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Reading Unsigned Integer's explanation of wage rigidity reminds me of the bit in Seeing Like a State where the local lord absolutely would not raise the grain tax from "one basket" to "one and a half baskets" because that would cause riots, but they would try everything else - stretching the basket so it becomes slightly larger, pouring the grain from a greater height so it compacts more etc.
Over here in the UK, where everyone from train drivers to university lecturers to the postal service has either gone on strike recently or will be doing so soon, the equivalent of fiddling with the grain basket seems to come down to: (1) awarding pay rises below inflation, (2) messing with parameters like the percentage of wages that go into the pension scheme, or the conditions of the scheme, (3) expecting workers to work longer hours for the same pay and conditions (overtime in the UK is mostly unpaid).
I remember that as the foxes became more docile their appearance changed to be more like a cute dog, and these two traits seem to be linked. It seems possible that the more intelligent foxes would be more aggressive, wild, and less cooperative, which would make it very difficult to measure for "intelligence." I've read that wild animals have larger brains than domestic ones.
IMO the quality of intelligence test would be a limiting factor. An IQ test for animals. What animal would you start with? I think the Foxes study had 40 generations of breeding.
What would the SCOTUS look like if it required an 80% supermajority in the Senate to be elected to it, and instead of/as well as the president, any Senator (or just the majority and minority whips?) could nominate a justice to be voted on?
Meh. Much more interesting to ask what it would look like if getting a law degree or ever practising law disqualified you, i.e. none of its members could be lawyers, or even people who studiied the law.
They would probably also need to establish a new Marbury v. Madison like precedent, in which they struck down laws as unconstitutional if they defied the ability of a reasonably intelligent non-lawyer to even understand what the hell they mean after a few hours of concentrated good-faith effort. I'd be good with that.
...empty? I think ubiquitous stuff like breathing air might still fail to hit 80% Senate support, and adding additional candidates would just split the vote.
I'm sceptical of this - You may be right, but I think it's plausible that making achieving partisan advantage an obviously-impossible goal would mean that both sides would see that nominating the most politically-neutral judges they could find, or even nominating strict partisans in pairs, was better than no new judges.
Without a mechanic penalizing a lack of judges, there's no reason for someone to deliberately pick a judge they think will overrule them. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them currently prefer law interpretations to be split across the various Court of Appeals, which is what an empty Supreme Court gets you. Maybe they'd do the pairs thing, but there' s a reason the court has an odd number; the eight-person court of 2016 had a lot of no-decision ties.
(Also, it's now easier to make a Constitutional Amendment changing the Supreme Court selection process than it is to follow the process.)
seems like a straightforward extension of current image generation stuff to train it to make 3D models using a corpus of video game levels and CAD stuff.
I recall reading a blog post by a woman who was warning against mindfulness meditation potentially being harmful. I think I'm her case she said it slowed her reaction times and increased the severity of her visual snow. I can't seem to find it, anyone remember this?
Its interesting but should also mostly be ignored in favor of data. Even the most widely effective interventions and practises can be harmful for particular individuals.
Well, I wouldn't expect such extreme downsides, but I do think there's something to the point of view that your brain is doing things like compressing sensory information for evolutionary reasons. I think some of the sales pitches for meditation don't hold up to scrutiny super well, unless you have something like an anxiety disorder which would lead to you benefiting from it quite a lot.
Maybe, but again, refer to data, not one individual (who could be an outlier, could be lying, could be mistaken etc.). Some widely prescribed drugs can be fatal to certain people, doesn't mean they aren't life changing for many others.
Yeah just to be clear, I'm definitely not saying anything like "no one should meditate." I'm saying something more like "it's probably not the case that everyone should meditate."
Highly doubtful. I can believe that a survey of Iranians a while ago would turn up high levels of endorsement of child abuse - but the birth-order effect literature rests mostly on things like Scandinavian population registries where I expect being beaten to affect a very small percentage of children and hence, even if the effects were huge, would struggle to explain the meaningful average effects measured at a population level. I bet if you find some stats on the rarity of child-beating levels in Sweden (IIRC, the best birth order effect paper currently), and the average birth-order effect, make some plausible assumptions about differential sibling exposure (can't have a *birth-order* effect if all or none are beaten), and back out the effect size necessary, you'd find that it'd require something ludicrous like totally determining personality or needing to drop IQ 15 points for anyone who got a strapping even once, that sort of thing.
A crazy notion... Maybe people eat meat because it makes them feel good. Not for some psychological reason, but there's (also) some physiological reason which is not yet understood.
If you want people to not eat meat, perhaps the right direction of research isn't to invent a plant-based thing which is indistinguishable from meat while you're eating it, but rather something which is pleasant enough and is a good physiological match for meat.
Evidence: I know a couple of vegetarians who went back to eating some meat after years of not eating meat, and it really did seem to be more about health.
No, people in wealthy countries eat more meat. They can't afford it developing countries, but when they get to America they switch from rice and beans to animal protein. Moving to western countries increases ALL aspects of a person's carbon footprint including meat consumption. What you've said is just wishful thinking with no empirical basis whatsoever.
Even if you convince e.g. an hispanic American to reduce their meat intake, this reduced amount is still likely to be higher than what they did/would have consumed in their home country!
"this is bordering on monomaniacal"
No, this is a perfectly relevant point. Climate veganism is an almost exclusively western white phenomena. Convincing people to cut back on meat to save the environment only works for white people. And you're going to convince them to do this MUCH more slowly than the rate of immigrants coming to America, which means it is trivially true that reducing meat consumption to save the climate is a completely hopeless cause as long as immigration exists.
If the leftists get their way, that won't be a concern, because humanity won't be around in the future.
What is of more interest is why leftists think that preserving one of the 5000 species of frogs is more important than humans being able to survive winter.
Funny that the leftists think the same thing about the rightists:
"If the rightists get their way, that won't be a concern, because humanity won't be around in the future.
What is of more interest is why rightists think that preserving one of the 5000 kinds of steak is more important than humans being able to survive the coming floods, hurricanes, droughts and hydrogen sulfide infestation."
Hmmm, this style of arguing won't get us much nearer to the truth.
Livestock is responsible for about a quarter of the agriculture sector's greenhouse gas emissions. And meat is much worse than plants in terms of greenhouse gases per calorie, with beef the worst of the lot. So replacing meat with plants (ideally, by making fake meat that tastes just as good) seems like a good way to take a bite out of global warming.
But I suppose if you don't think global warming is a problem, then you would call all of that "random unrelated stuff."
A missing vitamin, maybe? I know vegans need to supplement with B12. (Or add nutritional yeast to your recipes, which is fortified with B12.) I don't know how long it takes before you start to notice the deficiency.
The behemoths are waiting. Off the coasts of Spain, Portugal, the UK and other European nations lie dozens of giant ships packed full of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Cooled to roughly -160C for transportation, the fossil fuel is in very high demand. Yet the ships remain at sea with their prized cargo.
After invading Ukraine in February, Russia curtailed gas supplies to Europe, sparking an energy crisis that sent the price of gas soaring. That led to fears of energy shortages and eye-watering bills for consumers.
"It's built up for about, I would say, five to six weeks," says Augustin Prate, vice president of energy and commodity markets at Kayrros, one of many observers who has watched the situation unfold.
He and colleagues track ships via AIS (Automatic Identification System) signals, which are broadcast by vessels to receivers, including on satellites.
Registering here a conspiracy hypothesis that this has something to do with the recent + historically-unprecedented "global market punishment for economically-rational behavior" events on both British bonds and Meta stock. (I.e. that some collection of UHNW individuals and investment firms are colluding to manipulate markets by restricting commodity supply, to create artificial inflation, to get people to react by lowering spending [i.e. to engender artificial bottom-up austerity]; and then are further manipulating the market by collectively shorting anyone who ignores the prior manipulation and continues spending anyway.)
You think that British policy and Meta corporate strategy are actually good and economically-rational? I think the markets rightfully view tax cuts during inflationary times, and a focus on the likely-doomed Metaverse as bad ideas.
I never said "good." (At least, they're not ethically good.)
(Also, to be clear, the thing market analysts have reported the market as 'punishing' Meta for, has nothing to do with the Metaverse, and everything to do with not "obeying" the bottoms-up market austerity measures by "doing 20% layoffs like all the other bigcorps did" — i.e. "aiding" in cutting spending / decreasing liquidity available to individuals in the market.)
Anyway: these strategies are "economically rational" (not quite the same thing as "rational" undecorated) in the sense that organizations (corporations, governments) have incentive structures (emergent preferences) which can — and often do — lead to all their resources being aligned behind selfishly maximizing short-term gains of their own shareholders, at the expense of both their own long-term gains, _and_ reducing the size of the pie for everyone else outside the organization. In other words, these are "firestarter bird" strategies — "I flush out the prey and so get more food for me now, in exchange for burning the area to the ground, so nobody else (including me) can get food later."
Such strategies are "economically rational" in two senses:
1. an instrumentally-rational sense — i.e. they're rational presuming you hold an organization's terminal preferences as axiomatic: the people involved in directing the organization in this direction can take their winnings and leave the organization before the long-term consequences come due. (This was the focus of the Tory plan: decreasing taxes on the rich, so they could get richer, and kick back some of that wealth to Tory leaders.)
2. a epistemically-rational game-theoretic sense: spending resources in a time of austerity enables you to outcompete rivals who spend less; thus driving them out of business; thus forcing the market to consolidate around you, granting you more monopoly power over the market, allowing you more control over prices; thus putting you in position to make more money in the end, when the market eventually recovers.
The interesting bit to me, is that none of the above is a hot take — organizations have been doing these sorts of selfish short-term "firestarter bird" plays throughout the history of capital markets. But, by-and-large, the organizations undertaking such acts in response to inflation have been _rewarded_ by the market. (It is in an individual investor's selfish interest to go long on governments and companies that bully others. If buying foreign war bonds was a thing, everyone would buy the bonds of the predicted winner of a war, even when they're the aggressor.)
There is a reason that Meta (a public company that plans in accordance with the market) and the current Tory government of Britain (a group without a fundamental libertarian bone in its body) would choose to undertake these tactics: they _expected_ the market to react positively. Their mental models _predicted_ the markets would react positively. Like they did historically. Like any naive model of "the market" as a set of people all trying to maximize their own wealth by buying and selling would predict.
Note also that investors and wealth-management firms _in_ the UK weren't selling off held British government bonds. It was only _foreign_ investors holding British bonds that were shorting. Which would refute this being an action of "the market" in general thinking the Tory policy would tank the British economy over the long term — as that would been expressed just as much through Britain's own investors shorting the bonds, as foreign investors doing it. The fact that the British investors continued to hold the bonds (until they hit sell-triggers that meant they couldn't any more) meant that, at least in _their_ eyes — for the effects on _their_ investments — the policy was a long-term rational one.
It takes a kind of centralized awareness — a game-theoretic non-defection between distributed actors, that "the market" as an entity does not inherently possess — to choose to punish "firestarter bird" tactics _despite_ those tactics being profitable for individual investors. Until this most recent global inflational crisis, that centralized awareness was nowhere to be found in the market.
I've mostly seen stories about Meta's stock decline being related to the Metaverse, not its labor market decisions, but maybe that's not the case. But assuming it is, I think investors are correctly recognizing that the Metaverse is not a good idea, and reflects both poor leadership and weakness in its core product. If I'm wrong about investors' thinking, then that might provide evidence for your hypothesis.
I had not heard of the difference in domestic versus foreign investor behavior. But that could simply be explained by differences in opinion about the long-term effects of the policy, not from conspiracy. And growth in the British economy isn't really a firestarter bird tactic - economic growth is generally a positive-sum game between countries. So a story of international markets punishing the British because they're trying to jump ahead of other countries in growth doesn't make sense to me.
On the other hand, energy subsidies are right now a zero-sum game in Europe - more natural gas for the British directly leads to less natural gas for the Germans. But that wasn't the policy making the news regarding the market reaction, even though it would most align with your theory.
That's not the main reason why increases in the minimum wage might not decrease employment; the standard argument from economists is based on non-competitive markets for labor, *especially* at the low end. When labor markets are monopsonistic (a monopoly but in reverse; only one buyer), it makes sense for an employer to artificially lower the wages it offers. You can almost think of it as the Marxist-style "reserve army of labor," except it's not held together by magic class-consciousness glue. If you're the only employer, refusing to create enough jobs for all workers so that you can drive their wages down is a viable strategy. (Unlike in a competitive market, where all that does is drive those workers to different employers and leave you without a workforce.)
To be clear, monopsonies are not all that common in labor markets as a whole. But low-income labor markets are a *lot* less competitive, particularly in rural areas where you can easily have a single Walmart or a factory that provides a third of a town's employment and most of its low-education jobs.
Economists generally agree that in the long run, nominal wages are fairly flexible, because employees move between jobs, at which point wages become "Unstuck." Even if they weren't, under the model in that comment, minimum wages would still damage employment and the economy overall. In the commenter's rigid-wage model, wages are too high in boom times, but in a bust, wages will be too low. If that's the case, setting high minimum wages will cause high unemployment in recessions, which will more than compensate the higher employment during booms.
That's definitely one theory, and yes, rural areas can have non-competitive labor markets. But urban and suburban areas usually have plenty of employment opportunities for low wage labor, so the monopsony explanation doesn't hold well.
I think you're mixing up the implications of the nominal wage rigidity model, though. While wages are flexible upwards, there is a great amount of rigidity downward, particularly caused by labor supply concerns. People hate taking pay cuts, and will often leave a job instead of accepting a pay cut, even if they'd actually be better off staying. So, during boom times, wages may get stuck at too low of levels, because employers are hesitant to raise wages when they need to. But the more common effect is that during busts, employers are unable to lower wages even if they need to, so they end up laying off employees. Then those employees are unwilling to accept jobs making less than they did before, unless they get desperate. And that effect can help prolong recessions.
Sorry for the overly broad question, but what do you guys do for stress?
I try to rationalize my way out of it e.g stress is useless and isn't helpful, but this is typically a short term solution and the pit in my stomach inevitably comes back. I try to meditate but this is also short term. Any ideas?
:- Talk to people I love - my parents or my siblings. They probably can't help with the thing stressing me, but being reassured that people love me and care about me sometimes makes me feel better.
:- Go for a run. I /hate/ exercise with the burning fury of a million blazing suns, but/so it works as a counter-irritant, and I need to do it anyhow so I might as well get something out of it. Plus, /having/ run, and showered, does sometimes leave me feeling good.
:- Decide that I'm going to let the ball that I'm stressing out about keeping in the air drop. Obviously, this isn't always an option, but it's often worth at least asking "if I just don't do this, how bad will it be?"
Oh, one other one I've found helps: sit and play with my fancy rats. Having a rat demonstrate that it trusts you by climbing onto you and licking peanut butter off your finger is very soothing.
(This doesn't work well when the source of stress is that one of your rats has escaped and is hiding under the sofa, but thankfully I've just recaptured her).
Move. Get out of the house, go for a run. Do some kind of exercise.
It sounds silly - "why would going for a run make me less upset that Jack has done X, Y, and Z? Why would it make me less worried about my test scores or my job?"
But we don't get to decide the things that make our brains release endorphins, so go for a run. And if you can go for a run or play basketball or do something exercisey with a friend, so much the better.
It doesn't need to be running though, any kind of exercise should have more or less the same effect. Better if it's something you enjoy. Dancing works well for me, it's very hard (for me) to be in a bad mood while dancing.
Oh I hate running. I just can't argue with how I feel *after* running (or really any other form of exercise). I keep wanting to believe that I have complex thoughts and emotions and shouldn't be as easy to manipulate as "go outside and wiggle around for 30 minutes and you'll be less upset," but every time I find myself upset, if I just make my self go wiggle around for 30 minutes... boom, suddenly I'm not as stressed out about whatever was bothering me.
That has never been my experience. I have enjoyed various forms of exercise in service of a greater goal (such as going hiking to see nice scenery, or playing some kind of sport with friends), but I've only ever enjoyed those things *in spite* of the physical exertion.
There are stressful things that *cannot* be avoided, and there are also stressful things that *can* be avoided. On the other side of the equation, there are things that *reduce* stress; some of them are harmless, other some with bad side effects.
The general strategy is to eliminate the unnecessary sources of stress, and only do the harmless things that reduce your stress, but do them a lot. Hopefully the overall result would be that you can deal with whatever stress remains.
A lot of stress is caused by specific people. Some people just *love* drama; they will create a conflict even in a situation where anyone else would just relax and enjoy a beautiful day. Some people are assholes; they reduce their own stress by stressing out others. If possible, avoid them. If not possible, try to reduce your time spent with them, and stop thinking about them when you don't have to (unless you are calmly strategizing how to further reduce your contact with them).
On the other hand, there are people who are great at making you relax, or great at helping you. (These might be two different types of people.) Try spending more time with them; maybe do something nice for them in return.
Some people do not realize that they can be strategic about who they spend their free time with. For example, instead of picking up a phone and calling other people, they wait until someone calls them. Problem is, sometimes it is the wrong people who call you all the time; you could call the right ones instead.
The same is true about internet debates. Some places are just horrible, and the winning move is not to visit them. Even in a relatively nice place such as ACX sometimes bad things happen. You need to realize that "not responding" is a perfectly valid option, and often the right one.
For me, the stress-relieving human interactions typically happen *offline*. There is something nice about being fully in the moment, instead of having 20 browser tabs open. Another activity that works for me is taking a walk alone.
Some stress is caused by things other than people. In such case, try asking a friend for help. Or just talk about it, any someone may offer a useful advice. Sometimes there are people able and willing to help you, they just do not know that you have this problem.
Avoid addictive things. If you start fighting stress by taking drugs, overeating, or debating online, there is more stress coming in the future as a consequence of your actions. (Nothing wrong with browsing the web once in a while, or eating once in a while, per se. Problem is, if you do it as a way to cope with stress, so you increase the dosage when the stress increases.)
Don't panic. If you can't fix the big things, at least try fixing the smaller ones. (Do the dishes. Clean up your room.) It might help build you the right attitude.
Sometimes the stress is caused by stupid ideas of other people. Maybe you worry a lot about achieving something you actually do not care about, only because someone else told you that you should. (Problem is, this is sometimes difficult to distinguish from a genuinely good advice.) Sometimes, abandoning the whole idea is the right option.
There is a checklist "HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired". If you feel bad, check if you are not in one of these conditions; if you are, address it directly. (Take a healthy snack. Breathe deeply. Call a friend. Take a nap.)
I'll post here mostly to be notified about other people's answers, I can use them myself. But, I'm not one to let a massive lack of knowledge stop me from giving advice.
For acute stress, like worrying that your work won't be up to par, I think the most stress-relieving option is to just assume the worst outcome as the default, and plan for it. So if you're worried about work problems, look up other jobs hiring in your area, and do your work with the knowledge that you have a fallback job if you crater badly enough to get fired from this one. Then when you don't crater, it's all gravy.
For more long-term stuff like unemployment, cleaning seems to help. Clean, call people you've been meaning to talk to, do things that can at least reasonably be interpreted as productive. Get enough productivity under your belt and your stress will ease. I assume.
Rationalizing probably won't work. Exercise is probably the best cure, but it takes time and repetitive practice to really embed itself as a positive addiction.
What kind of stress are you talking about? Is it situational, related to something in particular? General?
Generally, I think SSRIs are the miracle cure for how to live in the 21st century. They'll make your daily anxieties and depressions seem not so awful. That's the only thing I've tried that is good for relieving stress long term, as in anything else I've tried hasn't really worked for more than like 20 minutes.
A quick question for the people living in California (and/or any other high tax US state). I am having a genuinely hard time understanding how the tax rate there is so high, and yet the public goods are so… non existent.
For reference: with Germany’s tax rate, if you are making about 100,000 euro, you pay 36.5% taxes (https://incomeaftertax.com/100000-after-tax-de). If you live in California, and make $101,100 (aka about 100,000 euro) you pay 30.1% (https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=101100&from=year®ion=California). (And I think California tax rate exceeds German tax rate in the top income brackets). They get free health care, free university, pensions, actually working trains, great unemployment (the government will give you unemployment for life, if you need it), maternity/paternity leave etc.
Small differences, I understand. Differences in priorities, I understand. Low tax rates/Thatcherism, I hate (but understand). But I really do not understand how two places with comparable tax rates and ideals can be THIS different. Is it a culture thing? Corruption?
An alternative question: is there anything that California’s government does better? Like at all? Is there something that I am over looking here.
I friend recently asked me this question, and I don't have a good answer-- any thoughts?
Edit: first, some detail on German income tax and social security schemes. If not interested, skip and go directly to last paragraph.
As for German income tax, there are six tax categories or classes, depending on whether you live alone, are married with both earning, live alone and raise a child and so on. And then there is a progressive tax system for the income tax. Plus, there are so many exceptions and occasions to deduce tax. So overall, one simple rate at a certain point of income might be not enough for comparison, not even for income tax alone.
Maybe even more importantly, healthcare, pensions and unemployment in Germany are all based on so called social security schemes.
For a few examples: if you earn 60 000 a year, in tax class 1 you'll pay roughly 11 k in income tax and 12 k in social security. The other half of the social security was already paid by your employer. So if your gross income is 60 000 and your net income is 35 000, than the employer's gross is roughly 74 000.
If you're earning 120 000 a year, your income tax might be 40 k including 2 000 Euro for supporting the eastern states in Germany and 3000 Euro for the church, if you're a member, and an additional 14 k of social security. So the tax has risen quite a bit, but the social security only somewhat - there is a cap on the latter.
I didn't look up the newest numbers, but overall it's sth. like unemployment insurance: 2.4% per half employee / employer, long-term care insurance: 3.05% each half employee / employer, statutory health insurance: 14.6% + additional contribution (depending on the health insurance fund), half for employees / half for employers, pension insurance: 18.6% borne half by the employee and half by the employer.
Also, just for the record, unemployment payment is not for life - it once was - now it's for about a year. You only get it if you paid into the unemployment insurance scheme before. Whoever is in urgent need gets social security money, whether they worked before or not, and yes, this is for however long you need.
Well, I had fun looking that up. But honestly, if you want to compare state income and state output, don't look at a single tax. Better have a look at state budgets, both on the income and the expenditure sides. Obviously, you need to consider all the state levels that are relevant to the issues you're looking at (federal, state, local).
IIRC California is a net producer of taxes to the federal government treasury, while some other states are net consumers. Californians' taxes go in part to paying for these other states' federal public-works projects; federal disaster-relief efforts; federal military bases (and payments to military contractors); upkeep of other states' national parks and forests; etc.
California is a net producer of transfer payments. In other words, California pays more into things like social security or food stamps than it receives.
It is not a net producer of taxes but a net recipient. In other words, it receives more money in purchases or payments for things like military salaries, infrastructure projects, software purchases, etc than it pays. It's about average in terms of percentage of budget received from the Federal government.
The "welfare queen red states" meme is actually rather awful. Red states in the sense of the actual government tend to be less reliant on Federal dollars than blue ones. It's the poor people in red states who receive those transfers, not the state itself. And most Republicans in those states would be very happy to cut those benefits. So when some California liberal sneers about welfare queen Louisiana and how they should be cut off they're not threatening to hurt the elite of Louisiana. They're threatening to withhold food stamps from the poor.
My biggest objection the "welfare queen red states" meme is that most of the money is going to individuals, not states. This has two major implications. One is (as you brought up) that the people paying the taxes and the people getting the money are generally not the same people even if they live in the same states, so a programmer paying income taxes to pay for a poor person's food stamps is a very similar transfer whether they both live in California or if one lives in California and the other lives in Louisiana.
The other big problem is that individuals are not statically tied to a single state. Two of the biggest categories of federal spending are Medicare and Social Security, where the beneficiaries are primarily older retirees. Since it's common for people to move upon retirement (and generally moving towards southern red states or southwestern purple states for combinations of climate, tax level and structure, and cost of living), then you wind up with people paying taxes in New York or California during their peak earnings years, then collecting federal retirement benefits in Florida or Arizona. Combine this with people being at different life stages, and at any given time the "donor state" map looks like people in Sun Belt states are mooching off of the Northeast and the West Coast.
Neither of those things (transfer payments; balance of state taxes + federal state-level grants for execution of programs that are federal mandated but are state-level executive responsibilities) were quite what I was referring to, though, no?
I was speaking more of the spending the Federal government does _at the Federal level_ (i.e. not by giving money to a state government to disburse, but by the Federal government itself directly cutting cheques to private contractors), where that spending happens to end up having its _effects_ in other states than the state in which the (Federal!) income tax to fund it was collected. California ends up funding a large portion of Federal spending, simply by having a large portion of the country's GDP inside it, and so its individuals in aggregate paying a large portion of the country's Federal income tax. That's not a California-specific thing, though; Federal income tax is the same wherever you are. That's just a "where the people who make the most money happen to live" thing.
This is why I mentioned tried to use e.g. national parks and forests as an example — these are Federally-controlled land within a State's borders, not State-government-controlled land; and so the _only_ spending that happens to these, is direct Federal spending.
If I understand you correctly then I think my fourth sentence addresses that. California is a net recipient of Federal taxes in terms of purchases/salaries/etc. It has a bunch of large military bases, Silicon Valley, a bunch of Federal government hiring/infrastructure, a large amount of Federal land, etc. You're right of course it's also a very large tax base.
So I think it's better to compare the US as a whole to Germany, rather than CA individually. Tax comparisons are tough because states can get you through income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. Texas has no income tax, for example, but it has a decent sales tax and I'm seeing property tax rates of 2% or higher. Oregon, by contrast, has a 9-10% income tax rate but no sales tax. California has fairly high income taxes but it's property taxes are relatively low and stay low through prop 13. The only state I've found that doesn't get their money somehow is Nevada, where the casinos make so much money that the local taxes are legitimately low. But overall, just looking at income taxes will throw off the comparison.
As for why the US gets so much less benefit than Germany, per Krugman, the US government really only spends on three things: Medicare, Social Security, and the military. And while Social Security and the US military aren't efficient, they are fairly effective. Medicare, meanwhile, is tied to our nightmare healthcare market so...uh...that's doomed.
Even looking at it from a national level, I just find it slightly strange that there is such a gaping difference in the quality of public good provided. Germany has its own Social Security system and is now hiking up military spending (Still not nearly US-level, but not THAT drastically off either).(https://www.sipri.org/commentary/blog/2022/explainer-proposed-hike-german-military-spending).
With regard to health care... yeah... that is a massive mess. But it seems that nearly everything is a mess:
Usually the rhetoric is "Europe has more taxes" but from what I am seeing that is just not all that true. Sorry for the rant. It feels like there has to be something fundamentally wrong with the US's spending. (To be clear not all government spending, just the US's government spending). I know this is a larger topic than I started out with :). But from my perspective it makes NO sense and is super annoying.
Corruption for some value of corruption. California civil servants are extremely well paid and their contracts are extremely large and all that.
To take a simple example: The average California schoolteacher makes about $86,000 not including benefits which push it well into six figures. The average German schoolteacher makes €42,000 and has worse benefits. Germans can get two schoolteachers plus change for every Californian teacher and the German schoolteachers produce better results on average. And you can find similar statistics for most positions, private subcontracting, etc. Though teacher's are notable as one of the biggest line items.
Europe has a class of relatively low paid but efficient civil servants. America has a class of extremely well paid but relatively inefficient civil servants. The reasons why (or my opinion of them) are probably a bit culture war.
42 000 seems too low, where did you get this from? Also, I can't compare the benefits for German teachers to those of Californian teachers. However, in Germany, if you have civil servant status, which you usually do if you *studied* for being a teacher, this comes with a lot of benefits.
>Germans can get two schoolteachers plus change for every Californian teacher and the German schoolteachers produce better results on average.
No. German students perform better than Californian students. Whether this has anything to do with the quality of the respective teachers cannot be inferred from this. When you control for student race, this education gap would likely be greatly diminished.
There are Black Germans you know. Both recent arrivals and people who have been there for over a century. Comes with having African colonies. "Would likely" is just you assuming you're correct. Feel free to do the research if you want to. Until then I'm going to assume you're wrong.
Okay, so what? This is a basically meaningless statement without numbers. Germany is around 87% European, 9 % Asian, and 0.6% black african (the majority of whom have not "been there over a century"). It doesn't matter how low the black germans score, they aren't meaningfully impacting German schooling scores.
Meanwhile, California is 39% hispanic, 37% white, 14% Asian and 5.5% black, 4% mixed and the rest other non-whites. It's demographics are vastly less white/asian than Germany, and are going to have an enormous impact on schooling scores. And yet somehow you think the fact that there are some finite number of black people in Germany invalidates this. Bizarre.
>"Would likely" is just you assuming you're correct.
First of all, you're the one who simply asserted that teachers are the ones who "produce" superior results between countries with no evidence whatsoever.
Secondly, I don't have data for California specifically, but white US students beat the pants off German students despite the fact that the US performs worse overall, meaning that the overall differences between the US and Germany in schooling are mostly a product of Germany being much whiter than the US: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
And you can see that hispanic US students perform much worse than US overall and Germany, meaning that the gap between California and Germany is going to be driven by non-white students to an even greater extent than US overall compared with Germany.
So if it was caused primarily by genetics you would have groups with similar genetics under different systems and could run the numbers Which you haven't. You've instead latched onto a minor point about why California takes in so much taxes to climb on a hobby horse. I'd be interested in seeing your full argument if you could articulate a well cited and argued one. But I haven't seen it yet.
>So if it was caused primarily by genetics you would have groups with similar genetics under different systems and could run the numbers Which you haven't.
Don't you think its weird that you don't need any of this to substantiate your assertion that German teachers are better than American ones?
White American students do better than German students. German students do better than non-asian minority American students. There's absolutely no reason to assume that German teachers are better.
>But I haven't seen it yet.
And again, you haven't offered a damn bit of evidence for your assertion that German teachers are superior to American or Californian ones, which was the claim I was responding to in the first place.
Not sure on teachers but CA civil servants are not well paid and it's going to be a big problem in the next ten years.
Bottom line, most civil servants are Office Technicians or Staff Service Analysts, making $30-$60k. The more senior ranks are Associate Governmental Program Analysts or Staff Services Managers making $65-$90k/yr. Add on $700-$1500/month for each in state contributions to the pension system and you've got decent money but nothing fantastic and people at the Associate Director level are only making $130k/yr.
The problem is that a house in Sacramento with minimal gunfire costs $400k, Elk Grove is running $600k, and Midtown Sac is a mil plus. So your executive team can't afford to live near the offices and most line staff are looking at houses at 10x their annual salary. That's not sustainable. How you bump salaries without blowing up the pension system through, I dunno.
At any rate, it's significantly higher than Europe. But the statistics do not bear your anecdotes out. The median/average bureaucrat (who admittedly is mid-career because they're average) costs the state six figures. Here's, for example, a breakdown from a California newspaper that ranges from $121k to $214k total comp. (https://californiaglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-21-at-7.20.11-PM.png)
Did you intend to link to that? Because I'm pretty sure those are municipal salary ranges, not state, and weird ones at that. Police and fire are generally city things, not state, and they've got to be an overwhelming % of what they're looking at if everyone else is "misc".
And there's no anecdata here. The CA Secretary of State has the data here, they pay ~$2.3 billion/month in gross wages to ~700k employees, so ~$3.3k per employee in gross wages(1) (this does include UC, CSU, and JC salaries). If you think they're lying, literally every single state employee's salary is available online in a searchable database (2).
Also, I know why you're referring to total compensation instead of pay, but my impression was total compensation is usually 50% higher than salary, roughly in line with what you showed. (also, that seems weird to me. Civil service benefits are exaggerated but they're definitely better than the private sector.)
Are city employees not bureaucrats? We're talking about the general quality of civil servants in California and I'm pointing out they're much more expensive and that creates issues. We've been talking about teachers, who are municipal, from the start.
For (1) why are you calculating per deposit and not per employee? That could easily be wrong due to, for example, two week pay periods vs monthly. Per employee it's $118,399.05. I don't think they're lying. That's entirely in line with the data I found. And that's just wages.
I'm less certain about benefits in general. But we seem like we're more in agreement there.
Not really, city employees and state employees don't mix anymore than local police and the FBI mix. Different pay scales, different missions, different benefits, no real crossover. I think county and city governments do some cooperation but state and feds really don't. And the state bureaucrats get paid out of state income tax and sales tax, I think city/municipal gets paid out of property tax.
I'm calculating off pay warrants because, well, paychecks are easier to track than employees and basically everyone gets paid monthly. The problem with doing it off pay warrants is that it includes part-timers and seasonal guys. The problem with doing it with just employees is that the pay warrants include the Judicial Council salaries (minimal) and the UC/CSU colleges (big). Based on the pay scales I provided I think that's far closer to accurate but, to be fair, without downloading the whole dataset and running it ourselves, I'm not sure how I'd prove it.
Yeah, benefits are a legitimate concern. Honestly, less the pension system and more the health care benefits. The state has done a decent job getting more money out of the workers, I think it's a mandatory 2% contrib now into OPEB/CERBT (1), but with health care spiraling so fast and retired workers looking at 80%-100% of medical benefits covered in retirement...it's just a financial nightmare.
Interesting. Thanks for your answer! So are school teachers just rich in California? (Is it a very sought after job?). Or is the cost of living just higher leading to higher salaries being needed?
And, if you don't mind me asking, what do you mean about the culture war? How does this relate to gov spending?
They're much better paid compared to their society's average. German teachers are paid below the German average (42k vs ~48k euros) while Californians are paid above ($86k vs ~$54k). As to whether it's sought after I can't say.
It'd involve some unkind words about significant factions on the American left and making claims that, while true, they find rather upsetting. I can go there I suppose but I don't want to derail this. I prefer the technocratic discussion.
That is definitely concerning. It is strange though that salaries for mediocre work remain that high. You would think higher salaries lead to more qualified applicants, and thus better schools.
There must be some sort of inefficiency or misalignment of motivations in the system. The only other explanation is that US workers are just on net less capable (which I doubt).
(I worked at a Starbucks while living in Chicago rather than teaching there, despite already having a teaching degree and making probably a third as much as I could have)
I'm not sure what German schools are like, but American schools tend to be highly constrained in ways that result in rather low overall job satisfaction. Especially, the teachers and students are not permitted to choose or leave each other by mutual consent.
It's common to have a few young people in each class who are intent on frustrating the teacher's plans each and every day, and it's not possible for the teacher to do anything about it other than attempting to employ psychological tricks, while the young person talks over them and challenges at them to their face, and utterly disregards their attempts to teach. When this dynamic is found out, the administrator might chew out the teacher, and tell them to do better at employing the psychological tricks, which the young antagonists know quite well and don't care for all that much. Even if there are only two such people in a class of 30 where the others are students who are trying to learn, there is no possible force other than that of personality and stern looks that can be exerted against it. This is very common in bad schools of all levels.
So, for instance, someone had a desk thrown at her, the young person who did it came back the next day without an apology, and she left to become a fire dancer. It isn't unheard of for teachers even in basically normal suburban districts to quit midday without notice. Administration tends to react to struggling teachers with hostility and the implication that they should develop more forceful and engaging personalities Nobody knows how, personalities don't chance all that much, most people can't perform a charasmatic persona 7 hrs a day.
Americans also have the expectation that all students should be above average and college ready, and this inflicts some misery on both low level students and their teachers.
Pay to some degree reflects these kinds of problems.
Also, there's a lot of gatekeeping and pickiness despite supposedly wanting more teachers.
> I'm not sure what German schools are like, but American schools tend to be highly constrained in ways that result in rather low overall job satisfaction.
My brief teaching experience in Slovakia did not seem fundamentally different (only there was no violence involved). Some kids misbehave all the time, you are supposed to "do something about it", but you are supposed to figure it out on your own. The solution seems to involve some psychological tricks because anything else is forbidden; the problem is that the problematic kids already know that. The advice to develop a charismatic personality is probably the #1 solution offered in online discussions.
So I suspect that this is universal (or at least, universal in countries with universal school attendance), only the specific type of misbehavior at school reflects the misbehavior common in the country in general. (Like, in USA, the misbehavior is more likely to include bringing a gun to the classroom.)
How much the teachers are paid, is therefore probably unrelated to all this. Probably a result of something else, such as how the state regulates the teacher salaries in state schools, and what proportion of the population attends private schools.
Thanks for sharing! I guess the US is just paying a massive externally in the form of teacher salaries for all of our social issues.
Germany does have a trade school system that acts as a release valve on their education system-- there is a place to put problematic students that probably is actually a lot more effective at educating them for post grad.
As for gatekeeping... I don't know about Germany, but I would think it is better? More regulation/standardization.
Is that German tax rate just federal taxes? I would guess that Germans have to pay state taxes too. Is that California tax rate just state taxes? (The link doesn't work for me.)
In addition to that issue, the U.S. spends, proportional to GDP, more than twice as much on the military as Germany does.
Yes, exactly, the national government collects the income taxes and redistributes them. (Or at least a single authority does that; I think the tax offices are actually run by the communes; but it's based on national law.)
There are consumption taxes, like VAT and taxes on gasoline and some alcohols, which are paid in different ways. And some exceptions like taxes around pets and cars.
They'll let you know about the political orientation of where news stories are covered.
I subscribed, but I eventually found I wasn't getting around to using it. Still.... they *notified* me when my subscription was coming up for renewal so I could make a choice about whether or not to keep paying, and I think they deserve some publicity for that.
