasis on its collapse in 1940 following a very shaky period in the later Interwar years and the crisis of France's rapid and shocking defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Weighing in favor of the Third Republic as a relatively successful (by French standards) Constitutional regime is its longevity: at 65 years' duration (1875-1940), it's still the longest-lived French regime since the Ancient Regime ended in 1792. Although the current Fifth Republic, at 63 years and counting, seems likely to overtake it soon. Other post- and para-Revolutionary systems have lasted much shorter periods. In reverse chronological order:
Fifth Republic: 63 years and counting
Fourth Republic: 12 years
Provisional Government (post-WW2): 2 years
Vichy France: 4 years
Third Republic: 65 years
Provisional Government (post-Franco-Prussian War): 5 years
Second Empire: 18 years
Second Republic: 4 years
Orleans Monarchy: 18 years
Bourbon Restoration: 12 years
First Empire: 10 years
First Republic (Consulate): 5 years
First Republic (Directory): 4 years
First Republic (Committee of Public Safety/National Assembly): 3 years
The United States tried a system where the President was elected by the legislatures of the states, through the Electoral College. This is not really a parliamentary system, unless you think of the set of all legislatures as its own sort of parliament. (In a way, the German Bundesrat has some similarities to that idea.) But in any case, it was effectively abolished by all states choosing to make their electors subject to direct election.
Yep, the patchwork cruft of the US system is a graveyard of approaches that seemed like a good idea at the time but ultimately gave way to political forces. See also: the 17th Amendment and direct election of senators.
Was this during the Articles of Confederation time period, or maybe immediately afterwards? I know even post-Articles they made several constitutional changes in quick succession
There was no President under the Articles of Confederation. (There was a "President of the Continental Congress", but he just ran the meetings.)
After the Articles of Confederation era, the Constitution said, and still says, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . . " It's just that every state legislature has decided to have a popular election to choose the electors. I think this happened pretty early on; Wikipedia lists popular vote totals for every presidential election, even the very first one.
Even as late as the 1824 election, several states didn't have a popular election - Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Vermont.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1824_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state
Didn't the President of the Continental Congress also act as a caretaker head of government (i.e. executing the laws and resolutions Congress had passed) when the Congress wasn't in session?
One of the many problems with the articles of confederation was that the states were tasked with executing federal laws (and thus they ignored them whenever the laws were inconvenient)
So Elon M comes with new robot (barely walking) , Boston Dynamics has a robot that does parkour. It will be interesting to watch what they can do this time. Before he always jumped on industries that were non existent or barely existed. I will take my hat off to Tesla team if they can beat BD in their game.
I'm wondering what the problems actually commercially worth solving in robotics are. I'm not convinced that walking is one of them -- as Boston Dynamics has demonstrated, a robot that can walk but can't really do anything else isn't something that people want to buy.
I feel like the worthwhile challenge is cheap, easily programmable robot hands which can displace manual labour in factories. Give me a plastic device that can replace an old woman from Henan province, and make it cheaper than an old woman from Henan province, and you can sell millions of copies. It doesn't need to be able to move around, it just needs to be able to assemble cheap plastic toys.
I agree, but the hands are not the problem. Factories use lots of advanced robotics in production now. What's missing is a sensory system attached to the ability to react in multiple ways to fix a minor problem. If the widget you're assembling gets knocked out of place, it's easy for a human to identify that and put it back in place from a variety of slightly different placements. A robot would have to be programmed to see each and every potential and react accordingly, but that's very hard because the engineer would have to know every possible placement as well as how to fix it. That's millions of dollars to potentially build and program a robot hand, or just hire that old woman to do it for pennies.
Those sensory systems already exist. Robot vision isn't always as good as a human's, but "identify the position and orientation of a widget on a conveyor belt" is a relatively easy challenge that's been solvable for a long time now - the lighting is always consistent, the shape you're looking for is always consistent, you can easily add visual aids to make the robot's life easier, etc. etc.
Baxter is pretty close to OP's vision, actually (a general-purpose robot arm with a vision system, designed to be easily "taught" new actions), and it's over a decade old at this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_(robot)
The article says sales weren't very good, but doesn't go into detail why. My guess is that basic "widget assembly" tasks were already mostly solved by more simple robot arms, while the old ladies you're trying to replace are doing tasks that can't easily be broken down into step by step actions.
Looking at a Boston Dynamics video of their parkour robots, it struck me that they were trying *too* much to copy *human* locomotion. I noticed the robots swinging their arms for balance - but is this necessary? The 'arms' end in stumps, so it's not like they use hands or grasping implements. Do they need the arms, then? Couldn't they have a different balance system?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk
It does seem to me that they are so enamoured with the idea of copying a human perfectly that they are going down a blind alley. We already have humans, come up with a different bipedal motive design. Why does it need to be a gymnast on a balance beam, wouldn't it be better to have something stumpy and nearer the ground that is less likely to topple over and can just stomp over/through obstacles?
EDIT: And here is the problem: they spent years and millions developing a robot that could carry packs for the Army, but it got canned because it was too noisy. The simplest problem was the hardest to solve. So I think they have very fancy research going on paid for by the military, but it's going nowhere as practical use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdm2ggtFvmQ
The advantage of a robot that moves like a human is that it can operate in environments built for humans without needing special accommodations. You don't need to build a special robots-only factory or pack your boxes in a special way for the robot forklifts to handle, just have it walk into the building and start doing stuff.
However, I do note that Spot, a BD robot that's actually being sold commercially, is kind of close to what you're imagining - short, four-legged, with one manipulator arm. It's used for remote inspections - basically just something that can go up and down stairs, open doors, and give you a camera view of whatever you're trying to look at.
BD's goal is not to create the perfect parkour machine, but to create what people envision as a futuristic robot. This is about PR - there's a reason we've seen videos of incredibly proprietary advanced technology instead of that being kept ultra-top-secret until they're ready to sell it for $$$. Maybe it's a funding issue, but they need to impress people more than they need to create a functional robot.
BD's approach is a dead end, and I think they have to know this. The robots use far too much power, so they are either tethered to a power supply or run a few minutes on a battery.
Maybe they're counting on a revolution in battery power, or maybe their goals are about the technology of automated movement and isn't intended to result in an actual independent robot. I could definitely see them selling advanced sensory and reaction technology to someone else who would use it in a completely different way (perhaps in a factory making widgets).
I don't know anything about Elon's robot, but if it's intended for a different purpose (for instance hours of use instead of minutes), I could see it being far less effective at what it does while still serving more purpose.
I'm not sure that the two are comparable - purpose, economics, tech are all quite different. Comparing robots to robots is like comparing cars to cars. The car industry was hardly "barely existent". Also - one year of development versus decades...
It's a shame that the presentation led with the robot. All the really cool stuff came after.
I heard the difference is, that BD runs on hydraulics and drains batteries much faster and is not very precise. Elons robot uses motors for movement. It's a different approach, and hence different outcome.
They're more efficient but only by 50% or so. And the extra compliance hydraulics give you is incredibly useful sometimes. Some people are working on motors that combine the good points of each[1] but until then practical robots are going to be wheeled.
[1] https://www.riserobotics.com/
Yeah, Optimus was indeed Subprime, but BD is not super ahead? Their demos are fantastic, but the productized offering don't look like much, do they?
Fortunately, it looks like the days of Ukrainians needing to flee from their country are coming to an end. But they'll maybe be replaced by the Russians needing to flee from the Ukrainians' country.
And on a practical note, keep in mind that many of those fleeing Russia now were pretty OK with Russia trying to conquer Ukraine and are mostly objecting to having to do the dangerous parts themselves. It's a good thing to give those people an out, even if they are six months late in making the move, but if you're into helping refugees from this war, it's probably best to keep the Ukrainian refugees and the Russian refugees separate. Many of them will have friends and family who were killed by the others' friends and family, and they may not be in a forgiving mood.
One of each came to a local ACX meetup. While I didn't overhear their conversation, it appeared that the risk of bloodshed was minimal.
But this begs the question: should refugees be tested on the ferocity of their grudge, assuming that a grudge beyond a certain threshold becomes a liability to the host country.
Do you have any research to support the claim that many fleeing Russians are or were supportive of Putin? My prior is that the Russians who are sufficiently resourceful to flee to the west are resourceful enough to speak English and consume western media to the point of having a western view on the conflict. This is backed up with anecdotal evidence in the form of a Russian friend who has stayed in Russia until a few days ago, but has been vocally anti-war from the very beginning and claims his social circles have been the same. He only fled–by himself–a few days ago due to pressure from his wife after his friend got snatched by the draft. I suspect leaving your home, family, and potential pets behind is quite difficult for most people.
Probably wishful thinking. Many well-educated Russians may not be exactly pro-war but they often subscribe to the idea of Russian supremacy. They may be against Bucha massacres and still think that Russian state is better and Zelensky should just give up and accept neutrality and closer ties (whatever it means) with Russia to avoid more war casualties etc.
Russians living in Latvia had their own social democratic party (called Harmony). It recently experienced a split and most voters went with a newly formed extremist party (Stability) that clearly announced to be against the EU and closer ties with Russia. It is thought that the old party's condemnation of the war in Ukraine played a big role that voters deserted them. Sorry, but I just don't believe that most educated Russians even living in the EU are actually against Putin's ideology anymore.
An anecdote during my 2013 to 2017 PhD in Germany I met a Russian econometrics PhD student there who was very nationalist, supported (financially) the LPR and DPR separatists and called Ukraininans "peasants". Back then in 2014 she said that Ukraine belonged to Russia.
She did not in fact like Putin but only because in her eyes he was not nationalist enough (back then I guess).
Of the USSR she said that it was bad because it was made to support non-Russians against Russians.
She was clearly clever enough to do PhD level mathematics (maybe not the best student but good enough to get a PhD in maths, so I'd say definitely at least one standard deviation above the mean in IQ).
So, clearly education/above average IQ does not save you from propaganda.
I still think she was an outlier. But I also think that the decision of most central and Eastern European countries (Finland, Baltics, Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, maybe others) not to accept Russian tourists and screen refugees (people who are clearly persecuted in Russia may still come) might be quite wise.
Especially in the Baltics it is a matter of national security. During Soviet times, Russians purposely relocated hundreds of thousands of Russians there and created large minorities in those countries, likely with the aim to eventually replace the local population with ethnic Russians. They did and are doing the same in Crimea with the Tartars, tried the same in Finland before Finland became independent etc.
Russians had 6 months to leave Russia and I know a few who did that on week one. For example a Russian company our company did some consultancy for last year and early this year...they moved the entire company a few days after the invasion, including 40 or so developers. First to Turkey, Armenia and Georgia and since then they have been transitioning to the UK. They also cut ties to all Russian investors (one of Mikhail Fridman's companies held something like 20 percent of this company...but no more) and found investment in the UK....so I think it is a good heuristic to assign a prior to those who come now as being generally supportive of Russian imperialism and not permitting them entry unless evidence shows otherwise.
To play devil's advocate for a moment: would forcing the Russians to stay in Russia maintain an anti-war pressure on the Russian government? It's true that most of the 'resistance' we're seeing today is people trying to personally avoid the draft; neither peaceful nor violent resistance are that common despite the lurid stories they've generated. Still, it's not beyond imagining that denying those men a convenient out could hasten the sort of blowback that Afghanistan had on the Soviet Union.
Russia has no civil society able to exert political pressure as democracies have. None whatsoever. Hoping for a bottom-up, peaceful revolution is a total Western fantasy.
I think it's good for the West to be seen as the good guys in this conflict (and I think it's good to *be* the good guys). Presumably the Russians will close the border anyway when they realize that losing 10x more manpower through emigration than through fighting is unsustainable.
I'm pro-freedom of movement anyway, but I think that letting Russians avoid the draft is not only humanitarian, it also helps gut the Russian economy.
The extent to which Russians accept whatever Putin makes them do is unknown but surely looks like "being slaughtered in another country" is not something that creates a lot of anti-war pressure. And Afghanistan was a 10-year affair on top of the decades of the official ideology everyone stopped buying into long before that. Whether majority of Russians these days are really buying into "holy war against Western satanism" discourse is hard to gauge, but they buy into Russian jingoism and it's a way more powerful drug than the promises of "communism" always around the corner.
Been feeling down lately and this obscure band/song helped me through the worst of it, so here it is, in case someone else can enjoy it, as well. https://youtu.be/muemSk8WqNs
Well... not sure this is appropriate here, but the song made me think of the dreamlike melancholy of Silent Hill 2, so I figured I'd link a cutscene video. Content Warning, maybe? Probably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ejVtrv7yQc
A bit disjointed in places without the gameplay, but I can safely say the quiz show section makes just as little sense in context.
Sorry. Hope you can find some things to laugh about. That always makes me feel better.
Thanks! Cheery entertainment doesn't seem to work for me personally in that case, but it sure does for many. Last time I was down, it was Muse -- Dead Inside that helped. Rammstein is a good way to deafen your sad thoughts.
Haha, I have dark humor, so I get it.
In May, I asked people on an open thread to take a short, unscientific survey. I then turned it into my bachelor thesis in philosophy on emotion, have since graduated with very good grades, and now you can read it here: http://killermilchschnitte.de/uni/BA.pdf. All 67 ACX responses as well as responses from other samples are in the appendix.
The survey questions were "How are you feeling?", "Are you experiencing an emotion right now?" and "How do you know?", I reference the answers when discussing theories of emotion. I'm exploring how emotion can be differentiated from other things and distinctions between different types of emotion.
I also wrote down some less academic observations of the responses, I collected those on substack.
Very cool! Congratulations on your degree! Obviously I haven’t had the chance to read your entire thesis yet, though I skimmed and found it very interesting. I remembered participating and found myself in the text: I’m “Perez,” quoted at 260. Happy to have contributed in some small way to your achievement.
I haven’t read the thesis yet, but checked the references and saw you cite LFB’s work on how emotions are made. What are your thoughts on her book & the theory? I’m finding it very satisfying but wondering how it might fail to satisfy someone who is heavily involved in your discipline.
It's on my reading list, that is to say, I have only read a few sections yet, as I discovered her relatively late into the writing process, but she is my favourite discovery. Since starting with philosophy, I've been asked a couple of times who my favourite philosopher is - some people get really, really into someone in particular - but it hasn't happened for me. Feldman Barrett, however, made me love every sentence of her I've read.
I don't feel heavily involved in the discipline at all - I barely scratched the surface, and in hindsight it was certainly a choice to pick a topic I hadn't learned anything at all about yet, so I had to start from scratch. I cannot meaningfully dissect or prop up any theory with confidence. But to the degree I can be, I'm a fan.
I have a newsletter about three interesting things, once a week. Pretty simple.
https://interessant3.substack.com/
All of my substack eamails ended up in my trash folder. I've solved it by whitelisting them (no word back from support at panix). Has this happened to anyone else?
So I'm getting notifications for posts, but not for replies to comments. I'm hoping I can get this fixed.
Substack complaints/helpful fixes thread
Why did this substack switch back to showing new first as the default comment display setting? I thought we had lobbied pretty hard to get that incredibly toxic default changed. Is there any way to fix this on a user by user basis?
also I am still getting horrible bugs that make comments practically unusable. Whenever somebody replies to one of my comments, it is inpossible to discover the context, I only get the choice of seeing their reply or the huge list. Substack generates permalinks but doesn't give us access to them. Comments aren't indexed by google. All of this makes it literally impossible to have a conversation that goes on for more than one or two replies, as soon as something is not ctrl+f-able from the main list i might as well just give up.