Cautiously endorsed. I haven't spent enough time with Ground News since I first became aware of them a few weeks ago to get a detailed feel for how they deal with the more difficult media dynamics, but their approach is theoretically very interesting and I haven't seen any missteps.
Question for y'all, only a little inspired by Scott's recent house parties posts.
How does one go about hosting one of these? I spent most of college studying, and now that I actually have: a space to host in (in a few months hopefully), people around me who seem fun who I'd like to get to know better, and a few years spent working on social skills; I'd like to host a party.
Do I just... send an email? This feels almost like an ugh field to me, like I really don't know how it works but maybe it's not as complicated as it seems? Is there more to making it half-decent than getting food/drink, putting on some music, and being welcoming? Is there some form of social capital that drives whether people actually want to come, or is an email going to land in inboxes & invoke an "ew" in the recipient? Do I have to state a socially acceptable reason for hosting to get invitation responses?
Are these even the right questions?
And if it's not actually complicated, is there a way I can make it... fun? I.e. with as little material for another post like Scott's as possible
Really just out here yeeting questions in search of advice for someone who's never been too skilled socially. Anything helps!
Thank you all! Really appreciate the insight - this is excellent advice. I feel quite encouraged. Hopefully y'all will hear a report back before too long about some measure of success.
My wife will usually ask a few people first that she really wants to come to find out when they're available. Then she texts everyone to let them know, ideally about a month beforehand. Sometimes as little as a few days beforehand, but then we get a small turnout. Sometimes there's a reason, more often there isn't. Day of, we buy some cases of beer, some kids drinks, forty hot dogs, and smores stuff. I try to drink at least two beers before people come to help with the socializing. When people start to turn up, I light a fire, set out some chairs and benches, and crank up the boom box. This seems to work well if we have two guests or fifty (well, I buy fewer hot dogs if we're only expecting two).
Tossrock's advice covers what I had started typing earlier.
I think, activities for a come-and-mingle-with-strangers party, like a housewarming: places for people to sit and talk; if you have a yard with a fire pit, you can have yard games there (ring toss, darts, that type); trivia games and party games are good. Cards Against Humanity for the right crowd, but if not - Taboo, Charades, Pictionary.... there are a whole bunch of phone-based ones these days. You can have the games happen later on in the day, after people have had some alcohol and mingled a little bit and ate.
On the food: the main "hot" food, like the pizza, can be delivered a little later after the party starts, so that it can be an event during the party.
Refreshments: for food, depending on your budget, have a main "meal-ish" item, pizza being a good and inoffensive option - get plain and one other topping set. Supplement with a fruit tray, a veggie tray, a charcuterie board (cured meats and cheeses); maybe also snacks like pretzels or cheese puffs in bowls that you refill, or chips and salsa. Also cookies and sweets - Oreos, brownies (store-bought or made from a mix), elephant ears - 2-3 kinds. With the large assortment, the nice thing is, not everyone will eat everything, so you don't need to get enough of EACH all the secondary things for everyone. And it ensures at least some kind of nibbles for people with food sensitivities you didn't know about.
Drinks: get a pallet of water bottles; more beer than you have guests; a non-beer beverage is optional (e.g. hard cider or White Claw) and a soft drink option (e.g. cokes or sprites). Get more than enough; you will find a use for them later, even if (as will most likely happen) you will have plenty left over.
At least this is what I like to do, but I also have maybe up to 10 people, not huge parties with lots of people. But it's also what I like at a party food- and refreshments-wise.
Just sending an email could theoretically work, depending on the existing dispositions of the folk involved, but I'd recommend doing a little more homework to improve your chances of good outcomes. First, a fun wiki link (mostly because I like it, but it's also relevant): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi - basically, getting buy-in in advance of any formal invite raises the chances of the people you want to attend actually attending.
Concretely, first think about the core people you really want to be there. Approach them individually (ideally in person, but a private message of some kind can work too), and say something like, "Hey, I'm thinking about hosting a get together on <arbitrary weekend about a month in the future> and wanted to invite you - is that something you'd be interested in?" Oftentimes you'll get something like, "Oh that sounds really cool, but I'm doing <other thing> that weekend!" Because you haven't firmly committed to a date yet, you have the opportunity to change the time to pull the maximum amount of your core set of folks. As you start to get the soft, informal 'yes's, you can then use those while proposing it to other people, ie "I'm thinking about hosting a party on <new date>, <interested persons A & B> said they're in, would you be down for that?"
Once you've got your nemawashi covered, then you can send the wider formal invite describing the date/time/location/etc, confident in the knowledge that there will be a good base of people who show up. How you do that depends on the community norms - in some places email is perfectly appropriate, others might use Paperless Post, Facebook events, Partiful, plain MMS, etc.
Especially among nerds and when forming new groups, an activity or reason for the gathering can be helpful. Some basic ones include holiday parties, televised sports, media consumption, games, etc. More advanced stuff (and relevant to the kind of parties Scott is describing) might include flash talks, fundraisers, launch parties, performance art, etc.
It's easier if you have an occasion. Board Game Night! The Superbowl! St. Patrick's Day! The weather is cold now and I want to make chili! The occasion doesn't matter, but it makes it easier for people to attend. Like, the occasion provides an easy first topic of conversation with strangers, beyond "So, how do you know An ACX Commenter?" It provides guests a way out of conversations they'd like to leave ("Well, nice to meet you, I'm going to check out this chili")
But no, you don't need a reason, you can just invite people to a party at your house. It's just regular social capital that drives whether people want to come: do they want to spend time with you? Do they think they'll meet other interesting/fun/socially valuable people there? You probably already have enough social capital with the people around you who you'd like to get to know better to invite them to a party without it being embarrassing for any of you. Whether they'll come is another matter.
Also, I think it's perfectly okay to use a dorky / cliched means of inviting people like an "e-vite" (like greetingsisland.com) Part of what cliche/etiquette/formality is for is letting people know you aren't weird. A formality like an e-vite spares you having to write an email, and spares them feeling bad turning you down when you went to all the trouble to write a nice personal email.
I'm a big believer in games. Rules-heavy, nerdy games for your nerdy friends; funny, silly, easy games for your more socially extroverted friends; videogames for your gamer friends. It's very easy to say yes when you get invited to game night, and it's also very easy to say no. If people feel socially uncomfortable, they can focus on the game. And if it's going to be just games and pizza, you can skip the evite (that'd be too formal) and just start a group text.
(PS, one of the reasons it's great to host parties is that you yourself can escape any conversation to go take care of other guests ("I'd better check on the drinks, see if anything is running low", etc).)
Oh! Of course! If you're getting a new space in a few months, invite them to a housewarming party! (If you don't mind giving "the grand tour" and your guests spending the whole evening talking about their own housing searches past and future)
Not exactly the same thing, but I used to live in an international community house and parties were kind of similar. (less techy, but still nerdy and just as interesting)
It helps when there are 5-10 diverse people already living in the house. So, if each of them brings as a +3, you already have 2 dozen people at your house party. We lived near a couple of world class universities, so a lot of guests were grad students doing really cool work.
The most important part is how you select roommates. We used to do 1 hr long interviews, with a 2 stage elimination process based on introductory messages and the vibe we got from them. We also enforced gender parity, age range 22-35-ish, a vague sense of avoiding formation of any homogeneous group and a strong desire to build a community.
Honestly, it is hard. Because it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you have this sort of situation created, it is self reinforcing, but the first year or two takes what can seem like a lot of deliberate effort.
If you're starting something like this, find a partner who is your polar opposite. (man vs woman, stem vs humanities, artsy vs sporty, that kind of thing) and be very deliberate in how you choose the first few roommates. Once initialized, you can't really control how these things develop. So you have to very careful about how you initialize it. Also, be located somewhere accessible. No one wants to drive 1 hour to come to your party.
In our case, we were doing meetups for SSC readers back when SSC was still live. I think we announced on SSC initially. At this point I have an email list of people who wanted to be notified, so when we do one — ideally monthly but in practice a good deal less — I sent a notice to the list.
Anyone here a fan of Star Trek? The DS9 episode 'Statistical Probabilities' reminds me in some ways of the rationalist-adjacent community (no insult intended, as I include myself in this group). Lots of success in forecasting and understanding things that most people wouldn't see, but excessive confidence in longer-term predictions and overreliance on game theory. Curious what others thought of the episode, and also happy to hear other Trek-related thoughts.
(From my memory of watching it years ago, refreshed by reading a wiki page) It seems clearly intended as a parable about overconfidence, though it seems notable to me that the forecasters' recommendations weren't rejected BECAUSE they were over-confident, but because the recommendations were weird and made large short-term sacrifices for very long-term gains. No one proposed, say, testing the forecasters' accuracy, or asked what quantitative level of certainty would be needed to justify the plan. So I am not impressed with any party in this episode.
I think a lot of our fiction (and especially family or children's fiction) teaches the unfortunate lesson that, when the stakes are high, you should never cut your losses, but should always gamble on the longshot of getting everything you want, no matter how implausible it is or how disastrous it will be if you lose that gamble. For example, if two of your friends are in mortal peril, you should take a million-to-one shot at saving both, instead of a ~100% chance of saving one. I notice some reflection of that philosophy here, in the refusal to even entertain a temporary surrender.
Interesting! I agree that the recommendations were rejected on the basis of weirdness and not overconfidence, and that confidence is usually the "right" metric when forecasting. That said, it also seems like weirdness can be a sign of inaccuracy? It intuitively feels like any strategy that is too strange is probably not robust to small changes in one's priors on e.g. the Dominion's battle tactics and governance strategy.
I also agree with you about this property of fiction. I guess on one hand, I agree with you that it is unrealistic that things will work out in most cases, and so realistically you should depict more failure. On the other hand, I think sometimes when you analyze the situation in more depth, it sometimes turns out to be logical to not cut losses. E.g. say a terrorist group captures hostages as a bargaining tool, knowing it will take you a huge loss in manpower to recover them, possibly exceeding the number of hostages. In a single situation, given that they have done this, it doesn't make sense for a utilitarian to rescue them. However, if you retain the policy of always mounting hostage rescue attempts regardless of the expected casualties, then after a few such situations, terrorist groups will be less likely to take hostages as they will realize that there is no point in hoping they can bargain with you. This thus decreases casualties in the long run.
I'm not sure to what extent this applies to DS9....as I recall, the Federation would have been conquered had it not been for the wormhole aliens, so a bit of a deus ex machina. So maybe in their absence, the forecasters' suggestions would have saved lives after all! In any case, thanks for the interesting discussion.
I have some requests for fiction / surprise that they don't exist.
I've had a recurring fantasy since childhood of showing magical modern technology to various people in the past, or explaining recent history to them and seeing how they react. I'm not essential to this picture, just the fact of seeing someone having to absorb all the stuff that's happened in the however many hundreds of years they've been gone. I get that this has been done for present-day protagonists adapting to the future (e.g. Futurama, Samurai Jack, Idiocracy). However, I'm not aware of any past-into-present stories other than the film "Er Ist Wieder Da" (Look Who's Back) about Hitler waking up in modern-day Germany. But that's a comedy with a deliberately controversial premise while what I really want is a non-comedy about someone like a famous scientist or philosopher, a random peasant from the middle ages, or an ancient Assyrian king. Doctor Who might be an obvious place to look, but it's optimised for different stories to this. The TARDIS auto-translates languages which deprives us of an entire host of interesting issues to do with language evolution, improvised communication, themes of being alone in a familiarly human yet incomprehensible modern environment. I'd want to see those, the point being it's set in the *present* with no sci-fi besides whatever mechanism caused the time jump in the first place. Premise: so-and-so from the past wakes up in the modern world. Then ask: what would happen next, realistically? (if the answer is "die of shock / a modern disease" then we relax the realism to get an interesting story.)
Another spin on this would be a present-day person surviving in the distant past, maybe trying and failing to make interventions like advocating the germ theory of disease. Or if they have an extensive knowledge of history, compiling a huge list of very specific predictions for future wars or disasters (we'd obviously have to do something about the fact that such an act might itself change the course of history and render most of the predictions false, but this won't be the case for astronomical events or scientific knowledge.) The Man From Earth (highly recommended) didn't do this, but it's in the same ballpark and I enjoyed its story.
Perhaps all this is stemming from a desire for fiction that requires me to put myself in the shoes of a completely different person with different values in order to even comprehend the story. To truly experience a concrete example of the past being a foreign country where they do things differently. The same feeling Scott's Tumblr pills story gave me at the beginning:
> Nobody is the villain of their own life story ... Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.
I ache for the opposite of the bullshit mindset that "depiction = endorsement"; that a protagonist must be *good* or likeable or not have any weird or immoral beliefs. To me, Starship Troopers is valuable as showing you what fascism must have felt like from the inside: your enemies appear to you like irredeemable non-human insectoid monsters who need exterminating. I want to see what life was like from the POV of some Bronze-age patriarch --- perhaps hallucinating command spirits a la Jaynes -- in a world where both men and women would laugh at the idea of gender equality; where you could just invade and conquer a land because you get resources and slaves and that's seen as a perfectly normal thing (rather than having to couch it as "self-defence" or "Special Military Operation".) Not that I think we'd be better off with any of that, it's just fun to inhabit that distance and feel the poignant WTF factor referenced by the quote.
Finally, what about "return to monke"? Imagine living in the environment your body and mind actually evolved for! At least, as a knee-jerk reaction to our modern problems. Constant exercise; you only have to worry about the opinions of less than Dunbar's number of people; insert something about mating. I hear some amazing things about dental health compared to agro societies. And everything has an explanation! Anything weird happens because of spirits, your dearly beloved recently-deceased aren't truly gone. Slaughtering the outgroup is as moral as it is fun! Do moral quandaries even exist in this world? I envy this "fit" of mental architecture from my position as an atomised 21st-century materialist schlub in a vast world of superstimuli, quantum mechanics and half-decent moral principles.
Obviously this is a rosy picture and others have said it all better. The relevant point is I would certainly enjoy sampling the perspective our distant ancestors had on the world. The thing is, there are all sorts of historical dramas set in various civilizations ... but not so much for hunter-gatherers and their even less relatable lives. What sort of problems did they have to solve, what metaphors and jokes did they use? Could you write a decent romance in this setting? There should be enough man-vs-man and man-vs-nature conflict there for something interesting. In the worst case there needn't even be a "story" but just a documentary following (fictional) people through the events of a day or year.
So, does this resonate with anyone or remind them of stuff they could recommend? Movies or TV shows preferred, but written stories or other formats are OK in second place. If all else fails, and I'm patient enough, then maybe one day I can just type a prompt into an AI movie generator...!
Doctor Stone is an anime about building modern technology in a primitive world. Technically, it's set in the future, but so far into the future that all traces of modern civilization have vanished, and it's up to our protagonists (a group of talented high-schoolers preserved from the modern era) to rebuild civilization with their knowledge of science.
It doesn't really fit your other criteria of "trying to get in the head of someone from ancient times," as the protagonists are from the modern era and have a pretty normal moral code, but the antagonist is definitely a "return to monke" sort of person - he's disillusioned with the modern world, and wants to build a "kingdom of might" where they can live as hunter-gatherers without all that technology making things complicated. Not that he's stupid, he's a smart and tactical opponent, he just doesn't think modernity was good for people and sees an opportunity to avoid repeating that mistake.
Anyway, it's just a really awesome show. It successfully combines shonen action with surprisingly realistic science (basically, the technology is real, but you'd have to be an improbably talented anime protagonist to build it with stone-age tools), and it really *gets* what "the power of science" really is. It's not the cliche "civilize the natives with gunpowder and steel" power fantasy, it understands that science isn't just a list of facts, it grows from our desires to understand the world and make our lives easier. Senku does mix up a batch of gunpowder, but he gets a lot more results from being able to make eyeglasses, antibiotics, and coca-cola. So on the whole, a very optimistic show - it is a shonen, after all.
-Try searching "Modern-day Rip Van Winkle" to find stories matching your first criteria.
-Return to Monke -> I guess Clan of the Cavebear? It was fine when I was 12...sort of doubt I'd still like it as an adult, but maybe someone else can comment.
You can read what ancient people wrote about themselves. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Tale of Genji, The Iliad, The Kalevala, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bible, all that stuff.
At least one of your requests already has a category on Google and a Wikipedia page: "Books / Fiction / Prehistory" & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_fiction, the most famous of which is Jean Auel, (who I haven't read).
I like The Name of the Rose for accurately putting you in the mind of a medieval person (unlike, for instance, Pillars of the Earth)
I'm maybe being a bit too flippant. Here's a more detailed story: I read Pillars of the Earth in high school and loved it. Then I went to college and read a bunch of actual medieval writing (Canterbury Tales, Augustine, Aquinas, The Divine Comedy, etc) and thought seriously about medieval European people's worldview. Soon after graduating, I read the beginning of World Without End (the sequel to Pillars of the Earth) and couldn't stand it. It felt monstrous to me: the protagonist had a modern mind, thinking modern thoughts, in a medieval setting. Much later, I read The Name of the Rose, and loved it. All the characters think the way that kind of person would have thought at the time. There's even a character who's more modern than all the others, whose thinking is situated at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and he contrasts really well with the genuinely medieval thinking of the other characters around him, without being an actual anachronism.
So I may be falsely attributing anachronistic foul play to Pillars of the Earth which I should be attributing to the World Without End. When I actually read Pillars, I didn't know any better. Also, I might have been much more sensitive when I read World Without End, having the actual medieval authors closer at hand than when I read Name of the Rose.
I liked Pillars of the Earth-- it seemed plausible enough, but I'm no expert.
The main story was about a man from a poor family-- the father had worked all summer for a pig, but it was stolen. They had nothing. Somehow (this is from memory) the son ended up as a designer of cathedrals.
The big social shift was from a world where civil disorder (like the pig getting stolen with no hope of recompense) to one where the church became dominant. As I recall this was either neutral or described as good.
The most unmodern thing was the main character's efforts to learn enough algebra (it wasn't common knowledge even among educated people) to help with designing cathedrals.
I couldn't get into the sequel.
I've also read *A Bridge to the Sky* by Margaret Ball, and I may have conflated the books.
On the hard side of “moderner survives in the distant past”, there's the novel *Lest Darkness Fall* by L. Sprague de Camp. Archaeologist gets dumped into ancient Rome and combines his historical and modern knowledge to make his way in the society of the time.
"To me, Starship Troopers is valuable as showing you what fascism must have felt like from the inside"
Are you talking about the book or the movie? The society in the book isn't fascist.
The idea of a modern person finding himself in the past and trying to change it has been done. The earliest version I know of is Mark Twain's _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_. A good more modern one is _Lest Darkness Fall_ by L. Sprague de Camp, whose protagonist is trying to prevent the Dark Ages from happening.
> Are you talking about the book or the movie? The society in the book isn't fascist.
I haven’t seen the movie but isn’t that the book where mistakes during a military operation were punished by flogging? And NCOs used quirts as motivational tools?
If I’m remembering this correctly I wasn’t thinking of fascism so much as sexual kink on Heinlein’s part.
I have a related fantasy of traveling back into the past and kicking up a scientific/industrial revolution. I'm pretty convinced that the main blocking point would be metallurgy/chemistry.
On to a recommendation : the Quest of fire by Rosny aîné is a pretty great novel in a palaeolithic setting. Great writing but obviously the scientific background is completely outdated as it dates from 1915.
Iceman is the most serious one I can think of, about unfreezing a caveman in the 1960/70's; I remember nothing about its quality.
The main problem with bringing a past person into the present is that both the writers and the audience are intimately familiar with the present and not the past, so any awe a character feels at modern-day stuff is going to result in chuckling. So you get comedies; Austin Powers, or Kate and Leopold. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, in the other direction (with emphasis on technology). Timeline is a darker version where the modern day guys are completely out of their depth (in the book; never saw the film). But it does involve specific predictions of the current medieval war.
If you just want a sense of alien-ness, read The Decameron, and marvel at the massive differences in morality between the 14th century and the 21st.
This kinda fits with a number of Isekai which is still rather popular in Japan as Light Novels and Manga/Anime. Or it's side genre, reverse Isekai. You'll need to be a bit more specific if you want any recommendations.
Basic premise is that the protagonist(s) is somehow transported to a completely separate world/time (think Alice in Wonderland). Or in its reverse form, a fictional character gets transported to a modern setting.
A frequent narrative beat is that they use their memories of the "real" world and introduce them to the often medieval worlds they end up in. Like modern food, or guns, or printing presses.
The premise is often either a power fantasy or a pseudo educational presentation of modern ideas.
To be frank, a lot of it is rather patronizing/idealistic of how superior things are to those built-to-be-strawmen backwards civilizations especially with how close it sometimes hits to colonization/new world globalization. For example, I mentioned food, and as these are Japanese media, naturally they are Japanese foods, which somehow always "works" and is the best thing these people tasted, often putting in extra effort to have it retain the authentic flavor (ie. recreating/finding the spices rather than using local ones). And while food exchanges are very common on Earth, they almost always include some kind of alteration (using ketchup instead of tomato sauce)/don't work initially (Sushi)/go two ways (British Indian foods and Indian British foods)
Also note there are a lot of other kinds of Isekai. Some of the more common being trapped in a game, getting superpowers to live a easy new life, creating a harem or other power fantasy stuff.
I used to fantasize about bringing a hand held calculator 50 years into the past. Then the smartphone came along and blew that out of the water. Although if you brought an iPhone back to 1970 most of its functionality would be nonfunctional.
I recall an Asimov short story about a far future society discovering how to do long division on a piece of paper. Not the time travel direction you are looking for tho.
Wikipedia says some limited contact with anthropologist in the 90s, terminated in 1997 without language learned. I believe some passive audio recorders were dropped onto the island.
It is illegal to go there, and the residents tend to kill those who try.
"I recall an Asimov short story about a far future society discovering how to do long division on a piece of paper. Not the time travel direction you are looking for tho."
"The Feeling of Power"
But more a 'rediscovering a lost ancient technology' theme than a time-travel story in either direction.
Also, ACX Tweaks by Pycea is a thing. Works well enough after some initial config that I keep forgetting half the features aren't vanilla ACX!Substack.
I was actually playing around (in my head) with an idea for a forum that lets users comment with scripts that are ran everytime the comment they are inside is viewed\liked\endorsed\replied to. The language will have an API for programmatic access to the forum, like how VBA has acess to the spreadsheet it's running inside or emacs lisp has access to the buffers.
It's useless, but I love it, running arbitary user code inside applications is so underrated.
Yeah, the biggest hurdle to running arbitary user code in a networked application is denial of service and tragedy of the commons type of problems.
I'm not convinced they can't be solved, for example, what if I ran the code *on your computer*, the code stays on your computer and everytime the triggering event happens I just call it over the network with any necessary data from the server. If you're offline I either (1) delay the run till you're online (2) run it on another computer in the network or my own servers, but "charge" you for how much time it ran, you owe me that much compute time, and I can redeem it when you come back online again. If you keep racking up compute time without paying, I disable your ability to submit scripts till you pay.
Does anyone know of a history of bounty hunting for animals? It seems like an interesting chunk of history, and sometimes has driven animals to extinction or lowered their population a lot, but I've never seen a resource on the subject.
My father, who served in WWII to place this in time, had told me of small bounties on nuisance animals that would not cover much more than the price of a shotgun shell.
I don't know a lot about it, but it's often risky with pests because bad actors will sometimes breed the animals deliberately and then turn them in for the rewards. Sometimes, they'll even actively release them into the environment to make it easier to catch them- in other words, they're enhancing the problem that they're the solution to so that their role is secured.
This isn't an issue with larger animals like deer, I assume.
1. Really pour over their social media, going back a few years. If they seem like they're trying to launch a career as an influencer, and/or they get in a lot of petty squabbles, or something else seems unreasonable/unpleasant/volatile, it might be a good sign to give them a pass, especially if they weren't self-aware enough to sanitize their presence or go friends-only.
2. Are you familiar with the Ask A Manager advice blog? https://www.askamanager.org/ It's a terrific read and might be a good resource. You can search by keyword for "hiring," but "how to avoid hiring someone who will be awful to customers?" is a question I don't recall ever seeing, so I'd say, send it in.
Make sure they have lots of references, and that at least one of these is very recent.
Ideally, hire someone who already has a real job somewhere else (not a desk job twice a week for 3 hours). If they don't have a real job somewhere else, try to make sure that the reason they no longer have their previous job is not that they were awful.
Avoid people who don't have and didn't recently have a real job, unless they have obvious family reasons for this.
If you feel there's something wrong about the person, even if you're not sure what it is, always listen to yourself.
There's not much you can do because generally going off on a customer or co worker is based on variable life stresses. At least in acute situations. Being generally harassy or something is more feasible to avoid.
Hire a better class of people, wealthier, from better family backgrounds. Run criminal background checks. Get real personal references and follow up on them.
If you're willing to wade into some serious legal questions (worth it for certain positions, like the police) you can get psychological evaluations and do some really intensive background checks.
Wealthy people from "better" family backgrounds are surely less likely to do certain awful things and more likely to do other awful things. So it depends on which sorts of awful things you want to avoid.
Good point. I suppose it's more accurate to say that hiring wealthy/good family people are less likely to get caught and less likely to bring condemnation on your business. Or as Nancy clarifies downthread, less likely to yell at your customers.
Depending on your customers, people from wealthy families may be a lot *more* likely to yell at your customers. And depending on what sorts of awful behavior your worried about people condemning, they might be *more* likely to bring condemnation on your business.
That depends on your definition of "good family." My definition of good family is a group of people that consistently show well adjusted social behaviors. Wealthy can play into it in terms of learning what socially adjusted behavior is, though that has its limits. The very rich may not play by those rules, but I sincerely doubt the very rich are an option for a customer-facing front line employee anyway (it sounds like retail/food service).
Most people don't do something awful, so you should play it safe (low variance) and hire the most unremarkable person you can find. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
(this is an answer to your question but I would not generally recommend doing it IRL because you're giving up a lot of upside as well as downside. Really depends on the job though. Hire boring people to run nuclear reactors and interesting people to think up new marketing campaigns)
Probably something akin to the fizz buzz test for coders - give them a practical exercise.
More seriously- nasty to customers is work behavior and can be fixed via training & supervision.
Hostility to coworkers is more likely intersocial behavior and is much harder. Often means completely retraining and changing world views, +/- resilience and stress techniques.
Added to this - its really helpful for retraining if the employee understands that they can be fired for not adapting their work behavior. So it's important to have at will work laws so the employer can fire bad actors and so that (other) employers can give the allegedly reformed employee a shot without being locked into keeping that worker if they are in fact not reformed.
Depends on what you mean by "awful". Married people with kids are much more likely to cause deep-seated lasting psychological harm to kids than people without kids.
"Reliability" is usually why people *don't* want to hire parents, because they're worried that parents will have a "sick kid" or some other excuse for why they don't want to come in to work.
I think one needs to have a much more specific conception of what "something awful" means in order for any particular demographic property to be clearly relevant in one direction or another.
Yes. If you care about one thing, parents will be good, but if you care about the other thing, parents will be bad. I don't think there's a simple heuristic of either form "if you care about not doing awful things, then (don't) hire parents".
I appreciate not wanting to unduly bias reader judgement by showing a comment's likes, but I wish that it were possible to ❤️ comments in a way that only the commenter could see that others appreciated the thoughtfulness/work that went into their comment. Currently I have to either give them $10 or clutter up the comment thread by praising their comment.
As other commentators have said, this exact thing is indeed possible. I am constantly seeing emails about the likes my comments get. Frankly I wish that system would get done away with two, it reminds me of when a YouTube video creator likes your comment and YouTube sends you a notification that starts with "Congratulations!". Just feels a bit dopaminergically unhealthy.
FYI to anyone that cares enough to install a browser plugin, you can get Pycea's ACX plugin and it will allow you to unhide the like button. It also reformats everything to look like the old SSC comment section which is even better.
When someone gets an e-mail notifying them of a reply to their comment, or a sibling reply to a comment they left, that e-mail contains a "like" button. If people click that button, then the person who wrote it gets a notification (unless, like me, you've set up a filter to send all "like" notifications straight to trash - relevant for other Substacks where likes are enabled on-site).
For the posterity, if Sovereigness happens to read this: your comment https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-247/comment/9951877 was what made me wish I could like your comment without cluttering the conversation. Twas a very measured & interesting response informed by a lot more knowledge than I possess.
The 'like' button still works here, it just isn't displayed by default. There's some plugin trickery you can do to restore it and 'like' comments as on other substacks. ACX Tweaks does that iirc, but I'd have to double check.
So I came across this story in my news feed - https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3701369-california-baker-wins-case-over-same-sex-wedding-cake/ - and I wondered, as I have previously whenever such stories about wedding cake baking come up, not about the legalities of the claim, but rather why this is a battle worth fighting at all from the perspective of the plaintiffs - i.e., why not just go to another bakery that aligns with your beliefs, rather than incur significant additional cost to force someone you disagree with to accept money from those with your beliefs in the future? Is there something about wedding cakes that's inherently "important" enough to be worth fighting over? Is the niche so small and bakers so hard to find that it's worth fighting over? It doesn't seem like it would be that small a niche to me, but I'll admit to not having researched that side of the issue at all.
I'm probably blind to something here, coming at it from a cis white dude perspective, but "wedding cakes from THIS SPECIFIC BAKERY even if they don't want to sell to me" seems like a particularly weird piece of ground to battle over.
I mean, the actual cake isn’t the issue generally. The issue is creating standing to challenge a law in US court.
I really don’t like such “test cases” because they seem really unfair for the defendant. At the time they denied the cake, the bakers had no reason to believe what they were doing was illegal (in the most famous cake case, it occurred while the state in question still did not have full marriage equality - if the gov’t can discriminate against gay marriage, isn’t it reasonable for a private bakery to believe that they can?)
So basically some small business gets sacrificed on the altar of generating standing to challenge a law.
On the flip side, the plaintiffs have to show they are directly harmed by the law to challenge it. But of course, in a case like this they can’t really be made whole - the harm was time dependent and that time has long past.
Wouldn’t it be better to find a way to allow questions of constitutional law to be raised without necessitating legal cost and jeopardy for someone on the wrong side of it?
Of course the bakers in Masterpiece Cakeshop knew what they were doing was illegal; the law clearly made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and at no point did the baker claim either that he did not know it was illegal, or that he was refusing to bake the cake because the marriage was not recognized by state law. Moreover, the couple was planning to get married in MA (a marriage that CO was almost certainly required to recognize under the Constitution, not that it matters), and wanted the cake for a subsequent celebration.
Nor does it matter that the couple could not be made whole; injunctive relief is a thing, and besides, they might want to buy a cake for their wedding anniversary.
Having a way to litigate issues without someone on the other side might work, though the Court has held that the "cases and controversies" clause means that it cannot issue advisory opinions.
“ the law clearly made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation”
If this were true, the case would not have gone where it did. The whole point was that the applicability of the law, and whether a custom designed cake was a public accommodation, was not “clear”.
No, that was not at all the issue. The baker did NOT claim that he was not a "public accommodation" but rather 1) "that it did not decline to make Craig's and Mullins' wedding cake "because of" their sexual orientation. . . . Masterpiece asserts that its decision was solely "because of" Craig's and Mullins' intended conduct --entering into marriage with a same-sex partner"; 2) that the law compelled him to speak in violation of the First Amendment; and 3) that the Colo Civil Rights Commission was biased against him on the basis of religion.
The Colorado statute obviously applied to him, because it says: "'place of public accommodation' means any place of business engaged in any sales to the public and any place offering services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to the public, including but not limited to any business offering wholesale or retail sales to the public . . . "
The BAKERY was a public accommodation. But whether a custom designed cake was a public accommodation or compelled speech was the crux of the bakers argument. A custom cake is arguably not a retail or wholesale product, being essentially a commissioned artwork.
However you want to slice it, the point remains that whether or not the cake baking act in question was covered by law was an open question that had to be decided by the court.
I'm sorry, but it makes no sense to say that the cake was or was not a public accommodation. A public accommodation is an establishment that sells certain goods and services to the public. And a custom cake is obviously a product.
And, no, whether a custom designed cake was a public accommodation or compelled speech was NOT the crux of the bakers argument. Go read the case. He did not make that argument, and in fact he could not, because it is incoherent. The petition for writ of certiorari makes very clear that the question presented was: "Whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel Phillips to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/16-111-cert-petition.pdf
Finally, "I think the law cannot be constitutionally apply to me" is pretty much the opposite of the original claim that somehow it was unfair to charge the bakery with violating the law, because they had no way of knowing that the law forbade them to discriminate. That simply was not an argument made by anyone at any time.
I think this sort of question of standing is often an important matter of legal strategy. If you can pass a blatantly unconstitutional law, but written in a way that ensures no one has standing to sue, then it can stay on the books for ages. The sodomy laws lasted for decades like this - they were used to deny people employment because the fact that they were gay made it likely they were engaging in illegal activity, but for 20 years between Bowers v Hardwick and Laurence v Texas, no cases were brought, because basically no one was actually charged under the law.
Right, that’s another reason I don’t like it. The upshot of standing is that it prevents thousands of frivolous challenges to every law, the downside is some actual person has to be the Guinea pig on which the law is tested, with potentially life-altering consequences depending on how the question falls.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given the forum, that the vast majority of comments in this thread are of the form that just read bad faith into everything they disagree with, rather than trying to actually answer the question.
Wedding cakes are in fact a smaller niche than bakeries in general, and if you don't live in a major metro area your choices are often extremely limited. Even if you do live in a major metro area, if your tastes are at all discerning, your selection might be limited - a friend of mine decided to bake her own wedding cake, despite all the work that would entail while preparing for the wedding, because she disapproved of every wedding cake baker in Los Angeles. (She had the level of discernment that she wanted a cake that tasted good as well as looking nice, while all the bakers seemed to focus on making cakes look excellent and taste a little better than cardboard.)
She should have tried a Japanese bakery, there are some excellent ones in West LA and Santa Monica. I guarantee that they sell nothing that tastes remotely like cardboard. Their cakes are lovely -- visually pleasing, delicate and delicious. She didn't look very hard.
Those sound good. I wonder if the date, and/or the Pasadena location of the wedding was relevant to why those weren't selected. I bet she would actually have an answer for me.
If a world class painter is offering to paint wedding portraits, it would be somewhere between "not cool" and "illegal" for them to refuse to paint a portrait for someone on the basis of sexual orientation (assuming this is paid work as part of a business or other neutral exchange, not just doing favors for someone).
You aren't entitled to force a specific individual or company to work for you under your terms or none at all. You're just entitled to do business with individuals or companies on the same terms they do business with the general public.
And even in the more common case where the "ceremonial" cake is edible, the bakers often also bring at least one sheet cake in the same flavor and with similar frosting. The sheet cake provides a margin if guests want to eat more cake than was planned for (and may allow the main cake to be smaller and thus cheaper), and it serves as a backup in case some mishap befalls the main cake before it can be served.
That's actually an Orthodox Jewish wedding! The real wedding is the signing of the marriage contract followed by leaving the couple alone for while. The rest is, religiously speaking, celebration -- including the march down the aisle, the vows, whatever.
I'm not saying that she's indicative of what the average same-sex couple is facing. I'm saying that there are very few wedding bakers, they often have a lot of things in common, so anyone who wants something a little unusual may find themselves with *very* few choices. If a picky person can find themselves with no acceptable bakers in a city the size of Los Angeles, then I suspect a gay person who isn't picky could easily find themselves with no acceptable bakers in a city the size of Bakersfield, let alone Chico or Arcata.
Kenny: "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given the forum, that the vast majority of comments in this thread are of the form that just read bad faith into everything they disagree with, rather than trying to actually answer the question." Seems to me your response to Kenny is an example of reading bad faith into his remark. I see his remark as an example of a good-faith effort to alert discussants to a feature of the wedding cake shopper's situation: How many choices of bakers a person has is a function of how many bakers are in the area, how picky the person is about cakes, and what fraction of bakers are willing to make a cake for that person's wedding, given the person's sexual orientation. We can now discuss the issue of gay couples shopping for wedding cakes with that in mind, and think about not only whether gay couples have a right to have a local baker do their cake, and also whether picky gay couples get to have a lot of possible bakers to choose from.
I am not taking a position on this question, and Kenny isn't either (at least not in this post. I haven't read his other ones on the subject). I'm just pointing out the good-faith nature of his comment. What he points out is relevant, useful to consider. He is clearly not defending some picky gay cake shopper who might say, "my standards are too high so this vast array of options isn't good enough, we need to sue the one option which probably isn't good enough either but also wouldn't serve me. does not feel compelling enough to justify all this grief as well as strangling people for having unpopular political views."
You're getting irritable and sarcastic in response to a bad-faith comment that he didn't make. It occurred in your head, not here on the page.
When good faith fails, fallback to bad faith and see if it helps.
Here's a very common story :
(1) There is a giant piece of machinery that (or is supposed to) solves some problem, you're being paid to maintain or operate it, but it's no longer needed. Maybe the problem was solved (with it or without it), maybe it was discovered it's not a problem to begin with. Long story short, you're being paid to do a thing that is not needed anymore.
(2) If you're a good human, you will tell the payers "This is no longer needed, my job was maintaining\operating it, therefore I'm no longer needed. Thank you for paying me when it was needed, it was good while it lasted, don't stop writing the emails, bye".