On top of that, trying to find specific things from the past is impossible because the 'activity' page that substack uses is one of those nightmare infinite-load-scrolling pages that doesn't save your position, so every time you click 'back' it resets to the top, then I have to spend about 3 minutes scroll-loading to get back to where I was. It's impossible to open a comment in a new tab, because right clicking in the 'activities' section doesn't actually treat the comment like a link for some reason.
Whatever substack is paying you scott, I would like the opportunity to outbid them for you to move back to a fucking WordPress please
I keep the open thread open in a browser all week. That lets you do a search for "new repl", similar to the old "~new" search. It works well enough. The only wrinkle is that you can't follow continue thread links, or when you come back, everything will be collapsed.
That, and if the computer feels like rebooting itself, you lose the record of new replies.
The e-mail I get with a comment always has a link directly to that comment, and another link directly to the one that it is replying to. Unfortunately, each of these links only works about 80% of the time.
To tack on an unrelated problem: This susbtack is the only one that does not show up in my Substack Inbox (desktop web UI). I got in contact with a support person through the substack subreddit, but they stopped replying without ever solving the issue.
I'm pretty sure that comment ordering defaults to new-first for open threads, and chronological for others. Which I believe is specifically how Scott wanted it and seems reasonable to me.
I do agree that it would be nice to have more functional context links.
I was planning to make the stew this week too.
I have a suspicion that it remains the top post on that substack not because of any particular transcendence, but because it contains the author's announcement of another high-profile project.
But I enjoy beans, and the author's attitude towards beans. So we shall see.
That seems very faint praise about the stew! I was intrigued because I love dill, but putting it with cabbage doesn't work for my mental taste buds. Has anyone else tried it, is it really "yeah it's okay but I wouldn't go out of my way to make it" recipe?
Cabbage and dill together in soup is a classic Eastern European combination (and something I've been eating my entire life). I don't know why it doesn't work for you, but it works for millions of people.
I think for Irish tastes, pickling cabbage isn't a thing, as is putting in strong herbs when cooking it. Traditionally we do it very basically: boil salted/smoked meat (bacon, corned beef) and then cook chopped up cabbage in the meat water, serve up with boiled potatoes and parsley sauce. Can use kale instead of cabbage, and if doing mashed potatoes, mix in the kale or cabbage to make colcannon. Everybody has their own family version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colcannon
The cabbage in this stew is white cabbage (I am presuming) which I tend to find somewhat bland, I prefer stronger-flavoured green cabbage (or cavolo nero which is gorgeous and I only found a year or so back in a local supermarket, it's hard to get it down here).
I do like pickles and vinegar and dill, I am indifferent about beans (I'd be more accustomed to using potatoes or pearl barley as the thickening agent), and the peasant part of my brain is going "where's the meat?" though I imagine it's the beans that act as the protein as well as thickening.
Looking at the recipe without the tiresome cookery blog talk, it's mostly the fried onions that add taste to this. Beans and cabbage are bland enough that it's the vinegar and dill doing the work of flavour, and then the onions (as well as whatever stock you use). As I said, I don't have the palate raised on things like sauerkraut or pickled vegetables (apart from pickled onions and mixed pickles) so the mental flavour balance in my head is see-sawing between "dill and vinegar, yes" and "cabbage???"
I think this stew succeeds or fails on how it is cooked, if you get the balance right - not too much salt - you need to be careful with the salt, the recipe calls for adding salt at every addition of ingredients and that could end up way too salty, not too much (or too little) vinegar depending on taste, what stock you use, and how well-cooked the cabbage is. Like all stews, it probably benefits from being allowed stand for the flavours to settle and might be better the day after. I might try making it, I don't know. I think this counts as "hearty comfort food" not "best stew you ever tasted", but this is the season for "comfort food like your mother used to make".
Simplified recipe (without cookery blog talk):
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion
Salt and black pepper
2 15-ounce cans white beans such as navy, butter, cannellini, drained and rinsed
4 cups vegetable or chicken stock
¼ of a head of cabbage, core removed, coarsely chopped (roughly 8–10 ounces)
1 tablespoon white distilled vinegar
1 cup dill, coarsely chopped
1. Heat butter and olive oil in a medium pot over medium–high heat. Add onion and season with salt and pepper. Cook until browned, 5-8 minutes.
2. Set aside ¼ of fried onions for topping.
3. Add the beans to the pot and season with salt and pepper. Using a wooden spoon or spatula, smash some of the beans into the pot, breaking them (this is what will thicken your stew).
4. Add the broth (or water + bouillon) and bring to a simmer. Simmer 15–20 minutes or so, depending on desired texture (thicker or more liquid). Add the cabbage and vinegar, stirring to wilt. Simmer until the cabbage is tender, 10–15 minutes. Season with salt, pepper, and more vinegar to taste.
5. Remove from heat and stir in half the dill. Divide among bowls and top with more dill and reserved onions. Top off with small amount of softened butter and black pepper.
I mean, lots of people like pickles, and I don't. (My husband, who's into borscht, liked it more than I did, I think.)
FWIW, I think I didn't do a good job making the stew, but I'd be a little surprised if its substantially better when well-prepared. My guess is that a bunch of people just really like dill (and vinegar and beans). [I was expecting maybe ~16 people to come, and so I made a 4x recipe, which, combined with the other food, meant I wasn't paying close enough attention, and oversalted half of it.]
I am just out on cabbage as a whole in anything. One of those things I think people would never start eating if it wasn’t already something people were habituated to back in an era when they had no choice.
It's not my favourite vegetable, but I'll take (green) cabbage over lettuce of any variety. I suppose that's penny-pinching mindset though: it's not so much that the taste or texture are incredible (they're fine), more that a single good-sized head lasts me for days. Sometimes a whole week if it's big enough. That's very efficient use of my leafy-vegetable dollars, and chopping hassle is minimal. Whereas a bag of spinach or whatever...paying so much for so little, sigh.
Of course, it's all just poor Western substitutes for the Asian vegetables I grew up with...but I refuse to pay American-grocer prices for things I know I can get 2x (usually even more than that) cheaper at a proper Chinese grocery. I have a bitter little laugh inside every time I sell a precious little bag containing maybe 4 "baby" bok choy to some poor rube customer. Almost a dollar each...
Lovely green spring cabbage and a bit of salt bacon and the floury spuds?
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-20386054.html
Brassicas and grasses are the basis for almost all of the human diet.
Yeah and cabbage is the litteral worst par tof brassicas. Look at what people are tlaking about here. Surkraut? Pickle cabbage? Those are punishments not foods.
I feel deeply sorry for anybody who cannot enjoy sauerkraut. Have you ever had a reuben?
You’re crazy man. Cabbage is really great. I never ate cabbage as a kid, just wasn’t on the menu, but when I learned to cook as a young adult I fell in love.
Hear, hear! Cabbage is awesome. and versatile! You can use it to make stew, soup, cabbage rolls, coleslaw, pickled cabbage...
You are missing out on a lot of great Korean food.
Nah, most things with cabbage are better if replace it. No reason to be tradtional with food in 2022. A little bit of cabbge can be ok, but if cabbge is a main element in your dish it probably sucks.
In Roald Dahl's marvellous boyhood autobiography "Boy", young Roald's Maths Master, Corkers, objects to the boys' flatulence but blames the school for feeding them cabbage.
I love cabbage. Roasted, pickled, or even just shredded fine as a topping or in a salad.
Sauerkraut is marvellous, but like Marmite (also marvellous), it's not for everyone.
Trevor Klee recently wrote a critique of the FTX Future Fund, and in particular the Clearer Thinking regranters, for giving out too much money too quickly and creating bad effects for the EA community:
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/xprjul/is_it_me_or_are_the_proposed_clearer_thinking/
I think Trevor has quite an interesting point: "the insane amounts of money they’re spending is changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money, to being one where you expect to get money." And this might attract grifters and rent-seekers.
There was lots of good discussion on Reddit and I'm interested in hearing more views. My own view is that it might be OK for most of the grants to be wasted if a few are hugely successful, but from what I've seen of the Clearer Thinking finalist list, it seems like there could be better ways to allocate money. In other words, Trevor pointed out:
"When you start giving out millions of dollars and ask for it to be used ASAP, there will be very few “shovel-ready” projects that can use the money. Concrete ideas are difficult to implement, take time to plan, and need and use money in stages. You know what doesn’t take time to plan and can use a lot of money quickly? Hiring a bunch of people to write think pieces."
The idea that prescience and free will were incompatible always struck me as nonsense.
Free will is a property of the actor's perception, not that of an observer.
Postulating a universe in which free will was real, and a person had their entire life observed and recorded, a person in the future watching that recording would be able to "predict" what the person in the past would do at any point. That's not a paradox, and it's not a disproof of free will, it's pointing out that it's a language game masquerading as profundity. See also: The Chicken and The Egg.
Can we get some discussion going about Joseph Henrich's book _The WEIRDest People in the World_?
Quick summary: Westerners are very psychologically unusual compared to other societies throughout the world, and this is responsible for the incredible success that western countries have experienced. The usual psychological outlook of westerners was caused by the Catholic Church's ban on cousin marriage during the middle ages, which had the side effect of breaking European clan hierarchies, and forcing westerners to adopt more a more individualistic mindset.
I find the theory fascinating, but I'm not completely convinced. I'm waiting for more evidence. (Maybe someone in this thread can provide it.) But this is one of those things that is "huge if true", so I keep thinking about it.
One counterargument that I've never seen brought up is that Hinduism has also forbidden cousin marriage, and for longer than Catholicism.
Starting from the Gautama Dharmasutra (600 BCE-200 BCE) and reaffirmed in the Yajnavalkya Dharmashastra and all subsequent legal authorities, marriages between descendants of a 7th-degree ancestor on the paternal side and a 5th-degree ancestor on the maternal side are forbidden.
(The Manusmriti only forbids marriage between those sharing a 3rd-degree maternal ascendant, but traditional commentaries on it say that the 5th-generation rule overrides it.)
The Yajnavalkya Dharmashastra says that this rule applies to all four varnas—unlike the much-better-known ban on marrying anyone of one’s father’s gotra, which only applies to the twice-born castes.
This rule appears to have been--and still be--observed in practice among North Indian Hindus, although South Indian Hindus allow and indeed encourage marriage to cross-cousins. There was a fascinating Quora post asking whether Hinduism forbids cousin marriage with North and South Indians duking it out on this issue.
This is just a bad summary of the book. Henrich finds a correlation between WEIRD traits in populations, prevalence of cousin marriage and years of exposure to the Church, and theorizes a causation, but if someone demonstrated that this is just a coincidence and the causal mechanism was entirely different, it wouldn't much affect his overall argument or the about 95% of the book that's about other things.
And I have yet to see a criticism of the book that points out a different causal mechanism or disputes that the correlation exists; the complaints they do have strike me as more or less irrelevant.
I'd like to see your attempt at a summary of the book.
OK, I'll give it a try:
"How people think is shaped, in large part, by culture, and people in western societies are markedly unusual compared to the humanity at large - highly individualistic, analytic and systematic. This seems to be because sometime during the middle ages, its former larger tribal/clan/family structures based on kinship, interpersonal relations and roles and group loyalty have been gradually replaced by (increasingly) voluntary associations of individuals/nuclear family households, based (necessarily) on universalist principles and the rule of law. Those have subsequently proven highly adaptive. (And are now spreading throughout the world, but culture changes slowly and the spread is uneven, mostly concentrated in globally-connected urban centres, so psychological differences between societies remain high - unfortunately it's the urbanites who are most likely to be tested by psychologists, which may create a false impression that western personality traits are a human universal rather than culturally acquired.) They (paradoxically?) increase cooperation and social trust, in particular within groups in the presence of inter-group competition, but also in general, by raising the importance of individual credibility, replacing socially-enforced conformity with intentional morality, and discouraging zero-sum games and risky all-or-nothing behavior. They also facilitate specialization (as the people need to distinguish themselves from the crowd), innovation (as individuals are quicker to adapt to new technology than groups), and spread of knowledge (through long-distance networking in voluntary societies of self-selected like-minded people).
That change, in turn, seems to have been facilitated by the moral package spread by the Catholic Church (likely in self-interest, as it depended on donations from wealthy individuals) - which includes, e.g., individual ownership, monogamy, and a ban on cousin marriage."
This (slightly) downplays the space the discussion of cousin marriage is given in the book, but I think correctly represents its (marriage's) importance to its (book's) overall thesis. Certainly more correctly than (disappointingly common) takes that focus on cousin marriage as a single explanatory factor and ignore the important parts discussing the much more direct causes (and effects) of the western societies' uniqueness.
(Also, sorry if my earlier post sounded harsh, I was not necessarily reacting to your words in particular, but to the whole thread that resulted, and the familiar missings of the point it contains.)
Thanks. That summary legitimately was better than mine.
That sounds like one hell of a just-so story but a fundamentally wrong way to do history.
The question of why Europe at first lagged but eventually overtook civilisations further east is a good question, but the answer is always going to be ridiculously complicated, you're not going to get something that fits on a t-shirt. There's vast numbers of advantages the West had over the East, just as there's vast numbers of advantages the East had over the West, and what happened in history is that the advantages of the West just happened to outweigh the advantages of the East.
Banning cousin marriage _might_ be a factor that helped out the West, but I really doubt it's a significant enough factor that without it we'd all be speaking Chinese or Persian. I don't think any one factor is nearly that strong with the possible exception of climate, or the economics of wheat vs rice.
Book recommendation: Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: the West vs the Rest. Tries to identify some of the important factors which led to the victory of the West over the Rest. Certainly doesn't capture everything, but is more extensive than "partial ban on cousin marriage".
>but the answer is always going to be ridiculously complicated
You should check out this article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/14/how-likely-are-multifactorial-trends/
I think it provides a very convincing argument that you are wrong. Simpler explanations are always going to be more likely than complicated explanations. If you disagree with this, could you explain why?
I have that Niall Ferguson book in my reading queue! I'll have to move it up in queue now.
Thanks for that; I vaguely remember that article.
However I don't think it applies in this case, that argument applies when we're looking at changes in a single system, not when we're comparing two very different systems. Comparing the pre-1994 US to post-1994 US, single-factor explanations make more sense than multi-factor explanations because, as is argued, "If ten different factors caused the decline in crime, that would require that ten different things suddenly changed direction, all at the same time in 1994. That’s a pretty big coincidence". I accept this argument.
But if we're comparing two very different things, then this argument doesn't apply. Comparing (say) England 1-2000AD to Persia 1-2000AD, there's clearly very many important differences between the countries, so the "coincidence" argument doesn't apply.
(Comment 2/2) Two anthropologists also worth looking into before reaching a conclusion on Henrich's thesis:
Emmanuel Todd https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2013-willy-emmanueltoddlinventiondeleurope.html & https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=real-estate_papers
Alan Macfarlane, less well-known, wrote a book titled The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition. Here is his journal article with key findings: https://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Origins_HI.pdf
I keep looking for someone to offer an intelligent summary of all of these theses. Anyone, please let me know if you know of such.