(3) More likely, you will start *manufacturing* a problem where none exist, you will creatively interpret vaguely related existing problems as your problem when they aren't, you will start getting catty (not in the cute way) and troublesome, you will start actively manipulating the world so that your problem happens again and you can swoop in to solve it.
If you want to be really *really* extra charitable, you can say that (3) is a systemic cognitive shortcoming instead of a deliberate act, stupidity instead of malice. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.", per Upton Sinclair. Or "You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.", per Mark Twain.(http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html) One can no more admit that one's job is no longer useful than one can look at the sun at 12:00 pm.
This is an extremly powerful (and bad faith) way of seeing motivations and understanding incentives, it can explain everything from why the clergy keep insisting that you *need* their magic words and their supposed understanding of their religion to survive and thrive, to why the USA - home to the largest and most profitable weapons manufacturers worldwide - love wars so damn much, to why programmers are so fucking fond of creating new tools and frameworks that are twice as complex as the old ones and do the exact same things.
Put simply, humans deeply want to feel useful, but also hate learning\doing new things, breaking perfectly good brain patterns whose only fault is that reality no longer require them. The only solution implied by the constraints is bending reality so that the old things are\seems-to-be useful again.
Bakery fights (and many many other things) is just a special case of this general pattern, the american progressive machinery is experiencing an Upton Sinclair problem. Too many "non-profits", too many "NGO"s, too many (wo)men(x) getting their corn pone from "defending civil rights for the LGBTQ++ community" for you to simply come here with your bullshit about this being not needed and counter productive. They have to do it for the same reason the javascript framework author need to write one more framework other than the 12 we already had this year. People Like To Feel Useful, and they Don't Let Reality Get In The Way.
I like this take a lot and only want to push back by insisting on the added nuance that some important does genuinely exist to be done and I'm fact the spandrel useless class manufacturing problems to fix can only exist on top of it and not on nothing at all.
Let's be discerning about who is a useless spandrel and who has a legitimate cause. It's typically pretty easy to tell.
In addition to what a sibling comment notes about prejudice being normal and the default for a lot of people and identities, I will also note that if you have a problem, people who benefit from the continued existence of the problem do not share your enthusiasm for ending it.
Weapons manufacturers end wars, but never in a way such that no more wars happen.
What problem ? that some people don't want to deal with some other people ? This is universal, I don't know how to solve it, I know of ways to reduce its effects, such as being a free and decentralized society with extremly small political entities (~1000 person per polity if possible) that have open communication and immigration between them, preferably based in space, and preferably with not too deep division of labor. I know it's a Utopia, some elements are long into the future and some are probably never going to happen. But what can I do, Life Sucks.
It's simply not possible to live in a society and not be forced to comply with the herd, I'm forced to do it everyday on at least 3 major belief clusters of mine. The most you can ever ask for is for it to never escalate beyond silly unfunny jokes. Demanding that people *do* things for you is far far beyond the pale, why would you even want things from people who hate\disagree with you ?
There's a sort of "background noise" of prejudice though, so no prejudice will ever be gone. Prejudice against Volvo drivers, or uptalkers, or bodybuilders are all out there somewhere, but we don't have special social machinery devoted to fighting them.
Given the confounders of mental illness as comorbidities with homosexuality, it is difficult to determine how much of the social conflict described is due strictly to sexual orientation and how much to other factors.
Why does that change a thing? If anything, it seems to me it would suggest even more careful weighing of the return on investment, since the plaintiffs aren't even spending their own money, but money that is extracted from the taxpayers. Does the CA Dept of Fair Housing and Employment have *nothing* of more pressing importance on which to spend limited time and resources? All the bigger evils of housing discrimination, slumlord neglect and abuse, discrimination in employment, hiring and firing, and so forth -- these are all solved already?
This reeks of whoring after headlines, the kind of stunt an agency does to make it seem they're of some use to the large majority of taxpayers who aren't personally experiencing any particular housing and employment discrimination, and which is much cheaper and easier than getting down to the difficult and complex and much less headline-grabbing spadework of actually helping the minority that is.
You are taking issue with the State of CA enforcing its laws? That seems a bit odd.
And, I am a taxpayer who AFAIK is not personally experiencing discrimination, yet that hardly implies that my interests are not served by actions by the state to ensure that ALL laws are enforced and that society is made a more just place. I once voted to increase my own taxes in order to fund repairs to a public swimming pool that neither I nor anyone I know ever used or will use. Because I think that providing such resources is sound public policy. So, I see no problem with using state funds to pursue public policy that is supported by the majority of the state's voters.
Yeah. Until the State of CA has a budget of $infinity and Panopticon is a reality, it has to pick its priorities in law enforcement. That's why I don't think it's reasonable for the state police to spend its entire budget writing tickets for people going 1 MPH over the speed limit on well-lit straight level interstates at 4 am with zero traffic, and thereby fail to do squat to interdict or solve kidnapping, hit-and-run fatalities, drunken driving, unlicensed drivers, and people and drug smuggling.
When California is a blissful haven free of unsolved murders, rapes, and arsons, when nobody sleeps on the streets or dies of a fentanyl overdoes from some laced pills, when slumlords can't fuck over minorities for exorbitant deposits because they don't have cash to pay a lawyer, when no cute girl anywhere in the state is fired for declining to give her manager a beej -- why, then, you'll find me right there with you wanting the state to ensure that ALL laws are enforced with equal vigor and the big remaining problem of two lesbians not being able to get a nice custom wedding cake from the baker of their choice gets squashed.
That seems to imply that, until the state has a murder case of zero, if should not enforce any laws at all, including laws about arson, and rape, let alone racial discrimination in hiring, or pretty much anything. So, that is not much of an argument. All it is is a claim that the state should ignore laws that you, personally, don't think are very important. But, the legislators elected by the voters have different priorities, as reflected by the budget they pass every year.
And, one thing one can say about enforcing discrimination laws: It actually effective at reducing discrimination by imposing costs and altering incentives. Which is more than can be said about a lot of efforts to reduce drug abuse. That seems to be an argument for spending more on the former, and less on the latter.
Yes, and the state was correct to enforce its segregation laws, unless and until they were deemed unlawful by higher laws. That is what rule of law means.
As for whether the state is using its limited resources badly, do you have any evidence that that is true? Have you looked at reports of how the relevant agency spends its resources? Because if you have, you have not linked to them.
I think that's because the couple brought a complaint to the State agency and the agency brings the suit on the couple's behalf as the bakery is alleged to have broken a state law.
I can completely see people wanting to live as ordinary members of society, which includes being able to generally buy what one can afford without having to look for a vendor who is willing to deal with one's kind.
Whether the cost is worth it to force vendors to sell to people they don't want to sell to is another question, but there's nothing weird about wanting to be able to just buy things.
People run into restrictions on the places they can go all the time. I am not a member of the local country club, so I can't go there. I'm not a member of the Methodist Church, so I can't fully participate in their organization (and maybe very little at all). I don't culturally fit in at certain bars, so I either get asked to leave or made to feel really uncomfortable about it. I'm not a veteran, so I can't go the VA.
Part of growing up is realizing that not everywhere can or will accept everything about you. Also, that is both normal and okay.
Anti-discrimination laws are about when *no one* will accept you, and you don't have any options without such a law.
It's a test case to try and write anti-orientation discrimination into the Civil Rights law. Currently sexual orientation is not written into anti-discrimination law. Various constituencies tried to get it written in but couldn't muster the votes. So now they're trying to get it interpreted into existing law by suing. So while I'm sympathetic to the aim the point here is not actually that they care about the specific bakery. They're purposefully seeking out people who will refuse so they can have standing to sue.
EDIT: Apparently this is a state case in a state where such discrimination is banned. So I'd guess it's a test case in the opposite direction? Or some third thing?
Yes. Per the article: "A California state judge on Friday handed a victory to a bakery owner who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, citing religious objections."
Note that it's not that they can't get a cake made to their liking at all. It's not "this is the only school in the area" or "this is the only Harvard on the planet".
It's 'this person has thoughts we don't like, and those thoughts must be eradicated'.
Not at all. It's "this person claims to run a wedding store that doesn't serve weddings we like, and therefore this wedding store must be eradicated". The law doesn't require that you like gay people. It just requires that if you serve weddings as a business open to the public, then you should serve same-sex weddings to.
It's no more accurate to read this as demanding the eradication of homophobia than it is to read the bakers as demanding the eradication of lesbians.
No. The baker is not forcing actions on anyone. The activists behind the lawsuit are attempting to force compliance on the baker.
This is wrong, this is anti liberty, and it exposes the lie of 'homosexuals only want to be left alone to live their own lives' - some might, but many are power hungry attention seekers who want to tear down the liberal society that shelters them.
...no, sorry, I don't buy having to select another baker as a significant obstruction. I don't even accept 'having a cake' as a major part of constructing a marriage.
This is bullshit harassment of the baker, and people who want fair treatment of other humans should be willing to call out the agitators for what they are doing.
The CA law in question does not apply to "public accommodations" but rather to "all business establishments of every kind whatsoever," as it has since at least 1959. Flores v. Los Angeles Turf Club, 55 Cal. 2d 736, 748 (1961).
Moreover, I am about to go to my local art supply store -- not a core service. Do you really think it is ok for them to refuse to serve me because of, say, my race? Or my religious beliefs?
The issue here is a failure to distinguish between "This is immoral" and "This should be illegal".
I don't think many people actually believe that these should be the same thing, but I think many people will tactically blur the line between them on occasion.
To clarify, it is not simply immoral; it is harmful to those being discriminated against.
And, no, it is not sufficient to say, "they can go to other bakers." Eg: On the end of my street is an entrance to a local park, If my neighbors and I block black people to use that entrance, I don' think the fact that there is another entrance two blocks north and another two blocks south would be much of a defense to a cease and desist order from the city. (And, before someone points out that a public street is different from a private business: I know, but that is irrelevant. "Private businesses are different" is not the same defense as "there are other ways for the victims of discrimination to access the services.")
The point is that the discrimination is itself the harm. Just as the police stopping me without reasonable cause, even for 2 seconds, is the harm. See https://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/sites/ca3/files/6_Chap_6_2020_August.pdf ["[Where appropriate, the jury may award punitive damages even if the plaintiff suffered no actual injury, and so receives nominal rather than compensatory damages."]
What you are talking about, such as re the thirsty man, goes to the extent of damages, not the existence of the violation.
You *think* that is the issue, but some people actually believe that this should be illegal. Some people might even think it should be illegal *without* thinking that it's immoral.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that it tends to refute your specific claim that this case is an example of "the leftist cultural agenda [attempt] to have "public accommodations" be as ludicrously sweeping as possible" -- the fact that the law has been around for more than 60 years implies that you are incorrect, at least in regard to this case.
I will admit to being a little disappointed in my own cultivated sense of cynicism that this particular possibility never even occurred to me until I posted here.
Should Internet platforms be allowed to refuse service to Jan 6 "insurrectionists?" To people who think vaccines cause autism or that the efficacy of ivermectin treating COVID was deliberately suppressed by public health authorities?
Do you think that a baker should be forced to bake a swastika cake for Hitler's birthday if a customer asks for one? If so at least you're consistent.
It seems to me that there's two consistent positions you can take: either the baker can pick and choose with whom they do business (allowing them to refuse the swastika cake or the interracial marriage cake) or the baker can't (meaning they must bake both, if asked). Of the two consistent principles, I think that "my oven, my choice" is the lesser of two evils.
There is also of course the inconsistent principle, the one that states that people should be forced to do things for politically popular groups (like homosexuals) but not for unpopular groups (like Nazis). This seems to be the law of the land in many places, and if people want to support it then I guess that's fine, but I hope they would be open about it.
Consider a group of neo-nazis who join together and open The Church of Adolf Hitler, Modern Day Saint. Same reprehensible beliefs, but now they're a protected group on the grounds of religion*, and they want a swastika cake for their "the holocaust was a lie" day festivities. Should the baker be forced to bake the cake?
* Assume they all totally believe it in whatever way and to whatever extent is necessary to count as a "real" religion.
Yes I think that is actually a much better and healthier society in the long run. Poeple should be able to discriminate and hire/fire serve/not serve on whatever basis they desire.
The market can sort it out, that is one of the things it is actually pretty good at. Of course I would also be much more of a hardass about having real markets. No more bailouts and no say "Comcasts" lobbying to setup effective monopolys.
So in the real world it is more of a mixed bag. I certinaly see zero issue with it for things like bakeries where there is effetcive competition. It gets hard if it was AT&T or Comcast or whatever, where people might not have effective alternate options.
Except that historically, market forces have done a terrible job of sorting things out. If they had, we wouldn't have had to use the government to integrate things like lunch counters, hotels, and other service industries—and the hiring practices of corporations in general. If money were a motivating factor, you would have thought that in the deep south, in counties with large African American demographics, service industries would have been eager to cater to black customers. But social prejudices were more powerful than cash flow. Likewise, finance industries discriminated against blacks. So, the market forces—driven by societal prejudices—were actually restricting the ability of blacks to start their own businesses or purchase homes.
"Show me on the doll where the Invisible Hand groped you."
It is not at all clear that we "had to" use the government to integrate things like lunch counters, etc. We *chose* to go directly from the government keeping those things segregated, to the government mandating that those things be integrated, without ever trying the "let people decide for themselves" market-based solution.
Some people ever since have been arrogantly certain that if left to the market, the result would have been eternal segregation. The rest of us can't help but wonder why, if the market would have segregated everything on account of white business owners all being incorrigible racists, the South ever needed Jim Crow *laws* to enforce segregation.
I mena a lot of things were integrated? The market wasn't totally failing. The deep south, I agree was an area where markets weren't solving the problem... Or were they as huge portions of the black population fled north?
Also it is not as though there is much dnager of widspread dsicrimination of this type today.
If we got rid of civil rights laws you would anticipate a lot of businesses with official/unofficial "no blacks" policies? I would not.
As for "Likewise, finance industries discriminated against blacks."
I haven't ever seen very convincing evidence this was really happening. Remember they didn't have computers and data sceince was much more primative. Black borrowers really were in actual fact MUCH worse bets than white borrowers in general 9just as they are today).
In such an environment it really isn't clear to me that some of the restrictions didn't make sense. The same way you might not lend to unmarried people, or unemployed people. Sure some unemployed people have other means and could support the loans, but when you make exception you find out often these are lies and it is more trouble than it is worth.
If I am a bank in 1905 and have a limited ability to parse data on creditworthiness, eliminating the blacks/laborers/Finns/Chinamen/Catholics might be a pretty effective sorting tool. its one of the things that has always frustrated me about the "redlining" story. Depending on what phase/era of it people are talking about it, the decisions being made weren't necessarily "incorrect".
People now find them ethically wrong, but there is also this implied premise that not only was it wrong, but that it was "incorrect" and that these were not good discriminations to be made at the time. Which 20 years ago I was totally on board with that story.
But the limited extent to which I have loooked into the particulars (which has invovled some reading of source materials from 100 years ago), and my experience with how much progressives (who I had thought were my allies) like to misuse the concept of discirmination or even paint things as discrimination which make perfect sense has made me skeptical of this element of the story.
Take sentencing of criminals. There are a whole raft of previously progressive, very reaosnable sentencing policies that progressives now work to eliminate because this have disparate racial impacts. Except people cannot even bring themselves to make the concession that they were a good idea in practice, so they act like it was pure racism and nonsense.
Does the offender support a family? Does the offender have a reliable job with a legitimate source of income? Does the offender have a history of past offenses?
These are all super relevant and worthwhile things to consider while sentencing, but because they have very bad racial gradients, there is a large groups trying to get them eliminated or acting like they are only about racism.
TLDR: I don't really have any problem with a banker in 1905 not lending to blacks because he doesn't think they are good loan risks even if his basis for that belief is pretty poor. Probably the basis for a lot of his decision making was poor. Or becuase he doesn't want to hurt the value of the othe properties he has leins on through loans. I do have a problem if he is doing it "because he hates black people".
And I feel like there has been very little effort to figure out how much redlining was column A, and how much column B, and it makes a real difference. In one scenairo he was perhaps mistaken, in the other a jerk. And the story gets told as though it was ALWAYS B. And it also gets told as if that was all bankers everywhere, which isn't true.
Hmmmm. The railroads may have filed friends of the court briefs, but Plessy was challenging the segregation of passengers by race using the Equal Protections Clause (14th Amendment). Plessy was a member of the Comité des Citoyens, who wanted to create case law that would overturn Louisana's statute that forced the segregation of passengers by race. The Comité hired a private detective with arrest powers to detain Plessy to make sure the charges would be for violating state law rather than just misdemeanor trespass. Whether the RR's were funding the Comité des Citoyens, I do not know.
The initial case was State v. Homer Adolph Plessy. When Judge Ferguson, a parish judge ruled against him, Plessy filed a federal lawsuit—which was Plessy v. Ferguson.
The longer answer to that scenario involves the following:
-Surplus black laborers can be hired elsewhere, including in other states/regions/countries, who will be at an economic advantage and outperform places that discriminate.
Right now people can (and do!) regularly discriminate against ugly people. What, if anything, should be done about that? If something, do you worry that it might cause more issues to fix than to leave alone?
(Not relevant, but I do support anti-discrimination laws generally. I just recognize that they do cause a lot of problems, are very poor tools for fixing problems, and strongly believe that anywhere they don't absolutely need to be in place they should not be in place. In this case, if a gay couple can go to five different bakeries for a cake, but another one will not serve them, I say that's perfectly fine).
If the discirmination is "working" then it sounds ike the discrimination is justified and not bad.
As for the former quesiton, you know, evaluate whether particular consumers who complain have relevant recourses or not. Seems not that diffuclt, and certinaly an easier court case.
I wanted to eat at this PotBelly and they wouldn't serve me because I take my dog everywhere. There is a Jimmy John's across the street that serves people who bring dogs into the store, you are fine.
I wanted to get a new TV installed from XYZ TV place and they said they don't deal with my kind. This is a rural area and they are the only installer for 2 hours around. Ok they need ot serve you.
You know use common sense. Are there effective alternatives?
>If the discirmination is "working" then it sounds ike the discrimination is justified and not bad.
To be clear, the example you were responding to was racial segregation in the pre-CRA South, and you're saying it was "justified and not bad" because it served companies' financial interests? As long as a separate (implicit "but equal" here, that I'll do you the favor of assuming you meant) service or establishment existed?
By my read of the article, the reasoning used by the court would have yielded the same result if it had been an interracial couple rather than a lesbian couple that wanted the cake. The baker still wouldn't have had to make one for them.
Ehh, I'm on the same general side of the fence as you on this issue, but this is a bad argument. Serving interracial couples would indeed constitute an ideology, especially in a place and time where interracial couples are a taboo.
My own answer is "yes", anybody is allowed to refuse or accept anything. For this not to turn into a defacto self-imposed dictatorship of the majority, there has to be some kind of an exception rule that says "Not if you're only provider of $SERVICE for X km^2". Ideally we should become a libertarian Dyson Swarm civilization of decentralized polities and never need this, but right now that exception is needed because sometimes people are stuck in a place that doesn't like them and they can die if the only hospital in town refuses to treat an atheist or a gay man.
Most notably, this rule is blind to identity or belief. There is no such bullshit as """Protected Classes""", anybody can discriminate against anybody if there are alternatives, nobody can if there aren't.
> right now that exception is needed because sometimes people are stuck in a place that doesn't like them and they can die if the only hospital in town refuses to treat an atheist or a gay man.
Funny that you chose those examples, when the last time that has happened is around 40 years ago. Meanwhile, hospitals *today* are denying treatment to people for holding libertarian political beliefs.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if somebody wanted a cake with a decorations celebrating something loathesome.: let’s
say a cake for a child molester’s
group, with frosting spelling out “after 8 is too late.” Can the baker refuse to produce that cake? Can he still refuse if the clients say, ok skip the decorations, just give us a starndard white wedding cake?
Yeah OK. How about this, then. When Dan Savage married Terry, their wedding cake was topped with a golden cock. Should a baker be allowed to refuse to provide a cake with a golden cock on top?
But if we mean "erect human male penis", then that's a matter of personal taste. Me, were I a baker, I'd think it so incredibly tacky I'd refuse (but then again, wedding cakes always run to the tacky, and since it's Dan Savage I certainly don't expect anything but vulgarity and crassness from him). Personally, I'd bake gay wedding cakes or trans cakes, but my own opinion would be "Eh, it's legal - but you're still a guy/girl, and all the cakes in the world won't change my mind on that".
And that, I think, *is* the deeper meaning to the push about "bake the cake, bigot!" That it *does* mean forcing a change of mind/opinion; that simply baking the cake and taking the money is not enough, you must think gay marriage/trans rights are the normal, natural, right and proper thing. If the baker baked the pink and blue trans cake for Scardino, but said "You know this doesn't mean you're really a woman, right?", I don't think they'd be satisfied merely with the cake. I do think they would still go to court about hurt feelings or feeling unsafe or hate speech or whatever.
We don't even have to go that far, 14-16 teenage girls are *sexy*, hellishly so. It's the normal and healthy male heterosexual response to sexualize girls this age, no matter what the man's age, it's literally the "correct" evolutionary response. What if a group of 40 years old men decided that the stigma against desiring 14 years old girls is too stifling and start asking for the right to freely practice a relationship that a *lot* of men arleady fantasize about ?
And don't gender re-assignment surgery undermines the "Born This Way" argument for gender and sexual orientation? A gay man can simply choose to be a straight woman, a woman can simply choose to be a man. Makeup does a similar thing for skin color.
If race-hiding makeup and gender re-assignment surgeries are currently too disruptive and\or costly to be choices for ordinary people, the principle of The Least Convenient Possible World says you should *imagine* a world where they are not, would it be okay in that world to discrimnate on basis gender and race and etc ?(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neQ7eXuaXpiYw7SBy/the-least-convenient-possible-world)
> And don't gender re-assignment surgery undermines the "Born This Way" argument for gender and sexual orientation? A gay man can simply choose to be a straight woman, a woman can simply choose to be a man.
Every trans person I've ever talked to would strongly object to characterizing their situation as a choice. GRS is meant to make physical sex align with the given mental facts, not be a choice.
Okay, I will not open the can of worms that is the T debate. But I will simply note that GRS can be used for more than one thing. The relevant fact is that it can (however imperfectly and with high variance) change physical sex, even if people *right now* aren't doing it out of choice, other people can.
But why ? people despise each other for their choices all the time. Why is despising, say, Trump voters or Putin supporters okay but not gays ? I can anticipate the "Gays don't harm anyone" arguments and, while I agree, I can point to tons of people who believe very fervently otherwise. I reject most of their reasons, but some (e.g. gays are more sexually promiscuous thus spreading more diseases) I'm sympathetic to.
Note also that the abstract quality of being gay is different than the actual concrete gays in the world. If somebody says, on e.g. the internet or live stage, that they're gay, it's very likely that what follows would be a tedious and condescending sermon from the progressive religion, which people hate for other reasons. As an analogy, many people hate the middle east and by extension also hate Islam. Or people hate Islam and by extension the place it's most prominently associated with. Gays and progressivism might be in a similar relationship, even in our world where being gay is (probably ? I don't actually know how I can trust claims like this in 2022) not a choice. I imagine, in a world where being gay is a choice, choosing to be gay would be like screaming *I want special treatment and love lecturing people*, I think we already see this in our world with meaningless "Spicy Straight" identities that go something like "I'm straight and I do 99% of all straight things but I'm you know like ⭐⭐⭐Queeer⭐⭐⭐ or something like that" and so on.
For more examples, people hate vegans all the time. Football fans, hundreds of millions worldwide, go berserk over what other people choose to watch and cheer in their own living room very frequently. All of those are personal choices, what the vegan chooses to eat on their own dinner table really affects 0 people, and yet some people still hate the digestive bacteria in their living guts. Why would choosing to be gay be special ?
Is there an objective criteria for what are "political or social opinions" instead of one of your other categories? You don't have to go very far back in time (10 years, maybe 15?) before homosexuality itself was a "political or social opinion" that could be safety ignored. Even the rest of your categories were opinions alone 50-75 years ago.
I think you're being pedantic about "opinion" but to follow that thought - does it really matter if it's an opinion instead of an inherent characteristic? See Deiseach's question about pedophiles/"Minor Attracted Persons" below. It's entirely possible that being attracted to minors is in fact deeply felt and immutable, should we normalize it?
There definitely exist people who are sexually attracted to children but do not act on their attraction. I think there's a good case to be made for society's viewing these people as worthy of respect and compassion. I'm quite sure none of them would be ordering a pedophilia-celebrating cake., though.
Are they now? I have a hard time keeping up with what the "studies" departments have decided this week on whether these are 100% biological or 100% political/social.
Sorry, I think that's factually incorrect. He was willing to sell cakes to whoever, but drew the line at making cakes designed to express a certain opinion (celebration gay marriage in Colorado and I think this one was about supporting trans issues).
So in these cases, it would be more like the opposite. They would happily make cakes for gay people, but not people who support gay marriage.
My half-formed, weakly-held take is something like: "The case of racial discrimination is special because the Civil Rights Act was what the US did instead of reparations. The ideologically pure solution to racism in the US in the 1960s would have been to reinstate to the descendants of slaves 100% of the wealth stolen from their ancestors, which would cause the average wealth of black Americans to rise much closer to that of white Americans. Due to political and practical considerations this was impossible, so black Americans got the Civil Rights Act as a (significantly worse) consolation prize. No comparable "bargain" was struck regarding sexuality-based discrimination, so the law doesn't need to make it illegal to refuse to bake gay cakes."
The idea is that informal violence as well as Jim Crow laws maintained segregation. If a single business defected from the order, they would be targeted for that informal violence. Thus, a law was required to push all businesses to "defect" at once, and thus no single business could be coordinated against.
> The ideologically pure solution to racism in the US in the 1960s would have been to reinstate to the descendants of slaves 100% of the wealth stolen from their ancestors, which would cause the average wealth of black Americans to rise much closer to that of white Americans
Wouldn't it cause the average wealth of black Americans to fall to the level of black West Africans?
To my way of thinking, "reparations" was paid in the form of US citizenship. The alternative, circa 1860, would have been to give them some money and resettle them in Africa.
I think that debt was paid long ago, in blood. 2 million white boys, almost none of whom owned slaves themselves, volunteered to free the black man, and 400,000 of them made the ultimate sacrifice before the job was done, and another quarter million were permanently maimed.
If there were remaining pureblood descendants of the slaveocracy who weren't expropriated and disenfranchised after the war, who still today held onto some secret gold stash for which black blood was traded, I'd be first in line to kick their God-damned asses, strip them naked and hand it all over to black schools or something.
But there aren't. There were 400,000 owners of any slave at all in 1861, and that number is dwarfed by the millions who fought them. Any random white person alive today is much more likely to have the blood of a liberator than an oppressor in his veins -- and of course even more likely to have descended from people who immigrated decades or a century later, who had nothing even distantly to do with slave-owning, indeed who may have been slaves themselves somewhere else.
Frankly, I was more responding to the very strange notion that U.S. citizenship was adequate compensation than making a declaration in any actual reparations debate. The idea couldn't be made to work so I don't see the point in trying and have not attempted to fully parse the morality of it. Your points have merit; so does Nancy's; Lincoln also spoke of paying the debt in blood, though in a somewhat different way. As for descendance, it being as long ago as it was, I imagine many of us come from several of the different actors in that piece of history & others; personally I know I'm descended from at least one minor slaveowner as well as from later Irish immigrants. I don't think that makes me guilty or something, but I'm pissed at them and at the self-congratulatory tone of the one family story they passed down to me (they were *good* slaveowners, doncha know.) My whole reason for engaging here is that I don't like people minimizing the horrific things that were done; as for what I think ought to be done now, I think some sort of truth and reconciliation process would be best, but I'm also very pessimistic that the time for it has long passed.
Minus the cost of generations of free accommodation and meals, of course.
In the end, the value of basic manual labour minus the cost of room and board is not all that high, which is why non-slave labourers don't manage to save up a whole lot of money and get rich.
Again, like I said, US citizenship is far more valuable.
Having replied off the cuff, allow me to correct my previous phrasing to "wasn't all that economically beneficial to the owners." The central point remains. Frankly, I think you're overvaluing the "room and board" which was, to put it mildly, of extremely low quality, as well as the sheer amount of labor. (People will work livable hours when they have the option, even if it keeps them fairly poor. Slaves don't have options in that regard.) Not to mention: are we including compensation for wrongful deaths? There is clear precedent to do so in U.S. law. I'm not an experienced accountant or anything, but the bill does seem to be mounting.
I suppose some kind of calculation would be needed, but I don't think yours is correct.
The most logical, to me, would have been for former slaves to each get something of the same value as their unpaid labor previously rendered (40 acres and a mule, but you know, actually give it to them). I suppose the option of a free trip back to Africa and a little set up money could have been an alternative, but by 1860 there were few to no black slaves directly from Africa and even those that had come in their own lifetime had spent many years in the US and lost all connections to the continent.
Dealing with this in 1960, it's a non-starter to offer to send people back to a land of their great-great-great-great-grandparents and wish them luck. Forced servitude in order to get an US citizenship is also a bad solution, as they were not allowed to make that choice and we wouldn't allow that choice now either.
Personally I think the idea of reparations is silly and a non-starter anyway, because then you have to sort out the people who were responsible and the people who were mistreated from every similarly-situated-but-not-mistreated-people-who-have-similar-characteristics. This would happen on both ends of the equation. Take a rich Nigerian immigrant from 1995 and offer him reparations? Make a Polish immigrant from 1988 pay for it? Should Barack Obama be paying or receiving, or both?
To expand on this, enabling the strong variation of this principle would lead to court officers refusing to grant a marriage license to a gay couple (as has happened), or to people refusing to serve a minority (as has happened). If you have a moral opposition to serving certain members of the public, go into a profession where you don't have to do that.
The only professions that serve "the public" in any sense are in government and the military, because government and the military are the only professions that are employed by an abstract entity called The People. The governor works for no one person in particular, but rather The People. So does the highway patrolman, the detective, the Superior Court judge, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Every other profession exists as a series of private contracts between individuals. A baker is a person who offers to make individual contracts, one at a time, with other people -- his customers. Each party to the contract is traditionally free to make, or not make, the contract at his or her own discretion, for any reason or none, and it's no more anybody else's business than it is someone else's business who an individual want to befriend or fuck or marry or become business partners with.
At no point ever does a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker work for "the public" in the same sense as a policeman or USMC lance corporal. At least...not in Western legal canon going back a millenium or more. There are certainly other forms of social organization in which *everyone* works for "the public," and there is no such thing as an individual contract -- every citizen is a party to every contract made by any other citizen, and there are no individual choices, only collective choices about what "we" want to do here or there or anywhere.
Fortunately, almost everyone in the West finds such a system repugnant, if for no other reason than its record of misery, oppression, and carnage in the 20th century.
If it's illegal to get gay married, and if you got gay married in another state but the state where you live does not recognise it and says you are just cohabiting with your partner, how did the baker infringe on any rights by not making a cake to celebrate a gay wedding which was illegal and could not happen and did not exist, by the law of the time?
The strong variation of this principle would entitle me to walk into a Jewish deli and demand they cook me crubeens, or else I am being discriminated against, and no it doesn't matter that there are six Irish butcher shops where I can buy crubeens, I insist this business serves me because their conscientious objections based on their religious faith don't matter in secular society.
Or you know, that might make me an asshole if I did that, rights to buy crubeens if I want be damned.
But isn't there a distinction between those working for or on behalf of a governmental entity vs. those acting purely in their own private capacity? Someone gets denied a marriage license is being denied a fundamental function of county (or whatever other local government handles it in their area) government to which everyone is entitled. Someone being denied a cake by a particular bakery has to drive another 10 minutes, or do another google search. Yeah, the baker may be an asshole, but that asshole is also a private citizen - absent a specific statute/law/regulation (the establishment of which may ultimately be the goal here, as Eurasian notes in a separate reply) that person is under no LEGAL obligation to do business with anyone for any reason. Maybe there are moral/ethical/some other sort of obligations at play, but the resolution there isn't "force this person to do business with me because it's the "right" thing to do", it's "don't deal with this person because they're objectionable, find someone who isn't."
There are many jobs where someone does not have to deal with the public at all. For example, I know someone that has avoidant personality disorder and she works in the back room at Walmart, where she does not have to deal with the customers. Or take any other job where someone's sexual orientation would simply not some up, such as just about any white collar or even blue collar job that is not customer-facing. Hell, you don't even have to quit being a baker. Just stop offering wedding cakes. Wedding cakes are a low margin product anyway, as they take too much labor for how much people are willing to pay.
What I found particularly egregious about the Colorado baker was that at the time, gay marriage was illegal in Colorado. So he was being asked to bake a cake celebrating something that by state law did not exist. And yet the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found he had violated their rights. So when did the CCRC take a case against the Colorado state legislature? Never happened.
The Autumn Scardina case is mischief-making. This person is not just taking a case about "I wanted a birthday cake and they refused me". It's a political act. It's been agreed that when Scardina rang up to order a cake that was pink inside and blue outside, the bakery was happy to do so. It was only when Scardina made a deliberate comment about this was to celebrate being trans that they refused.
So if Scardina 'only' wanted a pink and blue birthday cake, no problem. If they wanted a trans birthday cake, no problem so long as they didn't say it was trans. But then they wouldn't have had their big lawsuit about "bake the cake, bigot! you must approve, tolerance is not enough!"
Anyone know any good, up-to-date, research about how to accurately discern domain expertise? Or how differentiate experts from novices? I've read most of the classic papers on this topic, just wondered if anyone knew any less well-known papers, or blog posts, or books that are worth reading?
I don't see how there could be a domain-general answer to this question. It seems that each domain would need its own way to identify expertise.
There are some broad heuristics you could use - ask the people whose expertise you trust most who are the experts you should ask in the domain in question, and then have those people evaluate the person whose domain expertise you want to evaluate. But this method doesn't tell you anything about how to resolve disagreements, or how to identify the first person to start your chain, or how to even identify the domain in question.
I don't see how you can discern domain expertise unless you yourself have expertise in that domain. Other than that, you have to find someone you trust as an expert in that domain, and trust their judgement of the expertise of others in that domain.
I have a quick-and-dirty method I used when interviewing job applicants: I'd ask them to tell me about some work they'd done in their domain, or some way they'd applied their expertise, /for fun/. Not for work or for school. Anyone who has no answer to that question might be an "expert", but they're no good.
(This works very well for technical staff. I don't know how well it would apply to managers.)
I think this can rule people in but not out. I don't do a lot of coding for fun any more, because moving my body enough to maintain my mental health takes up nearly all my available energy and leisure time.
I mean a smart person might navigate that, but I am absolutely a topic expert in a little tiny field of consulting, and I can gaurantee you I do ZERO of it for "fun"/personal projects. I would barely read news article about it for "fun" (maybe once or twice a year). It is work for pay only.
I don't find the field particularly interesting and the skills involved are used for lots of personal projects, but aren't really related to my "expertise" they are just generic thigns like (can use a spreadsheet, and knows how to lead/train adults effectively).
I am really good at managing and organizing things and am the leader of several orgs/entities, but that is hardly me doing things in my "domain expertise" as a personal project.
There was a study of underwriters, done partly by looking at the distribution of insurance premiums asked for the same insurance at different companies. I forget who did it. It's described in a popular book, "Noise". The conclusion IIRC was that most or all underwriters have no expertise. But I don't remember the specifics nor the qualifications on that conclusion.
"Read *Noise*" would be a good answer to the original question. Although there are a couple of egregious errors in that book, the most-important one being the claim that scatter due to bias and scatter due to noise are equally important -- based on circular reasoning.
I find the idea that no underwriters have expertise kind of suspect. Maybe in actual fact few do, but the job is certianly one that is tractable to skill.
You may miss out on old, tired, experts, like I was before I retired.
40 years ago, I loved both my job and my field. I did hobby projects a lot, though often restricted by employment agreements from doing anything, even as a volunteer, that might possibly compete with my then current employer.
But in my last decade, I believe I started exactly one hobby project, and didn't finish it.
Of course I could have answered your question, citing my past, and there's one particular project that had come up in many interviews. But nothing recent, and even now that I'm retired, I'm still doing just about anything other than work in my erstwhile field.
"I have a quick-and-dirty method I used when interviewing job applicants: I'd ask them to tell me about some work they'd done in their domain, or some way they'd applied their expertise, /for fun/. Not for work or for school. Anyone who has no answer to that question might be an "expert", but they're no good."
This seems like an approach that might work for engineers and artists/musicians/etc. but would fail for trauma surgeons. Would you insist that an expert pilot fly for fun as well as for Delta?
The distinction that you can make here is that the latter categories require certification, and the former (in most cases) do not. In other words, distinguishing domain experts is more or less a solved problem (certified or not), unless you're looking for something specific.
One of the most highly cited ones that I thought was interesting was a Michelene, Feltovich, and Glaser (1981) study that looked at the differences in how physics experts and novices approached solving physics problems.
The TL;DR of it is that novices appear to solve problems by focusing on its unique features, whereas experts seem more inclined to work forwards from first principles (i.e the laws of physics) to solve problems.
I liked it because it kind of corresponded with Telock's research on the traits of good forecasters- who are less likely to be swayed by the idiosyncrasies of events, focusing instead on the base-rates that such events happen.
Any recommendations/suggestions for book that look at the phenomenon of the global 19 and 20th century Indian diaspora/migration? When I say this, I’m thinking of the grand flows of migration settled the Indo-populations of the Caribbean, Southeast-Asia, and Africa. Less so the post WW2 migration to US, UK, etc.
I’m thinking particularly something along the lines of Grand histories such as Replenishing the Earth, Fischer’s Albion’s Seed or the Formation of New Societies.
I would not want anything ‘ethnic or critical studies’ and the more stodgy facts or numbers, the better!
Part of me feels like I came across such a book and forgot, or I dreamt it..
Thank you! The first one from 1956 is very interesting and kinda what I was looking for, book-wise.
And yes, its certainly an interesting one! Like the Jewish and Irish diasporas, they went quite far and wide, with significant and varying influence in the histories of some countries (Fiji, Mauritius, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago). The fact they often straddled market-minority and plantation worker, settler and subject, makes me wonder if we underrate how interesting migration was in 19thC.
I wear minimalist/barefoot-style shoes because I have ankylosing spondylitis and for some reason zero-drop minimalist shoes reduce my back and hip pain. These insoles seem popular in the barefoot shoes community, claiming to help with posture and foot fatigue, but it all looks like snake oil to me. Is there any reason that these "proprioceptive" insoles would actually help with posture and reduce fatigue?
"bad" posture is any posture that causes you pain or discomfort. There is not 1 posture that is best for everyone. People don't sit or stand with one posture for very long under normal circumstances. A posture can feel great at first and then cause pain or discomfort over time. Was it "bad" to start with or was it the time in that position made it "bad"?
Generally, the human body is quite adaptable and able to perform under many conditions.
I love the idea of people getting shoes without soles, and then getting socks with mini soles in them so they can kid themselves about liking soleless shoes.
Anecdotally only, I feel like "bad posture" is a thing, at least in some sense.
For example, when working on the computer, I used to lean in too much and hunch my shoulders and I'm pretty sure this contributed to a lot of discomfort (after the fact, not so much during).
I lowered my desk to be proportional to my height, got a better chair, and started using a split keyboard. This helps to place my shoulders and back in what feels to me like "better posture", and has caused me to feel less pain and tension after work.
Another example - if I spend too much time sitting, it seems like I start to stand 'wrong' and walk 'wrong', and this contributes to back and hip pain for me. Doing yoga about it seems to help to 'reset' my posture, so I stand 'better' and walk 'better'. Even more subjectively, I just feel better and more confident when I have "good" posture.
What's objectively good or bad? I am not qualified to say. It seems like when your posture is compensating for stiff/tight muscles, that's usually a bad thing.
Anyway - no comment on the insoles. I always figured the barefoot people would believe that being closer to barefoot is better? I actually wear barefoot shoes exclusively, but I've never looked into what people actually say about them.
I don't know if bad posture is a serious health risk, but it can devastate your social and professional life. Even if it's a cultural construct, posture which people recognize as "bad" marks you as a bad sexual partner or manager.
Peter Zeihan put out a video recently on the Jones Act: https://youtu.be/Sc128K695R0. I tend to agree with him, but am finding it hard to play devil's advocate--I may have a blindspot on this issue. Can anyone tell me why we shouldn't significantly update the law, or why congress can't or won't (other than low-priority/laziness, and perhaps a small union lobby)?
BLUF: The US Merchant Marine is critical to the US military. Allowing foreign competition to undercut US shipping is a national security threat and gets treated as such because the US military will not depend on non-US citizens to deliver critical military gear in wartime. While there's definitely an economic cost, US national security interests will almost always beat it.
The reference case for this is, as always, WWII. The Jones Act gets passed in 1920 specifically to protect US shipping from foreign competition and, within 20 years, the Merchant Marine is supplying Britain and the Soviets with critical arms to fight the Nazis. This was incredibly risky for individual sailors (1) but also probably the most the most important front in the war; D-Day and Hiroshima get more attention but keeping Great Britain in the war and the Soviets supplied with arms and equipment for that brutal warzone is basically what won the war.
Post-WWII US commanders aren't looking at the US Merchant Marine as an economic unit, they're looking at it as a key part of their post-war logistics infrastructure, especially as US military bases spread across the globe. There might be clever ways around these concerns but...most references I see to the Jones Act and similar laws aren't focusing on the Jones Act itself but more as a reference class for bad laws, which means strategies for seriously revising it aren't really there.
Which is fair because I'm not sure there's a better solution. Without the Jones Act, US shipping will basically die because foreign seamen are so much cheaper. And make no mistake, the Merchant Marine seamen are absolutely what is being preserved here; we can build new ships much much faster than we can train seamen and officers. The Navy could take over this function but...god, the US military is already a bureaucratic mess and adding the US Merchant Marine fleet would more than double the number of active ships to handle. Bottom line here: the US military needs thousands of experienced sailors it can trust in the event of war to ship goods through warzones. They don't trust foreign sailors and having the Navy do it would be a nightmare. In order to have US sailors do it, you need to subsidize the industry, so they do. Baring some fourth group of sailors becoming available, I don't know how you get out of this.
I might change my mind if @bean or someone else does a really in depth take on it but I have family working in this industry and from them it's a pretty open secret that the US military is keeping US shipping alive.
Counterargument: The US Military can not depend on the US Merchant Marine to deliver critical military gear in wartime, because the US Merchant Marine is a small handful of mostly outdated ships that are all going to be booked solid keeping e.g. Hawaii from sinking into anarchy and ruin no matter what war we are fighting. I'm *pretty* sure our allies will come through for us if we need them to deliver critical military gear in wartime, and there's also the Military Sealift Command, but it's those or nothing, or close enough to nothing as makes no difference. The Jones Act has *failed*, and there is no credible plan for resurrecting a substantial fleet of US-owned, US-crewed private merchant ships. We're going to have to learn to live with that.
Alright, so several factual disputes here, and then a broader point that isn't being picked up.
First, the US Merchant Marine isn't antiquated, they work the same ships as everyone else with basically the same equipment. US merchant mariners work for companies like Maersk all the time and there's no major quality gap in equipment.
Second, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan shows that even if US allies are willing to help, they're not often able to help to US military standards. Additionally, we'd be talking about sending unarmed ships with tens of millions of dollars in military and relief supplies into a warzone. If there's a shooting war over, say, Taiwan, the US military needs those supplies to be delivered, if not to Taiwan, then to US bases in Guam, Korea, the Philippines, Japan, etc. They won't trust that to non-US citizens, especially not to foreign crews who will start to see lots of their crewmates dying as the Chinese will absolutely try to sink these ships and interfere with US logistics. This also kind of runs into the idea that the US fleet is so far gone it doesn't matter. No doubt that the US fleet isn't where we'd want for an active war but the US fleet is somewhere between 200-500 ships, depending on how you define it. While there would certainly be some hard decisions in a war, there would be a lot more if we had no US fleet.
Third...Military Sealift command kind of is the Merchant Marine, or it's basically a contracting agency that only hires merchant mariner. I'm struggling to find firm number: Wiki says that 88% of the Military sealift staff are civilians, but that could be non-merchant marine (1). This letter to US Military Sealift Command states that 20% of all US naval vessels are crewed by merchant mariners, including all the auxiliary supply ships (2). I do know that USMSC hires so many merchant marines that the Pacific Run is mainstay of west coast shipping. Basically, USMSC hires a ship to carry military supplies to a Pacific military base, stereotypically Busan. Once that shipment is done, the crew are no longer USMSC, so they travel up to Shanghai and load Chinese goods for the US market. Once they're back in LA or Seattle, the USMSC hires them out to move more military supplies to Busan.
Finally, I think a lot of people are caught up with the ships but it's not the ships, it's the people and more importantly the skills and culture. Let me give an example with Chief Engineers, although I'm getting outside my comfort zone.
Chief engineers are critical on big ships because the run the engine and their duties basically boil down to performing as much maintenance as possible while in operation, because time in drydock is time not shipping goods for money, and fixing this giant monstrously complex engine in case something goes wrong. Both of these things are critical on a ship with a total value (ship, engine, and carge) of a quarter billion +. This blog (3) has a decent rundown of the requirements to be a chief engineer but it boils down to taking a mechanical engineer and throwing him in a ship for ten years. This is a highly technical and highly specialized skill set, foreign chief engineers can expect to make $100-$150k and US chief engineers usually make $300k/yr for 6 on, 6 off.
And here's the thing, you can't get these guys in a hurry. In a worst case scenario we could just buy container ships from our allies or neutral shipyards; this is a money solvable problem. But if you don't have US-national chief engineers, no amount of money will solve that in less than 4-5 years. You can't train them that fast, not without seriously compromising quality and a lot of the stuff can't be taught in the classroom, it needs to be picked up not just through experience but from "passed-on wisdom", for lack of a better term. Extend this out to US-national captains, chief mates, senior mates, etc and all of sudden you realize you need this entire ecosystem of different high-skill positions to make it work.
And I think that's the guts of the thing. International shipping is hard, but it's also profitable so lots of foreigners do it and do it for cheaper. The US Military, however, doesn't trust foreigners in a war with their key logistics. And using protectionism to keep a rump US merchant fleet around is cheaper and simpler than building a whole second navy just for shipping. And when people complain about tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in economic costs, the US military just laughs because in their world serious costs are denominated in trillions.
So, the plan is that during war we're going to put US Merchant Marine crews on foreign ships and have them deliver critical military supplies? Because I think there are some problems with that. Otherwise, the US Merchant Marine is limited by its ships. The Jones Act, does not incentivize US shipowners to maintain enough of the right kind of ships to perform the states mission. The MSC perhaps does, but it does so by paying taxpayer dollars for ships and sailors, not by waving the magic "Jones Act" wand.
No, I've got no special information on what the plan is and, while the Pentagon has probably wargame-d out a bunch of different scenarios, they're going to do the best they can with the specific circumstances of a very bad series of events.
And while the US Merchant Marine doesn't have as many ships or crews as the Pentagon would like for a full conflict, it's a heck of a lot better than having none.
Without the Jones Act there would be very, few perhaps no, US flagged civilian cargo ships. Not US owned. There'd still be plenty of ships owned by Americans and American companies. But they'd be flagged in other countries. Plus the usual arguments for protectionism and the fact of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Though not so diffuse for Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. But those aren't exactly electoral powerhouses.
I'd assume it's for classic public-choice reasons: a small tight community would lose out a lot from reform (or at least thinks they would lose out a lot) and so are motivated to lobby intensively against reform; the community who would benefit are much larger but also more diffuse and the individual benefits are smaller.
Yep. Its also a really hard political sell for any one in an election year. "My opponent hates American industry" is a terrifying slogan to campaign against. (I support Jones Act repeal)
Well said. However, I think the same thing can be said of U.S. manufacturing. I don't want to argue about protectionism vs a freer market, just that there are lots of persuasive security arguments for protectionism, and it almost always ends up being really bad.
Etiquette question. How do folks feel about starting multiple, controversial comment threads within six hours on an open thread?
Yes, this is about le_berger_des_photons. At this point, approximately a quarter of the comments on this thread are them, or people responding to them.
That's two distinct questions and for me generates two distinct responses.
(a) In general, one user starting multiple controversial/challenging comment threads within a few hours on an open thread is one of the potential joys of participating in a comment board. BUT....my lifelong experience with this sort of system (google "Usenet newsgroup" kids) has made it clear that "potential" is the keyword. The number of users who can actually do that in a way which adds value is small. Much smaller than the number who are certain that they can do so, which leads to...
(b) le_berger_des_photons is clearly not one of that small number. And another part of my long experience an online discussion systems is that allowing such users to "go to town" is a sure way to kill off an online discussion system. Been there, seen that, multiple times. My libertarian leanings are pretty strong so this reality saddens me quite a bit. But it is the reality.
I think you should phrase your question either as a general question, OR as specifically about le_berger_des_photons, but NOT as both. Doing that leads to the construction of social norms which are actually maximized for one peculiar edge case.
I think their earlier posts were interpreted as being in good faith and answered in good faith. The other post other post was plain terrible and IMHO worthy of an instant ban. Them resorting to name calling after the replies came just proved that point.
The probability of a discussion with an anti-vaxxer, Holocaust denier or a believer in antisemitic conspiracy theories creating any light instead of just smoke are basically nil. Just a waste of everyone's time.
Wasn't this just a transparent attempt to stir up some shit? My guess is that some bored 14 year old or mentally ill loser decided to see if he could troll everyone with the most offensive possible topics.
Hm, haven't read down that far yet, just opened this thread. Since I have the bad habit of commenting multiple times on a thread, I can't throw any stones. Let me read down that far and I'll think about it.
Okay, I've read them and yeah. This is not someone trying to share thoughts in good faith, it's tinfoil hat time. We *must* believe viruses do not exist, vaccines are death-jabs, and their selection of Covid fanatics are telling the truth Big Pharma/the Rockefellers/maybe the Dero inhabitants of the Hollow Earth don't want us to know!
I can't in good faith call for a ban, but this is not going to be any kind of productive interaction.
Ah, yes, because if you just put something in the same sentence as "Hollow Earth", that makes it false. Doesn't matter how overwhelming the evidence is - just say the word "microchips" and you're good.
"Multiple threads on controversial topics" shouldn't be a problem, but antagonistic tone + conspiracy theories + bad faith "just asking questions" very much can be.
Seconded. It's true there can be a fine line between spouting rambling conspiracy theories and being an interesting-to-speak-to divergent thinker, but this guy is nowhere near that line. I've already reported several of his comments for him unproductive and antagonistic.
That's a long way of saying these threads need extra moderators as Scott cannot be expected to do the heavy lifting. All comment sections need mods IMHO.
Agreed. Mods are almost never the answer. Mod bias is far worse, and probably more prevalent, than nasty comments, which one CAN ignore if one is an adult. And websites that get mods often move on to banning comments altogether.
That isn't what people mean when they say "moderation". I've had numerous discussions and arguments about the need for moderation, and the two sides in these arguments aren't "No moderation" vs. "Reporting of comments", but "Reporting of comments" vs. "Administrators obligated to read comments and empowered to delete comments and ban users", or even (as in the case here on AC10) "One adminstrator who reads comments and sometimes deletes them and bans users" versus "MORE adminstrators who read comments and sometimes delete them and ban users."
I believe mods are the only answer. I've been in some good unmoderated newsgroups on usenet, but nothing since then.
And I don't believe that "just ignore it" is an adequate answer. Having things you need to ignore is a cost. Low enough if the problem is just a moderate proportion of things you aren't interested in, but higher for emotional provocation.
I find that ignoring things can also lead to becoming numb.
For the broader question, I'd say it's fine; open thread is for talking about your interests, if you have a lot of interests why not start a lot of threads. But, I'm new here, don't actually know the decorum.
What are we all doing for legal drugs, for entertainment/killing time on a weekend night? Emphasis on the world 'legal', please. To date I've tried experimenting with marijuana (legal in my state, I enjoy the drinks much more than the smokeable form), small amounts of alcohol (I don't enjoy more than 2 drinks), kratom, and kava off and on. I do like kratom probably most of all, but it's chemically related to opioids, and it also makes me nauseous after a couple of hours, so I tend to be sparing with it. Kava can be quite fun but requires drinking a large gross-tasting concoction, it's rough on the digestive system, and it doesn't last that long.
A couple of drinks and 25mg of CBD seems to be a nice combination to mellow out, watch Netflix etc., while not being super-strong. I've tried making experimental mixes of half a marijuana drink (so 1.25mg of THC and CBD all-in) and a small amount of kratom, haven't quite found the perfect combination there but I'm working on it.
Does anyone else have anything different they use to while away a Friday or Saturday night? My apologies to Scott if it's an inappropriate question, I can delete. Obviously this is not meant to be an illegal drug discussion
I think you'd be better off staying sober and trying to improve the quality of the activities you're doing, if you find that you're "killing time" on weekends. Get better hobbies or friends or a girlfriend or something.
Ooh, I forgot to mention nitrous. Yeah, I experimented with it several times earlier this year. It only lasts for an incredibly short time period of time, even a few of them give me a hangover, and I feel uncomfortable with basically 'huffing' drugs. I mean, what's the difference between doing nitrous and huffing paint or glue? So I peaced out on NO
Marijuana is excellent for enjoying art, listening to music, and watching some movies - in particular those with slow pacing (2001: A Space Odyssey is magnificent in that state). I'd say using it for random Netflix trash is a waste.
A friend of mine wholeheartedly recommends painting minis (Warhammer etc) while stoned - the states of mind are apparently very compatible.
THC is great for hours long conversation with friends too. They tend to play out like the friendlier long exchanges on ACX.
Disc Golf is alway good too. Got a nine basket course a couple blocks from where I live. Sometimes I’ll jus sit in a tee box and describe the goal ahead.
Hey guys, you got a dogleg left here. Either lay up by that tall pine or if you are feeling lucky and have a good arm go straight past the tall oak.
I can count on most of those fellas being high too.
I'm sure this is not what you're looking for, but I find the high from extremely intense physical activity + adrenaline from related risk (such as in fight sports, heavy lifting, sprinting, etc.) to be far superior to anything the more gentle drugs can provide. And the afterglow from these activities is very similar to what I usually feel from 1 or 2 drinks + CBD. Not meant to be a moralizing answer, just one that I think a lot of drug users don't take very seriously.
"I'm sure this is not what you're looking for, but I find the high from extremely intense physical activity + adrenaline from related risk (such as in fight sports, heavy lifting, sprinting, etc.) to be far superior to anything the more gentle drugs can provide."
I have been trying to understand "runner's high" for a while. Maybe you can answer a question for me. Does 'extremely intense physical activity' include something such as 'hit ~80% of max heart rate and stay there for an hour'? Does this generate the high you are describing? Or does one need to be more intense? Or is there some other component needed?
For me the "runners high" usually comes with time, not intensity (though duration of exercise does increase intensity). Im also more likely to experience it by pushing my self beyond some limit or barrier. Quieting that annoying voice in my head telling me to stop feels great mentally and physically.
I concur on time, though intensity is important as well. I'm not a runner, and I don't regularly exercise, but I do like to take hikes. If I do a 5 hour hike, I usually don't get anything like a runners high. However, one time halfway through the hike I realized I miscalculated the time and needed to turn around immediately or I'd miss an important deadline. All the way back I pushed myself to go fast, so the second half of the hike was significantly more intense than usual. After the hike was done, for about two hours I felt extremely relaxed, stress free, and happy. It was directly comparable to when I was put on oxycontin after dental surgery a few years earlier. Felt good.
I absolutely concur with this answer. Though it does depend a little bit on taste and opportunity, meaning I can't currently do the activities I like all year round. And even if its the right time of year, you might not be able to do it on a given work day. But this can be mitigated with experimentation with other "drugs", to find something for every time and place.
I experimented a bunch with kava a couple of years ago. It's very very very picky about how you make it, if you don't get the steps right it doesn't get you high (and then you've consumed this foul-tasting brew for nothing). It's been a while, but originally I used the strainer method plus hot water- later I purchased this thing, the Aluball (1) If I were to make kava again, I'd say hot (but not boiling) water and shake the Aluball vigorously for 60 seconds
trigger warning: suicide, drug abuse, pregnancy, irresponsible parenting
I know a woman who is a former opioid addict who raised healthy and happy children. Bless her heart. I also know another former opioid addict who killed herself after miscarrying. She's finally found peace.
I also know a third former opioid user who seems to be struggling with some sort of drastic personality change in the first trimester of pregnancy: it's looks like something overrides her decision making and emotional self-regulation, in a way that might be acutely detrimental to the well-being and mental health of a young child. And I worry about her, as well as about her unborn child: what sort of life would that child have? Would parental trauma doom that child to repeating the same self-destructive patterns?
I am still working through the consequences of being born to a mentally unstable mother, who only mellowed out somewhat after entering menopause, and to this day refuses to admit that certain traumatic episodes that have burned themselves into my memory took place. So I suspect that a culture-bound self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing acts as the triggering factor: anxieties about child-rearing and self-worth in a patriarchal society, and persistent failure of loved ones to respond appropriately, could definitely drive someone to self-harm, drug abuse, general risk-seeking behavior, and (perhaps most harmfully) a sort of persistent psychological blind spot that would negatively affect a child's upbringing and initial psychological makeup, perhaps to a crippling degree.
So I came here to ask: does my model of the above make sense? Furthermore, is there a biochemical connection between the effects of opioids and those of pregnancy on the human brain?
I hadn't connected the dots in this particular way - my suspicion was more along the lines of hormonal changes eliciting the same behavioral patterns as drugs. But what you're saying definitely makes sense. Truth be told, if that turns out to be the case, I'd have no idea what could be done without antagonizing her or victimizing her further: she has already responded with hostility and duplicity to outside perspectives on her situation, and in our community there are hardly any sources of support for people with such problems.
Suppose we rule that out, though. Suppose she is well aware of the dangers, responsible enough to stay off the stuff, and her erratic behavior can be attributed to a preexisting personality disorder that she is working to mitigate - where does that leave her then? Is there literature that suggests a possible biological connection between, let's say, maternal instincts, and opiate abuse in particular?
It feels like a strange coincidence for Scott to have a "HOT or not?" discussion this week, me feeling pretty ambivalent either way, and then suddenly this OT has caused me to update strongly in a decisive direction. All part of the plan!
(Counterpoint to more frequent OTs: some other blogs do them super frequently, like one a day, and those get basically ~no traffic despite similar sized readerships. The 1k+ comments on ACX OTs are intimidatingly numerous and cause technical problems, but I'd much rather have that sort of lively activity than a dead mic. Lends a certain liveliness to the place, rather than feeling like a passive commentariat that just comes out of the woodwork to react to author posts.)
I can't tell if this is like, insane or not. I can totally buy that skilled people can use body language, suggestion etc. in order to manipulate others. But the effect claimed here seems very large. And even if it works, would being able to make people feel terrified without them actually knowing why be a generally useful tool for getting your own way?
He describes this killer PUA-adjacent NLP technique as a "weapon of the woke" used intuitively by gay, lesbian, and trans people and transmitted by... some kind of autism-mediated osmosis, I guess? Like crows learning from each other to steal pensioners' glasses or something.
Even correcting for the fact that it marks him as my outgroup, this punctures the credibility of his account for me. I'd have seen it work by now.
Well damn, how come I have missed out on all the cool autism-related superpowers? I just got the overwhelming social anxiety and weirdo vibes! I didn't even get the mathematical ability!
Walliserops covered the point with more flair, but for what it's worth (said the Marxist to the Catholic) you've never come across as serving weirdo vibes, especially against the backdrop of the local menagerie. Always remarkably human.
Oh, please. Being a local legend in a community best described as "SEELE but not evil, we hope" isn't enough for you?
I bet you get one bright-eyed, EA-adjacent Percival Tsarevich type at your door seeking wisdom each week, and there's a 50/50 on whether you solve their quest with a medieval anecdote that is somehow perfectly tailored to fix their problems, or kill them on the spot for their insolence. And you want this guy's socially transmitted terror beams on top?
Gentlemen, ladies, reverend fathers, reverend mothers, my lords, your eminences, your graces and fellow-peasants:
My online persona is *extremely* different to what I am in real life. Believe me, nobody is asking me for advice or even taking notice of me besides occasional "who's the oddity in the corner?"
Online is *easy*. Reality is - well, I make hermit crabs look like gregarious jet-setters.
Yeahhhhh.... no thanks. "I've figured out a secret psychological superweapon which I am going to tell you all about how it worked on *me*, and I'm an Alpha Alpha, so just imagine what you poor inferior specimens will be like if anyone tries it on you! Of course, for global security, I'm not going to tell you anything concrete about it, but if Really Important People in scientific fields want to contact me, I'll consider it".
Nice piece of fiction writing, but not a genre that interests me.
Hum, both posts are so obviously ridiculous that I have some difficulties understanding why they can seem convincing.
Because yes, mirroring, in the general meaning of matching the other person way of speaking, emotional tone, level of gesture, etc., is a very real and natural component of social interactions. Most people do it most of the time, to some extent, when talking with someone.
But as mirroring will not magically convince someone, "freezing" someone by "compensating for and neutralizing the other person's motion" will certainly make them uncomfortable (they were having a normal conversation and the guy is suddenly acting very weird!) but it will not magically induce a panic attack!
Keith Johnstone's "Impro" goes in depth into body language and various messages subconsciously sent via side channels - this anecdote would fit right in there.
I've definitely experienced people completely hijacking my will to resist their influence in ways that are hard to explain and leave me very confused later. I think it's more about what they say than their body language - but probably both.
As for the use, being able to unsettle someone on demand seems great to end any unpleasant/dangerous interaction.
I've watched people (including some well-known in the rationalist community) hijack the wills of the people around me, but never felt the effect on myself. Perhaps a degree of Asperger's shields one from such emotional attacks. Intensity and conviction in one's views, even past the point of rudeness, even if devoid of supporting evidence, seem to be inordinately convincing to neuro-normies, as if they weigh their updating by the speaker's probability estimate. Perhaps this is a good heuristic in a Dunbar-number-sized group. The dynamics also seem to depend on the genders of speaker and listener.
Interesting, I searched under mirroring and found lots of similar stuff. I just want to add that I've always found it easy to get along with people... And thinking about it it is likely that I'm mirroring them... unknowingly on my part. Two stories:
I'm sitting in an airport bar with several hours to kill, I'm talking with the bartender who has a thick Irish accent. An hour or so into our talk I notice that I'm also using a thick Irish accent... "Huh" I think to myself, but I don't stop it.
In grad school I worked in a physics lab that had mostly foreign students. When talking with the foreign students I'd often notice myself using their same speech patterns... none of this was conscious. I'm not sure about the physical part of mirroring, I'm even less conscious of that.
It seems extremely implausible to me. And the whole "I know about this amazing super weapon but I'm not going to give away any information about it because it wouldn't be ethical" thing is very "middle school". It reminds me of a classmate who always explained that because he was so good at karate, he could never use it - he could have killed someone, you know!
To me, the messages give a bad overall impression, the guy keeps making very strange generalizations.
This is a predatory interaction; anything that messes with their ability to reason is going to help you get your way. Long-term, though, no, you'll make enemies everywhere you go.
It sounds like a souped-up version of the idea that you can tell when someone is observing you, even if you cannot see them (e.g. standing behind you). That supposedly triggers a feeling of being stalked/hunted, which triggers prey behaviour like freezing up, etc.
But I thought that was a discredited notion? People don't have that kind of peripheral sensory awareness after all?
I'm 5'10" and I've been fluctuating between 205lb and 230lb since 2019. This comes after I was 260 to 280lb for about a decade previously. Obviously I'm thrilled about having lost so much weight from my previous state, but I get so frustrated by being unable to get below 200lb.
There's been a good deal of talk lately about new weight loss drugs, like semaglutide, which are really repurposed diabetes drugs. The scary thing about these drugs is that they all seem to come with an increased risk of thyroid cancer, at least in animal trials. Can anyone speak to this? It seems to me that unless I were so obese that I could barely get up stairs, the prospect of thyroid cancer is so scary that it doesn't seem worth it to try such drugs. Am I overestimating the risk? Is there anyone here who knows more about these drugs that can speak to the risk benefit trade-off?
Personally, none of these "try this and the weight will just melt off" recommendations I've gotten over the years have worked. One doctor put me on a particular diabetes medication and told me that the happy side-effect was weight loss; a former patient of hers, indeed, had lost *too* much weight.
I assured her there was no danger of that with me. And yes, I am still as chunky afterwards as I was before. So "current/former diabetes meds makes the weight fly off" stories leave me very dubious. I imagine they do work for *some* people, but *only* in conjunction with what you generally have to do when you have diabetes, anyway; go on a diet, cut out sugar, cut out carbs, take exercise.
There is no magic pill where with no effort on your part the fat just melts off (except for amphetamines, and those explode your heart; and the last wonder drug when I was younger also turned out to have bad effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine)
I've read some accounts of those drugs quieting constant hunger so that people can move to a normal hunger/satiation cycle. This can cause people to lose weight, but it's not a matter of eating less than they want.
That is interesting, I'm not sure to what degree my weight loss stalled due to hunger, vs something else. In losing my initial weight, getting from 280 to 220ish, I think I largely managed to numb myself to the pain from hunger. I am able to go long periods without eating, because I can just put the hunger pangs out of my mind. I think most of my current problems are from the simple joy and love of flavor, which causes me to have very big cheat days, where I eat all the foods I didn't get to eat throughout the week. Though maybe it's amplified by suppressing my hunger so much, maybe if I were less hungry, it'd help. Don't know.
Yeah, that's the problem. Were it simply hunger, then munching our way through a head of raw broccoli would be just as good, but it's not. It's cravings for a particular food, or a particular taste.
I get terrible chocolate cravings, which are bad for me, and before anybody says "just get used to the pangs", thanks, I've tried that and it doesn't work. I can get used to having a toothache or a headache and ignore the pain, but the signals of "you have to eat RIGHT NOW" are on a different level.
And those people fortunate enough not to experience that, be thankful to nature and your genes.
Olivier Ameisen, an alcholic surgeon (he says he never operated while drunk, a claim I mistrust on general principles) found that Baclofen, a muscle relaxant, stopped his cravings. He even found out he'd been addicted to spending money and hadn't previously noticed it.
He was unusual in thinking that the cravings were a quality of life problem, not just the drinking.
Unfortunately, it took him a long time to raise money for a randomized trial of Baclofen, the results weren't clear, and he died before he could pursue the matter further.
You're absolutely right. The glp-1 agonists drugs like ozempic, semaglutide, and mounjarro do not make you lose weight, they just make it much much easier to eat less.
You will still have to diet - but these meds make it substantially easier to do so by making you feel much less hungry. For some people that may not work - for others, including my partner, it made it trivially easy.
Disclaimer - I am not a doctor. (I'm a med device engineer which might make me smart enough to be dangerous)
The benefits far outweigh the risks.
These new drugs are "glp-1" agonists. Don't need to know too much about that except it's a hormone related to blood sugar levels. The agonists dont drop your blood sugar but they do prevent it from raising too high and so you naturally just don't feel hungry. They have an incredibly safe risk profile otherwise, and have been around for like 15 years or so.
Rat thyroids have a glp-1 receptor that humans simply do not have. There is no clear mechanism of action for how a glp-1 agonist would cause thyroid cancer in humans, but it's extremely obvious in the rats. But, the way these trials work, if you see it in the animals you must include it as a risk. It seems extremely unlikely that it would actually cause it in humans, and these drugs have been used in humans for a while now and so far as I know there haven't been any associated cancers.
Finally - thyroid cancer is just about the least scary form of cancer. It is extraordinarily treatable, and even if you totally lose your thyroid, you can fully replace it with pills. Lots of people have auto immune disorders that prevent their thyroid from working right and love totally healthy from thyroid replacement.
Being chronically overweight however is really bad for both health and happiness. So, of you're worried about the risk I'd still say go for it and just get regular thyroid screenings.
Family Medicine Doc here. I didn't know about the different thyroid receptors between rats and humans, although I always assumed it had to be something like that. I use GLP-1s in people all the time (and as soon as I find someone who's insurance covers Tirzepatide, I plan on using that one too). I've found it safe and pretty effective.
I wouldn't say thyroid ca is the least scary cancer (that honor belongs to Hodgkin's Lymphoma), but that's just nit picking.
Seems like the obvious solution to me. I understand there is some regular weekly schedule of open threads, but I don't know what it is. Maybe to people who do know, there's a good reason why putting one on weekends, or Thursdays, or whatever, would be problematic.
Agree or disagree: all reasoning is motivated. The real difference between the rationalist movement and other groups is our particular value system that emphasizes map-territory alignment as good, instead of the things other groups say are good.
Maybe in a "all conscious actions are selfish" kind of way?
I mean, devi'ls advocate or steelmaning the opposition (if you use them the way they were originally meant to represent) is literally do the opposite.
I'm not sure how to define the "rationalist movement" but I do not believe they have a particular value system (consequentism?) or they are the only ones that go for that kind of philosophy. I guess you can start looking at things that try to emphasis low context like KISS or simple english?
You, of course, can define "motivated reasoning" in a way that would make all the reasoning motivated. This wouldn't be a helpful or interesting definition, though.
A common and useful definition of motivated reasoning distinguishes between reasoning focused on finding the truth whatever it is vs finding arguments in favour of something you want to believe regardless of whether it is true. This definition is meaningful regardless of whether you value finding truth or not. It is still a distinct type of reasoning which we can talk about.
But isn't the fact that we distinguish specifically reasoning leading to finding the truth, compared to reasoning leading to say... mentioning red objects, saying something about us valuing finding the truth more than mentioning red objects? Well sure. So what?
All reasoning is motivated by something, and it's a trivially true and useless idea. Which is why "Motivated reasoning" don't mean "reasoning you got a motive to do", but "Reasoning that is motivated by a specific goal you want to reach before you start".
Either that, or I've been using the words wrong for quite some time.
Hard disagree here. What exactly is motivating a person to reason is going to determine not just how they reason in specific cases, but - more importantly - what they choose to reason about at all.
> "Reasoning that is motivated by a specific goal you want to reach before you start".
This is a curious framing. It seems... motivated.
This framing implies that 'reasoning' is a process with a discrete beginning and ending. This framing implies that motivated reasoning only causes problems in particular cases, namely, when setting out to answer a _specific_ question, that a person would have a goal they want to reach _on that question_ before they start reasoning _about_ that question.
But does that ever happen? Do people actually, honestly set out to answer questions with any goal in mind other than the truth?
I think motivated reasoning is better understood as "reasoning that avoids asking certain questions altogether." In my expeience, everyone who bothers to ask a question then sets out to find the truth for that question.
What motivation really does, in my experience, is prevent people from asking questions in the first place. When people give their reasons for belief X, sure, many times that person set out to find reasons why X must be true. But this means they never actually asked themselves the question, _is X_ true?
So if we accept that all reasoning is motivated by something, we wouldn't' try to avoid 'motivated reasoning'. Instead, we would ask, what exactly are my motives?
I think the standard distinction is between reasoning that is motivated to get at the truth (whatever it is) and reasoning that is motivated by something to get some answer (whether it's true or not).
I agree that this is the standard distinction. But is it describing a real thing?
I agree that people often get attached to some ideas being true. I find these responses are generally in response to someone else saying, “your beliefs are wrong.”
How often do people ask themselves a question, and then go off looking for something other than the truth? My experience is that when people want to believe X, they simply don’t ever ask whether X is true. If you tell them, “there is no evidence of X,” this is when what is typically called motivated reasoning occurs.
When people say, “my goal is to believe the truth,” my question would be, “which truth is that?” A person can’t ask all questions simultaneously. Motivated reasoning, to me, really means, “ which question does a person actually bother to ask?”
hah, no, i can't, because the concept of 'unmotivated reasoning' doesn't make any sense to me.
You're expending energy to reason; there's going to be _some_ mechanism shuffling energy into the reasoning system and deciding what to reason about, what to consider, and what to ignore.
It makes a difference in the case of AI vs. human reasoning, perhaps? The human (or crow, space alien, whatever) has an internal motivation to reason (or to do anything else). The AI is turned on like a toaster and reasons at the behest of its user, without internal motivation.
Well then I've got to say I don't understand the post at all. "All reasoning is reasoned. The difference is in the various differences." It's tautology, so... I guess I agree?
Hard disagree that the rationalist movement has any sort of monopoly on less-motivated reasoning. It’s a large group of people trying hard to see the world clearly, but aren’t the first, last, or only to do so.
What do you think differentiates rationalists from other groups, if anything? Is it a specific package of techniques?
It does seem that rationalists argue pursuing truth is the _highest_ goal, as opposed to other groups which generally, as far as i can tell, that pursuing truth is instrumental to higher goals.
I don't think Rationalists value truth above all other goals and I don't think most(any?) of them would claim that they do.
They see truth as a necessary but not sufficient means of achieving their greater goals. You need truth in order to make accurate decisions, but if they could make decisions without truth that accomplished their goals, they would just as happily do that. They do tend to value truth highly in practice, for materialist scientific truths. They seem to have the common struggles with metaphysical and non-materialist truths (maybe worse because they seem to deny that such things exist).
I’ve never spoken to the Rationalist Czar, so I don’t have an official answer, but in my experience rationalists seem to think all social problems are insufficiently solved natural science problems, leading to eg prioritizing mosquito nets for Africa over better food for poor people nearer to home. It’s an interesting and daring position, one that history may even remember fondly! But even when we sort out our micromorts, I think it does leave rationalists somewhat naive in the face of bad actors, because sometimes bad equilibria are stable for unspoken but locally well understood reasons. Or perhaps that naivety was a prerequisite for our optimism.
But more importantly, claiming to be the first or only rationality-first organization is … bold, at best. There are lots of science-adjacent societies, and historically some of the most strident (such as the Skeptics) have become the biggest hindrances to science.
This. I'm not a Rationalist or anything, but I've always found the comparison with things like climbing or martial arts to be useful. (If slightly cringe; cf. some of Yudkowski's early writings where he manages to sound like a katana-wielding anime protagonist.)
Anyone can do these things and has innate instincts about how best to do them, but taking them up as a subject of concentrated study, systematising, pressure-testing, and meta-learning can produce/select better techniques, even if (as usual) you first have to climb down from a local optimum to get there.
One of the better imho objections (see Gardner vs Pinker, which Scott covered on March 4th) is that the process needlessly discards useful heuristics that also add up to better ethics. Even the best established truth doesn't on its own tell us what to do about itself.