A year ago Scott linked to a critical review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28QL9PWWETSD6
Review of review here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september/comments#comment-2984646
Excerpts (in case of paywall) from other critical reviews I've read:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/20/history-cliodynamics-weird-turchin/
"While the church did indeed attempt to influence the marriage rules in Europe, its obsession with regulating the institution was not, contrary to what Henrich claims, a Christian invention. The Romans did the same, attempting to control various minutiae of how people married, as such examples like the lex Papia Poppaea, a 9 A.D. law, show. In fact, Christianity owes many of its precepts on marriage to Roman law, in which polygynous marriages were already prohibited. While the centerpiece of Henrich’s thesis, first-cousin marriages, were permitted, they were actually rarely practiced. If Henrich’s team had consulted a historian, they could also have learned that just because a church figure said something in the Early Middle Ages didn’t mean people obeyed—or even that it represented the opinion of the whole church. The historian Peter Brown has coined the term 'micro-Christendoms' to describe the stunning diversity of views and interpretations that permeated the first millennium of Christianity. Most of the promulgations cited by Henrich as examples of a unifying program are local synods, letters directed to local rulers or ecclesiastics, and only a handful had even a pretense of being widespread. Paradoxically, at the point when the church started to appear more universal, the strictest prescriptions against cousin marriage were already gone. What unites Henrich and many others is confusing prescriptive sources for reality. What is forbidden is rarely banished, and what is permitted is not always practiced. Medieval sources are particularly tricky in that respect."
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-joseph-heinrich-review-daniel-a-segal/
"Henrich's explanation for this European divergence is that starting around 500, Western Christianity adopted rules about marriage that resulted in the 'dissolution of intensive kin-based institutions', thus singularly transforming European society by 1250 or so. Henrich designates this intervention as Western Christianity's 'marriage and family program', or MFP; its core element, he tells us, was the banning of 'cousin marriages' extending as far as the sixth degree. In terms of the MFP's social consequences in these centuries, Henrich foregrounds Europeans travelling beyond their own villages to find a spouse who was not a cousin, thus making Europeans more worldly. Yet rather than supporting this claim about travel with social historical data, Henrich provides the calculation that 'someone looking for a spouse in the 11th century would have had' to exclude some '2,730 cousins'--a figure based on including all cousins up to the sixth degree, as if people followed Church law to the letter, even though such genealogical knowledge must have been extremely rare. By Henrich's own model, moreover, changing the limit to cousins of the second degree would reduce the number of persons to be avoided to a seemingly manageable 10, even without much travel. Henrich also seems to shield the claim about increased travel from evidentiary testing by allowing that the Church was 'likely' indulgent of elites and indifferent to popular strata, meaning that this impact of the MFP would have emerged 'from the middle outward'--thus limiting the impact to a very small stratum for some unspecified span time. And this narrower claim also exceeds any evidence Henrich provides. What in any case is more important for Henrich are psychological changes he claims were induced by the MFP's un-kin-ing of Europe. The MFP made Europeans, he says, more individualistic because they were unfettered from kinship groups; more analytical because they saw themselves apart from larger wholes; more interested in producing outcomes beneficial to others because they had to form social ties for themselves; and more drawn to universal laws because they were less anchored to a kin group. Henrich again provides scant historical evidence for these claims."
Have you tried finding five people in the West and telling them that Protestants or Pagans are clannish and hierarchical but Catholics are free-thinking and individualistic? How long did they laugh when you did so? The stereotypes run the other way, though I've seen no convincing evidence that the stereotypes are true either.
The hardest part to stomach about the WEIRD argument is that it's hard to square with the West's history of the West. Despite having funded Copernicus's research that lead to De Revolutionibus, the Church would eventually dig in hard against the Scientific Revolution. They even made an example of Galileo, and while he was a dick the whole episode was really about establishing the Church's originalist credentials in the face of Protestant critiques that were landing with the general public. The Church became one of the arch-enemies in the eyes of the Enlightenment; the French Revolution threw out the monarchy AND the Church. The story we tell ourselves is that the Enlightenment is the foundation of who we are, the idea that one of its chief opponents is somehow its architect is ... suspicious at best, and requires some very strong evidence.
It also doesn't account for us Jews. We did not pay much heed to the dictates of the Catholic Church. We are to this day proudly clannish in some ways, but fiercely individualist in others, and have won ourselves an outsized role in science and culture despite prejudice.
>Have you tried finding five people in the West and telling them that Protestants or Pagans are clannish and hierarchical but Catholics are free-thinking and individualistic? How long did they laugh when you did so?
When you put it like that it sounds silly, but if you were to instead find people and them that people in countries that were at one point Catholic are free-thinking and individualistic, and that people in countries that were never under the control of the Catholic Church are clannish and hierarchical, the result is more ambiguous.
Sure, the time period of the WEIRD argument is mostly before the Reformation, but it would be strange enough to demand an explanation if the Church somehow lost the thread. If all that was keeping people WEIRD via abstaining from cousin marriage was the Church, wouldn't it be strange if after the Reformation the WEIRDest people weren't the most Catholic? Are France, Italy, and Spain significantly WEIRDer than the US, Britain, and Germany?
Now, sure, it's hypothetically possible that the same individualism that the Church allegedly nurtured pushes people away from Catholicism and towards Protestantism, and therefore the Church doesn't get credit for work it did, but that's a pretty big claim that would require pretty big evidence.
After all, these effects could be pretty fast from a historical perspective. In America, some communities in Appalachia were isolated by the evolution of railroads and for a century or some became notably inbred. Morgan County, Kentucky, for example, had around 7.6% consanguineous marriages in 1830, 18% in 1850, a peak at 21.2% in 1870, declined from 1890 to 1930, and leveled off sometime between 1930 and 1950 at around 8-9%, and then dropped to 3.6% in 1970.
So if the Church had been enforcing these policies for a millennia, and consanguinity matters and can change significantly in under a century, why did Europe only start to catch up and pass the rest of the world with the Age of Exploration in the mid-1400s? And why do the areas of the strongest continued Church presence not continue to dominate the WEIRDness charts?
>that's a pretty big claim that would require pretty big evidence.
It doesn't seem that big of a deal to me. History seems full of instances of an organization naively promoting things that would later lead to the downfall of said organization.
>So if the Church had been enforcing these policies for a millennia, and consanguinity matters and can change significantly in under a century, why did Europe only start to catch up and pass the rest of the world with the Age of Exploration in the mid-1400s? And why do the areas of the strongest continued Church presence not continue to dominate the WEIRDness charts?
There's a difference between "Some people in Kentucky married their cousins." and "You live in a clan based society where all marriages are arranged marriages with someone in your extended family, and there is no one outside of this system."
Culture takes a very long time to change. How long has the developing world been taking to develop? This is not a change that happens in a generation. And this is not even taking into account that the church wasn't always able to successfully enforce its marriage rules. The theory, if true, involves a long, slow grind over centuries.
This feels off. Let me explain.
Historically, the big European powerhouses were...kinda backwaters. Britain and Germany were the literal edges of the world during Roman Times and they weren't big powerhouses throughout the dark and medieval ages. No one from China or the Middle East or India, the big historical power/science centers, cared what Alfred the Great or his cohorts thought and they certainly weren't afraid of them militarily. For context, William the Conqueror invaded England with 7-10k dudes and the height of military tech was calvary and chainmail, while in the Jin-Song wars 70 years later in China, both sides would regularly field armies of 100k+ using proto-firearms.
It's hard to say when this flip happened but the flip was probably sometime around the Siege of Vienna in 1529. It's not like European forces were obviously better than Islamic or Chinese counterparts but they were comparable. I couldn't tell you exactly when the flip happened but...I don't think the English were hugely ahead of, say, the Qing Dynasty during the English Civil War, but sometime in the 1700s the balance of power flipped and it flipped hard. British forces were wrecking the Indians and the Chinese hard during the early 19th century.
And that's where this feels wrong. If there's a cultural effect here, and there probably is, it feels really weird to point to Catholic teachings since those teachings didn't really have positive effects in the 800s or the 1200s. Instead, the cultural trends we tend to see in Europe from, say, 1500-1800 are Protestantism, secularism, and science. To be fair, a lot was happening then and there's a ton of debate about which of those mattered, but Catholic marriage practices that had been in place for at least a millennium feel off.
TLDR; Europe didn't matter historically until the 17th-18th century and the cultural changes we saw at that point aren't Catholic.
"I don't think the English were hugely ahead of, say, the Qing Dynasty during the English Civil War, but sometime in the 1700s the balance of power flipped and it flipped hard. British forces were wrecking the Indians and the Chinese hard during the early 19th century."
Well, look at the Jesuits in China. They got great influence with particular ministers because they had access to The Latest Shiny Tech And Theories when it came to astronomy. They were producing better calendars and predicting eclipses more accurately.
And for a combination of reasons, the opposition very much did not like the influence these foreigners were gaining in the court, and trying to convert the Chinese to their strange religion. So they threw the baby out with the bathwater - they didn't kick out the Jesuits and Christianity but keep the science, they threw out this foreign nonsense as well and compelled adherence to traditional Chinese methods - which had fallen behind badly by this stage, and were getting more and more incorrect.
The Pope was able to correct the calendar in Europe and get most of the Catholic nations to adopt it - the Protestant ones were slower because "the pope is not the boss of us" and the Orthodox church territories were also "the pope very much is not the boss of us" so they stuck to the Julian calendar. But the reason you, me and everybody else uses the Gregorian calendar is because of Pope Gregory XIII, and it was motivated by religious reasons - to calculate and fix the date of Easter, which was being celebrated at different times in different places.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/christoph-and-the-calendar/
The Chinese, for whatever reason, stagnated, and worse - they chose stagnation as a rejoinder to foreign cultural influences.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/the-seventeenth-century-chinese-civil-servant-from-cologne/
From what I've read, the timing doesn't work out; the breakdown of clans and end of cousin marriage happened during or after the Industrial Revolution. In the U.S., the advent of rail initially increased cousin marriage because men who had moved far away for work were able to get wives sent from back home instead of settling for a local wife. (Personal anecdote: my grandfather's family was known for their distinctive ears, and he inherited this trait from both parents.)
I wrote a short post riffing off the WEIRD theory. What's most interesting to me is not cause but what we have gained and what we may have lost by the end of kinship in the WEST.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/weird-kinship-the-queen-the-harfoots
I enjoyed the post, thanks.
Surely there were a lot of areas where there were a bunch of competing states. Why didn't the enlightenment happen there?
I wonder if we could prove or disprove the clergy thing? Were there areas that were Catholic, but that still had no "clergy"?
If you come up with an alternative theory about how the enlightenment was caused by something the Catholic Church did, I think there is a lot of overlap with Henrich's theory, and you could use all the evidence that he gathered about how the enlightenment happened in Catholic areas.
Any home energy geeks want to give me tips on hunting a stubborn energy vampire?
I have a Tesla system with solar panels, a Powerwall, and a "Home Energy Gateway" box that ties the whole thing together. In the Tesla app I get a "real time" view of how much energy the house is using, how much the panels are producing, whether energy is going to/from battery or grid, etc. And there's a stats tab that gives readings of home energy use in an every-5-minutes timeseries, rounded to the nearest 0.1 kW, as well as daily, weekly, etc total usage in kWh.
I noticed from looking at these stats that even when I turn off "almost everything" to go on vacation, the house still uses 7-8 kWh per day, and the 5-minutely load never drops below 0.2 kW even in the dead of night. Now some of this is the largish built-in fridge and chest freezer, but they'd have to be reeeeally inefficient to account for that much usage, and more to the point, those are intermittent and not constant loads. I wanted to know what else was going on; I don't mind using a lot of energy on actual useful things, but I hate wasting it, and I like understanding my house better as a system even though it'll likely not save enough to be "worth my time".
So, one recent weekend, I did some experimentation with "really turning off everything." I got smart plugs for the appliances I know use standby power, and turned those off, after verifying that the power usage measured through the plugs wasn't anywhere near sufficient to account for the observed load. I turned off all lightswitches and thermostats, of course. And to catch the remaining stuff I went to the breaker panel and turned off almost all the breakers (exceptions discussed below). And still the real-time and 5-minutely load did not fall below 0.2 kW.
I'm now stumped. Here are my remaining hypotheses:
1. It's one of the exceptions, such as:
(a) the Internet router, which I can't turn off because then the data reporting would stop-- but the smart plug on that power strip shows a ~20W steady state draw, not nearly enough.
(b) An old security system control box, the kind that calls out to a company, which I inherited from the previous owner and haven't used in years, having installed modern DIY security instead. I can't tell which circuit that's on-- but it's hard to believe it would use a lot of standby power.
(c) Something else I'm just forgetting. I turned off the hot tub, heat pump, and EV charger all at the breakers, so it's not any of those, for example, but maybe I'm overlooking a common cause.
2. It's the Tesla system itself using all that constant standby power. I asked Tesla support about this and they couldn't give me a quantitative estimate for their system's standby usage-- not "that's confidential" but "we don't know"-- which surprised me.
3. It's measurement error.
Anyone have any ideas on which of these is most likely, whether there are other possibilities, and how to do better tests to find out? I could get a Sense or similar home energy monitor, but it's not clear what that would give me that I can't find out by turning breakers on and off and looking at the Tesla app stats.
How large are your batteries? You should expect batteries to self-discharge at about 1% per day. So if you had 800 kWh of batteries that would do it.
800 kWh of batteries is approaching utility scale. A Tesla Powerwall is more like 13 kWh.
Re 1a, can you turn off the router and use mobile phone data?
Several things could be contributing to this - for one, the Powerwall storage is DC, and to power your house it has to pass through an inverter to become AC, which represents an efficiency loss, sometimes quite a substantial one. I have a non-Tesla solar charging/battery backup system, and the wattage it reports being used tends to be 30 - 50% higher than that reported by a killawatt type power meter. So 20W being used for the router might represent 30W coming out of the battery. Add up 20W for the router, another 20W for the home security system, another, say, 50W for stuff you're forgetting, or that uses standby power even when "turned off" (eg smart LED bulbs, which consume power even when "off", etc), multiply by the inverter losses, add in the usage of the powerwall itself, and 200W doesn't seem out of the question.
Has it never occurred to you that the Tesla "Home Dashboard Box" might be the culprit? Either using that much energy itself, or misreporting loads in some subtle (and likely non-malicious) way.
Auto mechanics know that when chasing down "parasitic drains" aka battery-killing gremlins, trust and assume NOTHING. Disconnect everything while watching your own meter all the while. This becomes nearly impossible when Auto Manufacturers have built-in monitoring and status systems that are either hidden, or carry Dire Warnings to Never Disconnect. What is Tesla's main consumer product?
My bet is system overhead from the Tesla system. Of course, if the solar panels are producing, easy to cover the 7-8kWh every day....
These hidden systems are why I drive a 50-year-old truck. No electronics, no invisible smog sensors, no completely changing my vehicle over wi-fi.
I've seen too many default backdoors and secret surveillance systems working in the software/networking space, to EVER trust a "networked" consumer product to do ANYTHING vital, or life-sustaining.
BRetty
That's quite a snarky way of asking whether the possibilities that the OP listed as options 2 and 3 occurred to them.