> they take themselves to have actually *found* a better way to be rational
Is this actually unique, though?
I can agree that the _specific techniques_ rationalists are advocating are unique, but doesn't every group have a technique that they say makes their maps more converged than that of other groups?
I can't think of a single group that says something like, "hey our worldviews are less accurate that other groups, but accuracy of worldview doesn't matter to us, so much as how you act in the world, and our worldview promotes better actions."
From my own inside view, i think some aspects of the rationalist-promoted techniques really _do_ work better. But every group thinks this, so that doesn't seem so unique to me.
Either these "dogmatic opinions" are not as dogmatic as you thought them to be, and actually have quite reasonable explanation and it's your own irrationality and lack of epistemic culture that prevents you to see it.
Or politics is such a mind killer that even people who found a better way to be rational still fail to do it regarding political controiversies at their current level of rationality.
Personally, I count the fact that the majority of well educated, intelligent and rational people are somewhat left leaning as an evidence in favor of leftism getting controversial issues better than rightism, but I understand why you may disagree.
http://levels.fyi is a very good source for programmer salaries broken down by company and pay grade. Looks like around $150k for entry-level positions at most Big Tech companies, closer to $100k for programming roles at non-tech big companies.
That's for software engineers in general, though. No breakdown for ML specific salaries, but anecdotally those seem to be similar to but somewhat higher that general software salaries.
I dunno about average; you can make $100k at many places, and possibly more at electronic trading places doing quantitative trading work. Let me know if you’d like to hear more about that last part.
Yes, very much. Could you please email me at economicprof@gmail.com. I'm asking for my son who is in an unusual situation. He will be graduating college with a degree in CS and some work experience in ML at age 18.
As a subscriber, I prefer the closed thread just for having a lot less activity. I’d be disappointed to see it permanently replaced by another open thread even if the open threads improve substantially.
Or just limiting the amount of comments free subs can post. Let's say 3 per day. If that's possible. Would force a high signal-to-noise ratio while simultaneously encouraging people to pay for being a subscriber.
No, I don't think we'd improve matters by making commenting "pay to play". "Oops, I really have a good and insightful comment to reply to this, but I've used my allotment of three comments per thread" is not something I want, nor do I want the division of the sheep (subscribers) versus the goats (non-subscribers).
First time posting to this site. Really. Amazing open thread. So many cognitive styles in evidence. The diversity of the human mind is incredible! Key to our species success, I imagine. Cognitive antibodies to any possible cognitive disease.
Welcome to ACX, how do you want your complimentary infohazard? We can deliver it as an acausal trade or a counterfactual mugging. Warning: newcomers are advised to refrain from value handshakes with strangers in open threads!
I will step away from conflict at every opportunity since my reformed cyber bully vows are still in force. My future contributions will hopefully be all sweetness, light, fluffy bunnies, pretty little ponies and Rainbow Unicorns! Further, rather than say anything unpleasant to people I judge to be low grade morons, mental defectives, certifiable loons or mere trolls, I will reply, "Notable comment!"
Sapolsky talks about wanting to live in an empire as pathological, which it might be, but is there evidence that life in an empire is actually better? Worse? Good when it's good and bad when it breaks?
Interesting claim that some people don't just verbally agree with a group which makes false claims about which line is longer, some people affect their memories to eventually see the shorter line as longer. Sapolsky calls this "internal compliance".
A claim that desert cultures lead to monotheism and valorizing dying in battle, while rain forest cultures don't do either. Vikings seem like a partial counterexample-- plenty of water, but valorize dying in battle.
An account of the Christmas truce in WWI-- it's different than "Christmas in the Trenches"-- a brief truce was declared by the Pope for people to retrieve and bury their dead, and led to cooperation between the sides until the officers forced a resumption of fighting with threats of execution.
Disagreement with Pinker about when war was invented. And that peace was less stable that peace didn't become all that stable.
,
Suggests, using 1800s Sweden (a very violent place) that people may be continue to be arrogant and hierarchical, but can be convinced to be proud of different things.
Values and behavior can change a lot faster than genes.
Say you wanted to raise a genius. How would you go about doing that?
Assuming that your starting with an above average intelligence child with a greater likelihood of naturally becoming a "genius", can appropriate environmental/educational interventions substantially increase the child's potential for becoming one?
A couple of anecdotes say yes:
(1) Scott's review of "The Man From The Future" (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future) shows that Von Neumann, besides from obvious his obvious genetic advantage, benefited from growing up in a very resourceful family environment with rich exposure to top intellectuals & domain experts from all kinds of fields and private tutors.
(2) Laszlo Polgar's "Raise A Genius" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/) suggests that the key is "early specialization" in a subject chosen under the parent's discretion (as long as the child enjoys the subject) in conjunction with 1:1 tutoring and having access to peers that are "mentally appropriate partners."
The field of behavioral genetic paints a somewhat different picture:
Most if not all psychological traits including intelligence being highly heritable, as long as you don't severely mess up your parenting (eg abuse, malnutrition), the specifics of your parenting strategy won't influence your child's outcome that much. Social/educational interventions just ... aren't as effective as one may expect them to be a priori.
But these two views aren't incompatible; some possibilities include:
(1) Tail-effects in education: Since interventions have to scale, they end up being mediocre to "what could be possible." Perhaps having a Really Good Education (like what Von Neumann had) has disproportionate effects on one's life outcomes/genius-ness in a way that standard social/educational intervention RCTs can't capture.
(2) Tail-effects in genetics: Just like how people with very low-intelligence seem to be fundamentally bounded (https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara) in terms of the tasks they're capable of (regardless of the education they receive), a similar effect might be going on with normal intelligence folks where there's rapidly diminishing return to improved education—i.e. education scales better with individuals genetically predisposed to be smarter.
(3) Both (1) and (2), where geniusness is a "leaky pipeline (https://www.gwern.net/notes/Pipeline)" in which you need both tail-end education and tail-end genetics to become a "genius."
What is the actual underlying dynamic of "genius production"? My hunch is that things are closer to (3), considering how Von-Neumann-type intellect is much rarer compared to the number of individuals that grew up having access to his level of resources. Also remember, the causal influence is bidirectional (https://psyarxiv.com/pqf78/).
Is there any prior work on "designing literally the Best Form of Education that's conducive to genius production" (provided that the child is genetically predisposed enough to actually benefit from them)?
Longitudinal studies like SMPY (https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) comes into mind, but I don't know whether studies like these have been distilled enough to validate the practices of Neumann/Polgar, or produce novel insights for (non-mass-consumption) education.
Show them lots of cool shit and spare no expense in supporting their free exploration of whatever strikes their fancy. Minimize disruption caused by school, teach them ways to cope with living in a dysfunctional society and the inevitable mental problems, and turn their talents to their advantage.
As a kid I'd kill for someone I could look up to, who actually treated me seriously instead of trying to control me.
It helps if you're at least halfway there yourself, so you can keep up and engage them on their level (which midwit parents will find very difficult).
"Say you wanted to raise a genius. How would you go about doing that?"
It seems to me a very bad goal, as it is so unlikely to succeed. It seems a good way to be disappointed by your child eventually, which the child is probably going to realize at some point.
Why not have the usual goal of "how can I help my child be the best version of him/her self."?
Otherwise, my impression is that, at least in the scientific/tech fields, genius usually requires a combination of smart/drive/efficiency/curiosity which can not really be increased by education (as you mentioned, parents still need to provide a "good enough" environment). But I am a geneticist, so clearly biased in that direction!
The key verifiable mark of being smart is asking good questions, which is both a skill that can be taught and one that some people seem to be born with in at least some contexts. Everyone is right sometimes, but a smart person is often right when other people are unsure and a genius is often right even when others are sure the genius is wrong. After working at SpaceX, my standard line was “I don’t always bet on Elon, but I NEVER bet against him.” He was right frustratingly often about a dizzying array of technical and business questions.
To some degree, people who reach the rarified heights of genius are autodidactic, as demonstrated by them learning how to ask good questions in new contexts. But even the most famously autodidactic people (such as Elon Musk) struggle to generalize their genius beyond a categories. This may be inherent to the nature of genius. Over time, being right when other people are wrong is incredibly psychologically potent. They run the risk of updating their priors to “when we disagree, other people are never right”, and then they’re lost. If Elon isn’t careful, he may follow the path that Henry Ford blazed.
So if you’re trying to raise a genius, starting with a smart person, think very carefully about what kind of genius you want to raise. What do you want them to be good at? Who can preload them with the questions that will clear away all the nonsense that wastes the time of us mere mortals? How do you make asking those key questions a game they live to win? And how do you nurture their curiosity and competitiveness such that they never become complacent or arrogant?
The answers “specialization” or “range” presume different answers to those questions.
I think we need to rewind a bit. When you say "raise a genius," what do you mean by "genius?"
Is a "genius" is someone who stands head and shoulders atop others at the top of a field, like a Mozart or a Marie Curie?
Or is it one of those Ben Franklin polymath types who speaks 5 languages, designed and built all the furniture in their hone, and has published both fiction and non-fiction?
Or are we using a straightforward, easily measurable method and just defining a genius as someone with a high IQ?
It seems like under the 3rd conception, as you say, if you and your partner are geniuses, your kids probably have a good shot at being one too barring some gross parenting malfeasance like abuse or malnourishment, while under the first or second conceptions, it seems like education and access to resources are absolutely critical (and there's probably more wiggle room on IQ than we might think).
That might also sort out the incompatibility between your two paradigms. Both are aimed at understanding where "geniuses" come from but each has a separate and distinct understanding of what "geniuses" are.
Yeah, I should've phrased it a bit differently. I meant the type of "genius" normally associated with unmatched productivity & resourcefulness & novel contributions in diverse academic disciplines, like Von Neumann (I probably should've used a better example instead of Polgar)
By "raise a genius," I was trying to figure out how genetics would influence the effectiveness of the environmental/educational interventions provided to the child.
To quote my response to Mark:
> What would happen if we cloned Von Neumann and could afford *infinite resources* to put into his education? What if we took a ~100 IQ person instead? Of course it would yield worse results—but would the diminishing return to input education happen faster or slower?
> To phrase it differently: Does resource-input-to-education have different scaling properties (i.e. how fast is the diminishing returns) depending on the child's underlying genetic intelligence?
Speaking very very much as a non-expert in the field I would view IQ and environmental/educational interventions both as inputs, and I'd expect to see diminishing returns on both.
The difference between having $1B and $2B to spend on a single individual is probably not that much, and neither would I expect much difference between 130 and 140 IQ subjects both given infinite resources.
Also, since we're measuring genius based on "useful outputs" rather than direct IQ processing power, I'd also expect that someone well resourced but of average intelligence would probably outperform someone high-IQ but under-resourced by a greater margin than might be expected by others. But then, that's just my own personal opinion - I tend to believe that IQ is overvalued in these kinds of conversations, because they tend to take place among high-IQ (or professed high-IQ) communities, and smart people are just as prone as anyone else to overvaluing traits the possess in abundance. Everybody loves to measure with the stick that shows him in his tallest light.
> the specifics of your parenting strategy won't influence your child's outcome that much.
and
> "no one has yet demonstrated a mechanism for reliably raising a genius which is not specific to that particular child, and which shows up in large scale randomized controlled trials "
Yes, because afaik most social sciences RCT on "educational interventions" are constrained by the need to scale to millions of students, and so of course it would be near impossible to run a large scale RCT on hyperfocused & well-resourced aristocratic tutoring.
... which leaves us with vague anecdotes and biographies of past geniuses, which is impossible to rigorously test whether they're a robust tactic or not (although that doesn't mean anecdotes provide ~zero information).
What would happen if we cloned Von Neumann and could afford *infinite resources* to put into his education? What if we took a ~100 IQ person instead? Of course it would yield worse results—but would the diminishing return to input education happen faster or slower?
To phrase it differently: Does resource-input-to-education have different scaling properties (i.e. how fast is the diminishing returns) depending on the child's underlying genetic intelligence?
I'm reading the book "Range" by David Epstein at the moment. The author argues against early specialization. But he mainly uses examples from sports or business. I.e. Tiger Woods, who held his first golf club at the age of 4 months, against Roger Federer, who sampled different sports until deciding for tennis in his teens. So there seems to be, at least anecdotally maybe scientific, evidence for getting a broad education. Instead of a hyper focused one. I don't have any details on this topic but you might want to read up on that.
Also i'd like to question your definition of genius and the general usefulness of this status. Is a genius just really smart? Can he solve differential equations in their head? Can he beat chess grandmasters? While all of theses skills on their own are impressive their real world use can be limited. For me it's much more useful (and pays very well) to have a very wide range of domain knowledge over many disciplines. Paired with actual experience in these fields I can combine different ideas to generate new value. Which for me is better than just raw intelligence. But maybe you are working with another, very specific definition of genius.
Thanks, I will check out the book, sounds interesting.
I was using the term "genius" as the ability for an individual to make disproportionate contributions to a given field (or multiple fields, as was the case with Von Neumann), which is probably a correlate of a bunch of things like raw intelligence, resourcefulness, ambition—which I guess is similar to the definition you seem to be pointing at.
(now that I think about it "Raise a Genius" is probably a bad example for this definition of genius because Polgar definitely had a big focus on single core discipline (chess) aside from other "auxiliary" ones like language).
Despite this dissimilarity I still think there's something similar between Neumann/Polgar, in that Neumann did in fact "specialize early," although the scope of that specialization was way larger than that of Polgar (i.e. "diverse mathematical subjects," while still mathematics, is way broader and more interdisciplinary than "just chess").
A better way to characterize this situation is to taboo "early specialization" and instead talk in terms of "intensity" and "scope," where Neumann/Polgar both was high in "intensity" while different in the size of "scope." So in this view, broad education isn't necessarily in conflict with hyper-intense aristocratic tutoring, it's just that broad education—which normally manifests in the form of (1) public schools or (2) lax parenting with a focus on "many-facetedness"—is high on "scope" but very low on "intensity." (sorry if I'm motte-baileying my usage of the term "early specialization" here)
I think the above point might be counterintuitive (at least to me) because broad education generally goes together with "low intensity" i.e. lax education.
So, in this usage of the term "genius," I wonder whether educations that are BOTH broad and intense can have disproportionate effects. (does "Range" argue in favor of "broad education" in the sense of high-scope-high-intensity, or high-scope-low-intensity? If former, I would agree with its conclusions)
I can't talk about the conclusions of the book since i haven't finished it yet (started yesterday and literally just read the first chapter).
But there is a graph showing the intensity of education/training over time. This graph suggests that a very high intensity early on can lead to a kind of burnout or loss in motivation. Children that start with a lower intensity and then ramp up over time will overtake the high intensity children when they lose motivation and stop their training. I can't provide proof of that here. But that's at least what the book says.
I also find it interessting that you call language an "auxiliary" discipline. In my work on AI (especially large language models) it seems to me that language is a core discipline of intelligence. But that's a whole different topic.
On the point of disproportionate contributions to a given field i like to repeat my earlier argument: after a certain point raw intelligence runs into a wall which need to be overcome by experience. This is just my personal observation with N=1 (me). I think i'm somewhat smart and did well academically. But at the PhD level there were just so many things which were not easily solved with pure intelligence: some things are counter-intuitive and logical fallacies are abundant, some problems require knowledge/math from an adjacent field, a lot of it is conventional rules made by humans which you can't deduct from reason but need to look up. Some of these contradict each other or only make sense in the historical context they were written. And some things just seem to be known by everyone who worked in this field since the 80s but are never expressed anywhere in the literature.
All of these problems can however be mitigated by a competent teacher. Which brings us to the same old question: nature vs. nurture.
The UK's in a rough spot economically, on top of a decade of stagnant growth, and several decades of stagnant wages. A lot of young people are living materially poorer lives than their parents and maybe even their grandparents. Most of the western world is similar.
I'm wondering if there's any disagreement that we need a change of economic system comparable to the New Deal/post war consensus or the neoliberal revolution. If so what what sort of system do people favour?
It seems like our options are to be more free market then neoliberalism, return to social democracy, or move to something even further to the left than that. All those possibilities look quite radical or tried-and-failed. And there doesn't seem to much political pressure for reform, beyond just expanding the money supply.
Does anyone think this crisis will work itself out or is overblown?
sorry if it's too broad a topic for an open thread.
You are reaching back a decade, or maybe decadeS, and Brexit isn't quite 4 years ago, but it feels to me like the elephant in the room - no one's mentioning it in this thread, but it's likely to account for some proportion of differences between Great Britain and continental Europe.
Other than that, there are things changes of economic systems can probably fix, and things they probably cannot fix. Sometimes you need changes of political system, or new technology, or new territories to exploit. I have no idea what would work for the UK, if anything. But I suggest thinking very broadly.
I also have no opinion on the current crisis, except that some of the UK's current politicians missed their natural calling as clowns and stand up comics ;-( (Sadly, the UK is not alone in this, and better clowns than tinpot dictators.)
And another underlying factor is that the British yellow press is particularly bad and surprisingly powerful. It seems to have had a strong influence on the people to vote for Brexit, among some other bad decisions.
Do you have any points here? I assume from the sneering you disagree, but I don't know because you don't even bother with something as simple as, You know, Brexit was good, actually.
The two lines look very, very similar to me until 2018, when the preparations for Brexit were well underway and the UK line starts lagging behind the US one. Both countries have a nasty notch in the graph corresponding to the first wave or two of Covid, although the UK seems much harder hit than the US.
Here's a zoomed-in look at the notch, rescaled to Q1 2020 as baseline:
Q2 2020 was a huge dip for both countries, with the US losing 8.8% of real GDP and the UK losing 18.5%. Both countries bounced back in Q3, but not completely, with the US returning to 98.7% of baseline and the UK returning to 94.2% of baseline.
Unfortunately for ease of analysis, Q1 2020 was also when Brexit went fully into effect, so it's difficult to disentangle the effects of different Covid impacts and responses from the short-term effects of Brexit.
The fundamental issue with the UK is low labor productivity. It has relatively low hours worked and labor force participation but so do many European countries. Indeed, all of Europe has a low labor productivity issue but Britain's particularly badly off. (Contrary to your claim, the west does not have these problems generally. It's mostly a European issue.)
The big government and high taxes are probably creating issues. The UK is still very much a social democracy with government spending with a government spending to GDP ration similar to Denmark. But the more specific issue is almost certainly that the UK does not have a good education system and has much more interventionist/hard to deal with state. This creates a large body of relatively low skill workers who cannot profitably hired with all the additional costs due to regulation. These people in turn drag down productivity and creates all kinds of social issues.
Deregulation can solve this by making it cheaper to hire. But the reason this doesn't happen as much in Scandinavia or Germany is because the state has better educational systems that are explicitly focused on employment/work (rather than general enrichment). That's probably a better solution. But that would require such a fundamental restructuring of their education system that I'm not sure it's possible. There are other things that can be done as well. But Britain doesn't lack financial capital or technology. It's mostly a human capital thing imo.
Very interesting take and matches many of my friends experiences of state school education - it's mostly crowd control and a syllabus designed to dull you into a life of menial service work. Also the decline in technical/vocational colleges which, from casual chats with Germans, seem to be much more highly regarded there. (Perhaps a certain intellectual elitism coupled with industry decline led a lot of people to push their children into university education rather than a trade college)
Wasn't what true? Low productivity growth leading to lower productivity over time? No, it wasn't. Average productivity growth for the past 20 years is something like a quarter to a third of what it was from 1945 to 2000-ish. (Excluding the pandemic where it hugely dropped off then returned to normal.) The 1960s and 1980s were particularly strong periods but even the weaker decades from that period were significantly stronger than now.
no, the social democracy causing low productivity growth. Saying there's low productivity growth feels a lot like just restating that there's low growth.
It really isn't and you might want to look into labor productivity as a statistic if that's your sense of it. I also didn't say that social democracy was the main issue, specifically pointing out other social democracies do not have this specific problem.
ok yeah, I misunderstood you. I still don't think low productivity growth explains very much, it's essentially the same as just "growth" - total time worked. Low growth is what we're trying to explain and working more is a cost in itself.
Scott's opinion is that education is a lot less economically useful than generally assumed (for Case against Education type reasons), that's kinda the received wisdom, and I tend to agree. I don't think education is going to be a very likely candidate for explain economic trends as dire as the current ones.
There’s going to be a lot of restructuring either formally via government / BoE intervention or informally via inflation / currency devaluation / default. In that sense I think the crisis will work itself out and also be very painful.
I think one’s preferred solution depends very much on the problem you’re trying to solve.
I think Picketty (and Marx I guess) is probably right that median living standards have dropped/stagnated, because of inequality, despite past growth; and that it's a natural result of running a market economy with private capital ownership. Also the loose monetary policy has exacerbated the problem. so fix that first I guess.
That would still probably leave us with no growth though.
I'm also kinda sympathetic to Tyler Cowens "great stagnation" theory though, so more scientific innovation please, if you could.
I'm not sure if public capital ownership, i.e. nationalizing corporations, would decrease inequality based on state owned enterprises in PRC, India, KSA, etc. I'm pretty biased against SOEs though so maybe I'm missing why they're actually awesome.
Fixing central bank balance sheets really just requires a balanced budget till the debt terms out. I think the UK government debt terms out in 10 years so you can work yourself out of that mess by just spending less than you collect.
"Innovation" - or total factor productivity - would increase if laws & regulations automatically expired. I think Thomas Jefferson initially came up with that idea and seems relevant now.
Yeah it's probably better to be poor in a rich country than just poor.
I still think it would be desirable to raise median incomes (you'd get way more utility than from concentrated incomes), and inequality sucking up almost all the gains from 40 years of growth seems like a bit of a disaster.
Some kind of redistribution would do that, all else equal (i.e. no loss in total output), it's just difficult to know how to accomplish that, yeah probably emulating some third world country isn't a great idea. But it still seems more doable than the "rising tide lifts all boats" approach we've been trying and failing.
Are you claiming that the economy is zero-sum? Otherwise this is a non sequitur.
> Some kind of redistribution would do that, all else equal (i.e. no loss in total output)
A large portion of wealth inequality is simply due to real estate value increasing. How do you redistribute the concept of a place being valued higher than it used to be?
What I'm getting at is that consumption inequality is vastly lower than wealth inequality. The wealthy tend to hold their wealth in speculative assets and investments rather than spend it on perishable consumables. If you ignore money for a second and just think about goods and services, seizing even trillions of dollars from the rich would not at all affect the actual amount of goods and services being exchanged in the economy.
Imagine you had a society that you thought was really equal, but then you discovered that there was actually one ultra rich guy with 100 quadrillion dollars hidden under his bed. The whole time, your Gini coefficient was basically 1, but this massive inequality did not harm anyone because he wasn't consuming anything. Obviously, redistributing this money would be functionally equivalent to just printing 100 quadrillion dollars and would lead to inflation, but it would not noticeably change the distribution of goods and services in the economy.
I think there has been a stagnation in median living standards, despite gdp growth, but I'm not certain inequality is the cause, for reasons like this (also not many people seem to actually work serving the wealthy), I still think it's should probably be the leading explanation though. Cowen's Great Stagnation is probably my second preferred answer.
The most viable redistribution policy looks like a wealth tax like a higher property taxes offset by low/no sales taxes or a 100% estate tax above some level.
Society is bifurcating. Most of young people are living materially poorer lives while others are making money hand over fist with ridiculous ease.
I think we have reached the point where large segments of the population are no longer economically viable, and all other issues are downstream of that. The table stakes to contribute to a modern society are above what most people can bring, largely because of their terrible education that squandered all their talents. It wasn't that big of a deal when you were supposed to be a subsistence farmer, but it is when you can either be a domain expert or flip burgers.
If this was the case shouldn't we have strong growth (or at least some). It's not like a couple of geniuses are programming robots that are putting all the builders, cleaners etc. out of work because clean houses are so cheap and abundant.
I have a hard time imagining people in the UK adopting bitcoin as the country's main currency because it has the practical drawback of irreversible transactions. I'm not sure what day-to-day benefits of using bitcoin would outweigh the increased risk of accidentally losing your money.
these are a huge feature to lots of merchants who'd rather not pay the 3% fees they pay on every transaction
> not sure what day-to-day benefits of using bitcoin would outweigh the increased risk of accidentally losing your money
this depends on how bad inflation is, and how confiscatey your government is
if your government does things like seize money from peaceful protestors, using bitcoin lowers your risk of having your money stolen from you
that said, i think most people will end up using federated chaumian mints, so they'll get reversibility subject to local government rather than whoever happens to currently run their national government
I suppose this probably depends on what "the usual stuff" means to you. I'm more than happy to share or answer questions about this perspective, from someone who's been better on major inflation for years, who bet on trump and brexit and bitcoin prior to 2015 - if you think that's a good use of your time.
In particular I'd like to know if crypto has any advantages over gold, other than low transaction costs? economies on the gold standard haven't done fantastically historically.
What you'd do if there's a Keysian style slump in demand and you can't just pump liquidity, like in 2008 and 2020. Pretty sure you'd get a 30s style great depression if you get stuck in a low spending>low income>low spending feed back loop.
Also wouldn't the costs to the US be huge from loosing the purchasing power of the dollar for imports, if they just used the same currency as everyone else. No more petro dollar etc.
Condensed version, lmk where you'd like to expand:
> if crypto has any advantages over gold, other than low transaction costs
Bitcoin maximalists like myself see bitcoin as a groundbreaking innovation, and all of "crypto" as a series of scams, rug pulls, and copycat projects by people who didn't really understand nakamoto consensus. So i'll focus on bitcoin here.
The advantages of bitcoin over gold are, in order of least to most important are:
1) vastly lower transaction cost and risk
2) vastly lower storage cost and risk
3) totally inelastic supply and 21 million hard cap
4) trivial for any party to prove to another party how much they hold
With these in mind, i'll give a bitcoiner's retelling of 20th century financial history, which hopefully addresses both this statement:
> economies on the gold standard haven't done fantastically historically.
as well as questions around:
> Keysian style slump in demand
From my perspective, the 19th century had higher average growth than the 20th century. The main problems with the gold standard were the absence of the properties listed above, which lead to boom and bust cycles caused by banks printing receipts in excess of their holdings.
My belief is that the gold standard acted as a check on the power of both governments and banks. This check was unpopular with the banks, as well as with state progressives who believe that states are not merely constructs for securing God-given rights (ie. what is written in the declaration of indepdence) but, rather that states are primarily agents for technologically driven progress. Keynes' theories were sought after by british government leaders who wanted to justify the money printing they did to back world war 1; it wasn't that a new theory was developed and then people started acting on it, rather, the british government wanted a way to recharacterize a fraud (printing money on a gold standard) as being a kind of sophisticated new technology. American central banks were more than happy to print money as well, leading to the boom of the 1920's. The bust in the 30's was thus caused by the inevitable unwinding of the credit-driven expansion of the 20's.
the drop in demand in 2020, for example, wasn't caused directly by covid. It was caused by government lockdowns, which were undertaken both n response to covid, and with the belief that they could be 'paid for' by printing money. I think unchecked governments are dangerous as unchecked AGI's, for more or less the same reason: alignment is tricky.
> ouldn't the costs to the US be huge from loosing the purchasing power of the dollar for imports
I think massive changes are inevitable, as the entire global system is unsustainable. I think american elites will suffer the most in financial terms, since they have the most to lose. The "global south" will, i think, benefit tremendously, as will americans who just want to work hard and save.
But if instability is also a natural feature of markets or there's an exogenous shock, you're in a really vulnerable position with no control of the money supply.
Yeah Keynes was probably promoted for cynical reasons, but his core logic seems pretty solid to me. A low money velocity equilibrium seems perfectly possible, and there's a lot of latency in the markets' calculations, especially with a constrained money supply, it could take a long time for it to run through the feed back loops to return to the optimum equilibrium, assuming it doesn't just get stuck there because of low "animal spirits" or whatever.
Another awkward question: how do you stop the last 500 years of financial history repeating itself, but 1000x faster because everyone already knows all the innovations?
Can't I just print notes saying "I owe you 1 bit coin" and start trading them above my reserves? Then once my notes get established the state thinks it would be useful to take me over, and we're back to where gold is now.
Yeah definitely tricky, which is why I deliberately left it a bit vague.
Maybe things like number of hours of work needed to afford housing or other necessities.
If you compare nominal incomes, it's basically the same problem as estimating inflation.
I think it's fairly well established that median incomes now are about the same as 10 maybe even 20 years ago, in the UK and US especially, but also Europe to a lesser extent.
Generational inequality has also risen (i.e. the young are worse off), and you can look at graphs that show stagnate wages since the late 70s (main income for the young), which is why I say "maybe even their grandparents".
One of the many challenges with this assumption is that it fails to take into account substantial improvements in the quality of living. A good deal of the UK budget goes to the NHS which is supposed to provide healthcare. And undoubtedly the quality of healthcare available to the public has substantially increased over the past decades.
But the counterfactual, where the NHS stuck to providing 1960s-quality medical care at substantially-reduced costs isn't being considered.
The same applies for just about every other government service provided.
In the countries I'm familiar with that have stagnation, the problem is usually bad regulations (or bad government contracts) that benefit some insider or concentrated lobby group at the expense of large deadweight losses. Occasionally there are regs so stupid that they're a net loss even to the rent seeker responsible for them (cf. Jones Act).
I would be curious- what precisely prompts you to call the Jones Act a "stupid rent-seeking regulation"? (I assume we are talking about the Merchant Marine Act of 1920). Is it because you do not buy that non-monetary benefits (e.g., existence of a domestic commercial shipping/shipbuilding industry) should be included in regulatory design or because you think this particular Act has specific flaws/has costs outweighing non-monetary benefits?
The jones act doesn't produce non-monetary benefits. It has not helped grow domestic ship building industry or grow the ocean going shipping capacity of the US like it was supposed to.
Another one is energy stagnation: We just not have the energy availability nor energy efficiency increases we had in the post war. This restrict the amount of things you can do, can consume, and I think we are reaching the limits of spinning restrictions as if it was a chosen lifestyle improvement. First it was stagnation then decrease of energy availability, then asymptotic leveling up of efficiency gains, and finally it's then realization that living the frugal/ascetic life sucks, even if it's marketed as moral and progressive.
This seems like a distinctly UK phenomenon to me, rather than "most of the western world is similar". From what I see in the rest of north western Europe, there certainly is growth (in general; probably not right now), and relative losses are limited to a small underclass. I don't see a broad societal decline.
From the inside (continental western Europe - Belgium) It does not seems UK-only, it is exactly what I feel (so do my French friends and some German acquaintances). I would not be surprised for the US to be different, but it's a least Western-Europe-wide. Southern Europe too for sure given how Greece or Italy fared those last decades.
To answer the original question, I do not think things will resolve on their own. Apart for a new tech that is really disruptive (and not only hyped so), I do not see bright days ahead....By new tech I could see cheap fusion, cheap (safe, and accepted) fission and/or much better batteries (much cheaper per kWh*number of cycles than they are), this would put us back on track of more energy / people trend... And IA take off or non trivial genomics, after those 2 anything goes anyway so living standard downward trend will not be high in the priorities one way or another :-)
My perspective comes from having lived in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, and friends in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. The UK struck me as remarkably stuck in the past on so many levels, with innovation or infrastructure improvements failing to find traction in the country, low state capacity, and a health care system which doesn't deliver. Like, where else do you need to check if your apartment has double-glazed windows?
In the other countries, infrastructure is generally on a good level, even though Sweden has remarkably little housing isolation for its latitude. Health care mostly works fine and digitization in Sweden at least is off the charts.
On a more individual level, all these countries have some underclass, but those are relatively contained and not a large chunk of society. Especially in the Nordics, some people have trouble integrating into the highly skilled labour market and form ghettos. Happens in Germany as well. But there's not such a strong barrier between lower skilled and higher skilled jobs – maybe it's because of the education system / vocational training? The reasons behind this are a bit beyond my expertise honestly.
It doesn't surprise me that Belgium is somewhat similar to the UK – I apologize in advance for getting facts wrong, I'm not really well informed on the country. My impression is that the political system is quite deadlocked and stifling the economy. Tax rates are highest in Europe, with >50% of median salary going to state systems in one way or other. Housing stock seems similarly in decay, outside of cities. Until recently, Eastern Germany looked like that, too, but minus the areas which are getting abandoned they're fixing this with transfer money. Not sure about the education sector, but I was surprised as a tourist in the south-east of Belgium that people generally were monolingual. I couldn't get by with English, German, and Dutch. Again, similar to the German east but without the upwards trend.
Excuse the rambling, maybe it provided some insight into why I think there's not a general European trend downwards. At least until very recently, Ukraine war and all.
In 2016, the people of Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed Proposition HHH, a ballot measure that raised $1.2 billion through a higher property tax to create 10,000 new apartments for the homeless. “The voters of Los Angeles have radically reshaped our future,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said, “giving us a mandate to end street homelessness over the next decade.”
Six years later, neither the mandate nor the money has proved to be nearly enough. In 2016, Los Angeles had about 28,000 homeless residents, of whom around 21,000 were unsheltered (that is, living on the street). The current count is closer to 42,000 homeless residents, with 28,000 unsheltered. Prop HHH has built units, but slowly, and at eye-popping cost. The city says that 3,357 units have been built, and the most recent audit found the average cost was $596,846 for units under construction — more than the median sale price for a home in Denver. Some units under construction have cost more than $700,000 to build.
Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, the candidates vying to replace Garcetti, don’t tend to agree on much, but they agree that HHH hasn’t lived up to its promise. “To spend that kind of money per unit makes no basic common sense if you know anything about building,” Caruso told me.
Bass wasn’t much kinder. “If I’m elected as mayor, I want to go in and deal with homelessness like it’s a hurricane,” she said. “I want to say: In ordinary times we have all these requirements, but this is a hurricane — we need to get people off the streets immediately. A lot of the rules and regulations that are there in ordinary times need to be relaxed.”
You have to take into account the opportunity cost of working rather than sitting around all day getting drunk or high.
It's not about me or you, it's about the guy currently sitting on the margin between "just keeping his shit together enough to do his minimum-wage job to stay housed" and "just fucking giving up on life, sitting on the street all day, numbing the pain with drugs". If you make the latter more attractive then you get more of it, if you make it less attractive then you get less of it.
Right, so the "waiting list" becomes a bunch of people sleeping on the street, which was the problem we were trying to avoid in the first place.
And the "rules" are unenforceable, you can't prove someone's intent, especially the intent of a person with pretty sketchy decision-making capabilities anyway (that being the sort of person most likely to be sitting on the margin of housed vs unhoused).
I'm not saying that ordinary middle class me is going to put all his money into a Cayman Islands account so he can appear to be broke so that he can sleep on the streets for two weeks so that he can get a free apartment. I'm talking about Mr Margin, the addict who is just barely keeping his shit together enough to stay off the street.
Until you have to live near a large colony of mentally ill people. I think when doing something like this it should be done in an intelligent way instead, so that there is no incentive for NIMBYism.
Concentrating a large amount of mentally ill people in one or few locations is not an intelligent solution.
NIMBYism isn't necessairily bad. It is basically people looking out for their own self interest. There are plenty of positive sum solutions to societal problems.
Fans of truly niche games may be interested in the Finnish Army Simulator, which aims to recreate the experience of Finnish conscript service, including the parts that suck.
Hi. I just came by to say thanks for sharing a link to our game! I have no idea what website this is but it's always nice to see people talk about the game! :D
Any Finns here? I'm trying to understand the origin of the word "intti", the word for Finland's system of compulsory military service. It's not obviously related to any of the nearby words.
My etymology source says it's from intendentuuri, meaning "commissariat." Specifically, Suomen Armeijan Intendentuuri (Finnish Army Commissariat). Finnish equipment was stamped SA Intendentuuri (SA Commissariat). Apparently a lot of Finnish people found the word Intendentuuri awkward/long/hard to pronounce and abbreviated it to Intti. Intti was the Finnish equivalent of GI from the Winter War onward.
For curiosity, i was looking at the site of my country's EA organisation and its list of suggested charities. In particular, for AI and x-risk they suggested MIRI.
But how effective is MIRI, really? I personally don't think AI foom is possible and i don't think AI is an x-risk, but let us accept the argument that it is an x-risk and we need alignment reaserch. How much has MIRI practically accomplished in terms of alignment reaserch? Is MIRI reaserch well established in the AI field, since they don't seem to publish that much in peer reviewed journals? How much ideas and techniques developed by MIRI are being used in practice to align current day AIs?
There are several approaches to avoiding AI X-risk.
1) Try to align neural nets, since that's what we're currently building.
2) Try to align something alignable while trying to beat neural nets to AGI.
3) Ban neural nets while trying to align something alignable.
4) Ban AI in some general sense.
MIRI is AFAIK doing some decent work on aligning plausibly-alignable AI (i.e. not neural nets). This means they have had near-zero impact on current-day AI because big tech companies use neural nets. This doesn't necessarily mean they're doing the wrong thing; if you believe neural nets are fundamentally non-alignable (and, to be clear, I think this is probably the case; the entire point of NNs is that they work without you needing to know how they work), then any and all alignment research on them is at best useless and at worst actively harmful insofar as it leads to complacency and/or draws researchers away from things that have a hope in hell of actually working.
The elephant in the room is that MIRI is not going to beat Google and Microsoft to AGI with any attainable amount of money, so approach #2 is doomed. Approach #3 is plausibly not doomed, but MIRI's only part of the solution there; you also need to Fucking Kill Google (and others, but meme), which requires a lobby group, and whether MIRI or the lobby group is more in need of your money is in question.
(Approach #4 probably raises X-risk in the long-term, so it's at best a patch until #3 can be implemented.)
I really enjoyed the recent Bay Area House Party post, and I was thinking about how you could write a similar Foreigners in Korea House Party piece while I was reading it, but then I realized I'm a decade or more out of date and I had no idea of what they're like these days. Do the Seoul Players even still write and perform plays? Are any of them still in Korea? They would have been one of the groups.
It was interesting to reflect on that idea, in the context of the aging self, and on how while once I may have been horrified to be so far out of the loop, these days I have made my own loops and I am more than content to be headed in new directions. Really fun to think about how my points of reference have changed, and how personal growth is an uneven process.
20 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 15 % on September 12).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
45 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (unchanged).
35 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 40 % on September 12).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Main news now is that usually reliable Institute for the Study of War reports imminent Russian withrdrawal from their large bridgehaead on the western side of the Dnieper river (around Kherson).
This is important for two reasons: a) until Russians are squatting on the west bank, key Ukrainian industrial cities of Krivij Rih and Mikolajiv are in jeopardy. If they were made to withdraw, it is unlikely they will cross the Dnieper ever again. Ukraine would be thus free to pursue more aggressive strategy and less inclined to negotiate under duress. b) it destroys Russian credibility among local collaborators, whose, um, collaboration, they need to govern occupied territories. Few days ago Putin declared that Kherson is forever part of Russia, now apparently not.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
Ups, so ISW partially retracted their prediction that Russians are going to withdraw east of the Dnieper: "Russian forces are likely preparing to defend Kherson City and are not fully withdrawing from upper Kherson Oblast despite previous confirmed reports of some Russian elements withdrawing from upper Kherson Oblast." (https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-24). I am still going to wait with subsequent update, slash retraction, until situation becames clearer, probably till next week.
I think you're overly optimistic on Ukrainian victory. It would require a complete collapse of Russian forces in Ukraine, and willingness on Russian side to just accept it. A far more likely scenario in case of Ukrainian success in Kherson is the second wave of mobilisation in Russia and prolonged war with uncertain result. However, the latest news from Kherson are more optimistic for Russia than for Ukraine: several probes were repelled, and the city is being prepared for defence. Of course, it's not certain it can stand for long, even with all preparations, because of logistic problems, but it does seem that Russia is prepared to make a stand there.
Or maybe not. The talk on Russian war forums right now is about possible new offensive from Belorussia, directed toward Kiev or Chernigov. It might require to sacrifice Kherson, to make Ukrainian forces overcommit there. Or the possibility of this strike might be enough to prevent a full commitment in Kherson by itself.
I'd rate the probability of Ukrainian victory as described by you as close to zero. Maybe if Putin suddenly dies and the chaos of internal struggle follows. Possible, but not likely. Here's what's wisdom of the forums whispers to me:
1) Soon (if not already) rains will make the ground unsuitable for any large-scale action on any side. This might freeze actual battle lines until the winter.
2) Meanwhile, drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure will continue. I'm not certain if they will have any effects on the fighting troops, but they will hinder Ukrainian ability to repair or build new weapons and transport troops and munition.
3) By the end of November, most of mobilized Russian men should arrive into newly captured regions and be prepared to defend them against any counter-offensives. This, according to forums, is the cut-off date for any possible Ukrainian territorial gains, and it makes sense: in situation where Russian side has overwhelming artillery capability and advantage in the air (though not domination), Ukrainian offensives mostly succeeded because there was not enough actual warm bodies on the ground to defend against them.
4) When the ground freezes, a new Russian offensive is likely. Maybe it will be two-pronged, with the second force driving from Belorussia, as mentioned above. It still will not have enough force behind it to capture Kharkov, Odessa, or any other major city, but it might be enough to complete conquest of Donetsk region, and maybe drive Ukrainians away from Kherson. Some dream of Nikolaev, or even Odessa, but I can't imagine what should happen to Ukrainian army to lose so badly, short of betrayal of some key force commander, but such things could have happened in the Spring (and didn't), certainly not now.
So if I were to place bets:
5% on Russian offensive in the winter stalling without any noticeable results. The war goes on for longer than, neither side willing to negotiate in the near future.
25% on Russian forces getting bogged down near Kramatorsk for months, maybe capturing it by the Spring, but without impulse to go any further.
65% on Russian forces on the borders of Donetsk and Kherson region, but no further.
5% on more success (either a capture of a major city, or large new territory without major cities)
When that offensive winds down, it will conclude the exchange of blows that started with Ukrainian counter-offensive. What happens next depends a lot on mood in the EU and USA. Ukraine will need more weapons to recover the losses, and the reserves of Soviet-era tanks are coming to an end already. Yet, EU is reluctant to part with even the older NATO tanks. If the West does nothing new, Ukraine may finally sue for peace in good faith (e.g. largely agreeing to to Russian demands). I'd say Russia will accept the offer - the war didn't go the way Putin planned, and I don't think he has a new plan to conquer the whole of Ukraine, or even to take Kiev. The details might vary, but at least recognition of all conquered territories and neutral status are a must.
And if the West steps up its help, well, things could go in a lot of different unpleasant directions, depending on the nature of that help. But short of nuclear war, I think it still ends up with a defeat for Ukraine, the question is just the cost to Russia, Ukraine and EU.
Well guys who think it is a good idea to sacrifice bridgehead in the strategically vital southern location in order to conquer some backwater in the northeast are just stupid.
As I explained in my previous update, part of my change of opinion is that since Balaklya fiasco I take more seriously the possibility that Russian army is commanded by idiots.
Ukrainian victory imho most likely involves change in Russian government; that is however far from impossible.
Obviously, Ukrainians are not going to reinhabitate Kherson any time soon, but also, they don't have to. IF they manage to take it back, it will untie their hands in a major way
If I recall correctly, each time your probability estimate for a Ukraine win have increased and your estimated for a Russian victory have decreased. Are you sure your updating are strongly enough ? Well calibrated estimates should move randomly rather than in a predictable way, shouldn't they ?
With respect to Ukrainian victory, this is true about only last two updates. It looks worse if you include movement between Ukrainian defeat and compromise, but still, sample size is so far small.
Also, if Republicans win the House elections, I am definitely going to update in the opposite direction (they have 80 % chance to win according to 538)
In some situations this isn't true - if you asked me every day for the rest of this year for my probability that I will get covid at some point this year, those probabilities would almost always decrease.
I'm kind of baffled what these probabilities mean. If you were buying or selling options on Ukrainian or Russian war bonds, and these were your current prices, that would be interesting, because we could find out later whether you made or lost money.
As it is, one expects both percentages will tend to 0% and 100%, as the conclusion eventually emerges. So we already know what will happen to the numbers, and the only mystery left is -- what is the shape of the trajectory? Do the numbers change smoothly or not, monotonically or not, et cetera?
Is there something about the shape of the trajectory that is interesting? Could we somehow draw conclusions about whether you are a good prognosticator or not from this shape?
Jeremiah 31:37 feels very Unsong-y, but I don't remember it being mentioned. What are other verses remind you of Unsong?
37 Thus saith the Lord; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord.
There's this idea that strife in post-colonial Africa is primarily a result of Europeans "drawing borders" in Africa, resulting in the creation of countries that do not correspond to natural boundaries between tribes/ethnic groups, meaning these groups were forced to live together in the same country together. This is almost universally believed by people on the left (and is even common amongst people who are more or less apolitical) and is a "fact" recited entirely uncritically virtually any time there's a discussion on why decolonization has been a monumental failure (in producing the kind of functional, progressive countries western liberals were so confident it would). It's the received truth about the world and you're some kind of weird racist if you don't see its obvious accuracy.
This is really kind of insane to me. Just think about what being said: Ethnic diversity leads to political conflict, war and even genocide. This is the barely implicit belief being held by the same people who think diversity is the greatest thing in the world. This is the belief being held by people who think there should be virtually unlimited immigration to western countries regardless of the racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic differences between immigrants and the existing populations of the countries. This is the belief of people who think race is a "social construct" and the only reason "black people" are viewed as being distinct from "white people" is because of racist white eugenicist ideologies.
Imagine if somebody in Minnestoa said they want to commit genocide because they're being forced to live around Somalians. They would be considered demented psychopaths for feeling this way. But for Africa, this is not simply an understandable kind of mindset, it's the "expected" outcome of postcolonial diversity. OF COURSE there's war, of course Africans are butchering and raping each other, you made them live alongside a different tribe!
Now, it's at this point I usually get some kind of reply where people attempt to say that I'm misrepresenting what is being argued, and that "I think what people are actually saying is [insert unrealistic steelman position here]". No, that's not what they're saying. They say that drawing borders in Africa has caused its massive problems because different ethnic groups are made to live together. This is exactly what they're saying. And this is not compatible with fundamental liberal narratives around diversity.
It's an obvious double standard that exists to shift the blame for the problems in Africa off of genocidally intolerant Africans and onto Europeans. If liberal narratives were correct, making Africa more diverse should have been an unequivocally GOOD thing! But when diversity-induced conflict is manifest amongst non-whites, then temporarily abandon their previous narratives used to justify third world immigration to the west and create some other narrative where people who are different (but much more similar than e.g. black muslim americans and white christian americans) need to be kept apart, and where hating people who are different from you is perfectly understandable. But then e.g. a white Englishman says he doesn't want to become a minority in his own country, then the regular narrative gets brought back and he's a far-right racist nazi. It would be one thing if this were some fringe, far-left belief that only true radicals believe, but it's not, it's basically a mainstream belief at this stage. I think I even remember my history teacher in high school saying something to this effect.
"This is almost universally believed by people on the left (and is even common amongst people who are more or less apolitical) and is a "fact" recited entirely uncritically virtually any time there's a discussion on why decolonization has been a monumental failure (in producing the kind of functional, progressive countries western liberals were so confident it would)."
This just blatantly seems false. I don't know of anyone on the left who believes that European-drawn borders are the *primary* cause of strife in Africa. Most people I know on the left would think that European-drawn borders are below several other things on the relevant list - the legacy of colonial institutions, global market forces (controlled by corporations and/or the IMF), colonial imposition of laws and languages that don't have local history (but are now enshrined), Cold War era interference by Soviet and American strongman dictators, etc. I could see that some *centrists* might think that the borders are the primary cause, but I would appreciate some evidence that anyone on the *left* thinks that the borders are a *primary* cause.
"Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi were assigned to Germany by the Berlin Conference of 1884,[30] and Germany established a presence in the country in 1897 with the formation of an alliance with the king.[31] German policy was to rule the country through the Rwandan monarchy; this system had the added benefit of enabling colonization with small European troop numbers.[32] The colonists favoured the Tutsi over the Hutu when assigning administrative roles, believing them to be migrants from Ethiopia and racially superior.[33] The Rwandan king welcomed the Germans, using their military strength to widen his rule.[34] Belgian forces took control of Rwanda and Burundi in 1917 during World War I,[35] and from 1926 began a policy of more direct colonial rule.[36][37] The Belgians modernised the Rwandan economy, but Tutsi supremacy remained, leaving the Hutu disenfranchised.[38]
In the early 1930s, Belgium introduced a permanent division of the population by classifying Rwandans into three ethnic (ethno-racial) groups, with the Hutu representing about 84% of the population, the Tutsi about 15%, and the Twa about 1%. Compulsory identity cards were issued labeling (in the rubric for 'ethnicity and race') each individual as either Tutsi, Hutu, Twa, or Naturalised. While it had previously been possible for particularly wealthy Hutus to become honorary Tutsis, the identity cards prevented any further movement between the groups[39] and made socio-economic groups into rigid ethnic groups.[40]
The ethnic identities of the Hutu and Tutsi were reshaped and mythologized by the colonizers.[29] Christian missionaries promoted the theory about the "Hamitic" origins of the kingdom, and referred to the distinctively Ethiopian features and hence, foreign origins, of the Tutsi "caste".[29][41] These mythologies provide the basis for anti-Tutsi propaganda in 1994.[29]: 421 "
But the Hutus were the ones who committed the genocide, not the Tutsis. If anything, this supports OP's point even more - this group of people was so resentful that another group was favored by the Europeans 60 years ago that they committed a genocide against them. That doesn't sound like a group that would integrate well into other cultures.
Also, YSK that Wikipedia is worse than no information at all on politically charged topics. That passage completely ignores the 10 year period prior to the genocide that is overwhelmingly believed to be its cause. The only way it could be considered the fault of the Europeans is if you treat the Hutus as people with no agency, who just inevitably had to continue down the path of genocide for 60+ years after the Europeans came, and simply didn't have a choice in the matter of whether or not they committed genocide.
I'm astonished at the idea that everything would be forgotten after a mere sixty years..Some parts of Europe have bloody strife over things that happened centuries ago...eg. NI, Balkans.
Just from the wikipedia article, it sounds like the Rwandan government set up the genocide, which might suggest that Hutus are alright as minorities in countries where they don't have control.
I think you're conflating two slightly different uses for the idea of ethnic/tribal groups. There's the narrow meaning of a set of people with a shared culture and identity, which is what we normally mean when taking talking about ethnic groups in stable societies.
Then there's the kind of communities we are often talking about in these cases who as well as that have their own existing defacto governments, dispute resolution mechanisms, etc. which are distinct from those of their neighbors. The process of then having to establish a set of shared institutions, or of one side trying to impose its own on the other is what causes conflict, not the proximity of ethnic groups in the narrow sense.
Okay, and the differences between e.g. native French people and Arab immigrants in terms of values, political beliefs, morality etc are much, much larger than the differences between any two neighboring African groups. The fundamental issue here is that is considered highly unacceptable by people on the left for the native French to oppose Arab immigration on the grounds of any differences between French and Arabs, but a pass is given to Africans who feel violence is an appropriate result to political disunity.
Not between neighboring groups. How many ethnic neighbors in Africa are of an entirely different race, culture, religion AND language to the extent that Europeans and people from the middle east are? None?
> It's an obvious double standard that exists to shift the blame for the problems in Africa off of genocidally intolerant Africans and onto Europeans
Please look at what happened after European Yugoslavia was dissolved.
I think what you are describing is a right wing caricature of liberal thought. Liberals as defined by Sean Hannity. A millionaire paid by billionaires to drive up ratings by stoking white grievance.
>Please look at what happened after European Yugoslavia was dissolved.
Yes, diversity caused problems, exactly as right-wing ideology would predict.
>I think what you are describing is a right wing caricature of liberal thought. Liberals as defined by Sean Hannity.
I'm talking about my own "lived experience" of interacting with left wingers.
> A millionaire paid by billionaires to drive up ratings by stoking white grievance.
The left for years have been telling us about how great it will be once white people are a minority in the US. Then when people call this out, disingenious leftists like you call them conspiracy theorists.
irl or on social media or television? I occasionally see a projection that this will occur in the next few decades but I haven’t run into elation over it.
The best version of the arbitrary colonial border argument is not that this increased diversity in African countries, leading to dysfunction. Instead the issue is the ethnic groups that ended up split across countries have served as useful instruments for destabilizing neighboring rivals. Economists Stelios Michalapoulos and Elias Papaionnaou, in a 2016 AER article (complimentary pdf available https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20131311), provide evidence that "military interventions from adjacent countries are more common in the homelands of partitioned groups, rather than in nearby border areas where non-split groups reside." While there is a large literature on the consequences of ethnic fractionalization (ie diversity) in societies, untangling the directions of cause and effect remains challenging. For example, Pete Leeson of GMU has a great article on 'Endogenizing fractionalization' (https://www.peterleeson.com/Endogenizing_Fractionalization.pdf) where he argues that ethnic fractionalization is a consequence of poor institutions, not a cause.
So, I don't think anyone (for a given value of anyone that acknowledges the existence of the Lizardman Quotient) says 'diversity is the greatest thing in the world' (indeed, a google search for that turns up 4 results), unlike 'diversity is strength' which I have heard (and turns up several hundred thousand).
I think this strawman of what folks actually think about diversity is what's getting you in trouble. Especially with the expected implicit corollaries. Diversity is strength within the bounds of reason, in a modern setting where you're attempting to engage in problem solving of one sort or another.
No one thinks inviting a violent homophobe onto the board of GLAAD is good because it adds diversity.
Whereas including some black engineers in your facial recognition programming work may allow you to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Or not, nothing's perfect and black people aren't a monolith.
On the specifics of African nation creation, the obvious problem is that when people say diversity is strength, the implicit assumptions are about that being true in their environment, with the problems they face (where it probably is true). That's not necessarily the case in a place where the state doesn't have a monopoly on legitimate force and, indeed, may be viewed as an entirely illegitimate interloper. And attempting to force people to operate within governmental structures they view as illegitimate, almost always ends badly.
Diversity is strength, but it's not the only strength and it's not the most important thing in the world...which is okay, because that's a strawman you've made up.
>No one thinks inviting a violent homophobe onto the board of GLAAD is good because it adds diversity.
50% of muslim immigrants to the US think homosexuality should be illegal, and you're racist if you aren't okay with muslim immigration.
>Whereas including some black engineers in your facial recognition programming work may allow you to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Or not, nothing's perfect and black people aren't a monolith.
This is an INCREDIBLY narrow conception of left-wing support for diversity. What the left support in Europe is making sure that an ever increasing percent of Europre's population is non-white.
>the implicit assumptions are about that being true in their environment, with the problems they face (where it probably is true).
Okay, but the people who say this are completely opposed to any suggestion that non-white immigration to Europe could ever result in a "bad kind of diversity".
If you wanted to debate immigration, you could have just done that, without the hook of African history or the attempt to find hypocrisy rather than debate the topic that actually interests you.
Lol, London is literally majority non-english, and will be majority non-white in the very near future. The left in Europe are obsessed with "diversity" and "multiculturalism", and these things are by definition "LESS WHITE PEOPLE".
The difference that undermines all the thrust of your question is that the colonial powers specifically drew borders to group people together who already had grudges and feuds. Imagine grouping together a new state of Russians and Ukrainians, or Sunnis and Shiites, or Chinese and Japanese, or half a century ago Germans and Jews, and flippantly telling them to get along. It’s not a recipe for success. Of those examples, German and Jewish relationships are much less bad than they used to be because Germany and many Germans showed real remorse. The colonial pit-them-against-each-other model is designed to make that kind of reconciliation and healing difficult if not impossible by continually stoking the internal conflict so as to prevent them from uniting in external conflict.
Are there also patronizing double standards involved? Yes, absolutely. But you don’t need that to explain the strategy.
It’s also not a permanent strategy; Africa had some of the morally clearest things to say about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine precisely because they’ve spent decades thinking about borders and displaced ethnicities and coming up with solutions, so they were able to call out Russia’s excuses for what they really were.
>The difference that undermines all the thrust of your question is that the colonial powers specifically drew borders to group people together who already had grudges and feuds.
Why is okay for African ethnic groups to hold murderous grudges against each other? Why can't Europeans hold such grudges against immigrants?
And decolonization was almost entirely over 50+ years ago. They've had a long time to reorganize their borders in a way that doesn't play into whatever little conspiracy theory you have here.
I don't think people on the left say or think that ethnic hatred in Africa is alright, but they imply that ethnic hatred of whites against poc/non-whites is uniquely evil.
Russians and Ukrainians did actually live together for a very long time.
Regarding German/Jewish relations, one must note that a much smaller percentage of the German population is Jewish than there used to be. Similarly, for relations between Germans & eastern Europeans, there are a lot fewer Volkdeutsch in the east than there used to be.
Definitely meant those examples as moments in time and space. Before the Nazis, Germany was one of the least hostile places in Europe to Jews. As you observed, times change.
The conventional wisdom as I've heard it isn't drawing diverse groups together, it's drawing *enemies* together to make administration easier. Occasionally with an explicit comparison to the Baltics, which worked fine as a South Slav province but fell apart as a South Slav country.
I think casting the conventional wisdom as being about diverse rather than enemy groups is just the OP setting up his argument. But it's a strawman.
Yes, but why is it just accepted that African ethnic groups CAN BE enemies? Why can't the French be enemies with Arabs and refuse to allow them into the country?
Besides what Viliam said, there's the simple matter of nearness. The French are us. We study their history alongside ours. Many of our grandfathers or great-grandfathers (or both!) fought there. Some of us live in places they named (Detroit, Saint Louis, New Orleans). Their language is almost always offered in our high schools. Many of us have vacationed there. We see their country in popular movies. We judge them by our standards.
With the Africans . . . we barely know any of the players. I didn't know the thing about Hutus and Tutsis being made up until literally today. We know none of the languages. We don't visit. The only part of their history we know is the slave trade, and most of us have this weird idea of how that worked that totally removes African agency and makes them strictly victims. We don't see their cities on TV. There's is no Rick Steves' Africa.
We just don't expect the same things from those people. They're strange and alien and over there and just don't matter to us. Describe a specific bad and you can maybe get our attention for a minute, but it's just not the same.
Honest to God, you could probably answer your question as straight up racism. We expect the French to behave as members of modern society in good standing. We don't expect that of Africans. And because just about the only thing we know about Africa is them getting slapped around by Europe, we make excuses for them.
It's the same thing with the Israelis and, like, all their neighbors.
Well, the African ethnic groups *should not* fight each other, too.
The difference is that they often *already are* fighting, and that is a different situation. The first thing that needs to happen is to *stop* the fight. Wait until people calm down a bit. After they calmed down, then you can tell them that interacting with each other is maybe better than not interacting.
It's like, when your house is on fire, you also do things that you normally wouldn't be doing, in order to stop the fire. Flooding your room with water can be a good idea in some situation, and a bad idea in a different situation.
1) People interacting with each other peacefully.
2) People separated from each other.
3) People killing each other.
Option 1 is preferable to option 2, and both are preferable to option 3. But you cannot magically go from 3 to 1 overnight, you usually need some period of 2 in between.
In almost all cases, colonial-era borders were administrative ones only, at a time when independence was not expected for decades, or even generations. These borders, especially in Africa, were not established de novo by the colonial powers at independence. For example, the existing federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland under British rule became independent as Rhodesia, Zambia and Malawi, according to the old administrative boundaries. If your suggestion is that the colonial powers deliberately tried to create unstable states, then there's no evidence for that at all. The same applied, by the way, in parts of Europe that had been in the Ottoman Empire. As that Empire slowly disintegrated, national boundaries had to be constructed somehow, and this led to a great deal of violence and many wars.
This is a different issue from the decay of multi-ethnic superstates - the Hapsburg Empire, the SFRY and the USSR, where (and especially in the latter two cases) the ethnic question had been suppressed and all sorts of boundary changes carried out for administrative reasons, which ultimately led to a number of independent states whose frontiers made no sense. So there's a series of different questions here.
>No, that's not what they're saying. They say that drawing borders in Africa has caused its massive problems because different ethnic groups are made to live together. This is exactly what they're saying.
Most conflicts in human history have been caused by the incompatibility between territorial control on one hand, and natural communities on the other. This is not something as crude as "ethnic hatred" or even religious differences, it's just a question of two different ways of dividing up geographical space. In Empires, the problem doesn't really arise, because Empires are possessions of individual rulers and dynasties, and boundaries, such as they are, are just administrative. The problem is the rise of the nation-state, which assumes a one-for-one correspondence between ethnic/religious/cultural identity and political control. In practice, this never completely happens, and most of the blood-letting in Europe over the last few centuries can ultimately be traced to this incompatibility. In reality, borders in Europe (and the US I would suggest) are just as irrational as those in Africa, and just as often established by violence, if not more so. As I explain to African audiences, you could have our degree of relative internal stability if you can wait a few hundred years for the wars, devastation and massacres we've been through to make that possible.
The real problem comes with the attempt to export this nation-state model to new countries which were parts of empires of one sort or another for centuries, as is generally the case in Africa. In spite of the enthusiasm of first-generation Independence leaders to construct European style states, the result has been generally pretty negative: where you have frontiers you have barriers, and where you have barriers you have problems. Incidentally, whilst I think immigration is something of a red herring here (movement between regions and even districts is much less common in Africa, because of problems of communication and language) it does exist as a problem. The Ivory Coast civil war was ultimately due to immigration from poorer countries around, such as Burkina Faso.
"incompatibility between territorial control on one hand, and natural communities on the other"
Note that this doesn't have to involve anything about the *people* involved. There are "natural communities" based on geographic space (e.g., the people who happen to live along the same river and thus have easy transportation and communication between them) that have divided control (in this case because rivers, despite facilitating ordinary transportation, can be fortified into difficult barriers in case of a conflict, and also provide easy Schelling points for drawing peaceful divisions of land). As a result you get all kinds of perversity, with different tax laws in Jersey City and the West Village, and different labor and immigration laws between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
Borders drawn on the basis of lines of latitude or longitude are often even worse (there's that strip of northern Arizona that used to be primarily inhabited by polygamous Mormon breakaway sects, because they were outside the jurisdiction of Utah, but across the Grand Canyon from the Arizona territorial government).
Might be going off-topic here, but: "you could have our degree of relative internal stability if you can wait a few hundred years for the wars, devastation and massacres we've been through to make that possible. "
I've heard this often, but just as often people leave it at that. Would anyone care to speculate on what, in concrete terms, those centuries of violence actually got us?
Because, you know... if it could be identified, we might find it could also be constructed through quicker or at least cleaner means.
In an existential war, people tend to come to value meritocracy. Incompetent and corrupt officials get replaced by competent ones, and societal trust can rise as a result.
I don't think anyone has yet figured out "the moral equivalent of war".
Exhaustion, I would suspect, and the realisation that some other mechanism than war would have to be found to resolve the issues. For example, after WW2, the issue of whether France or Germany would be the dominant power on the Continent, which had caused three wars in 75 years, had obviously not been settled in the long term, and equally obviously never could be. The first, despairing moves in 1948 were actually to create the Brussels Treaty Organisation, a new military alliance against a one-day resurgent Germany. In the end, the answer was to change the question, and try to create supranational structures which would do away with national rivalries as a factor. The EU has largely been successful in this, although not without problems. I've had these conversations often in Africa (and in the Middle East) and the reality is that no state there is yet ready to compromise its sovereignty in this way.
This fits with how I understand America worked as well: they all saw themselves as separate states, they had a big war that killed all their menfolk, after that they saw themselves as the USA.
The next question is why stay together once the exhaustion has worn off? At a guess, at that point everyone who remembered the old way is dead and you've had a chance to raise a couple of generations who remember nothing else.
This is by no means a complete answer, but part of it is views from different eras being viewed as one system. The misdrawn borders issue is something I think I've been hearing my whole life. Does anyone know a history for the idea?
I do know that the construction of national identity goes back centuries in Europe, and I'm not sure how much was imposed on groups that were fighting each other rather than imposition on groups which were simply distinct from each other.
The idea that diversity is essential rather than merely good (I'm thinking of merely good as being something like the someone from every ethnicity units in WW2 movies, or an elf and a dwarf becoming friends in LOTR) is pretty recent. It just occurred to me, but LOTR had an elf and dwarf becoming friends, and whatever you want to call the good will between Gimli and Galadriel but not, as I recall, a general rapprochement between elves and dwarves.
Catholics and Protestants have figured out how to share countries in peace, but it wasn't easy.
I feel like I'm just noodling around rather than presenting a conclusion, but still, what is the history of the ideas?
"whatever you want to call the good will between Gimli and Galadriel"
'Do not repent of your welcome to the Dwarf. If our folk had been exiled long and far from Lothlórien, who of the Galadhrim, even Celeborn the Wise, would pass nigh and would not wish to look upon their ancient home, though it had become an abode of dragons?
'Dark is the water of Kheled-zâram, and cold are the springs of Kibil-nâla, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dum in Elder days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.' She looked upon Gimli, who sat glowering and sad, and she smiled. And the dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes; and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and there saw love and understanding. Wonder came into his face, and then he smiled in answer.
He rose clumsily and bowed in dwarf-fashion, saying: 'Yet more fair is the living land of Lórien, and the Lady Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth!' There was silence.
I think you are just strawmaning or at bast grossly weakmaning. Not a very productive comment, I know, but discussions about evil leftist "them" don't usually lead to productive discussion anyway
The OP summarizes the post colonial border thing in Africa and then says: "This is almost universally believed by people on the left"
Seems like a straw-man because there is not some grand leftist narrative about this.
Most people spend very little time thinking about postcolonial borders in Africa.
Tribalism is distinct from diversity too. Tunisia was Roman and more cosmopolitan, and due to this history Tunisians don't affiliate with tribes. Right next door in Libya there is still tribalism and civil war. I think the left sees tribalism as being bad, but is going to look for reasons to blame colonial powers for third world problems.
>Most people spend very little time thinking about postcolonial borders in Africa.
Okay, I believe that is almost universally believed by anyone who thinks/talks about this issue. The practical difference is immaterial.
>Tribalism is distinct from diversity too.
What? Tribalism is an anti-diversity attitude. The left thinks African tribalism is fine or at least entirely understandable, whereas European tribalism is absolutely unacceptable.
The OP frames this as a "gotcha." But with something as large and nebulous as "the left" you are easily going to find inconsistencies in thought, especially when you bring in something like "colonial borders in Africa" which is not a political issue in the US. Political issues are painfully hashed out in the political arena, they include is policy and people with skin in the game. Leftists tend to look for external excuses for the suffering of downtrodden groups. "Poor tribes in Africa, forced by Europeans to live together." "Hey it is cool to live in a 'diverse' neighborhood, especially when everybody is forced to hang a rainbow flag and drive a Prius and recycle." There is nothing incoherent or incompatible in these beliefs.
>Seems like a straw-man because there is not some grand leftist narrative about this.
"Grand leftist narrative" is a fuzzy term prone to motte & bailey re-re-re-definitions, but frankly, have you heard *any* other narrative around post-colonial borders & African conflicts? I don't think I've ever seen the topic mentionned without the "europeans drew straight lines on the map" line, including in schoolbooks. In fact there is rarely more to be said on the subject.
Stock far leftist response is that it is about greedy post-colonial corporations, I guess.
"Straight artificial borders" is imho more of a neutral conventional wisdom. It had not occured to me that it is a leftist perspective until I read this (no comment on what if anything is correct)
Poverty, disease, , aids, malaria, parasites, lack of resources, drought, no drinking water, global warming, Jihad, Boko Haram, apartheid, no infrastructure. I Hear about these things in Africa more than I hear about colonial borders.
I don't think there is really all that much disagreement about that being a cause of post-colonial conflict in Africa. (The power vacuum from colonial powers leaving and no existing authorities having legitimacy is another big factor). The interesting insight from the OP is that there's a new narrative for Western countries that diversity is good, despite the existing narrative that (at least sometimes) it's really bad.
The grand leftist narrative is certainly a thing, but I'm arguing that colonial borders in Africa is too small an issue for a grand narrative. This is far removed from public consciousness and public debate.
OP noticed an apparent contradiction in leftist narrative. Now it can be either a problem of the territory - an actual contradiction in the narrative or a problem of the OP map - his misunderstanding of the leftists argument.
The fact that OP initially approaches this with high confidence that his understanding is correct and his outgroup is just stupid is already a worrying sign. But even more so, the fact that he preemptively claims that any explanation are actually unrealistic steelmans. This is not approaching the issue with curiosity and good faith, this is pushing your own narrative and refusing to update on the evidence - not very inviting for a productive discussion. As a rule of thumb: if actual explanations by people who hold the view looks like steelman to you, you may be strawmanning them.
On the object level.
There is an important difference between voluntary immigration to a country and being enforced to live in the country by a foreign power.
Likewise, there is an important difference between ethnical tension and territorial tension. They can increase each other but they are not the same thing.
>The fact that OP initially approaches this with high confidence that his understanding is correct
This is special pleading.
>But even more so, the fact that he preemptively claims that any explanation are actually unrealistic steelmans. This is not approaching the issue with curiosity and good faith
I am not opposed to explanations. I am against people steel manning the claims I am referring to, because I'm not interested in the alternative arguments that they will respond to, I am interested in responses to the argument I presented. If people think these arguments are ubiquitous then our understand of the world is too divergent for a fruitful conversation to occur.
>There is an important difference between voluntary immigration to a country and being enforced to live in the country by a foreign power.
This is confused.
The people being forced to live in a country with foreigners are the native inhabitants of the country being immigrated to, not the immigrants. French people are the ones being forced to live amongst Arabs and Africans. My point is that African groups hating each other is considered the expected response to diversity+proximity, but if a Frenchman doesn't want to live amongst Arabs and Africans then he is called a nazi, and his opposition to this diversity is seen as a violation of the natural state of man (despite the differences between french atheists and muslim africans being vastly greater than between any two neighboring African groups).
There is nothing special in basic conversational hygiene of not assuming people you disagree with to be stupid with high probability. When I don't understand something about a right-wing political narrative I ask for explanation and not for counterarguments to specifically my version of misunderstanding, discarding everything else as steelmans. It's not special when expect other people to behave likewise.
> The people being forced to live in a country with foreigners are the native inhabitants of the country being immigrated to, not the immigrants.
Again there is an important difference between being forced by a foreign power and being a citizen of a democratic country, which representative goverment has some kind of emmigration policy
But even if there wasn't any difference, in case of border drawing its about two groups of people being forced to live with each other against their own will and in case of immigration it's about only one group of people being forced to live with another.
The situations are quite different even if we look from the "ethnical tensions" lense, which is only the minor part of the picture, anyway.
Well, for starters, I don't think that mainstream left in the Western countries is in favor of "virtually unlimited immigration regardless of the racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic differences between immigrants". This is a radical, fringe position, useful as a rightwing bogeyman, not something you win elections with.
Okay, the absolute norm amongst the left is that restrictions on immigration based on those factors is absolutely unacceptable, so perhaps there should be a limit on how many immigrants per year, but if all of
And importantly, to the extent the left support immigration restrictions, it is almost always on an ANNUAL basis. They may want to restrict how many come per year, but there is no point at which they will say "okay, that's enough immigration, let's close the borders". They support the same level of immigration as currently exists or higher *in perpetuity*, which means ultimately, yes, there is no limit to the number of immigrants they support bringing in over the long run, which also means that Europeans will necessarily become minorities in all western countries if this continues.
You may think this is a good thing, but the point is that the difference between literally unlimited immigrants and reality is meaningless over even a medium time horizon.
As I replied to your ideological fellow traveller previously, if you think that difference between current immigration regime and full open borders is somehow negligible, we really disagree about basic facts of reality to an extent that makes productive debate almost impossible.
To me it sounds like someone would say there is a human colony on the Moon, or something like that.
Europeans are going to become minorities in their own countries at current rates. Open borders would simply means this happens sooner rather than later.
>Immigration policies in Europe have only become more restrictive in the 21st century
No, most non-white immigration to europe has occurred IN the 21st century (Merkel's great syrian immigrant intake was in 2015!), and to the extent it has become more strict in certain places, this is almost entirely a product of the right, and centre-left parties trying to keep right-wing parties at bay. Ideologically, they have no point at which they will decide that "enough" or "too many" people have immigrated to their country unless it costs them elections.
>The second half assumes that immigrants never assimilate and never intermarry, which is basically the opposite of the truth as far as the particular group you appear to obssessed with is concerned: "Arabs" in France (which really means overwhemingly Algerians and Tunisians, who come from countries where French-style intitutions French-style clothing, French culture, French media and the French language are already omnipresent) overwhemingly are French monolinguals and are the most exogamous community in the country.
1. Do you have a source for any of this?
2. My claim was that French people will become a minority. That you imagine that arabs (and for obvious reason chose to ignore africans) are competently aping "french" culture is irrelevant to this.
3. Most of these people are muslims. Islam is not part of french culture and muslims by definition cannot be "assimilated". France is a secular/catholic country. Africans in Africa butcher each other over much smaller differences than these big categorical religious differences.
4. A majority of crime in France is committed by immigrants and their immediate descendants. This is the opposite of assimilation.
>You might as well say that Americans are now a minority in their own country since Proper White Germanic Americans are now only 30% of the population.
Why White Germanics? Why not, you know, the NATIVE AMERICANS, who are absolutely a minority due primarily to mass immigration. Are you going to say "oh, stop whining, we're all americans now!".
That's a fair point. However I do think its a mainstream liberal belief that drawing the African borders without regarding ethnic boundaries was a significant cause of bloody conflict in Africa. I also think its a mainstream liberal belief that diversity is a strength and not a weakness.
So I think it's very fair to better understand how liberal would square this.
I'd really like to hear your view on the two statements above.
My assumption is that "diversity is always a strength" is a pretty meaningless platitude and indeed there are many times and scenarios when increasing diversity can be harmful. I think many mainstream liberals would agree with this and it's hardly a groundbreaking statement. But it would be nice if they were clearer about the complexities and nuance instead of just blindly pretending "diversity" is obviously always a good thing.
Also it would be healthier if we didn't attribute all African problems to colonialism but that's a separate conversation.
To me that feels like avoiding the OP's main point, which is that the reasoning for one leftist talking point is incoherent with the reasoning for another. Instead of addressing that, we're now talking about a technicality of how much immigration is being conducted.
But to follow you along anyway: from where I'm standing, the difference between "virtually unlimited" and "too damn high" is negligible; I don't care if you wish to dismiss the existence of the first position when the second one is very real and functionally identical.