I went through something like this when I got my house. The most exciting part of the adventure was finding a live wire just sitting in my attic not connected to anything, laying in some batting. Anyway...
What about a pipe heater? Switched on for winter once but then forgotten about?
Alternatively, a dehumidifier in your crawl space? Or a burned out sump pump that's running continuously?
Ancient security systems can have a lot of weird behavior. The one at my mother's house started randomly chirping once every 1-3 hours before we realized where it was coming from. Seems like its backup battery died and it was telling us about it. Of course my mom didn't know anything about this so she just lived with it for about 4 years before we found a switch hidden in some closet that ran up to it in the attic to turn it off with.
Regarding measurement: can you read your power meter directly? I have a digital one so it's pretty easy to see the 0.1 kwhs tick by.
You may want to take one of those electrician's wands, turn off every breaker, and see if you can find anything still live. Maybe experiment with turning on a breaker at a time and confirming it only lights up the things you expect, as well.
Do you have any outdoor lighting? An outdoor light that got left on is easy to overlook during the day, and unless you change the fixtures or bulbs in the last few years, they're likely to be incandescent or halogen. A pair of 100W halogen floodlights would work out to exactly the 0.2 kW minimum usage you're seeing.
Similarly, a light fixture that got left on in a rarely-observed utility space (attic, garage, basement, etc) could also be using a substantial amount of energy.
For measurement error and baseline usage, you can try turning off the system at your breaker box (there should be a breaker where it feeds into your main power, if it works like my Sunrun system) and manually reading your electric meter at timed intervals.
For that matter, use a phone camera to make sure that your fridge light goes out when the door is closed.
You may already know a lot of this, but here is some information for anybody else who sees this comment and is interested in learning about energy efficiency.
Electricity has two major parameters. The first is current (I, measured in Amps) which is a flow: charge per unit of time. The second is voltage (V, measured in Volts), which is energy per charge. Multiply the two together and you get power (P, measured in Watts), which is a flow of energy per unit of time. In order to get to energy, you need to multiply power by time, and the standard unit of energy for utility power is the watt-hour.
Utility power comes in AC, which means both current and voltage are sine waves that vary with time, so in order to get power, you have to multiply (instantaneous) current and voltage and also integrate with time over a full cycle, which in the US is 1/60 of a second. To make things easy for users, most power meters will report a number for current and voltage that has been scaled by just the right factor so that the numbers that they report for current and voltage can be multiplied to obtain the power, no integration required. But for the following discussion, it is important to think in terms of the instantaneous current and voltage.
A resistor has the property that the current it draws will always be proportional to the voltage applied across it, so a resistor given electricity will always draw power.
Inductors and capacitors have the property that the current they draw is proportional in magnitude to but ¼ cycle out of phase with the voltage applied across them, if that voltage is an AC sine wave. So when an inductor or capacitor is exposed to AC, half of the time, the instantaneous voltage and current it is experiencing are in the same direction, meaning it will draw power from the source, and half of the time, the instantaneous voltage and current it is experiencing will be in opposite directions, meaning it is actually sending power back to the source. So inductors and capacitors do not consume power, but they do temporarily draw, store, and supply power. Even though the net power is zero, they still have power flowing through them.
At least, that is true for ideal, perfect inductors and capacitors. Any real device (not made from a superconductor) will have some internal resistance, so any inductor or capacitor connected to an AC system will waste a small amount of power
Many household appliances have transformers, which convert the relatively high voltage that outlets provide to a smaller, safer voltage that is easier to handle inside the appliance. A transformer is two inductors connected together. When the appliance is not on, the second inductor isn’t doing anything, so there is just the primary inductor connected to the outlet, not drawing very much power except for the small amount it dissipates due to it’s internal resistance. When the appliance is turned on, the second inductor starts interacting with the first inductor in a way that beings the voltage and current of the primary inductor more into alignment, meaning first inductor starts drawing power from the outlet, which is fed into the appliance.
The important thing to realize is that, even though the appliance is off, if its transformer is still connected to power, even though it is drawing only a very small amount of power, it is still drawing large current. The inductor is connected to the power, meaning it has an AC voltage applied to is, and an inductor with an AC voltage will draw AC current. The current and voltage are out of phase, so little power is consumed, but there is still current flowing through the wires between the breaker box and the transformer – nearly as much current flows through the wires as when the appliance is on at full power. The wires between the breaker box and the appliance are probably not superconductors, so they will have a small but noticeable resistance, and the current flowing through them will dissipate power. Remember, current and voltage across a resistor is always in phase, so current flowing through a resistor always consumes power.
This is one of the major reasons appliances subtly waste energy. If they have a transformer connected to voltage, they will draw current, and waste a small amount of energy in the resistance of the wires. In order to not be a power vampire, an appliance with a transformer needs to have needs to have a switch break the circuit between the plug and the transformer. This switch needs to be large enough to handle the full power demand of the appliance; a dinky push button on a washing machine isn’t enough – it needs to be more like a light switch. Or, the dinky switch needs to trigger a relay that breaks the circuit to the transformer. You might be able to hear the relay click as it turns on, so if you appliance emits a clicks when it is turned on, or if it has a big chunky switch, it is probably not a power vampire. If it doesn’t you could check to see whether there is any small box or component on the power wires between the plug and the transformer, but it could be difficult to tell for sure if you aren’t experienced with electronics.
There is another, smaller cause of power vampirism: any and every wire connected to AC power will emit electromagnetic radiation / radio waves, simply by virtue of being connected to AC power. Just like any real inductor, capacitor, or transmission wire will have a small amount of resistance, any wire will also have a very small amount of unavoidable self-inductance and a small, unavoidable amount of capacitance between itself and everything else. This happens whether or not the wire is connected to anything on the other end. So simply having outlets installed in your house will draw a tiny bit of power as long as the breakers are closed. I suspect this amount of power is so tiny as to be completely relevant to household usage, relative to the transformer passive draw, but I don’t know for sure.
So to actually answer your question:
1) Check whether there are any transformers still connected to power, on the circuits you haven’t turned off at the breaker. The transformer for your fridge will most likely always be connected, so that is a candidate for your power sink. If the transformer is warmer than its surroundings, it’s drawing power.
2) .2 kW is a pretty small amount of power, so it would not surprise me if the computer on the Tesla system along with your other monitoring hardware is using that much constantly.
3) The batteries have some internal leakage current, which wastes power. Totally plausible to me that they would leak this much power. I don’t know if your monitor would be able to pick that up. If it is measuring on the input side, measuring power being sent to the batteries, then it would probably pick up and report that as a source of power utilization, though I don’t know if it would sense battery leakage if it is only measuring the power output from the batteries.
No SI units in Europe?
kW are SI. Hours aren't strictly SI, but everyone uses them anyway because of a combination of tradition and being more convenient than kiloseconds. kWh also aren't strictly SI, but they're similarly much more handy for home energy usage than megajoules.
The Imperial or US Customary units of energy are foot-pounds, BTUs, or horsepower-hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_the_SI
The Hour is an officially sanctioned convenience unit under SI. Not a base unit or a standard multiplier, but it's on the same level as liters and degrees.
Yeah, I made a mistake there. Sorry for the confusion.
I used to write software to configure custom rooftop HVAC units. kW were SI units and MBH were IP for here in the US.
For cooling I would calculate two values
Qs for sensible cooling (delta temperature * air mass)
Qt for total cooling (delta enthalpy * air mass)
Ever heard tons of cooling?
I’ve worked with commercial HVAC application engineers that like to bandy that term about.
Mostly it was the older guys though. The ones that had their own sling psychrometer and plotted Dry Bulb and Wet Bulb temps on a psych (romemtry) chart.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_of_refrigeration
It's a system agnostic unit! My favorite of those is specific impulse, a measure of rocket efficiency given in seconds (of gravity). The common interpretation is "how many seconds can this engine with that propellant accelerate its own mass at 1g".
I've heard it attributed to Werner von Braun, who apparently got quite fed up with conversions between his team (German, Metric) and the Americans he then worked for (US, US Customary). Everyone agreed on seconds and the force of gravity, so he factored it into those units.
What is the point of foreign development efforts? They clearly don't work and in fact often make things worse, and unless done in some precise and yet unknown way, they are inevitably referred to as "neo-colonialism". So why bother, honestly? White guilt?
Though, not trying to help will receive similar criticism, and obviously if today's exact policies actually worked, they wouldn't be called "neo-colonialism", it would be "obviously they worked, white people just needed to give us wealth back after stealing it during colonialism, duh", which is to say that accusations of "neo-colonialism" are entirely opportunistic. But why help people who spit on you for trying or not trying to help? What is it going to take for you to realize this doesn't work? Some bright spark has some great theory about why previous efforts have failed but this new fangled approach is going to avoid the errors of all previous attempts at helping, and then this inevitably fails and a new theory comes along explaining why and the cycle seems to repeat indefinitely.
ISTM that if you can make a convincing argument that foreign development efforts are on net not helpful, you can probably also convince most people to stop supporting them. But what's the evidence that they're on net not helpful? (I know nothing about this topic, so for all I know this is a nice high softball pitched right over the plate.)
My impression is that foreign aid is very often used as a kind of formalized bribery--don't annoy us too much with your actions and the cash will continue to flow. And also that it's often a kind of laundering of a subsidy--the US government gives your country money that it's pretty-much obliged to spend with a particular US company, say. Those would be reasons people would want to keep it around even if the development aid part of it did little good overall. But how do we determine whether it's doing any good or not?
>They clearly don't work and in fact often make things worse
Short version: people don't believe this.
"Clearly don't work" and "inevitably referred to as "neo-colonialism"" sound like good rationalizations someone might make, assuming a definitive answer to two controversial thoughts, so that you can take away the two main sorts of justification that are claimed.
You might ask, what is the point of school, since it clearly doesn't educate anyone and inevitably just makes parents mad. Or what is the point of taxes, since they clearly don't lead to effective governance.
And those would be very good questions.
Describing "foreign development efforts" as an interaction between white colonisers and non-white ingrates is somewhat imprecise, given that Japan has long been a massive donor of development assistance, vying with Germany for second place behind the US. South Korea is getting up there, as well.
Also, in addition to what Duarte wrote about the EU (to which I'd add that non-EU Balkan countries and e.g. Moldova receive a lot of help) there is a fair bit of non-OECD South-South development cooperation (obviously China and India as major players, but also many smaller countries) benefiting Africa in particular.
As far as ambassadorship of white rage goes, this is exceptionally poor grist for the mill.
We will see after the West starts helping building up Ukraine. Btw, no it works. It may not work as good as western institutions claim ( because depending on countries, especially in most corrupt ones, portion of money goes to government officials pockets, otherwise, you cant do international development effort there) but it helps a lot.
Foreign development and foreign aid are very different things. The former clearly works, in fact you could state the entire EU is a project to facilitate international co-operation in Europe, and that includes FDI and development funding.
Foreign aid also clearly works. In the sense that "working" means "making massive transfer payments to the elite of that country, thus buying loyalty".
What's the evidence they don't work? Obviously not all undeveloped countries are now developed, but is there evidence showing that they haven't helped some medium amount? Most countries are richer now than 10 or 50 years ago - do you have specific reason to think development efforts haven't contributed?
Historically, foreign development aid was based on theories of the 1960s, which held that newly-independent states could catch up with the West in a couple of generations, by moving from subsistence economies to cash crops and exports of raw materials, and then using these earnings to fund industrialisation, whose benefits, in turn, would enable them to import the food they used to grow from elsewhere. (Somewhere in all this was an economist with an assumed can-opener). It worked tolerably well in the 70s, with fixed exchange rates and raw material and food prices, but fell apart totally in the 80s, when all these prices were deregulated, and their income fell catastrophically. Many such countries had to borrow from the IMF to pay to import the food they used to grow. The person to read on this is the Cambridge economist Ha-Jun Chang, who uses, in part, the experience of his own country, to demonstrate how misguided these ideas are. As he points out, there isn't, a single case in history of a country achieving economic takeoff through foreign aid or foreign direct investment. The recipe seems to be autarky, strict import controls, and careful adoption of foreign ideas and technologies where they seem useful.
Much development assistance today is a scam, and it's hard to believe how much of a scam it is until you see it in action. Typically, it involves organisations like the EU/UN or donors like Canada, Japan or the Nordics doing social engineering to make other countries seem more like us. So if you have a city in Africa with a high crime rate and an ineffective police force, they'll give you a million dollars or Euros to set up an NGO to create police monitoring units around the country, organise seminars on community policing and human rights, and send promising price officers to Stockholm or Ottawa on all-expenses paid anti-corruption training with generous per-diems. Meanwhile, the police themselves aren't paid, and have no working vehicles or radios. This kind of thing creates a parasitic, pro-western elite (that's the idea) and is often bitterly resented by the locals.
"As he points out, there isn't, a single case in history of a country achieving economic takeoff through foreign aid or foreign direct investment. The recipe seems to be autarky, strict import controls, and careful adoption of foreign ideas and technologies where they seem useful."
I agree with the recommendation of Ha-Joon Chang, but this is a bit apples and oranges. You can have a high degree of state control (including state guidance of private industry in the style of Park Chung-hee) and import, capital, and foreign loan controls *in addition* to foreign development assistance. The latter isn't supposed to catalyse economic take-off simply by dint of its existence.
Of course, cynical Western "privatise everything! even utilities! that's how you get rich!" strings attached make this difficult, which is partly why South-South efforts involving less neoliberal orthodoxy (and, to be fair, less progressive didacticism) have been welcome. And there's some promise in the creation of special economic zones (e.g. in Tanzania) which Japan and South Korea have been pushing.
The countries that have developed the most are the ones that received the least aid. Even within Europe, the UK got more aid after WW2, but Germany had the economic miracle rather than becoming "the sick man of Europe".
You would expect donors to give the most aid to the poorest countries, and least to countries doing well on their own. Is there some analysis that has controlled for this?
The healthiest people are the ones who have spent the least time in hospital. This is not a good argument against the effectiveness of hospitals.
Good arguments against the effectiveness of hospitals have been made by people like Robin Hanson :) More seriously, we treat health as the natural state and lack of it as a deviation (indeed, Greg Cochran argues that the "placebo effect" is just regression to the mean). But countries don't start out as rich as the first world and then stumble somehow.
By this logic Spain, which was excluded from the Marshall Plan, should have become a tiger. It did not.
There was a "Spanish miracle" after the war (and Franco replacing Falangists with Opus Dei members). But Spain had also been poorer than Germany for a long time.
Those reforms took place in 1959, by which point Spain was no longer isolated and had begun to receive American aid and direct investment.
The German economic boom as well as the French Trente Glorieuses came into full bloom by 1950, during the Marshall Plan years. By contrast, between 1950 and 1959 (and certainly between 1950 and 1956), Spain's economy performed quite badly in terms of GDP growth and trade. And just about everyone except the UK did well in the early 1960s. Even the Soviets.
What's the evidence for that? https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2009/wp09118.pdf claims to have evidence that developmental aid does have a positive impact on GDP growth.
I'm interested in having my whole genome sequenced in order to figure out possible causes of my chronic health issues. Does anyone have a recommendation for which service to use or other advice related to genetic testing?
The services I'm currently considering are Nebula Genomics, Dante Labs, and Sequencing.com, which all seem roughly equivalent from what I can tell.