See, this is what I had in mind when I wrote that posts like usually don't lead to productive discussion. You and I evidently have very different ideas about what is important.
I think that difference between current immigration regime in both US and EU and open borders regime is huge, you think it is negligible. This is a chasm in a perception of reality which is very difficult to bridge.
I am not sure whether the thing about "badly drawn borders" is specifically leftist talking point, more like conventional wisdom. In any case, I doubt that most supporters of open borders subsribe to that. Probably you could find someone who incoherently believes both positions, but it does not seem fair to evaluate political movements based on their dumbest members.
Perhaps we can make this conversation more productive if I start by mentioning that I'm a big proponent of increased immigration as a general rule of thumb.
I certainly think that increasing immigration is going to become increasingly important in the western world as birth rates drop.
I think that countries that do immigration smartly are likely to outcompete countries that reduce their immigation blindly.
I'm not a US citizen but from my standpoint it feels like increasing legal immigration and reducing illegal immigration can and should be a bipartisan view in the US.
I really would like to delve deeper into "diversity" as a general value. Do you think it's always good and never harmful to increase ethnic diversity in countries?
When do you feel ethnic/cultural diversity is a problem and when is it not (or indeed an asset)?
(Unrelated aside: I don't see this as particularly unproductive - we've revealed a scope of immigration where "open borders" is on one end and "too damn high" is (in your opinion) a significant distance away from it but (in my opinion) still too damn high. This is wider map is good for both of us to know about. But my main response was:)
Do you personally disagree with the badly drawn borders talking point? It's absolutely something that's taken for granted by everyone I meet, including myself before I read OPs post. I would definitely be surprised to hear that a leftist didn't believe it, and that's without making any assumptions on the intelligence of said leftist.
I think the OP is right, that (even strong and steelman) progressive leftism has this blindspot that he has exposed, and I haven't yet heard anything to contradict that.
What I would expect from someone who's just had a serious tactical blindspot revealed is an immediate emotional reaction, an attempt to divert or end the conversation as soon as possible, and possible scorn, dismissal or aggression directed to the one who exposed it.
I can't prove this is a blindspot, because I don't tend to talk politics in person and I can't expect any triggered leftist to come on this thread and admit to having this reaction in front of a gang of their perceived enemies.
But I can absolutely have it disproved, if a leftist showed up to calmly explain why OP is wrong.
Your explanation, as I understand it, is that only stupid people believe both of OP's positions at once, and therefore the smart leftists must only believe one or the other.
I've looked a bit for similar polls, but apparently it's an uncommon question to ask, the usual being "do you want More or Less immigration?", with the More share having steadily grown to 30-ish percent. It's plausible that at least some fraction of them would prefer at least some restrictions, but like trebuchet says, there's no mainstream leftist position on what might those be.
It obviously depends on the country, and as a non-American, I am ill-positioned to speak for Democrats. But, it seems to me that Biden administration does not exactly welcome recent surge of asylum seekers with open arms
We're not talking about the Biden administration, we're talking about left-wing americans generally. Who do they support not allowing into the country?
If you have a state that is already functional, then it is relatively easy to keep it going. You have an army and a police force with decades of training, they will easily defeat any mob. Revolution is difficult.
On the other hand, if you have a deeply dysfunctional state, containing several different tribes with strong tribal structures, then it is relatively easy to keep the tribes doing their thing, but making the state more functional is difficult. All people who are good at violence are trained to be loyal to their tribes.
My honest opinion on diversity is: "it does not necessarily have to be harmful". I can imagine it work, in a society that is already functional, if all groups are willing to play by its rules (and those unwilling are small enough so they can be defeated). Especially in a modern society, where the tribes are not the source of... well, pretty much everything. People will side with their former classmates against their tribal elders, when it is convenient for them. But they need to be able to survive *economically* outside their tribe first.
So, the colonizers can be blamed for creating *dysfunctional* states, which otherwise would not have existed at all. Imagine some powerful aliens coming to Earth, creating a new state that contains a half of USA and a half of Mexico, keeping it together for 50 years, then leaving Earth. Would it make sense to blame the aliens for having drug cartel violence in California?
Sounds like you're saying diversity need not be harmful so long as it's trivial. I like chocolate ice cream and you like vanilla -- yay! We can live in peace!
I think it's more complicated than that. It's not "small differences like ice cream preference are okay, big difference like race or religion are not." The *same* difference can be more or less salient as part of someone's identity depending on their culture and circumstances. There are countries where being Christian or Muslim can get you killed, and countries where being Christian or Muslim is a minor difference that determines which days you take off from work.
(Really, "trivial" is a tautological description - if a division causes strife, then it's not trivial, if it doesn't, then it is.)
Colonial states have a disadvantage here because colonizers aren't trying to get the colonized people to invest in a new political identity - they have the military force to draw borders wherever they want and don't care if there's some sort of internal division that would make it difficult to govern in the absence of that force. This means that when the colonizers suddenly withdraw, those older divisions haven't gone away, and might be too much for the new government to handle.
(They might even intentionally stoke those internal divisions to promote their influence, like Belgium did in Rwanda. Hutu and Tutsi are mostly-constructed identities - there were some existing economic and social divisions, but the Belgians turned them into a rigid, hereditary racial system, which laid the groundwork for civil war and genocide a few decades later)
>don't care if there's some sort of internal division that would make it difficult to govern in the absence of that force. This means that when the colonizers suddenly withdraw, those older divisions haven't gone away, and might be too much for the new government to handle.
The point is precisely that these "internal divisions" are treated like a force of nature by many leftists, whereas if a Frenchman doesn't want millions of Africans and Arabs coming into France, his views are treated by these same people as being some repulsive abberation from man's natural state of being.
Look at Switzerland, a country that has *four* official languages. In other parts of the world, speaking a different language is often a pretext for a war. Yet it works for them, I guess because the people see something that unites them, which makes the differences in language trivial.
Another example is how religious or political conversions can remove old conflicts (and replace them with new ones). The same difference that was a big problem before the conversion, becomes trivial after the conversion.
If we ignore all the imperfections for the moment, European Union is built on the idea that "Europe" is more important than individual countries. A few decades ago, the most important thing for Europeans was to fight for your country and kill the neighbors.
...so, whether some difference actually becomes a problem, depends on context.
I think you've got a very strong point and I'm not arguing. However the steelman I would use that I actually think tracks reality is the following:
At earlier stages of societal development, ethnic/tribal boundaries are super important and conflict is very likely if they're forced to live together. After a prolonged experience of peace these ethnic and tribal differentiations tend to blur in favor of a larger national identity making a larger multicultural society possible. So maybe people think the borders were simply drawn too early?
In addition, there seem to be many cases where redrawing borders around ethnic borders is very beneficial in modern times. I understand this worked well in eastern europe (Kosovo, Serbia etc.) but I'm really no expert. All I know is this is the reason why Avigdor Leiberman the Israeli politician born in Belarus is a big proponent of using land swap agreements as part of a future israeli state. Basically giving uncontested territories with mostly muslim populations in exchange for annexing contested regions with mostly jewish settlers.
Proponents of the two state solution is another example of liberals acknowledging that diversity isn't always feasible.
The following is first-pass train of thought speculation. I appreciate all sincere attempts to refine or counter my logic.
At a certain point in a groups development, the value of an individual worker gets to the point where the cost of group violence massively outweighs the potential benefit.
If your group is a hunter-gatherer tribe, the economic value of a tribe member might not be significantly greater than their cost. This is especially the case if your supply of food is more dependent on the number of animals you have or the competition from other tribes for prime hunting or gathering space. Losing a few tribe members for a net gain of animals or space is likely a long term net win.
As you start getting more productivity for the average group member, the economic cost of violence goes up, both because the loss of the group member and the cost for maintaining the superiority in violence over your rival groups. At the same time, you get a point where maintaining that superiority in violence is expensive, and if you can find a way to use it, you're better off for it. Your average subsistence farming peasant in a feudal state still isn't producing much more value than he consumes, so losing a few to gain some doesn't hurt too much. What you'd see in this era is either big stupid wars between nations or the conquest of tribal societies which would be relatively cheap (ie, colonization).
We're now at a point where for the West where group violence (war) is so incredibly expensive compared to the potential gains as to be stupid to start, and we've realized that it's better if the tide raises everyone's boat than if our boat sinks slower than the other guys. Once you're at this point, you can argue that diversity is a benefit. Other groups aren't potential sources of violence because it would cost them too much, so cooperation and trade are the orders of the day.
At the same time, we forget that much of the world is still in a state where this isn't the case. There's a (possibly Russian) joke that goes like this: "A magical fish offers to grant one wish to a peasant. He is wondering which treasures he should request from the fish. Then, the fish explains that whatever the peasant wishes for and receives himself, his neighbor will receive double. The peasant says, “Ok, then I want you to poke out one of my eyes.”" Twenty idiots with boxcutters killed three thousand productive workers and cost us a relative fortune in lost productivity, and then we blew a significantly larger fortune in stupid attempts to reduce the likelihood of this happening again.
> a larger national identity making a larger multicultural society possible
Are there examples of actually successful multicultural societies? Where "multiculturalism" extends to something beyond traditional dresses being put on for a holiday once a year?
The Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Romans and to a lesser extent the Byzantines. The British too, depending on how you mean it. Basically, before the rise of modern nationalism in the late 18th century, you could run a multinational - and hence multicultural - empire pretty well. This got a lot harder through the long 19th century, and finally they all collapsed in WW1.
Unless I am totally missing what you mean by ‘multicultural’, I would argue that many European nations bridged important ethnic, linguistic and cultural divides. France comes to my mind as an example of a notably multicultural region; modern French identity fairly recently coalesced around a set of ideals and institutions heavily promoted during the third republic.
China, India, and Russia are other countries you might be interested in. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of examples, at any rate.
China is a country utterly dominated by one ethnic group and where minorities are often heavily repressed. It's absolutely not a case of multiple cultures getting along in peace.
Like ReformedHegelian says, I mean the replacement of the former "melting pot" approach by the current "multiculturalism" one. To the extent that the West was successful in integration, it was through convergence to the mainstream culture, and whenever these days this doesn't happen, there inevitably follow deep-seated problems (since you mention France, they're pretty used to riots in Parisian suburbs by now).
As for the others, in China there's Xinjiang, in Russia there's Chechnya, and in India - the constant Hindu-Muslim strife.
I think the US is the boring example but still applies. Even if you claim it's not ethnically diverse, there are certainly a large amount of competing "cultures".
Also, I was making an even more boring point thinking of countries like Germany that used to be made up of many smaller regional powers who hated each other but ended up merging and creating a shared national identity.
If we insist on multiculturism meaning multi-ethnicity (imo how its usually used actually), I think the anglo, western world does a fantastic job at accepting new immigrants and integrating them into the country. One of the top contenders for the UK prime minister is an Indian for example.
I think the non-dumb version of this argument is that empires could and did suppress local disputes, like keeping Muslims and Hindus under the same empire in India. When the imperial forces went away, those local disputes could flare up again. The partition of India really did happen, after all.
But mostly, I think it's mood affiliation. You know colonialism was bad so decolonization must have been good, and so anything bad that came with decolonization must somehow be the fault of the old colonial powers.
Referring to countries such as Finland and Romania where nine out of ten belong to the majority ethnic group as "multicultural" seems pretty weird. There aren't that many countries that come closer to being an ideal nation state.
That's a pretty amusing contrast to highlight. I always assumed people who weren't complete naifs were sincere when they suggested the post-colonial borders in Africa led to strife, because they understood that it's a greater challenge living with people that have quite different cultural assumptions and shibboleths, and that when they turned around a yammered about diversity = strength it was just transparent bullshit in service of some ideological goal they felt could not be said outright or discussed honestly.
Do you think there actually are people -- outside of students and other naifs I mean -- who truly think a more culturally diverse group is *less* prone to tribal conflict? (A reasonable man well might agree increased tribal conflict *does* happen but is a price worth paying to achieve some other putative benefit from diversity, but that's not who I mean, I mean someone who thinks the diversity *by itself* reduces -- or at least does not increase -- social friction and conflict.)
The argument goes that a more diverse society *eventually* leads to less tribal conflict. The society needs time to develop the tolerance adaptation, but when developed it can be used to accept more diverse people in the society and decrease conflicts between different societies.
Unless they're being pragmatically insincere, I've literally never heard anyone on the left say anything to the effect of "Yes, I know it's hard accepting in these foreigners with whom you have so little in common, but we need to stick at it". People who have a problem with foreigners are pathologized and called xenophobic bigots, and its treated as some weird aberration to not be welcoming to people different than you. It's *surprising* to them that diversity doesn't instantly work.
> I've literally never heard anyone on the left say
Maybe it has something to do with the way you approach leftist views. As long as you are in the "outgroup ridiculing mode" your picture of their views will be skewed and making little sense. Try to approach leftist narrative with curriocity and figure out the nuances of the views of actual leftists. You may be quite surprised.
One of the core ideas in modern leftism is that we are all have some racism/sexism/classism/transphobic/etc. That being somewhat bigoted is an inherited part of all of us. And that we can fight it in ourselves and thus become better people. Liberals are not born. They are made through overcomming our primitive xenophobic intuitions. And this of course requires some work, in a sense it is a constant struggle against entropy if you want to achieve perfection, but you can achieve good result even with small amount of effort if you put your mind to it.
I'm not sure whether it's malicious mischaracterisation or an honest mistake, when conservatives assume that being called bigoted is a pathologization and uneascapable sentence. After all conservatives have being shaming and pathologizing people for unchangable qualities throughout the history. Maybe they just project the same way of thinking? But it's not what is going on here. Liberals expect people whose bigotry is revealed to simply change their ways, as liberals have already done themselves. Now when people understand what they are doing, how harmful is that, they can just do some work to become a better. This is the desired and expected behaviour. If we all cooperate and overcome our primitive xenophobic intuitions me can build the better world. Imagine there is no heaven... it's easy if you try...
What is surprising and enfuriating to liberals is meeting people who endourse and identify with bigotry. Who knowingly refuse to cooperate to try to become better people. Who instead of doing the necessary work, become offended at the assumption that any work needs to be done. Previously liberals naively thought that everyone can become a better person if they just knew better. And now they are shocked to find that some people are knowingly choose to be evil.
In some regards. Because they actually became better, not because whatever they are is considered better no matter what.
I guess, conservative really want this to be about aesthetics, up to the point of endorsing the most strawmanish versions of postmodernism reasoning. But it's very clearly is not the case. You may be 100% aesthetically blue tribe, as soon as you are revealed to be sexual offender, you are totally cancelled. Or you may love your superbowl and fastfood. If you managed to overcome your bigotries you are a better person than you used to be and will be happily accepted in the liberal society. You may not be able to play the status games of the elites but you do not have to. How do you think blue tribe managed to unite both rich elites and poor minorities, otherwise?
Ah, well, I'd say so far the empirical evidence isn't making that argument look great. I wouldn't say tribal conflict in Africa has markedly decreased since the 1960s[1]. There's also the interesting experiment of the USSR: for 70 years tribal conflict was ruthlessly suppressed, and a broad cultural uniformity imposed from above. Everyone had to learn the same language, have the same politics, worship the same shibboleths and Olympic sports teams. And yet...when the USSR dissolved, it turns out the tribal conflicts were still there and many of them erupted rather violently[2,3,4, and perhaps the current exceedingly violent Russian-Ukraine conflict].
These are both experiments that have been running for a very long time, by social science standards: 50 years and up. One would think if some kind of tolerance were going to set in, however slowly, it would be visible by now.
One can of course just argue they're all doing it wrong, but that tends to sound like special pleading, or at the very least it calls into question the proposition that diversity *necessarily* leads to strength -- if it only does so when you "do" diversity just right, then maybe diversity per se is neither here nor there -- maybe what *is* true is that some kind of social structure reduces social friction from whatever cause, and it works on tribalism as well as any other random source of intrapersonal irritation.
I'm not sure how to properly account for USSR example. It actually somewhat succeded in creating new identity of soviet people and all the conflict erupted only after the collapse of the union and copromisation of this identity. It all actually worked for quite some time untill it didn't. Do we consider this a success or a fail? Something inbetween? Other similar example is Roman Empire. It was quite stable, partually because people could become roman citizens no matter their ethnicity. And of course Roman Empire eventually collapsed. But it fared quite well, much better than most. Quite mixed evidence here.
What complicates the issue even more, both roman and soviet model of overcoming ethnical struggles were not exactly the same model that diversity supporters push now. They simply replaced ethnical identity with a new empire identity, which is a step in the direction of more diversity, compared to ethnostates but still just the middle ground, not the end of the spectrum. So people with different narratives can account of this quite differently. Those who oppose diversity may claim that of course these empires collapsed because of diversity, but they were somewhat successful because they at least had singular emperial identity, while diversity supporters will contribute the success of the empires to the diversity and failure to this manufactured singular identity instead of developing propper tolerance adaptation.
We can also have a look at USA. It also has imperial identity: no matter where you came from you can be american if you support american values. But also a more liberal openness to different values. In a sense the current conflict between republicans and democrats is a conflict between supporters of american imperial identity and more general liberal one. And USA is pretty successful.
And closer to the end of the diversity spectrum we have such cluster of ideas as liberalism/modern leftism in general. You can have any religion or none thereof, all kind of beliefs and values, as long as you tolerate and accept everybody who tolerate and accept every other tolerating and accepting people, we are ready to tolerate and accept you and we will all cooperate for the greater good. This liberal identity is extremely successful in modern world. I think it counts as a strong evidence in favor of diversity.
OK the first part of this seems to me just moving the goalposts. Yes, sure, as long as you compel people to forego their tribal conflicts, restraining them with prison cells and guns -- why, that works. But your original argument was that, even if force was necessary at the beginning, its necessity would (or at least could) fade, because society would "develop the tolerance adaptation."
What I'm pointing out is that the USSR, for example, made strenuous efforts to "develop the tolerance adaptation" for 70 years, turn everyone into the New Soviet Man, and it was so manifestly unsuccessful that as soon as the enforcement was lifted, the old ethnic and cultural conflicts broke out again no less virulent than they were 100 years ago. If 70 years of enforcement aren't enough to "develop the tolerance adaptation" -- what would be?
I'm certainly willing to agree the United States is reasonably successful already, but it's the passionate advocates of diversity who don't think it is -- who think it is so riven with injustice and oppression that it needs massive revision to its standard social mythology, the kind of stuff that needs to be forced from above by law and fines and even prison sentences because mere persuasion and social pressure is wholly inadequate.
You can't have it both ways, you know: either the US is *not* a successful pluralitic tolerant society, and that's why we need massive DEI initiatives at all levels -- and eggs must be broken[1] to make the omelet -- or it *is* already a pluralistic tolerance society and diversity crusades are just the latest incarnation of tribalistic jockeying for political power by some special interest or other, and can be treated as no more deserving of general respect than the oil industry looking for tax breaks.
On the last, I disgree on two points: first, I don't think the modern liberal identity[2] is successful at all, which is why it faces increasing levels of political rejection and finds itself unable to generate a coherent stable governing philosophy, but rather stumbles from one urgent jihad to the next. It strikes me as in general just the intellectual narcissism of the upper middle class seeking some real-world basis for its desire to feel superior to the peasantry. Might as well be courtiers of Louis XIV sniffing at the uncouth speech of the sans culottes. And, second, almost no philosophy short of Stalinism is *less* ideologically tolerant. It practices acceptance on all the trivial forms of diversity -- skin color, sexual pecadilloes, styles of dress or salutation -- but rigid conformity on all the meaningful forms -- philosophy, political ideology, religion, private morality.
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[1] For example, some otherwise straight-A high-school graduates with a yellow skin need not to go to the most prestigious of colleges so that some people with a black or brown skin and lower grades can. Sorry, Charley, we'll get to the hypothetical judging by the content of your character rather than the color of your skin...soon. Not more than another 100 years, tops.
[2] Dating from roughly 2000, and as distinguished from a classical liberal philosophy, the kind of thing an old fossil like Jerry Brown or MLK Jr might have recognized, which apparently is a tea too weak for its soi-disant heirs.
It would be moving the goalpost if we had agreed beforehand on a specifics of USSR or Roman Empire social experiments, and then I declared that it was obviously flawed and didn't prove anything after it ended. As we are just speculating in hindsight - not so much.
>I'm certainly willing to agree the United States is reasonably successful already, but it's the passionate advocates of diversity who don't think it is
I concede that the blue tribe isn't good at celebrating previous achievements. This doesn't change my point, though.
> You can't have it both ways, you know
You very much can and actually should. We should celebrate current achievements of diversity and tolerance which are obviously better than nothing, but also be aware that there is still road to go and all the current successes can vanish if taken as something granted, not requiring to fight for. There is no contradiction here.
> I don't think the modern liberal identity[2] is successful at all
As long it's dominant in absolute majority of developped countries I think we would need stronger evidence to challenge it.
> It practices acceptance on all the trivial forms of diversity
Well, if the blue tribe is bad at celebrating achievements, the red one is bad at not taking them for granted. This "trivial forms" of diversity were fought tooth and nail for and are being constantly challenged still. Also I think you are plainly wrong by not including religion in the list. As a general rule "tolerance for everything except intolerance" also gives a lot of possibilities for philosophical views and political ideology, but I guess not the ones you would like to be more accepted. Sadly, I don't think it's possible to do better in current memetic climate. Maybe when the culture war ends, the dust settles and Ctulhu eventually moves even more left...
I don't understand what that means. You're saying conflict could continue even if the cultural differences were removed? That seems counter-intuitive to me. Do any examples come to mind to illustrate how this works?
2. Think your mistake is at least partially taking the argument at face value. In my experience, their perspective is either a product of regurgitating what they think the statusful opinion or active self-preservation. As someone who is mixed (black and white), I get to experience a lot more of the latter when this topic is brought up. I watch well-educated white people do the whole colonial scapegoating dance and then look at me like "Now you see! I'm one of the good white people!".
3. I think one version of the argument you speak of blames arbitrary ethnic borders and colonialism not necessarily because they increase inter-ethnic conflict, but because they are generally destabilizing. In short, if there were no colonizers it is quite possible sub-saharan africa would've turned out a lot better. Imagine an infant that's growing up slightly slower than their peers, but growing up nonetheless. Then, all of a sudden, she is thrown out of her home environment and has much less security than she did before. Would you not expect this interference to have some negative impact on the child's growth?
This argument is slightly stronger and harder to disprove because it relies on a counterfactual world where colonialism never happened. Also, they can draw fairly close parallels to Iraq where Western influence in the area appeared to make the country more chaotic, leading to a lot of excess bloodshed.
>Imagine an infant that's growing up slightly slower than their peers, but growing up nonetheless.
This is not close to accurate. Sub-saharan Africa's economies were extremely small and stangnant before colonialism. They weren't slightly behind western Europe. Europe and sub-sharan africa were categorically different. Most of the continent had not even invented the wheel or written language by the time Newton had published his most important works. There's no reason to expect Africa would have ever caught up to Europe if they had never been colonized.
>Then, all of a sudden, she is thrown out of her home environment and has much less security than she did before. Would you not expect this interference to have some negative impact on the child's growth?
Yeah, being "thrown out of her home environment" is an extraordinarily poor analogy. For one thing, her "home environment" was an extremely primitive place where different groups would routinely kill and enslave one another.
But the reality is that Africa's economy grew rapidly under colonialism. At the peak of colonialism, several African colonies had some of the largest economies in the world. Colonial rule was a period of stability for Africa, not instability. And the environment was one in which industry, farms, mines, roads, ports, railways, bridges and so on were built. Colonialism was Europeans introducing the infrastructure and systems that facilitated economic growth in Europe. The expected outcome of colonialism should be rapid economic development. But the problems following colonialism are a result of Africans being unable to maintain what the Europeans had created, and their murderous ethnic rivalries and so on.
And in places like South Africa, the "most colonized" country in Africa, we see the most developed country in sub-saharan Africa, whereas in the least colonized African country (or close to it), Ethiopia, it is amongst the poorest countries. This is the exact opposite of what your hypothesis would predict.
And just to be clear, I don't support colonialism. I wish it hadn't happened (not least because it was not beneficial to Europe). I'm just pointing out that it isn't the reason why Africa is much poorer than the rest of the world.
>Also, they can draw fairly close parallels to Iraq where Western influence in the area appeared to make the country more chaotic, leading to a lot of excess bloodshed.
Africa was also chaotic. It's just that the population was sparse and the technology so lacking that there was never a chance for the kind of things in post-colonial Africa to occur. But once the population grew and they had guns and their run of the place, the chaos emerged again but on a bigger scale.
Why go to Iraq for the example, when Iraq was a relatively standard suppression of one ethnic/religious group by another minority group, when the more ethnicly mixed (and far more excessively bloody) Yugoslavia is already a byword for the bad effects of Western influences?
(Maybe it's because Yugoslavia shows it is human nature to have ethnic conflicts, and not something one can blame on the West.)
Given MIRI-style beliefs about imminent omnicidal AI takeover, how much would humanity's long-term chances be improved by a global thermonuclear war? The largest impact EA intervention ever? (only slightly trolling)
(1) What is a "global" thermonuclear war? Only two nations have substantial nuclear arsenals (Russia and the US) and it would be logical to assume that if they go to all-out war almost all bombs would be used on each other. That's a lot of people and a lot of land, to be sure, but well short of a major fraction of the globe.
Are you assuming there's some unusually wide distribution of attacks, e.g. the Americans take time to nuke China and Iran and whoever else is on the President's shit list as well, and the Russians send a bunch of warheads to Brasilia and Tasmania because nobody should have a good day? Or that the other 6-8 nuclear powers get caught up in the fun and start throwing their few weapons around in other parts of the world, e.g. the Indians figure they might as well wipe out Islamabad while no one will notice one extra kaboom in the middle of the Flame Deluge?
(2) How "long term" do you mean? If you mean "the next century" that's a very different thing than "the next ten millenia."
1) A declassified Cold War era US nuclear target map suggested that China would also be targeted even in a US-Russia war, and I think that would be true today as well, to prevent them from dominating the post-war world. Likewise, I think it's safe to assume that Russia will "spread the love" among the NATO.
Other parts of the world will probably be less affected, but they also aren't exactly on track for advanced AI deplyment, so far as I can tell.
2) EAs usually refer to "a billion years from now", which is just as well.
Pretty sure no genuine Cold War targeting protocols have ever been declassified, but I would be very interested indeed to hear of a counter-example.
Anyway, I find the proposition that the US would nuke Beijing on the theory that this might fashion a better postwar world to be a bit whimsical for serious military planning. I think it's likely strikes will be organized according to clear first-rank military goals, and there isn't a lot of firepower left over after that -- we should bear in mind stocks are 1/20 what they were in the 80s. Yes, I agree Europe would be included in any full on war, but it still means the conflict is hardly global. 90% of the world's land area and 94% of its population aren't in the target zones of either side.
That hardly means the world would be unaffected, of course, but not apocalyptically I think. In the short term the world would lose ~1/3 of its oil supply and probably 3/4 of its market demand, which would certainly cause a big recession, one that would perhaps last a decade or more. But there are plenty of dynamic countries that would rise to take technical leadership, I think. South Korea, Japan if it stayed out of the conflict, Indonesia, India, Chile, Brazil maybe, China of course. It would be a quite different world, but for those countries that weren't involved I can't see it being that worse than a really savage economic recession, sort of the Great Depression times 2-4.
So if fancy AI is possible and useful, I don't think the plausible kind of nuclear war would delay its appearance by more than a decade or two. At the outer limit maybe 50 years.
Ah so, OK, thanks. Yeah, that's a prospective SAC study, meant to inform actual future targeting decisions -- but whether the actual ultimate decisions matched up with the study, we don't know. We should at least bear in mind it listed ~2300 separate targets at a time (1956) when the United States only had about ~2500 nuclear weapons in total.
Why does every year count? I mean, I guess it does for people now alive, for whom every year of Skynet delayed means another year of sweet sweet bliss not being merely one of a mountain of skulls. But I thought the dogma here was concern over the future of the species per se. How does it change anything important if the species gets wiped out by Terminators not in 2035 but in 2085? What am I missing?
I'm not the target of your question, but I believe the answer is that more time means more ability to "solve" AI alignment and make them our friends instead of our enemies.
Highly sensitive to the outcome & effects of the war, but conditional on those views, I think most of the outcome distribution sees improved long-term survival odds. The main cause would be some slowdown in capabilities research, without there necessarily being (as much of) a slowdown in alignment research.
It doesn't follow that this would be a good EA intervention - beyond the obvious reasons like "nuclear war is bad", 2nd order effects are real and being the sort of agent(s) that would do that sort of thing is quite bad for your survival odds, so it's much better to not be that kind of agent.
> without there necessarily being (as much of) a slowdown in alignment research.
I doubt this part. I would expect a nuclear war to dramatically decrease everyone's quality of life, in various direct and indirect ways. Which means that much fewer people would have the luxury to think about abstract things such as AI alignment.
Well, EAs as they are now don't remotely have the capability, even if they had the inclination. A much more likely scenario is that the war would happen for unrelated reasons, but starting it could actually be a uniquely beneficial action, probably the most unintuitive idea that I've gotten through ratsphere reading.
Oh, it isn't mine. I happen to think that a simultaneous painless extinction of humanity is a better outcome than most possible futures, which isn't exactly a popular outlook either I'd imagine.
Survival is good in itself. I do think a WW without total annihilation of humanity will be beneficial for re-establishing aims of humanity in the long term. Important point is I'm talking about humanity; not for states, not for democracy, not for environment and so on. I can't help but think a devastating but not species ending wake-up call for humanity should be the last even of its infancy.
The trouble is in the aftermath of a nuclear war, people would very likely develop a violent antipathy for anything nuclear, including nuclear power stations.
Seeing as fossil fuels are increasingly rare and expensive and challenging to obtain (or will soon become so), the resulting shortage of reliable and plentiful energy would greatly hamper future modern life styles and technical advances.
I think consequent aftermaths of WWs provided more and more rule-based approach in international relations, even though I cannot cite any sources for this claim. My hope is that an international government/organization with executive power along with judicial and legislative power can be established. Then, political stability provided by srong measures against ear and power-struggles may lead over all betterment in long term.
Sustaining and providing energy is a bottleneck and nuclear energy is definitely among best choices in my opinion. But without getting into politics, I don't know what is best for overcoming the current and future energy issues.
When I was young (cold war childhood), I was also dreaming about a world government, as a natural way to get peace and no organized war. It was a given for many SF stories, the earth united and the nationial/ethnic difference transposed into interplanetary relations...
For me this "hope" culminated in the early 90, with the fall of the eastern bloc....
Since then, I have lived (in fact, live from) the IT revolution, with easier surveillance and push for a no cash society. I have seen Chinese social credit, Greek crisis and Cyprus confiscation, lately Canadian trucker bank freeze.... And IA is looming in the not distant horizon, except it does not look anything like Asimov robots, it's all big data and closer to his psychohistory stuff....
Let's say I am not so fond of the idea of a world governement anymore, even with Putin restarting the (not so) cold war....
After a world war the surviving world will most likely drop back into anarchy. It depends on how much china is affected - a possible outcome is they dominate the world. There won’t be any adults left.
Why have allergic diseases exploded in the richer parts of the world during the last few decades? And why do babies put everything in their mouths? Could it be that nature has given babies an instinct to put things in their mouths in order to train their immune systems? When people get higher standards of living and fewer children, one of the things they are suddenly able to do is to keep their babies from putting outdoor dirt in their mouths.
* Allergies have exploded in the rich part of the world. About 20-45 percent of young people have some kind of asthma, allergy or atopic eczema.
Within the rich world, urban children have more allergic diseases than rural children. Older siblings seem to protect from allergic diseases. Children on farms are known to have especially low rates of allergic disease.
* A study compared children on Amish farms with children on Hutterite farms. Both the Amish and the Hutterites are anabaptists, but they live differently: The Amish live in single-family households and are selective with technology use. The Hutterites are agricultural socialists who live in collectives of up to 150 people with very large-scale, modern agricultural operations. The Amish had low rates of allergic disease. The Hutterites had normal rates, more than 30 percent of their children were allergic. Researchers analyzed indoor dust and concluded that the barn dirt escaped into Amish homes but not into Hutterite homes.
* Does this mean that only cows protect against allergic disease? A study comparing children in Denmark and urban and rural Greenland found that a lot fewer children had allergic diseases in rural Greenland. Despite the lack of cows, then.
* A study comparing Finnish and Russian Karelia found that rates of allergic disease were multiple times lower on the Russian side. Finns started to get allergic in the mid 20th century, but Russians did not.
* My conclusion from this data is that the common denominator for people who get little allergic disease is outdoor dirt. Third-world dirt, Amish dirt, Greenland dirt, Karelia dirt. Our immune systems do not seem to be very picky. A study from 2004 suggests that babies take everything they see in their mouths in order to train their immune systems for the inevitable.
* When people get better houses and fewer children, they are able to prevent their babies from ingesting outdoor dirt. That could be an explanation why people get more allergic diseases when they get richer, more urban and have fewer older siblings. I can't find any study of how parents behave in this respect, but anecdotal evidence suggests that many parents prevent their babies from eating outdoor dirt.
What do you think? Could allergic disease be prevented if parents allowed their babies to crawl outdoors and eat things from the ground?
The hygiene hypothesis is part of it, but he also mentions the hypothesis that people avoiding feeding their kids potential allergens means that they're more likely to get exposed first through their skin than their digestive system, which seems to trigger allergies. He also mentions potential genetic factors, and a hypothetical role for vitamin D, but none of these things seems sufficient (even if all are part of the story).
The idea that eating allergens is good is very interesting. I wonder if the same thing goes with allergens that are not food, like pollens and dust mites. Then that could be a reason to let babies taste (almost) everything they like: When they crawl around and eat everything, they might get the allergens in their mouths and not only on their skin.
My wife has allergies: I have none (except to mold spores, but I find that a very reasonable allergy). Nobody in my family has any food allergies. I have always assumed it was a hygine hypothesis sort of thing: I grew up in the woods (literally, my nearest neighbor was two miles away and the next nearest was 15 miles) and spent a lot of time as a kid playing outside. That included eating wild berries (without washing them) and wild plants (who knows what has peed or pooped on them? As a 6 year old I didn't think about it).
So I let my kids eat wild plants that I know are edible, and I let the baby crawl around putting stuff in her mouth without worrying too much. I really only care if she's putting something in her mouth that might choke or electrocute her.
Multiple sclerosis seems to be almost entirely prevented by living in a third world country (after adjusting for difficulties in diagnosis). Nobody knows why, but yeah, hygiene hypothesis is the leading one.
MS has recently been strongly linked to contracting Epstein-Barr virus as a young adult rather than as a child. That would probably correlate reasonably well with that observation.
I heard a theory that the reason Caucasians are much more likely to get auto-immune diseases is because of the Black Plague. While we mostly remember the big one in the 14th century, the plague would come back to Europe every decade or so for a few hundred years. Then it just stopped: we didn't cure it or anything, it just stopped happening. One theory as to why is that it simply killed enough Europeans over that few hundred year period that the ones who were left had immune systems resistant enough to prevent it from going epidemic anymore. The theory goes on to say that this shifted Caucasian immune system sensitivity enough that those on the high edge of the bell curve ended up with all kinds of auto-immune diseases.
Its a fun theory, I have no idea whether it holds any water.
Somewhat related - peanut allergies are extremely rare in Israel, and it's theorized that this is because Israeli children often eat Bamba, a peanut-flavored snack food that's popular in Israel but not that common elsewhere.
I have now read an article about it and it is really, really interesting. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02782-8 Basically, the article says that eating allergens protects babies against allergies but inhaling allergens seems to increase the risk instead.
I think that this strengthens the hypothesis that children's habit of eating everything they see protects them against allergies. If eating peanuts protects against peanut allergy, then maybe eating pollen could protect against pollen allergy?
That is very interesting. Bamba looks exactly like my favorite snack, peanut rings. They are rather expensive in Sweden so I almost never buy them, but now I will buy a packet for my 11 month old baby.
"I read that. So now I wonder whether allowing babies to eat the dirt they want to eat could be the best way to stop being over-hygienic."
I spent a lot of time saying, "It's clean dirt/sand ..." while my child was growing up. His mother and I were a lot more relaxed about sand consumption at the local parks (though we did check for cat poop ...)
Maybe. People have argued that in the past people ate a lot more soil-based microorganisms and the loss of their contribution to our gut microbiome matters in all kinds of ways beyond a greater tendency to allergies, e.g.:
This has predictably led to a boom in entrepreneurs hawking soil-based probiotics.
Personally, I'm all for infacts eating a little dirt if they want to, and I made no effort to prevent my kids from doing it. But the larger effect might be the way modern (plant) food comes to us, with a much lower diversity of soil-based microorganisms clinging to it.
And there are always other entrants in the horserace when it comes to biology, e.g. here's an interesting new article that says the population that survived the Black Death tended to have increased activity of genes that promote auto-immune disease (and I would say allargies can be regarded as a very mild form of autoimmune disease, as they are also a case of immune system "hysteria" = overreaction).
Yes, I think you are right that allergic diseases are only a small part of autoimmune problems people in the rich world get, probably due to lack of certain microorganisms. I chose to focus on allergic diseases just because they are so common and easy to compare between different areas.