If you are looking for specific variants which you know are linked to conditions you have or suspect you have, then that's great. If you happen to have a well-studied variant, then you will be able to find out about it. If not, what you will end up with is a list of VUS - variants of uncertain significance. If you don't have a control (ideally sequence from someone as closely related to you as possible who does not have the conditions you are dealing with), you have very little chance of working out which variants are actually causal and which are not. Especially because most variants are in non-coding sequence, and we still aren't very good at working out what they do.
What may be useful are the ClinGen Expert Panel resources (https://clinicalgenome.org/working-groups/clinical-domain/). These are panels of experts who have reviewed the literature for specific gene-disease and variant-disease links and classified them. Eg https://search.clinicalgenome.org/kb/affiliate/10031. They may not have covered your particular variant(s) or condition(s) yet, of course.
And all of that's before you get to the challenge of working out what the specific variant does to the gene and how to treat that therapeutically, which is a whole separate set of difficulties, I'm afraid. I don't want to put you off, and I don't know your background or how much you know about genetics, but this is in no way a simple thing to do from a single sequence, and there is a very good chance that you will end up with a long list of potential candidate genes/variants, none of which are particularly promising and none of which have therapeutic potential.
I ran my 23andme raw data through Genetic Genie, which identified a lot of useful info. I don't know if Genetic Genie will do that with other labs' data as well.
I did Dante, my girlfriend did Nebula (which I bought for her). I trust Dante a bit more on privacy (Nebula outsources sequencing to China) but they're equivalent in data quality.
Mainly that we're not at risk of any disastrous monogenic diseases. No APOE4, BRCA mutations, etc. We also learned that she's a carrier of colorblindness.
It will be more useful once we want to have kids and do embryo selection (knowing parents' genomes helps with imputing variants).
In my work I'm often trying to help people think about jobs and career, & I'm always wishing there was a list to consult of all the possible jobs there are. Is there anything like that? There are a few areas of life where I actually have a sense of what the various ob possibilities are, but regarding most I'm pretty ignorant. For instance, take the movie industry: Reading about Alec Baldwin's accident gave me a lot of new information about jobs on a movie set. For instance it had never occurred to me that there must be people who are specialists in firearm management on a set.
So anybody know of a book or an online database with this info?
Thanks all for the suggestions. I'm going to follow up on all of them.
Check out the NAICS - in the reference files header you can download an Excel spreadsheet. It's more industry than job, but there's a lot of overlap and may be what you're looking for. There's more than 1,100 listings.
https://www.census.gov/naics/?68967
80000 hours blog has ones that might be of interest, but I think jobs are changing so rapidly it's hard to know. You used to be able to scrape LinkedIn for data like this, but I think they blocked this kind of data mining.
Linkedin tried to block it, but a judge ruled them in the wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
That said, obviously they're still going to try and make your life as hard as they can.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US Department of Labor maintains an occupational outlook handbook that might be a start for what you are looking for https://stats.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm
In any discussion on here about national differences and their causes, there's almost always multiple people coming in and saying it's "good institutions" that explains why some countries are more successful than others (most recently, last open thread, but virtually any time such discussions arise here).
I always find this very irritating, because "good institutions" is a very high-level fact about a country that is going to be driven by much more fundamental factors, but the concept is talked about as if it were akin to the country's natural resources or climate.
It's really only just a bit better than saying China produces more cars than Brazil because China has more car factories. Of course, building more car factories will allow you to build more cars, but if that's all there were to it, why doesn't Brazil just build more car factories? That true cause of the difference are much more fundamental than this. "Good institutions" is actually worse than this in a sense because there isn't some explicit "good institution" policy that a government can pass that neatly explains the differences between countries (the way a national economic policy aimed at expanding car production can). It isn't even "democracy" - China is much more functional than a great many "democracies" in the world.
> It's really only just a bit better than saying China produces more cars than Brazil because China has more car factories.
I don't think that's a bad answer at all, if the alternative were not understanding the relationship between cars and car factories.
"Just get better institutions, bro" isn't a solution in itself, but it's a way of focusing attention on the problem that needs to be solved. "How do we get better institutions?" is an excellent question that deserves more attention.
>I don't think that's a bad answer at all
Of course it is - it has only the most superficial of explanatory power. Differences in car output are overwhelmingly driven by fundamental economic factors, not whether a country has decided they to build more car factories. Nobody doesn't know that you need factories to make cars - the real insight comes from explaining why countries build factories or they don't. The alternative is not that you think that you don't need factories to make cars.
>"How do we get better institutions?" is an excellent question that deserves more attention.
This is why "good institutions" isn't a good explanation of national differences because whatever is causing the differences in institution quality is what is actaully driving the difference between countries.
There's a fundamental difference between "institutions that look good" and "institutions that work well." Afghanistan until last year had the first, without ever having the second. On the other hand, there are plenty of places in the world where you find formal institutions that receive low marks from western political scientists but work well because people find ways to make them work. It also depends on what your objectives are: in Lebanon, for example, institutions work quite well as a way of funnelling wealth to the leaders of the various political clans, for downward distribution. In other countries, institutions work well because they ensure that all parts of society and ethnic groups are able to feel represented in some way.
In general, well-functioning institutions are a result, not a cause. They arise when the main players in a society agree that they have an interest in making the country work well, rather than competitively looting it. This may be linked to the rise of a professional middle class (as in Britain and Germany), to survival in the face of foreign threats (as in Japan) or for many other reasons.
Greg Clark is also skeptical of using institutions to explain differing outcomes between countries... but he also there are clear cases like North vs South Korea or East vs West Germany where different systems in otherwise similar places led to very different outcomes (he just thinks that's atypical as normally a place as dysfunctional as North Korea would get taken over).
I think Jason is right to say that a handwavy "good institutions" is an insufficient (even if necessary) explanation of those differences.
The reason that's the only answer you see is that "why do some countries have better institutions than others" is an open question. You are entirely correct though that "institutions" is not a very helpful or informative answer on it's own.
It's probably down to a whole host of complex historical reasons, some of which are likely lost to time.
With the caveat that I’ve not seen these threads, when I see the term good institutions, I take that to mean social capital and trust in government institutions and other behavioral heuristics, not firms and levels of production. More specifically I think about Robert Putnam’s early work on social capital comparing southern Italy and northern Italy and asking why the levels of efficiency were higher in the north, and the levels of corruption were lower in the north. His conclusion was social capital and trust. So if you go to the DMV, you trust if you show up, you’ll be offered a test, and when you pass the test and pay the fee you’ll be given a driver’s license, no bribes or “who you know” required. There’s a lot of work built on top of this original work and assumptions about social capital and heuristics in the fields of political science and microeconomics. I think if you start there, you might find thinking that helps you sort through your question.
Building on this, I think there's two major requirements to begin building trust:
1. That there are escalation mechanisms in place to take a grievance and get resolution. If the DMV required a bribe in order to do their function, you could complain to [their boss, a politician, the police] and expect reasonably prompt corrections to be made.
2. The people communally agree to norms that are both legally enforced and socially enforced. The Bill of Rights in the US is a prime example - the courts will enforce them, but so will the people. Where they are not enforced, people lose trust.
Is social capital just about trust and trustworthiness in government, or should it include trust and trustworthiness in the rest of society as well?
I think it's both, although I think the government has an extremely strong role to play in enforcing trust and trustworthiness in the rest of society.
For instance, in the US I can trust that the food I eat is safe, that the vehicles I travel in are roadworthy, and that if I pay for something at a store I'll get what I paid for. I have this trust largely because the government makes laws about these things, enforces them properly, and the people who enforce them generally don't take bribes. On the other hand I don't trust that I can leave my bike on the street unlocked because the US doesn't do a sufficiently good job of enforcing the rules against petty theft.
That's a good point, it's both. That's what heuristics are, an assumption about how people will behave. So you trust that drivers will drive on the right-hand side of the road in the U.S. and thus don't worry about the rare instances when it doesn't happen. You assume people will behave in certain ways or that there are certain codes of behaviors in various professions. That on average most people follow those unwritten rules of behavior creates social trust within a society/group of people because it reduces the occurrence of stochastic shocks/makes untrustworthy behavior stand out. Social capital is more or less a society/cultural thing that then informs institutional behavior, thereby creating trust in the institutions, meaning it has to come from something within a group and isn't something that typically can be imposed from the outside (e.g. see failures to impose American-style democracy in Iraq, etc.).
I have a couple of questions on American habits. Firstly, why do they peck at their food with just a fork, instead of using a knife and fork like normal human beings? :-) The only advantage I can see is that it saves washing up! Also, why do they hold torches back-handed, pointing down at the floor like some ham actor holding a dagger almost backwards, unless they raise their arms vertically like a telegraph arm? It seems a most cumbersome, unnatural way to hold a torch.
I suspect that in fact most Americans use a knife and fork, and hold torches properly, and the bizarre habits we see in films are mostly a Holywood affectation, rather like the way incoming meteors in films have to look like burning smoking toffee apples even though everyone these days knows they actually glow steadily with a bluish white light.
Never learned how to wield a knife to *eat* food effectively, only prepare it. But then, I'm only -American suffixed, tacked on to Chinese-. The only utensils I own are chopsticks and Asian soup spoons. Anything that might normally require a knife - is already gonna be in bite-sized pieces, ideal for chopsticks or spooning, because how else to ensure fast even cooking?. Can't remember the last time I used a fork at someone's home, honestly...all that to say, I wasn't raised to gain proficiency with either of those bizarre weapons, so on the rare occasions I do get stuck with them - yeah, you'll see me do the hunt-and-peck thing. Perhaps it's the same for others of Asian descent? (Genetic influence too, maybe: my dad used to practice picking up marbles using chopsticks. In both hands at the same time.)
Flashlights: I've never gripped them that way, did not even know it was A Thing. The dagger comparison is apt, the whole design of the grip and weighting seems to "want" me to hold it rightways up. Easier to swing that way too. (I miss the old-fashioned heavy-as-shit truncheon-like Maglites. Modern aluminium just doesn't have that same...heft. Ah, the weird objects that persist from childhood memories...)
Personally I hold the flashlight that way - it means that the default direction is down (which, if you're walking around at night and care about what you're stepping on, is where you actually want your flashlight pointed anyways), rather than forward and up. Where is most of -your- light ending up? Why? Are you concerned about vampires hiding in your ceiling corners?
Also, when there are other people around, it makes it harder to accidentally shine the light in their face - it takes a deliberate act.
As others here have touched on, the flashlight (torch) thing is an outgrowth of techniques designed to use a handheld flashlight alongside a handgun. Most famous is probably the Harries Technique, if you've seen a police-themed show you've probably seen it [1]. There are certainly other ways to use a handgun with a handheld flashlight, note that 3/4 techniques in this article use the "back-handed" grip [2]. I would guess that all of this was Hollywood-ized into the depiction you've seen.
1. https://149352664.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/harries-technique.jpg
2. https://www.concealedcarry.com/safety/how-do-i-use-a-handheld-flashlight-and-handgun-at-the-same-time/
Harries hold, while popular on TV is really bad for actually shooting (source: I shoot IDPA)
The fork thing is a bit weird. I'm first assuming you are living in the UK, which makes it complex to talk about.
A fork is a device designed with multiple tines meant for impaling food, and a shape meant for allowing the food to be inserted into the mouth while still on the tines without hitting the roof of the mouth. At some point, the UK decided, semi-randomly, not to use forks this way; what they'd do is use a knife to sort of scrape the food up onto the back of the fork, and balance it precariously on a rounded surface instead of using the tines.
In the case of someone saying "why don't they have a knife", we might be talking about "why aren't they holding a knife meant for cutting the entire dinner". That has reasonable explanations that don't devolve into a fight. But we also might be talking about what I described, which is something like "We adopted an absolutely bonkers misuse of a tool on par with using a drill by taping a nail to the handle and twisting the entire drill around until the nail bores a hole in the wood. Why don't you join us in this insanity? Don't know it's uncultured?"
> At some point, the UK decided, semi-randomly, not to use forks this way; what they'd do is use a knife to sort of scrape the food up onto the back of the fork, and balance it precariously on a rounded surface instead of using the tines.
That's not entirely true; the fork is used for stabbing and picking things up. You only load stuff onto the back of your fork if it's too small or too mushy to be stabbed, e.g. peas or mashed potatoes.
I do admit that flipping the fork over and loading the concave surface with food is a faster way to shovel food down your gullet, but table manners have never been about the fastest way to shovel food down your gullet.
I do want to push back on this a little, because I've seen multiple instances of a UK person looking down on a US diner for, say, eating salad with a fork in a sane way. From the linked article:
https://timeline.com/fork-switching-food-britain-3ec8ceee6a38
***I will never forget the time my British friend, we’ll call her Sara, looked across the table and declared dryly, “Americans eat like animals.” My mouth dropped. I peered down at my plate. Everything seemed tidy enough. There was the salad, albeit slightly overdressed, there the herbed potato cubes and a small squirt of ketchup, there the flaky salmon filet. Was my back hunched? Had ketchup crusted on my chin? Was I grunting with each bite?
“You stab your fork into everything,” Sara said, demonstrating by jabbing a bed of spinach. “You’re meant to scoot food onto the back of the fork using the knife in your right hand. Look! It even works with salad.”***
It's not the only example I've seen, I've had this conversation several times where US people are apes for using the tined spear designed for spearing food on foods designed to be speared. I know cultural bubbles differ, but I can't see it if it doesn't exist - it's the whole reason I know about the difference.
On the other note - that I'm supposed to use a utensil wrong because it's culturally superior - I push back in the sense that we could just as easily agree it's polite to use a fork in a way that makes sense. I can eat slowly or show restraint in either way; if unnaturally gating eating speed is what's desired, why not just give me a match-stick and a feather or something?
Ironically, sole use of a fork has gone a full circle, well semicircle more like, from medievil times, when people used just a knife at meals, as someone else described in this thread.
Old timers back in the 1400s or whenever (I think it was around then) must have chortled at finnicky youngsters starting to use "miniature tridents" to avoid having to touch their food or stab at it with their knives!
> On the other note - that I'm supposed to use a utensil wrong because it's culturally superior - I push back in the sense that we could just as easily agree it's polite to use a fork in a way that makes sense
No we couldn't, then it would be useless as a class signal. Something has to be a little bit silly to be useful as a class signal, otherwise low-class people would happen upon it by accident.
Or at least the concave side of the fork.
My understanding is that the British style of eating with knife and fork together is closer to the historical roots, while the American system of mostly only using the knife to cut is counterintuitively amore recent elaboration.
Specifically, the traditional eating methodology in British cultures (probably most of Western Europe, but I'm playing it safe by saying British since I'm most confident of English and Scottish practice) in Medieval and Renaissance times was to eat with a belt knife, dirk, or dagger (whatever general-purpose cutting tool/weapon you habitually carried around with you) in your dominant hand and the fingers of your off hand. The knife would be variously used to cut up food into bite-sized pieces, to stab morsels to transport them to your mouth, or to scoop up food with the flat of the blade. Your off-hand would be used to hold food steady while you cut or stabbed it, to tear up chunks of bread and use them sop up sauces and whatnot, or just to pick stuff up and eat it directly.
A bit later, the fashion changed to use special-purpose eating knives (still with sharp tips like a dagger), and to use a pair of knifes with one in each hand. Similar to the previous system, one knife would be used to steady food while the other cut it, one would be used to spear bits of food with the tip to pick them up, or they'd be used together with one pushing food onto the blade of the other to help scoop it up.
Over time, the two knives evolved in design for specialized purposes, with the dominant hand knife being specialized for cutting, scraping, and pushing (losing the pointed tip, only being sharpened on one edge, and becoming serrated so the edge would remain useful despite being abused by scraping it against a ceramic plate) while the off-hand knife was specialized for steadying, scooping, and stabbing (losing the sharpened edge, splitting the tip into two or more points for improved spearing and holding ability, and broadening and cupping the blade just behind the points for improved scooping ability). Until eventually the two knives evolved into the familiar modern dinner knife and fork respectively.
If you're using both a knife and fork to eat everything, you no longer have a free hand for under-the-table slapfights.
That's honestly the basic reason; if I don't seriously need a knife, I'd rather keep my hand free for my drink, or my napkin, or the dog, or whatever a free hand is good for.
The flashlight thing is specifically a cop thing. Normal people don't hold their flashlights that way. Maybe it's specifically a hollywood cop thing, I don't know.
According to this random article I found, real cops do it because
1) it's better for shining a light into a car
2) it keeps the light on the enemy if you get in a fight (fists in guard by face)
a couple other reasons I found less compelling, but 1 and 2 definitely make sense.
https://www.fenix-store.com/blog/what-brand-of-flashlights-do-police-use/#:~:text=Why%20Do%20Cops%20Hold%20Their,beam%20at%20the%20correct%20angle.
It's also much simpler to manufacture a tube and drop things into it, and you already need to complete the circuit on that end so you might as well put the button there.
Just to clarify for everyone, the continental custom is to hold a fork in the left hand with the tines point down and a knife in the right hand and use them simultaneously to cut and/or move food onto the fork and into the mouth. The American custom is to use a fork in the dominant hand to hold food stable while (not whilst!) it is cut with a knife in the opposite hand into a bite-sized piece, and then the knife is set down on the edge of the plate and the fork is then used with the tines point up to bring the piece of food to the mouth. No need to cut anything smaller? Then only the fork is used, hence the stabby, pecking movement referred to in the OP’s question.
Why this difference In comportment? Idk. Is one better than the other? Idk. Is one posher than the other? Idk. Can you pick up a single grain of rice with your chopsticks? That’s the real ticket!
Wouldn't using the offhand for cutting lead to inferiour cut results versus knifing using the dominant hand? That's how I was taught to do it, the few times anyone in my family bothered to attempt Western table manners. I'm pretty sure we got most of the table-setting placements backwards too, in hindsight. Though I suppose the arbitrariness is half the point, it's about setting rules and following them, more than efficiency in eating...
Yes, I can pick up a single grain of rice using just a single chopstick and some electricity. If it's properly cooked, anyway. Sometimes less is more!
I was taught (as an American), that "proper manners" are to hold the fork in your left hand (or non-dominant hand, for me they are the same) while cutting, then to switch the fork to the right hand (or dominant hand) for eating. Which I found cumbersome, and adopted the European style.
I had that same experience. Prescriptivism for this sort of thing is ridiculous.
Disagree, prescriptivism is the whole point of table manners. Using appropriate table manners is a way of saying "I was raised in a household of a sufficiently high class to know about this sort of thing, and I understand how the world works sufficiently well to care about this sort of thing".
Modern America is moving away from irrational etiquette as a class marker, and is instead adopting irrational opinions as a class marker. I prefer the irrational table manners.
This is interesting, because I, as a European, eat in the manner you describe as the American custom. I'm aware that table manners prescribe the continental custom but I find it too awkward to use a fork in my non-dominant hand to want to eat that way, and I'm not high class enough that anyone cares about which hand I use to hold a fork.
The back handed torch holding is to provide a stable rest for the pistol in your other hand. See Mulder and Scully enter a dark scary place in just about any episode of the X Files.
The cutlery thing is kind of curious. It might explain why people take me - an American - for a Brit so often when I vacation in Europe.
The torch/flashlight thing is totally a Hollywoodism. The fork without knife thing is real. I speculate that it's because the food we eat is overall more likely to be tender enough to cut with just the side of the fork, and safetyism makes us reluctant to give sharp knives to kids early enough to develop table knife use as a consistent habit.
Sharp knives? Are you giving your children steaks to eat?
Table knives are fairly blunt yet serrated enough to saw through food. A child would have to be pretty determined to injure themselves with one (more than they could with a fork).
Right, but most food tender enough to be cut with a table knife, is tender enough to be cut with the side of a fork. If we encounter food that needs a table knife, we'll use one, but that's usually not the case.
> Right, but most food tender enough to be cut with a table knife, is tender enough to be cut with the side of a fork
I was about to respond with a list of foods that are too tough for a fork but too soft for a steak knife, and I suddenly realised that most of them are things that Americans don't eat that much of, like roast beef or sausages. (I know you eat sausages but you don't eat them as a plated meal all that often.)
I feel like I understand American cooking a lot better now if everything either needs to fall into the category "soft enough to eat with a fork" or "steak". This is why you get a perfectly normal cut of beef and cook it for twelve hours until it's falling apart, it's because you want to eat it with a fork.
"This is why you get a perfectly normal cut of beef and cook it for twelve hours until it's falling apart, it's because you want to eat it with a fork."
We also do it because pot roast is delicious.
As is true barbecue. Does that even exist in England?
I find that the real killer app is heterogenous foods, like sausages*, battered fish, botanical fruits etc. where the decreased cutting area and serrations of the knife allow you to cut or carefully saw through the tougher parts without making an awful mess of the squishier interior.
* especially the Weißwurst, which must be peeled before consumption
I think cops often do the backhand thing with flashlights to hold them higher, but maybe it's just a Hollywood invention. After all, we also say goodbye before hanging up a phone and order at the bar more specifically than just "beer please".
Not sure what you mean about knives. I haven't noticed people in other countries using knives more than we do. If food needs to be cut, we use knives. If not, not. ANd I dodn't remember noticing this in movies either. Is there a movie scene you had in mind?
Knives can be used to push food onto the fork. In Portugal it's custom to always hold a knife on your main hand and a fork on your off-hand while eating, regardless of whether the food needs cutting. The fork is used both as a shovel and as a skewer. The food does tend to need cutting, though. Cultures that use chopsticks seem to serve food in bite-sized pieces, which is extremely uncommon around here. Still, if I'm eating, say, Chinese food around other people and not using chopsticks, I'm using both the fork and the knife (by myself I usually put it in a bowl and use only a fork, but this feels a bit rebellious).
I'm trying to picture a Portuguese person eating lasagna in this manner.
Why is this hard?
It seems counterintuitive to use your dominant hand to do something needless (cut off a piece of lasagna with a knife) and your less deft hand to bring it to your mouth. Especially if the non-dominant hand is accustomed to holding the fork pointing downward. I don't know that it's hard? But maybe it does slow one down. Perhaps this is why among our many other much-discussed failings, Americans tend to bolt their food.
Cutting lasagna with a fork is messy. It's usually possible, it's just that you tend to squish the saucy layers all over the place while you hack through the pasta layers. I'd much rather eat my lasagna with a knife and fork.
I think maybe American lasagnas tend to be different, though.
Hmm. Since we always use the fork on the non-dominant hand, that's the hand that is used to manipulating a fork. Also, we use the fork as a shovel (not pointing downward) plenty of times, including to eat lasagna. The thing I have no experience with is using a fork to cut anything at all, even though I get how to do it.
LOL! Two examples of tomarto vs. tomayto I guess. :-) Now you mention it, I should have realised "washing up" is a Britishism, although it also includes saucepans and cutlery! But torch vs. flashlight is a new one on me. I sometimes think a British person would make the worst possible spy in the US, because they would trip up with something like those and give themselves away in no time!
There's a scene in the third Alex Rider book where Alex (a british boy) will be posing as the son of a couple of American spies. When they first meet him, they ask how "the maths classes" are going to try to test him and he responds "nice try, but they say "math" in the US."
"Doing the washing": washing clothes
"Doing the washing up": washing dishes
Americans have the first one but not the second.
(And of course when I say "dishes" I don't just mean dishes, I also mean plates, bowls, cups, glasses...)
Well, there is the older term "washerwoman", whose implied job would be doing the washing (using a washing board, of course). I also notice that indisposed clothing is said to be "in the wash" rather than "in the laundry", and we do call it a "washing machine" rather than a "laundry machine" (although the commercial version is a "laundromat", not a "washingmat"). I think the verb "launder" is also rarely used outside of the crimey-deception context, too, although maybe that's regional...everyone says "wash".
But, yes, the exact permutation "doing the washing" isn't one I've heard before, despite those points of similarity. American English is strange.
You're probably right. OK, the Americans don't say either of those things, it's entirely a Commonwealth thing.
They’d go around reading the Sport page and studying Maths and want to have lunch at midday instead of noon.
You aren’t from around here are you mister?
I've had more than one person adamantly insist that "cutlery" refers specifically to knives, ("you know, like Cutco[TM]!") which seems simply wrong. None of them were cutlers, clearly.
"Flatware" is a designation I see more and more on product listings and other copy, but people will refer to the components of a flatware set as "silverware" still. Or more commonly, just the catchall "utensils". It's sort of confusing having three different reference-pointers that all aim at slightly different sides of the same table-elephant.
My spoons aren't silver, but they also don't cut and aren't flat. Surely the only reasonable term would be "eating implements".
"Mouthware".
On the contrary, why is it called a 'flashlight' when it emits a constant light instead of flashing?
Strobe settings aren't uncommon these days, so I suppose it was a nominative prediction of future technology.
I'm an American and I've never switched the fork from my left to right hand after cutting... but I'm also left-handed.
Same.
Actually, I'm having trouble even picturing the various techniques described here. Personally, I just use the fork in my left hand and the knife in my right when cutting, and put down the knife but keep the fork in the left for eating.
Fwiw, Emily Post will tell you that you should cut your bites as you eat, and that cutting up something into a pile of small bites is for children.
I'm conducting a 2-minute survey to better understand how people with niche interests (attempt to) find friends. Any help is greatly appreciated!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeCh2YASTcam5saz3aUhLF6hMJ10ubbHcZhrAI7nhaj1DWovg/viewform?usp=sf_link
Thanks. Love this.
I filled it out, but you could do a better job specifying what each option means. I don't know what qualifies as 'niche' or 'mainstream'; percentages might help, like "roughly 1% of the population would share my interest" or examples, like "Neutral (?): model train set building, crochet, performing in an orchestra".
Do you know of a good review of the empirical literature on what makes a new business/startup succeed ?
I read the unicorn's shadow by Ethan Mollick but it relied on a a lot of small samples. Do you know of anything in that genre but hopefully better ?
How much detail are you after? "Luck + Connections + Working really hard + being good at what you do" is the usual formula, though depending on what you mean by "succeed" having only 2 or 3 of the 4 might suffice.
Studying VC investments is going to look very different than studying cafes and lawn-mowing companies and self-employed tradesmen etc.
That description of the very different theories on how inspiration works is a pretty good start. Its super complex and has huge implications downstream in terms of hermeneutics, pedagogy, exposition and application.
Most Christians in the west fall into some version of verbal/plenary/inerrant as a function of the (controlled in some way by God) life context of the person writing the assumed inspired text. They don't really think about it much though.
The food article "Twenty Twenty Stew" was probably her top-ranked post not because it's the best stew ever, but because in it she offhandedly announces that she's releasing a TV show on CNN+.
======= RUSSIAN / UKRAINIAN COORDINATION AND HELP REQUEST SUBTHREAD =======
I'm posting on behalf of a friend in Russia, originally an Iraqi refugee from Baghdad, who is currently on his 3rd year studying medicine there, but urgently looking to transfer to a Western university in order to escape the local.. mess.
Is anyone here familiar with any university that accepts transfers, has classes in English, and a non-humongous tuition?
You can email me at kerrofelia (at) gmail (dot) com. Help is appreciated!
Hello! Has he considered going back to Iraq? Iraq is actually in a better place than Russia right now and it will buy him the time to get to a better country. As far as western universities the previous destinations for Russian students are mostly shut off as I understand it. I do know something about applying to American universities from abroad for whatever that's worth. I also know that the Biden administration recently said they would open slots for refugees from Russia and being a religious and ethnic minority helps. So he might have a refugee claim. I admit this isn't the strongest help I can give but let me know if any of that sounds helpful or promising!
Actually, the money is the main problem. I'm 21. I live in Russia. I'm a programmer (C#, .Net) but never worked. I'm freelanced for about year and a half. Because I can be drafted into the army at any time no one want to hire me (lack of experience also not helping, and no one want to hire Junior specialist when only god nows what the president's next move will be). Even before the war I didn't wanted to go to the army. But now, since after 4 month of training they can send me anywhere... So I have no money to flee the country. Not that I'm worrying about where I will sleep and what will eat. No - I don't have the money to get to the border. So maybe anyone can help with a job? Or, maybe you are Russian and can help me get to the Georgia, or Armenia, or Kazakhstan.
Do you still need help? My company might be able to take on a junior developer (C#/TypeScript), at least on a temporary basis.
Here's my friend's Telegram channel with comprehensive guides on how to get to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Mongolia, etc + first steps re settling. https://t.me/zzuurrrr
Hope it might be of some use.
Financial support for leaving (tickets, food, etc) may be available here https://instagram.com/fondvyberizhizn?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
I'm really sorry to hear about your situation. I don't want to make a commitment to help, but how much money would it cost to get across the border?
So, to get to the Vladikavkaz (town near Georgian border) is about 130$ (7500 Rub, tickets for Oktober 10th). About 275$ (16000 Rub to get to Yerevan.
As I understand it, you don't have this kind of spare money. This presumably means that if someone were to give you the money to get to the border, you would end up in either Vladikavkaz or Yerevan without a place to live, money for food, or particularly better employment prospects. Can you estimate how much money you would need in order to get across the border and then last long enough there to plausibly become self-supporting? I don't think it would be unprecedented for this community to sponsor someone out of your kind of situation, and if you double down that you just want a ticket to wherever I can personally offer that kind of money (assuming we can get it from the US to Russia), but dumping you penniless across the border doesn't obviously seem very helpful.
I believe Erusian has said in the past that they end up knowing about a lot of remote work opportunities, perhaps they can chime in here?
You can help circumvent internet censorship with Snowflake.
https://snowflake.torproject.org/
"Snowflake is a pluggable transport available in Tor Browser to defeat internet censorship. Like a Tor bridge, a user can access the open internet when even regular Tor connections are censored. To use Snowflake is as easy as to switch to a new bridge configuration in Tor Browser.
"This system is composed of three components: volunteers running Snowflake proxies, Tor users that want to connect to the internet, and a broker, that delivers snowflake proxies to users.
Volunteers willing to help users on censored networks can help by spinning short-lived proxies on their regular browsers. "
(https://support.torproject.org/censorship/what-is-snowflake/)
Just install an extension in Firefox or Chrome. Or leave a snowflake tab open. (The counter on the extension badge will not show much traffic; don't expext dopamine rushes.)
The Ukrainian government continues to try and keep its economy afloat. By and large what they need is money to buy weapons and keep services running. You can of course donate. But they're also looking for foreign direct investment and trade relationships. Both to bring in money for the war and as part of their long term economic strategy. Because the hryvnia is inflating and general economic woes everything is quite cheap right now. But they're very bullish on a post-war economic miracle that involves hugely expanded economic relationships with the west.
If you happen to know someone who'd be interested in such opportunities I know where to find them. They're looking mostly for things in the millions to tens of millions euros range. Which is more than I've got certainly. But figure I'd throw it out there.
PS: Ukraine has a startup city program if you want to include in your next thing Scott.
I don't think anyone's going to invest tens of millions of euros into postwar Ukraine until we know what the security situation and treaty alliances are going to look like. Which is what (among other things including corruption, yes) hurt Ukraine's economy so much prewar- investors were skittish about investing a ton because the security situation was unstable, which of course ended up being very accurate.
That's why they want to be in NATO so badly- if they're not, why would foreign capital build factories and such in Ukraine? They could always be invaded again
Post-war Ukraine maybe. But they're looking for investment now. And I agree it's not likely to happen. Still, I figured I'd pass it along. All that political risk is making assets very cheap.
It seems rather odd that only millions+ opportunities would be on the table.
Even fairly rich(tm) people I know usually don't throw millions at something risky, they throw small amounts in loads of syndicated deals.
Which is not to say people that would risk tens of millions on a single deal don't exist, but I expect them to be exceedingly rare.
Syndicated deals would be fine I assume. They're pretty proud of their open investment environment. And it's very rare for deal size for anything but the tiniest deals to be lower than a million. Even setting up a single McDonalds takes more than a million dollars. What opportunities would you expect to be around that are significant enough for Ukraine to put effort into closing them and yet would involve less effort and expense than a McDonalds?
I have a friend in Russia but I am afraid to reach out to them on open channels because I'm not sure if/how their communications are being monitored and I don't want to get them in trouble. I haven't heard from them in months. I know they have my signal number, but I do not have theirs. Is there anything else I can/should do?
Gmail or Facebook should be be quite safe for reaching out. Unless their devices get stolen or confiscated, the chance of these channels being monitored are low. You can just ask for a Skype or Signal call to be even more discreet.
Assuming Yandex isn't safe?
Correct
I would recommend writing them in open channels with surface level questions, such as "how are you doing, let's get back in touch, perhaps on another app" or so, and if they are tech savvy enough to have Signal, hopefully they get the hint to write there too. Just being in touch with foreign people won't get them in trouble, I don't think.
I know a lot of people are fleeing to Belgrade or Serbia. If you wish to come and need help, I am no expert and can't help with money, but I speak the language and am physically here so I can help you orient or advise you on where to go or how to find something. You can reach me at dusan( A T )dnesic( D O T )com
Hey. I don't have anyone specific but I've been reaching out to contacts in Turkey, Armenia, etc to try and establish places I can send people to. Are you willing to temporarily house people and help them get jobs/find accommodation? If so would you mind if I reached out just to add you to the list? I don't know too many Serbians unfortunately and a lot of Russians want to go there because they see the country as friendly.
I've filled my house to capacity, so I cannot host personally, but there are telegram groups that people should join with plenty of people willing to help:
https://t.me/SerbiaInMyMind
https://t.me/vstrechi_v_belgrade
https://t.me/immi_gration
https://t.me/rabotavserbii
Работа в IT: @youritjob
Possibly wrong place for the comment from the reddit discussions downthread.
Most of what I would call "reasonable" conspiracy theories operate in a grey world where some facts they posit are true, pointing at some goal that is likely true, and filling in the rest with some parts non-sense and some parts clever guesswork.
Take a "conspiracy theory" that the CIA would use US citizens to conduct medical experiments without their knowledge or consent, including causing significant medical problems with almost no ethical safeguards? That's about as bad as it gets in terms of wacky "conspiracy theory" territory, but it turns out it's true. https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/history-of-mk-ultra
If someone in 1970 posited a theory that the US government were experimenting on US citizens, but got some of the facts wrong while getting the overall direction and seriousness right, would that be a "conspiracy theory" or the primer for a federal investigation?
Some more recent examples: Was it a "conspiracy theory" that elements of the government tried to shut down discussion of gain-of-function research and also the potential that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab? There were a decent number of additional unverified or false "facts" that were brought up under the same umbrella (and some less believable things, like the Chinese government releasing Covid on purpose), but the core "conspiracy theory" was true.
In a more controversial sense, you can also look at the "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was "stolen." Obviously stronger versions of this idea are wrong/not supported by the best evidence. What many people meant when they say the election was stolen were less strong claims. For instance, that improper and unapproved voting mechanisms were implemented (due to Covid) that allowed more people to vote by mail, or drop boxes, or through collection by a political operative, with less oversight. There were states that had explicit rules that said how voting needed to happen, that the election officials changed without authorization. Is that a "conspiracy theory"? Yes and no. The idea that Democrats fabricated completely illegal votes (graveyards voting) is not supported by the facts. That thousands of votes were counted that didn't meet the legal criteria as devised by the state isn't even controversial. Most people just accept it because of the nature of the Covid shutdowns.
When you get into what I think of as "non-reasonable" conspiracies, that's the kind of stuff that is almost completely fiction, maybe loosely supported by circumstantial or misleading facts. This is often people suffering from schizophrenia or otherwise mentally unstable, though certainly not exclusively. If you take something that's true but hard to believe (like MK Ultra) and add a bunch of random-but-possibly-connected ideas that would necessarily be hard to prove, you can come up with a lot of weird stuff that's hard to plausibly deny. If you don't trust the official sources (maybe because they actively lied to you about this or similar things in the past - like MK Ultra or the Lab Leak theory), then it's really hard to settle on an explanation of what really happened.
Take the pizza-shop-child-slavery wacky story. This story posits that political and economic elites were running a child-sex ring out of a pizza shop. This included the Clintons specifically. Take the pizza shop out of it, though, and it's actually a true story, if you make it far less grandiose and make the powerful elites the people using the sex slaves instead of running it. Jeffrey Epstein was absolutely running a child-sex-slavery ring for elite people. By all accounts, Bill Clinton probably really was actively involved and went to the island a number of times.
I'm not terribly impressed with a take on this that leaves the discussion at "haha, those dumb rubes actually believed that powerful people were running a child sex ring out of a *pizza shop* hahaha," when the reality was really really close to that, except for the specific fact of the pizza shop.
Of course, I'm sure you have an extremely narrow conception of "conspiracy theory" and think all your political views are just the truth. Its funny when leftists who literally theorize that the powerful are conspiring to "oppress" certain groups of people point at everyone else as "conspiracy theorists".
You're coming close to assuming bad faith; there are definitely people who believe a whole lot of actual conspiracy theories (walk into a mental hospital and talk to the patients if you don't believe me - not all mental patients are schizophrenic, of course, but there are generally at least a few).
There are also things like Capitalised Important Concept rants, which I'm pretty sure are written by schizophrenics (they're not always paranoid, though).
See! This is exactly my point!
There aren't "actual" conspiracy theories, then things that leftists believe. *They're all actual conspiracy theories!* But OP is (literally) a marxist who think that their beliefs are the truth, so they don't register as "conspiracy theories" to them. So "conspiracy theory" is being used as a propaganda term here to make their outgroup seem crazy.
I have a large extended family that is prone towards conspiracy theories and also happens to have multiple schizophrenics. Perhaps the tendency towards conspiracy theory is the soft-core version of schizophrenic apophenia.
> subsyndromal schizotypal traits
The stuff I have to Google to follow what you say. You keep this up and I’ll start nagging you to dedicate one single lousy bit to represent positive _and_ negative numbers.
:)
You probably already knew I tried ROT13 on that.
-sjenci That’s Serbian for something but I can’t quite remember.
Positing a conspiracy is the easiest way to make any hypothesis fit any data.
JFK was killed by a Freemason laser beam? How do you explain the autopsy that says he was killed with bullets? Clearly the coroner was in on the conspiracy. What about the Zapruder film that doesn't show a laser beam? Conspirators must have obtained the originals and edited the laser out. Early 1960s lasers weren't nearly powerful enough to kill a man? I guess there was a conspiracy among laser physicists to hide their progress and pretend to be decades behind where they were.
Well, there are a lot of things that if you have a little bit of them are fine, & maybe even offer some advantages, but if you have too much they interfere with life -- being tall is a simple example. There are psychological things that are like that too. For instance, most people are distressed by the idea of having a serious illness, and others mostly see that as a reasonable attitude. Also, not wanting to become seriously ill motivates people to avoid doing various things that put their health at risk. But if someone is *too* preoccupied and worried about the possibility of serious illness, to the point that the worry makes them miserable and interferes with them getting on with life, then they have a diagnosable illness: hypochondriasis. Or take bipolar disorder. People who have the full syndrome are greatly disabled by it, and get a diagnostic label. But people who have bipolar in their family but do not have the full syndrome have something special about them: They tend to have playful, hyper-fluent minds -- they are often witty and inventive. And there's research supporting that clinical impression: relatives of people with bipolar disorder score higher on tests of creativity, and ratings of how creative they are in their hobbies and their work.
So maybe it's the same with autism: A little bit is fine, and has some advantages. A lot is disabling.
Some people with particularly severe autism pretty much need to be kept drugged and/or locked away of mental hospitals for long periods of time, or they will visibly suffer things that most people will see as intolerably worse than being kept in the locked ward of a mental hospital. And the last thing the "neurodiversity advocates" want is for these people to be out in the world, visibly suffering, as example for neurodiversity.
Hopefully these mental hospitals will be safe and caring places, hopefully their patients will eventually move on to someplace better, and hopefully nobody who doesn't absolutely need that level of treatment will be forced to endure it. But it's going to be a thing that exists. And for it to exist, for people to be treated in mental hospitals, there has to be a medical diagnosis that says what they're being treated for.
I'm certain there are some neurodiversity advocates who are so ignorant of this reality that they would deny the existence of any autism patients who actually need medical treatment, but that level of ignorance correlates closely with not knowing how to go about effectively challenging the contents of the DSM.
SSC linking service: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
Bit of a Fully General Response for all things DSM-classification-related, but: when X isn't in the DSM, it instantly magically loses credibility as a Real Disease/Syndrome/Disorder/whatever. This has reputational effects, and because of our sane and well-run healthcare system, also makes it much harder to secure proper treatment and accommodations. Sort of the equivalent of "well the FDA doesn't say the drug can be used that way, so I can't prescribe it/insure it/whatever". It's a balancing act between not pigeonholing people to a caricature diagnosis for the sake of legibiliy, and not removing often-necessary scaffolding for securing other needed resources. Autism's been a particularly difficult one because the extremes on "the spectrum" are so wildly far apart...you've got people like the Autism Speaks activists who function highly enough that they're mainly concerned with eliminating the stigma of "really a disease". And you've got...like...the unfortunate dudes who try to bite their own appendages off. Worrying about second-order stigma is the last thing on those guys' minds. DSM classification clearly, obviously matters for them. (This is a big part of why a significant fraction of the ASD community was unhappy with Asperger's being folded up into the greater spectrum, incidentally. Competing goals.)
C.f. history of GID -> GD. Less so for being a related condition (although there's oddly high comorbidity), more that that's fairly recent history and there's a lot of well-publicized argumentation from both sides regarding said change. Chasing normal is like the dog chasing the car and finally biting it, sometimes...
Generally I'd summarise the aspie-pride viewpoint as follows:
1. Autism *per se* isn't bad
2. ...but a decent chunk of autistics get it from de novo mutations
3. Because some parents get much more mutated than others (mutagen exposure varies by orders of magnitude + parent age), de novo mutations correlate with other de novo mutations
4. A lot of de novo mutations cause low IQ
5. Low IQ is bad
6. Because autism is pervasive, low IQ has different symptoms depending on whether you're autistic.
The relevant prediction is "autistics from families with lots of autistics perform much better than autistics from de novo mutations", which there's some research behind (though obviously psych research, shaker of salt, etc.). High-functioning autistics do on average still have crappy life outcomes, but given the nature of the syndrome at least a large chunk of that and possibly all is due to external factors i.e. neurotypicals detect us as weird and getting shunned for being weird has negative effects.
The real test would be to populate an island with supermajority-autistic, removing the external factors, and see what happened. Good luck getting that past IRB, though.
I'm ambivalent on that.
The main reason I am ambivalent is that the diagnosis of autism is helpful to alert parents to the cause of children's abnormal behaviour (which can help to head off parents becoming hostile to their children over persistent autistic behaviours, although there's also a quack-autism-cure community so this isn't a pure positive), to explain to the kid him/herself why he/she's not like other kids (relevant for things like self-esteem), and to give parents something to club teachers over the head with if the teachers don't do something about the bullying (there is usually bullying at school because autistic kids are ideal targets, and in my experience because it's usually almost-everyone vs. autistic kid the teachers often decide said autistic kid is the problem).
The first and second don't require that autism be listed as a mental disorder per se, but they're reasons to make sure doctors know about how to figure out if a kid is autistic which is not all that different. The third can theoretically be fixed without the disability club if bullying is sufficiently brought under control in general; I'm not super-up-to-date on the state of that at the moment since I haven't interacted with the school system in a while.
The old DSM *did* distinguish between Asperger's (high-functioning autism) and autism-per-se, with the latter requiring low IQ.
Autism is obviously more "mental" than homosexuality, in the sense that homosexuality just makes you... want to fuck people of the same sex... and that's it. Autism makes you quite different mentally -- this is what both autists and non-autists would agree on.
The question of "illness" is complicated by the fact that autism can mean many different things. The people who keep banging their heads against the wall, obviously are ill. The argument is that the people who merely enjoy math a little too much, are not. So the category that includes both is... what? We do not really want to remove the former from the DSM, even if the latter want to be removed.
In my opinion, the proper solution would be something like classifying autism of the math-liking type as a "mental type" or something, and autism of the head-banging type as a "mental illness" within this type. But finding a consensus is difficult and updating the definitions will take years.
>.. and that's it. Autism makes you quite different mentally -- this is what both autists and non-autists would agree on.
Not true. There are other mean behavioral differences.
"Autism is obviously more "mental" than homosexuality, in the sense that homosexuality just makes you... want to fuck people of the same sex... and that's it."
Be thankful you've clearly never been exposed to the social media "only joking but serious" posting about how being queer is so much better than boring old cis straightness, LGBT+++ people are so creative and colourful and fun and generally more amazing than straight people, and queer culture is separate from and of course superior to straight culture, and being queer is not at all the same as being straight but you just want to fuck people of the same sex (see all the stuff about Pete Buttigieg being the 'wrong' sort of gay).
A lot of that is, of course, just cope: well maybe I don't fit in around here and I'm different from everyone else and I feel outcast, but that only means I'm *special* and *better* than them, so there!
Yeah, there was a separate community and culture built up around being gay when it was something that had to be hidden, could only be referred to in code words not openly, and people gathered in small groups concentrating on this one key element of who they were.
Now that it's all out in the open and there is no stigma any more (at least in theory but increasingly in practice), there's the tension between the old culture, which made a virtue out of necessity and embraced outsider status and developed political thinking around challenging the status quo, and the new environment where it's "Joe is the same as Jack, only gay, but that has no effect on how he behaves except that he's married to Bill, not Sally". Hence the accusations of being 'the wrong kind of gay', that is, assimilated into mainstream society such that there is no visible difference between you and one of the straights, or the discussions around "Pride isn't for families, keep Pride kinky":
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2022/05/31/lgbtq-pride-events-family-friendly/7336610001/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/29/pride-month-kink-consent/
> I think the issue is that nobody is in charge of classifying "mental types"
Yeah. Just like nobody was in charge of classifying sexual orientations, and as Deiseach mentions, leaving this responsibility to social networks perhaps wasn't the best idea.
So I guess it's like: "These are not illnesses, but we want someone to provide an official definition, on a professional level comparable to DSM." It's an adjacent territory.
Is this useful for some therapists/doctors/parents to be able to seek treatment/help for their Aspergersy kids? My understanding is that there are therapies that help with figuring out social cues, but I will admit I am pretty ignorant of that world, so maybe I am just wrong.
Turbulently. Real economic hardship and a highly unpopular government are an explosive combination. Truss is unlikely to last beyond Christmas, there are likely to be U turns or backbench revolts. But the argument for welfare increases and tax cuts for the poor is mainly political, it's not a solution to the basic economic problems, and it's hard to see what is.
(A tidbit on the subject of protests: the government have passed legislation lessening the right to protest, particularly giving the police the power to break up protests that are "noisy". But at the ongoing party conference in Birmingham, the police ignored the new legislation).
I don't think there's anything approaching a political crisis.
To the extent there's an economic crisis, it will go the same as the rest of the world's. Things will get worse for a while then they'll get better. For a while you'll think that this time is different and the world really is going to end this time, and then two years later you'll be kicking yourself for not buying at the bottom.
There will be a bit of a recession, then some weak growth, then a general election that one of the two main parties will win. Same as usual.
I don't think there's much doubt who's going to win. One party holding power for over 14 years is pretty unprecedented, all the signs of a senescent late phase government are there, and labour have an enormous lead (25%-34%).
Labour has a serious habit of punting "unlosable" elections in the past.... Look at all the elections Corbyn was leader for - I think Labour would have been a favourite in any of them with a bland moderate leader
Its amazing how easily it seems Labor should have been able to win past elections. If they had taken the American approach of electing a Joe Biden like figure instead of an ideologue, they surely would have won at least one of these elections.
Two years is a long time in politics.
I wrote a little about this near the bottom of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/18/know-your-gabapentinoids/
2. Not exactly. They are both agonists at the GABA-B receptor. But GHB is also an agonist of (I believe) an excitatory GHB receptor. And phenibut is an antagonist of a certain subunit of voltage gated calcium channels. This is probably phenibuts primary mechanism of action, as it's affinity for these binding sites is much higher than its affinity for GABA-B. Also, phenibut is an antagonist for TAAR-1, although it's unclear how relevant this is to its effects. It would explain the pro-dopaminergic effects though, since taar-1 antagonism is known to negatively modulate D2 autoreceptors, and positively modulate postsynaptic D2 receptors.
I find phenibut to be vastly more euphoric than benzos, to the extent that it's hard to believe they're chemically related. I'd compare phenibut to mini-ecstasy, especially the first dozen or so times that I did it
I mean you could microdose a tiny amount and see how it goes. I used it to get high (just being honest), in quantities ranging from 1000-2000mg. On average I did 1500mg at a time, and I don't weigh that much for a man, and have no benzo tolerance.
Buy a digital scale and try 100mg or something, see how it goes. I've heard stories of people microdosing to reduce anxiety, improve performance for presentations, socialize, etc. etc. Obviously, do not use it regularly. I stuck to a strict 'once a month' rule and never deviated
When I play chess, I can sometimes predict what my opponent will do. That doesn't mean, as far as I'm aware, that I have any control on what they will actually do.
A human with a good enough model of an other human can predict their actions in some cases. God just happen to have a particularly good model.
(Also imo he does not live time in R but in some p-addic space which explains a lot of the difference)
There's a novel called _The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen_ (1963) which includes the idea that God can only know the past and present, not the future. I've asked around, and it doesn't seem to be an idea in Judaism.
https://iep.utm.edu/o-theism/#:~:text=Open%20Theism%20is%20the%20thesis,freely%20do%20in%20the%20future.
So, 1994. Might or might not be influenced by the novel.
There are no Platonic forms of religions, so one cannot definitively speak of what is or is not an idea in "Judaism," but the idea that God does not know the future was advocated by some famous medieval Jewish philosophers like Gersonides.
Thank you. I suppose you can at least tell whether an idea is rare or common.
Pretty simple: God created you, and you have free will, and He knows your will. No contradiction there.
It would be a contradiction to say that God created us *without* free will and yet we’re responsible for our sins.
I guess the problem you’re running into here is that you have some idea that free will means that the future is unwritten, but even if your will is totally free it is certain that you will make some arbitrary choice—God just happens to know what that choice is, that doesn’t mean He chose it for you.
If I put a cookie on the coffee table and walk away my wife will definitely eat the cookie. I know this for sure, but I definitely didn’t make her do it and didn’t want her to. (I mean really, I don’t care, but go with the hypothetical.)
At the risk of rehashing the standard compatibilism debate with a new (old) flavor, what exactly is free will doing in this formulation, other than opening one up to responsibility for sin? What would be different about a person who didn't have free will?
You’re right, I think this question isn’t very good because it essentially asks to rehash the definition of free will. “How can free will exist if people with free will can’t choose anything other than what they chose” is insensible; the difference is they have choices, but it doesn’t mean they can illogically defy causality by choosing something they didn’t choose. Ultimately they will choose something and that thing will happen, which means all the other choices don’t happen. If you want to know how this differs after the fact of the choice, you are begging the question.
"It would be a contradiction to say that God created us *without* free will and yet we’re responsible for our sins."
Oedipus is responsible for his sins despite not choosing them. That guilt requires volition is a modern belief not a logical formula etched into the fabric of reality.
I agree that other frames have this idea. I don’t agree that it makes any sense. If you’re pointing out that there is an opinion amidst my opinion, yes, I agree.
For any crime, there must be some action that can be taken to avoid committing the crime, because the purpose of punishing crimes (or sins) is to incentivize people to choose otherwise. If you cannot choose to not commit a sin, there is no point in punishing you and no point in you feeling guilty. It would be like punishing a rock for being influenced by gravity.
>the purpose of punishing crimes (or sins) is to incentivize people to choose otherwise
Oedipus blinds himself to punish himself for his guilt. That doesn't fit your model.
>For any crime, there must be some action that can be taken to avoid committing the crime
Oedipus flees his home in order to avoid committing the crimes he is prophesied to commit and, because of this action, unwittingly commits those very crimes.
That's nonsense. The fact that Oedipus *feels* guilty does not mean he *is* guilty, or that justice is served by whatever self-destructive acts he chooses to do out of a sense of guilt.
There was no point in Oedipus blinding himself. Doing it won't un-fuck his mother, and there is no moral lesson his story can teach anyone besides "if the Oracle makes a prophecy about you you might as well just lay down and die right now because that's going to be less painful." No restitution, no rehabilitation, no deterrence - Oedipus's "punishment" doesn't fit any theory of criminal justice, it's purely to make himself feel better. And I would argue that therapy is a better route for that than self-mutilation.
(Of course, if free will is a lie, then I can't hold Oedipus responsible for how he reacted, because that too was foreordained. But that just makes the whole affair even more unjust, IMO.)
It's kind of a Christian idea in fact isn't it ?
Yes. "Things should be fair." seems to be a Christian idea, although I'm no religion expert and don't really know. The Old Testament doesn't appear to have much interest in portraying things as fair.
It's not just a Christian theory, it's most modern theories of criminal justice. Our legal system is not big on punishing people for things they had no choice but to do.
I would think any God worth worshipping should be at least as moral as the human legal system.
A caveat'ed Open Theism sounds correct to me, the various prophecies I've heard from people are extremely If-Then things; If you continue building this thing, Then tragedy will befall your loved one.
So here's my caveat; the outcome is pre-determined except when God intervenes. Free Will comes down to: listen to the intervention, or don't. If you don't listen, then you get the predetermined outcome. After listening, there's the second Free Will choice of acting or not acting. Don't act, pre-determined outcome.
So at the end of the day there are exactly two possible outcomes; the Pre-determined outcome, and the Backup outcome.
Maybe we should start with an easier one: if one believes the universe operates deterministically, how is *that* consistent with free will? I suppose one could join Roger Penrose and assert consciousness is an inherently quantum phenomenon, and has some heretofore unsuspected ability by some unknown mechanism to collapse wavefunctions in its preferred direction.
But otherwise, resolving a deterministic universe with free will poses a prior philosophical problem that we'd need to solve before we can productively address the question of what it would mean for an omniscient being (or superintelligent AI) to know the (deterministic) future.
So what's the argument?
If the argument is so subtle that it requires my reading a whole paper written by philosophers, I'll pass. That much logic is certain to contain several major errors, the same way 100,000 lines of code is certain to contain several bugs.
The incompatibilist agrees it is incoherent, and follow that to a fairly simple conclusion. Can the compatibilist come up with a meaningful definition of "free choice" that doesn't have that issue?
Justice comes from rewarding the good and punishing the bad. If you want to increase the total amount of Justice in the world, the easiest way to do it is to create a whole bunch of simulated people, put them through some series of moral tests, and reward those who do well whilst punishing those who do badly. To squeeze out the maximal amount of justice, it's best to make the reward and punishments infinite.
In this particular conception of justice it's irrelevant whether or not you know in advance which of your simulated people are going to get the reward and which are going to get the punishment. The important thing is to just keep cranking them through the simulation, rewarding the good ones and punishing the bad ones. It is insufficient to create only good people and reward them all, you need to punish bad ones too.
If God is maximally good then he must be maximally good on some specific metric. And the only way to be maximally good on some specific metric is to Goodhart the heck out of it. So it's not surprising that God in His infinite wisdom is busy creating evil people just to punish them, just as Columbia University or D. E. Shaw encourages vast number of applications just to reject them.
AW Pink is one of the few Calvinists who acknowledged (according to them) God created before time existed, billions of souls to burn in hell.
Agreed, which is why many (though not enough) Christians are not Calvinists.
That would be double predestination, that God not alone chooses those whom He wishes to save, but chooses those to be damned. I think modern Calvinists have soft-pedalled on that a lot, and instead concentrate more on "God chooses the Elect, and *you* might be one of them, so you need to hear the Gospel preached!"
They go heavy on St. Augustine with regard to this, and (naturally) Catholics disagree with them:
https://www.catholic.com/search?q=predestination
That is a long chain of "if then".
(1) If the future is set in stone - for us humans, it is not, because we don't know with certainty what will happen or how it will turn out. To take a recent example of a local accident, someone driving home in the early morning from doing a work shift and getting killed in a crash on a pretty empty road, just because they met up with a lorry turning out of a side-road at the exact wrong moment. Nobody expected that the person alive at 8 o'clock would be dead by 9 o'clock.
(2) God can see the future - does this mean that God creates the future? That's the whole crux here, with Calvin taking a very strong position on God's sovereignty, omnipotence and omniscience. His argument being that what God wills *must* come to pass, otherwise God is not omnipotent. God must be able to see the future, else God is not omniscient. If God can see the future, then that future *must* happen, else God is wrong, and God cannot be wrong. So God knows who is saved and who is damned, and by knowing, causes it to be, and this cannot be changed, or else God does not have absolute sovereignty:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty_of_God_in_Christianity#Calvinist_view
Sovereignty of God was a big deal to the Reformers, in greater or lesser degree, because they were building their faith on the bare word of Scripture and if you cannot believe or trust that God can do what He promises, then you are hosed. Anyway, this is above my pay grade, I don't even play a theologian on the TV 😁
(3) Therefore God has created people to be damned. Now the hardcore Reformed were willing to bite the bullet on this, but us namby-pamby Catholics said this was wrong, since God does not desire any of His creatures to be lost or damned. God's knowledge of the future comes from being outside of time, not in it, so cause and effect are different. God knows the future, but also knows the possibilities for each of us if we freely choose to accept the gift of faith, to repent, and to seek salvation.
God *is* free, that is the whole point, Neither is God conscribed to damn people, even if He can choose whom He will to be saved. That's the point of the book of Jonah: Jonah is disappointed when God spares Nineveh, after all the travails he went through to get there and warn them they were damned. God says 'what, I can't change My mind?'
From the Catechism:
"Providence and secondary causes
306 God is the sovereign master of his plan. But to carry it out he also makes use of his creatures' co-operation. This use is not a sign of weakness, but rather a token of almighty God's greatness and goodness. For God grants his creatures not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of co-operating in the accomplishment of his plan.
307 To human beings God even gives the power of freely sharing in his providence by entrusting them with the responsibility of "subduing" the earth and having dominion over it. God thus enables men to be intelligent and free causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbours. Though often unconscious collaborators with God's will, they can also enter deliberately into the divine plan by their actions, their prayers and their sufferings. They then fully become "God's fellow workers" and co-workers for his kingdom.
308 The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator. God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes: "For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Far from diminishing the creature's dignity, this truth enhances it. Drawn from nothingness by God's power, wisdom and goodness, it can do nothing if it is cut off from its origin, for "without a Creator the creature vanishes." Still less can a creature attain its ultimate end without the help of God's grace."
The overarching point is that our creation is an act of freedom and gratuitous love. We were made in love, for love, by love - not to be damned.
It does so notably *less* from inside the religious house, honestly. If you a dyed in the wool atheists's atheist, you might say "Explain to me exactly how free will works, and if you can't, I might decide it doesn't exist". As pointed out by others in the thread, this actually complicates free will before you even get to religion; nothing about our current understanding points strongly to "free will is even possible" - most arguments about it end up devolving to someone eventually saying "Well, maybe there's something we don't understand in quantum physics that interacts with choices and elevates them above RNG. Let's hope!"
I often use the phrase "magic" to talk about various aspects of Christianity, mostly to tell someone I believe things that they will find silly. But a lot of religion posits magic in the sense that there are elements of the religion that transcend physics - i.e. that this is more than just a very powerful alien with a very good understanding of physics, but in fact something that can break some of those rules.
Once you are at that point of believing in the supernatural in the way a lot of Christians do, someone comes up to you and says "Aha! I have developed and ascribe to a system of completely secular belief in the implications of physics! And within my-system-not-yours, I feel there's a conflict between a belief you hold based on a belief in the supernatural and my system, which takes as an assumption that nothing like you believe is possible from step one!"
Basically it's in the vein of a pro-life person coming up to a pro-choice person and saying "Taking as a given that I'm right and that abortion is the unjustified murder of an infant, doesn't that make you a horrifying homocidal monster? Defend yourself, murderer!". It starts too late in the argument to be productive - you can't just handwave away the most fundamental aspects of the disagreement (in your own favor) and expect to get very far.
I think people instinctively understand this coming from another direction - like, if I went up to a very confident atheist and said "Hey, I've decided that for the purpose of this argument that we should use my system's assumptions, not yours; given that, how can you justify your disobedience to the sovereign king of the universe?" he'd basically get why my argument wasn't great. But it's easy to plaster over that flaw going the other direction.