I find the hypothesis that soil bacteria is necessary for the immune system interesting. The anecdotes I gathered led me to the conclusion that some kind of outdoor dirt protects people against allergic disease. Soil is... definitely a kind of outdoor dirt.
I have no evidence for this, but I wonder if it's a dysgenic effect from the low infant mortality in the modern world. I'm asthmatic and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived without modern inhalers.
It might still be still be caused genetically through mutational load, which would be less hereditary. I've read immune disorders aren't very heritable in general. Maybe the immigrant parents had siblings who died from allergies without first world medicine.
If I'm reading the study correctly immigrant children have more asthma than their parents but less than native first world children, which could fit that story.
Edit: actually thinking about it, that seems like it would require a pretty large fraction of third world infants to be dying from immune disorder, which I haven't heard is happening.
Have a look at Eastern Germany. In GDR time they had very low allergy rates, but after the unification they went up quickly and reached the same level as the west. Possible factors:
- In the GDR, many children went to daily childcare groups, whereas in the west, they stayed with their mother.
- In the GDR, many people used stoves instead of central heating, and insulation was worse.
- Carpeted floor was uncommon.
- No fast food.
- All children were vaccinated in the GDR against whatever, no questions.
- Nobody can have kiwi allergies, if there are no kiwis.
- Air pollution was terrible in the east, brown coal and industry, sulphur dioxide, you name it.
As far as I know, it was mostly after unification that researchers started to notice the differences between East and West Germany. That is, researchers in the 90s observed that children born in the East were much less allergic.
There we have a number of clues to what does not cause allergic disease: Pollution, vaccines, smoke from indoor coal stoves.
But at what age did children start attending daycare in the GDR? If they started very early they might have got ample opportunities to eat outdoor dirt early in life.
In the old days they started very early, then it became later and later. In 1950 a child could be admitted at 6 weeks old, then 1972 18 weeks, 1976 20 weeks. Since 1976 a mother could take off a year after birth of the second child; since 1986 also for the first child. Thus, most children would be more than one year old.
Thank you! That looks similar to Sweden. In the 1970s people could leave babies to childcare when they were only a few months old (source: my aunt who worked in a kindergarten in the 1970s). Now there is no public childcare provision for children under a year. They probably found out that providingchildcare for the youngest children is rather costly.
The only way of preventing babies from eating dirt is to always keep them indoors or supervising them in a very labor-intensive way. So if the DDR kindergartens ever let the babies out, they must have eaten many interesting things.
I thought it was conventional wisdom by now that the first world allergy epidemic is caused by excessive cleanliness. I'm pretty sure that parents wouldn't voluntarily subject children to dirt en masse nevertheless, too icky. A viable long-term solution would probably be something like a vaccine - convenient, safe, orderly.
Back in the '60s, my mother believed in 'clean dirt', i.e. it was good and natural for kids to play outside and get mucky. Perhaps in those days it was conventional wisdom too, and only went away for a time due to a certain 'hygiene mania'.
It is conventional wisdom that the allergy epidemic is caused by cleanliness. The question is which cleanliness is excessive and which cleanliness is appropriate. I think the data suggest that avoidance of outdoor dirt could be the specific culprit.
People might want to wait for germ drops to feed their babies. But for those who have babies now I think allowing that baby to eat grass and leaves could be a good idea. Especially as it will make the baby happier.
Amusingly, babies have a hard-wired protection from eating unknown herbs. They would happily put everything else in the mouth, but will eat only those greens that they observed their parents to consume.
I've come across this claim in some book (I wish I remembered which one), and the observation seems far from universal. Back before my kid had reached the stage of "all green things are poison," he would put or not put herbs in his mouth for reasons of his own. They typically were herbs I eat -- I don't regularly have other kinds around -- but if I eat, say, sage, at its least processed it's cut off the plant, rinsed, chopped, then stirred into a dish; the inference gap from that to "I will chew on this sage leaf" seems rather large.
Now, it's true that the 3-year-old (who is well into the "all green things are poison" stage) will sometimes try plants that he's just seen me eat (e.g. sorrel), but 3 is well past the age of putting everything into his mouth.
Ha ha, how great it would be if my babies ate the greens they observe me eating! My latest baby chewed on all leaves he found, so probably he was missing that wire.
In my experience, babies seldom actually eat the things they mouth. They just suck and chew on them (in order to get the juicy bacteria on the surface, I assume). If they actually swallow pieces of herbs they tend to vomit.
In best case soil germs can travel to grass or mulch woodchips. Then the babies could maybe eat grass and mulch and woodchips and get their bacteria without that much lead.
I've never heard that either and I've lived in America all my life (eating wild and garden plants without a care). Then again, I have always lived out West and never in big industrial or post industrial cities. It might be more of an east coast thing.
It makes perfect sense but is probably unlikely (a zebra to the horse of increasing awareness of Chinese tech threatening US security interests). It's certainly worth reconsidering any donations you make to AI safety over the potential for things like this to happen just in case, but I personally already don't donate to that field.
Compare two health surveys. BRFSS calls people and asks them questions. NHANES goes in person and measures people, rather than trusting their claims about height and weight. Also it does blood tests. But it only visits a few zip codes. This is a serious problem because different zip codes are systematically different.
They don't do this for the same reason that pollsters don't use larger samples and poll more often on a consistent schedule in all the key races. Money. It always comes down to money. Many pollsters even advertise their cost efficiency to clients.
For door knocking specifically it is also logistically challenging in many other ways. But the main limitation on polling is money, money, money.
Why can't pollsters say "whatever biases are inherent in our methods have produced an average error of D+2 in the past three elections, so we'll just subtract 2% from the Democrats' predicted vote share"?
Pollsters often do various changes to their methodology, each election is really quite different, many polls miss in a random direction by a random margin rather than a consistent one. There's a lot of reasons a simple modifier doesn't work. Although RCP decided to just do that this election. Although ironically they don't accept all the polls and they don't make any effort to make their error modifier consistent with what polls polled each cycle so they are bound to be quite wrong.
Note that 538 calculates house effects (pollster bias) on a *per pollster* basis rather than applying it to an average or a model. Deciding that YouGov has a D+1 house effect and adjusting their polls before throwing those into the ensemble is *very* different than claiming that the final number needs to be adjusted to compensate for a D+1 skew.
Every field contains a bespoke, incompletely worked out theory of PID controls. (proportional/integral/derivative; I'd compose a longer explanation but the substack comment box is hanging every three seconds, and reloading takes 40 seconds, loses the in-progress comment, and doesn't fix the hangs)
Thats a very interesting concept. George Soros says everything has three wave frequencies acting on it: short; medium; long. One needs only to track the waves
The most important part of any poll these days is the "likely voter" screen, which is a set of questions pollsters ask pollees that are meant to assess the likelihood that the latter will actually vote. Since about 4 in 10 registered voters don't actually vote (in an off-year election), and the distribution is quite definitely not random (generally those on the left are less likely to vote), this is a massive correction, and it can only be done by sampling a crapton more people than you need data points, and then applying the filter after you get the answers to your screening questions. That makes door-to-door canvassing even more expensive than it might at first seem -- because you don't even know on how many doors in a given district or neighborhood you need to knock until after you have knocked on enough to realiably predict the percentage of actual voters. And since you don't want to wait a week or two to gather your data, the only way to do this is to hire way more doorknockers than you think you'll need, deploying them all simultaneously, so you don't accidentally run short of usable data. (If you're doing it by phone, it's very cheap and easy to add an extra 1,000 calls to a particular Zip Code if you find you need it.) Very, very, expensive. Given that most consumers pay $0 for poll results, the ROI here is pretty rough.
Visiting a thousand random addresses spread across the country would be incredibly expensive compared to phoning up a thousand numbers with a possibly-automated poll.
And it still suffers from all sorts of biases in terms of who is home and who is willing to talk to a random stranger at their front door.
I assume your polling agency doesn't have 10,000 employees, so more than 90% of zip codes won't have an employee living in it. For these zip codes, you will have to add travel time at the beginning and end of the polling hours for your employee to go polling.
Once they are there, knocking on doors is a *lot* slower than dialing random numbers. When you dial a number, if there is no response in 45 seconds, you can instantly move on to the next one, and can easily try over 60 in an hour. When you knock on a door, you probably need to wait at least 45 seconds to see if someone answers, you might need to knock again after 30 seconds, and once you decide no one is coming, you will have to take some amount of time to get to the next door. (Possibly 5 seconds if you're in an apartment building - ignoring how you got inside and onto the residential floor - but more like 30 to 60 seconds in a suburban subdivision, or several minutes in a rural area.
I'm not convinced that you're likely to get a response faster by knocking on doors than by calling. I think a few decades ago it used to be common for people to answer random door knocks, but these days people screen their knocks even more than their calls, even assuming they are home at the time someone knocks.
During early voting periods, and on election days, there are agencies that do "exit polls", where they wait outside polling places and survey people there. That eliminates all the time knocking, waiting, and figuring out how to get into apartment buildings, but it still has the problem of representativity. They tend to aim for a bunch of precincts that are known to have diverse demographics, and then they wait for actual election results to come in so that they know how much to weight each of these precincts, and then they use that to estimate the results they got on the questions other than the demographic and actual vote ones. Because it is so much more difficult, there is basically just one consortium that does exit polling, and they don't do it in every state.
Yeah, African democracies and the AU have been really good on this sort of thing. I'm not sure if we'll ever admit it but their take on how sovereignty and peace works in the 21st century is probably the correct one.
Yes, just ignore the fact that there have been countless wars in Africa over the past few decades, many of which with obvious ethnic influences. This speech is practically propagandistic. What he says does not describe postcolonial Africa, and to the extent things have gotten more peaceful over time, it is precisely because the ethnic strife played out already in a way that shaped many of these countries. It certainly wasn't any nonsense about Africans all coming together as brothers and deciding that peace is the way forward.
You keep claiming extensive knowledge of Africa and you keep on saying pretty objectively wrong things. In particular this speech, which I agree is a bit simplistic compared to the more thorough policy documents, is trying to explain not the conflicts that happened in the aftermath of European withdrawal (or during European colonization) but how Africa's become increasingly peaceful and internationally cooperative over the past few decades.
Only 2:39 minutes, and I don't know how well Kenya has lived by the ideas, but it's a fine example on focusing on how people live with each other rather than assuming that ethnicity is more important.
Sure I have been vaccinated for a wide variety of things, including COVID a couple times (4?). Vaccines are generally pretty amazing and a huge benefit to global health.
I got the MMR when I was a kid, is that what you mean?
If this is more Covid scares and Ivermectin Guy-style hectoring, not interested in playing.
EDIT: Ai Eru melme, this *is* Ivermectin Guy Part Deux: our friend here reads a Substack newsletter put out by FLACC which is founded/headed by one Pierre Kory who is another "ivermectin is a wonder cure, I am A Doctor so you can believe me" type:
Then how do you explain the decline in infectious diseases, and the outright elimination of smallpox? Or how whenever a group of people choose not to be vaccinated against something an outbreak of that thing will most often follow?
anyway, how do you know that this so called “indoor plumbing” link isn’t a big plumbing psy-op designed to convince you to buy pipes you don’t actually need?
Mate, if we're talking the Brits and the conquest of water-borne disease, the famous story there is Dr John Snow and the Broad Street pump, and that was about cholera:
Viruses cannot use energy, right; that's why it might take thousand viral particles so one can successfully enter cell. But then it can make millions of copies of itself.
honestly, it is amazing to see how brainwahsed some poeple are. I cannot believe you actually believe in the existance of cells.
Can you show me a clever repeatable controlled experiment that proves these socalled “cells” exist? And don’t bring up “we can look at cells through microscopes” because 1. how do we know the freemasons aren’t hacking our microscopes and 2. if you “did” believe that things seen through a microscope were real, then you would have to admit that viruses were also real.
Done routinely on every biotech undergrad course, just enroll in your local university.
The existence of an entire industry of woodworking - which you can easily join, if you so choose - should convince you about the existence and usefulness of hammers and saws.
Now replace woodworking with sociology studies or philosophy or professional sport, does this argument hold? One can use hammer or saw without joining any industry.
> show me a link to the repeatale experiment which proves that inanimate "virus" particles
You're totally right that if a person believes this, they do so on trust. But this is true of many, many things.
For example, can you show me a repeatable experiment that demonstrates there is a consistent material reality outside my head that follows mathematical rules indepdent of my state of mind?
Huh, 'Henry Ford started the Second World War' is not something I'd previously heard.
And having heard it, I will now forget it as speedily as possible.
If you're going to share your tinfoil hat pals' conspiracy theories on here, at least make them interesting? David Icke may have been crazy/a grifter, but the Lizard People are at least fun to contemplate.
Hey "le_berger_des_photons," I have a question for you that none of us is bright enough to answer :
If you had to choose between administering fake vaccines for the International Jewish conspiracy for 20 years while being fellated by Anthony Fauci, in exchange for the freedom to take multiple witless shits online afterwards for the rest of your life
OR
mortgaging your testicles to Elie Wiesel while forgetting not to drink from the place where the neighbor relieves his bowels (but you do get a smallpox shot to protect you) in exchange for lessons from Elie in how to be a witty and intimidating troll instead of one who sounds like a cokehead with a case of undergraduate arrogance . . .
Please do us a favor: if you want to deny the Shoah, start your post with that instead of your theories of how covid is basically WW3. That way, we can update our probability estimate of you having something interesting to say and skip your post.
Even if any of that was true (we dropped a million tons of bombs on German cities, but you expect me to believe that hitting a few specific factories would have shortened the war by years?), I don't see how it denies the fact that the Germans were putting people into camps and killing them en masse.
And don't try to tell me that the Germans didn't put people into camps. I grew up literally down the street from a man who survived a concentration camp.
Also, Scott is putting most of his posts (and all of his important posts) out in the open, and his subscribers basically pay him so he can continue to do that, even though their marginal utility of getting access to a few extra posts and the hidden open threads is rather small in the first place.
As for the quality of the comments, I like to think that if people are wrong (IMHO) within the larger LW/SSC/ACX community, they are at least wrong in new and interesting ways. Not like your other comment, to mention an extreme example.
I think that with open threads the question here would be more about who can write than who can read. I am not a subscriber myself, but I guess that quality of discussion among people ready to pay for Scott's work might be higher. So, unless Substack has a way to show comments to everyone while allowing only subscribers to comment, those commenters are better off in the sense of having a "walled garden" where they and only they can chat.
Another person who is better off is Scott: he has promised benefits for subscription (and those benefits have nudged some people into subscribing). If he unilaterally revokes some of the said said benefits, it damages his reputation for not upholding his part of the bargain. And damaging reputation is bad, as it is a valuable asset. Also, after losing some of the benefits some people might decide to unsubscribe, and Scott gains less money, so this is another way he is better off with us (unsubscribed people) not reading some of the posts.
"a way to show comments to everyone while allowing only subscribers to comment"
Oh no, that would only drive away people! There are several Substacks where it's "only subscribers can comment here" and I'm "good night, good luck and goodbye" because I am not taking out a subscription merely to be able to comment. I'm interested in reading your stuff, but not *that* interested.
And I think there are likely to be many people who would be interested enough to comment, but not if they have to pay for the privilege. And we might lose out on good, new, voices that way.
>a way to show comments to everyone while allowing only subscribers to comment
This is doable, yes. I don't really agree with the premise, though - limited sample size, but among the Substacks I've perused which do use this feature, the discussion is not noticeably better. Actually, it tends to be honestly quite bad! (I'm always amazed that some people derive so much utility from social-media-barrel-bottom-quality commenting that they're willing to pay for such privilege...Twitter etc. are free!)
And many blogs outside of Substack also disallow or disincentivize anonymous comments by default too, with not-particularly-good results. One could also compare discussions between similar posts which are locked vs. unlocked, although I suppose that's a selection effect...savvy blog authors tend to paywall posts that are particularly likely to be controversial or misinterpreted, so of course those discussions tend to get a bit spicy.
For ACX specifically: this is a fairly costly subscription, as far as Substack pricing goes, and the benefits are pretty meagre. Fallacy of EMT I guess, but it's hard for me to understand why someone would weight access to HOTs highly vs. more intangible values like "support favourite blogger/affective polarization (NYT Delenda Est)". Scott's also not someone I'm particularly worried about being in rough financial shape from a hypothetical small subscriber decline, either, not that it wouldn't make me sad. It's the bloggers who subsist entirely off Substack income who I worry about a lot more - they have to be a lot more careful around "customer acquisiton and retention".
I'd agree with your statement. In fact, for a community of soi-disant rationalists, we seem to indulge in poor reasoning, unfounded conjectures, and opinions as if we were ordinary non-rational people. Who'd have thunk it? ;-)
I'm not singling you out Nancy. In fact, I'd say you were one of the more thoughtful community members.
Naw, I don't think you should be a paying subscriber for all that you read. I just don't think you should act like other people are obligated to pay so you can get content for free. You don't have to create a story where you're the rightful inheritor of other people's investments. You could instead try being grateful.
Indeed, Summitrecoup is the best charge back company out there, reached out to them after seeing their reviews to help recover my investment and they did just that and more. I’ve been scammed twice by fake recovery companies But Summitrecoup com showed why they’re different and Legit. Got back all my funds.
Reading Unsigned Integer's explanation of wage rigidity reminds me of the bit in Seeing Like a State where the local lord absolutely would not raise the grain tax from "one basket" to "one and a half baskets" because that would cause riots, but they would try everything else - stretching the basket so it becomes slightly larger, pouring the grain from a greater height so it compacts more etc.
Over here in the UK, where everyone from train drivers to university lecturers to the postal service has either gone on strike recently or will be doing so soon, the equivalent of fiddling with the grain basket seems to come down to: (1) awarding pay rises below inflation, (2) messing with parameters like the percentage of wages that go into the pension scheme, or the conditions of the scheme, (3) expecting workers to work longer hours for the same pay and conditions (overtime in the UK is mostly unpaid).
Here is the story of an experiment started in the Soviet Union back in the 50s, trying to domesticate foxes, which turned out to be wildly successful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
I'd like to replicate that, concentrated very strong artificial selection, but for intelligence, not for domestication.
Starting either with dogs or capuchins, double the population of the Belyaev experiments.
Back of the napkin calculations, this would cost somewhere around $90k per year (Eastern Europe is much cheaper than the US).
Are there any ways to get this funding?
VC funding expects returns with 5-10 years horizon.
Scientific grants would not be sufficient (again, Eastern Europe).
EU grants are mostly for politically acceptable targets, not weird stuff like this.
EA grants would not be appropriate either, it doesn't save lives.
Tech billionaires? Lesser known funds? Anything else?
How are you planning to measure intelligence?
I remember that as the foxes became more docile their appearance changed to be more like a cute dog, and these two traits seem to be linked. It seems possible that the more intelligent foxes would be more aggressive, wild, and less cooperative, which would make it very difficult to measure for "intelligence." I've read that wild animals have larger brains than domestic ones.
There are many tests for animal intelligence; I'd probably have to combine and improve them.
>It seems possible that the more intelligent foxes would be more aggressive, wild, and less cooperative
I wouldn't start with foxes.
But yeah, it's a possibility, in which case I'd have to add a second variable to select from, which would slow things down.
IMO the quality of intelligence test would be a limiting factor. An IQ test for animals. What animal would you start with? I think the Foxes study had 40 generations of breeding.
There have been much more recent and successful efforts at domesticating foxes than what the soviets achieved.
Could you link some sources on that? I'm not familiar with any outside the Russian programme.
Why do you want to do this? Understand the evolution of intelligence? Train a force of monkey assassins to destroy your enemies?
Either way, I support you
The newest post restricts comments to subscribers only? Since when is that a thing?
Huh ? Do you mean the mails one ? No, I'm not a subscriber and I just went there and saw the comment box, made a comment, it appeared.
Odd, I typed up a big comment earlier today and got a "comments are for subscribers only" popup. Must have been a bug.
What would the SCOTUS look like if it required an 80% supermajority in the Senate to be elected to it, and instead of/as well as the president, any Senator (or just the majority and minority whips?) could nominate a justice to be voted on?
Meh. Much more interesting to ask what it would look like if getting a law degree or ever practising law disqualified you, i.e. none of its members could be lawyers, or even people who studiied the law.
They would probably also need to establish a new Marbury v. Madison like precedent, in which they struck down laws as unconstitutional if they defied the ability of a reasonably intelligent non-lawyer to even understand what the hell they mean after a few hours of concentrated good-faith effort. I'd be good with that.
Sure, it would be super interesting if having expertise in anything was a disqualification. I for one, would not ever seek medical treatment.
Nobody would get confirmed.
...empty? I think ubiquitous stuff like breathing air might still fail to hit 80% Senate support, and adding additional candidates would just split the vote.
I'm sceptical of this - You may be right, but I think it's plausible that making achieving partisan advantage an obviously-impossible goal would mean that both sides would see that nominating the most politically-neutral judges they could find, or even nominating strict partisans in pairs, was better than no new judges.
Without a mechanic penalizing a lack of judges, there's no reason for someone to deliberately pick a judge they think will overrule them. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them currently prefer law interpretations to be split across the various Court of Appeals, which is what an empty Supreme Court gets you. Maybe they'd do the pairs thing, but there' s a reason the court has an odd number; the eight-person court of 2016 had a lot of no-decision ties.
(Also, it's now easier to make a Constitutional Amendment changing the Supreme Court selection process than it is to follow the process.)
probably not completely empty, but definitely no new justices since 1994.
Practical(?) question: how can I signal that I am a shape rotator while only using words?
Talk about shape rotation hobbies or passions you have.
Like in a job interview or in general?
If you have time for it just start reading a lot of books and become a double threat: shape rotator and wordcel
In general.
If I want to highlight my shape rotation ability in an interview I would just say “I’m a math guy.”
AI art generation + 3D printing seems like a low-labor low-cost solution to a lot of the complaints about modern architecture here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern
Baumol's cost disease makes masonry keep getting more expensive in real terms, until we automate the masons, and we're very nearly there.
AI art generation, right now, can only be used for inspiration, not actual architectural sketches.
seems like a straightforward extension of current image generation stuff to train it to make 3D models using a corpus of video game levels and CAD stuff.
I recall reading a blog post by a woman who was warning against mindfulness meditation potentially being harmful. I think I'm her case she said it slowed her reaction times and increased the severity of her visual snow. I can't seem to find it, anyone remember this?
Edit: Of course I found it as soon as I posted: https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/i-believed-the-hype-and-did-mindfulness-meditation-for-dumb-reasons-now-im-trying-to-reverse-the-damage
I think this is a very real and somewhat common phenomenon. Here's a Harper's article about it: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation
(IIRC I also once saw a LessWrong post about someone's personal experiences with this, but I can't find it again.)
Its interesting but should also mostly be ignored in favor of data. Even the most widely effective interventions and practises can be harmful for particular individuals.
Well, I wouldn't expect such extreme downsides, but I do think there's something to the point of view that your brain is doing things like compressing sensory information for evolutionary reasons. I think some of the sales pitches for meditation don't hold up to scrutiny super well, unless you have something like an anxiety disorder which would lead to you benefiting from it quite a lot.
Maybe, but again, refer to data, not one individual (who could be an outlier, could be lying, could be mistaken etc.). Some widely prescribed drugs can be fatal to certain people, doesn't mean they aren't life changing for many others.
Yeah just to be clear, I'm definitely not saying anything like "no one should meditate." I'm saying something more like "it's probably not the case that everyone should meditate."
Apropos to nothing, a (small, underpowered) study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042811018805) finding a strong number-of-siblings and birth-order correlation for... whether you'll be beaten by your parents.
"For parents, both physical and verbal severity scores of those with one child were higher than those with two children."
"The results showed that the second children in families are more beaten than the first child."
If this correlation survived a high-powered study, I feel like this could explain a lot about birth-order effects.
Highly doubtful. I can believe that a survey of Iranians a while ago would turn up high levels of endorsement of child abuse - but the birth-order effect literature rests mostly on things like Scandinavian population registries where I expect being beaten to affect a very small percentage of children and hence, even if the effects were huge, would struggle to explain the meaningful average effects measured at a population level. I bet if you find some stats on the rarity of child-beating levels in Sweden (IIRC, the best birth order effect paper currently), and the average birth-order effect, make some plausible assumptions about differential sibling exposure (can't have a *birth-order* effect if all or none are beaten), and back out the effect size necessary, you'd find that it'd require something ludicrous like totally determining personality or needing to drop IQ 15 points for anyone who got a strapping even once, that sort of thing.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-badly-need-better-alternatives
A crazy notion... Maybe people eat meat because it makes them feel good. Not for some psychological reason, but there's (also) some physiological reason which is not yet understood.
If you want people to not eat meat, perhaps the right direction of research isn't to invent a plant-based thing which is indistinguishable from meat while you're eating it, but rather something which is pleasant enough and is a good physiological match for meat.
Evidence: I know a couple of vegetarians who went back to eating some meat after years of not eating meat, and it really did seem to be more about health.
Then you ought to oppose immigration from developing to developed countries
No, people in wealthy countries eat more meat. They can't afford it developing countries, but when they get to America they switch from rice and beans to animal protein. Moving to western countries increases ALL aspects of a person's carbon footprint including meat consumption. What you've said is just wishful thinking with no empirical basis whatsoever.
Even if you convince e.g. an hispanic American to reduce their meat intake, this reduced amount is still likely to be higher than what they did/would have consumed in their home country!
"this is bordering on monomaniacal"
No, this is a perfectly relevant point. Climate veganism is an almost exclusively western white phenomena. Convincing people to cut back on meat to save the environment only works for white people. And you're going to convince them to do this MUCH more slowly than the rate of immigrants coming to America, which means it is trivially true that reducing meat consumption to save the climate is a completely hopeless cause as long as immigration exists.
Minor warning (25% of ban)
If the leftists get their way, that won't be a concern, because humanity won't be around in the future.
What is of more interest is why leftists think that preserving one of the 5000 species of frogs is more important than humans being able to survive winter.
Funny that the leftists think the same thing about the rightists:
"If the rightists get their way, that won't be a concern, because humanity won't be around in the future.
What is of more interest is why rightists think that preserving one of the 5000 kinds of steak is more important than humans being able to survive the coming floods, hurricanes, droughts and hydrogen sulfide infestation."
Hmmm, this style of arguing won't get us much nearer to the truth.
About the frog species, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss
Livestock is responsible for about a quarter of the agriculture sector's greenhouse gas emissions. And meat is much worse than plants in terms of greenhouse gases per calorie, with beef the worst of the lot. So replacing meat with plants (ideally, by making fake meat that tastes just as good) seems like a good way to take a bite out of global warming.
But I suppose if you don't think global warming is a problem, then you would call all of that "random unrelated stuff."
I still think it would be worth finding out why you need two meat dishes a week.
A missing vitamin, maybe? I know vegans need to supplement with B12. (Or add nutritional yeast to your recipes, which is fortified with B12.) I don't know how long it takes before you start to notice the deficiency.
That's plausible. The interesting thing is that there might be a vitamin which hasn't been discovered.
The BBC has an interesting story about LNG ships waiting around off the coasts of Europe, just chillin'.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63331709
The behemoths are waiting. Off the coasts of Spain, Portugal, the UK and other European nations lie dozens of giant ships packed full of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Cooled to roughly -160C for transportation, the fossil fuel is in very high demand. Yet the ships remain at sea with their prized cargo.
After invading Ukraine in February, Russia curtailed gas supplies to Europe, sparking an energy crisis that sent the price of gas soaring. That led to fears of energy shortages and eye-watering bills for consumers.
"It's built up for about, I would say, five to six weeks," says Augustin Prate, vice president of energy and commodity markets at Kayrros, one of many observers who has watched the situation unfold.
He and colleagues track ships via AIS (Automatic Identification System) signals, which are broadcast by vessels to receivers, including on satellites.
"Clearly it's a big story," he says.
Are there lots of empty slots at European LNG terminals? Is there space to store any gas that is offloaded? If not, that's your answer right there.
Registering here a conspiracy hypothesis that this has something to do with the recent + historically-unprecedented "global market punishment for economically-rational behavior" events on both British bonds and Meta stock. (I.e. that some collection of UHNW individuals and investment firms are colluding to manipulate markets by restricting commodity supply, to create artificial inflation, to get people to react by lowering spending [i.e. to engender artificial bottom-up austerity]; and then are further manipulating the market by collectively shorting anyone who ignores the prior manipulation and continues spending anyway.)
You think that British policy and Meta corporate strategy are actually good and economically-rational? I think the markets rightfully view tax cuts during inflationary times, and a focus on the likely-doomed Metaverse as bad ideas.
I never said "good." (At least, they're not ethically good.)
(Also, to be clear, the thing market analysts have reported the market as 'punishing' Meta for, has nothing to do with the Metaverse, and everything to do with not "obeying" the bottoms-up market austerity measures by "doing 20% layoffs like all the other bigcorps did" — i.e. "aiding" in cutting spending / decreasing liquidity available to individuals in the market.)
Anyway: these strategies are "economically rational" (not quite the same thing as "rational" undecorated) in the sense that organizations (corporations, governments) have incentive structures (emergent preferences) which can — and often do — lead to all their resources being aligned behind selfishly maximizing short-term gains of their own shareholders, at the expense of both their own long-term gains, _and_ reducing the size of the pie for everyone else outside the organization. In other words, these are "firestarter bird" strategies — "I flush out the prey and so get more food for me now, in exchange for burning the area to the ground, so nobody else (including me) can get food later."
Such strategies are "economically rational" in two senses:
1. an instrumentally-rational sense — i.e. they're rational presuming you hold an organization's terminal preferences as axiomatic: the people involved in directing the organization in this direction can take their winnings and leave the organization before the long-term consequences come due. (This was the focus of the Tory plan: decreasing taxes on the rich, so they could get richer, and kick back some of that wealth to Tory leaders.)
2. a epistemically-rational game-theoretic sense: spending resources in a time of austerity enables you to outcompete rivals who spend less; thus driving them out of business; thus forcing the market to consolidate around you, granting you more monopoly power over the market, allowing you more control over prices; thus putting you in position to make more money in the end, when the market eventually recovers.
The interesting bit to me, is that none of the above is a hot take — organizations have been doing these sorts of selfish short-term "firestarter bird" plays throughout the history of capital markets. But, by-and-large, the organizations undertaking such acts in response to inflation have been _rewarded_ by the market. (It is in an individual investor's selfish interest to go long on governments and companies that bully others. If buying foreign war bonds was a thing, everyone would buy the bonds of the predicted winner of a war, even when they're the aggressor.)
There is a reason that Meta (a public company that plans in accordance with the market) and the current Tory government of Britain (a group without a fundamental libertarian bone in its body) would choose to undertake these tactics: they _expected_ the market to react positively. Their mental models _predicted_ the markets would react positively. Like they did historically. Like any naive model of "the market" as a set of people all trying to maximize their own wealth by buying and selling would predict.
Note also that investors and wealth-management firms _in_ the UK weren't selling off held British government bonds. It was only _foreign_ investors holding British bonds that were shorting. Which would refute this being an action of "the market" in general thinking the Tory policy would tank the British economy over the long term — as that would been expressed just as much through Britain's own investors shorting the bonds, as foreign investors doing it. The fact that the British investors continued to hold the bonds (until they hit sell-triggers that meant they couldn't any more) meant that, at least in _their_ eyes — for the effects on _their_ investments — the policy was a long-term rational one.
It takes a kind of centralized awareness — a game-theoretic non-defection between distributed actors, that "the market" as an entity does not inherently possess — to choose to punish "firestarter bird" tactics _despite_ those tactics being profitable for individual investors. Until this most recent global inflational crisis, that centralized awareness was nowhere to be found in the market.
I've mostly seen stories about Meta's stock decline being related to the Metaverse, not its labor market decisions, but maybe that's not the case. But assuming it is, I think investors are correctly recognizing that the Metaverse is not a good idea, and reflects both poor leadership and weakness in its core product. If I'm wrong about investors' thinking, then that might provide evidence for your hypothesis.
I had not heard of the difference in domestic versus foreign investor behavior. But that could simply be explained by differences in opinion about the long-term effects of the policy, not from conspiracy. And growth in the British economy isn't really a firestarter bird tactic - economic growth is generally a positive-sum game between countries. So a story of international markets punishing the British because they're trying to jump ahead of other countries in growth doesn't make sense to me.
On the other hand, energy subsidies are right now a zero-sum game in Europe - more natural gas for the British directly leads to less natural gas for the Germans. But that wasn't the policy making the news regarding the market reaction, even though it would most align with your theory.
That's not the main reason why increases in the minimum wage might not decrease employment; the standard argument from economists is based on non-competitive markets for labor, *especially* at the low end. When labor markets are monopsonistic (a monopoly but in reverse; only one buyer), it makes sense for an employer to artificially lower the wages it offers. You can almost think of it as the Marxist-style "reserve army of labor," except it's not held together by magic class-consciousness glue. If you're the only employer, refusing to create enough jobs for all workers so that you can drive their wages down is a viable strategy. (Unlike in a competitive market, where all that does is drive those workers to different employers and leave you without a workforce.)
To be clear, monopsonies are not all that common in labor markets as a whole. But low-income labor markets are a *lot* less competitive, particularly in rural areas where you can easily have a single Walmart or a factory that provides a third of a town's employment and most of its low-education jobs.
Economists generally agree that in the long run, nominal wages are fairly flexible, because employees move between jobs, at which point wages become "Unstuck." Even if they weren't, under the model in that comment, minimum wages would still damage employment and the economy overall. In the commenter's rigid-wage model, wages are too high in boom times, but in a bust, wages will be too low. If that's the case, setting high minimum wages will cause high unemployment in recessions, which will more than compensate the higher employment during booms.
That's definitely one theory, and yes, rural areas can have non-competitive labor markets. But urban and suburban areas usually have plenty of employment opportunities for low wage labor, so the monopsony explanation doesn't hold well.
I think you're mixing up the implications of the nominal wage rigidity model, though. While wages are flexible upwards, there is a great amount of rigidity downward, particularly caused by labor supply concerns. People hate taking pay cuts, and will often leave a job instead of accepting a pay cut, even if they'd actually be better off staying. So, during boom times, wages may get stuck at too low of levels, because employers are hesitant to raise wages when they need to. But the more common effect is that during busts, employers are unable to lower wages even if they need to, so they end up laying off employees. Then those employees are unwilling to accept jobs making less than they did before, unless they get desperate. And that effect can help prolong recessions.
Sorry for the overly broad question, but what do you guys do for stress?
I try to rationalize my way out of it e.g stress is useless and isn't helpful, but this is typically a short term solution and the pit in my stomach inevitably comes back. I try to meditate but this is also short term. Any ideas?
Exercise and regular prayer.
Get more sleep.
(But also if you are both hungry and sleepy you should eat first and then sleep. I learned this the hard way.)
:- Talk to people I love - my parents or my siblings. They probably can't help with the thing stressing me, but being reassured that people love me and care about me sometimes makes me feel better.
:- Go for a run. I /hate/ exercise with the burning fury of a million blazing suns, but/so it works as a counter-irritant, and I need to do it anyhow so I might as well get something out of it. Plus, /having/ run, and showered, does sometimes leave me feeling good.
:- Decide that I'm going to let the ball that I'm stressing out about keeping in the air drop. Obviously, this isn't always an option, but it's often worth at least asking "if I just don't do this, how bad will it be?"
Oh, one other one I've found helps: sit and play with my fancy rats. Having a rat demonstrate that it trusts you by climbing onto you and licking peanut butter off your finger is very soothing.
(This doesn't work well when the source of stress is that one of your rats has escaped and is hiding under the sofa, but thankfully I've just recaptured her).
I macro expanded the first occurrence of rats to rationalists. Fancy rationalists
Lifting heavy weights 3-5 times per week
Move. Get out of the house, go for a run. Do some kind of exercise.
It sounds silly - "why would going for a run make me less upset that Jack has done X, Y, and Z? Why would it make me less worried about my test scores or my job?"
But we don't get to decide the things that make our brains release endorphins, so go for a run. And if you can go for a run or play basketball or do something exercisey with a friend, so much the better.
Is this one of those weird things where some people enjoy running?
It doesn't need to be running though, any kind of exercise should have more or less the same effect. Better if it's something you enjoy. Dancing works well for me, it's very hard (for me) to be in a bad mood while dancing.
Another vote for dancing, you get your exercise plus socialization. And music.
Oh I hate running. I just can't argue with how I feel *after* running (or really any other form of exercise). I keep wanting to believe that I have complex thoughts and emotions and shouldn't be as easy to manipulate as "go outside and wiggle around for 30 minutes and you'll be less upset," but every time I find myself upset, if I just make my self go wiggle around for 30 minutes... boom, suddenly I'm not as stressed out about whatever was bothering me.
Bodies are weird.
That has never been my experience. I have enjoyed various forms of exercise in service of a greater goal (such as going hiking to see nice scenery, or playing some kind of sport with friends), but I've only ever enjoyed those things *in spite* of the physical exertion.
I've never experienced this ever. Running makes me feel awful in just about every way, and certainly does not improve my mood.
I ***ing hate running and exercise, and agree with Nobody Special 100%. Our meat suits need sunlight and exercise to work properly
I make a joke about it. Laughing and hearing other people laughing always takes away tension for me. It’s all just maya after all.
There are stressful things that *cannot* be avoided, and there are also stressful things that *can* be avoided. On the other side of the equation, there are things that *reduce* stress; some of them are harmless, other some with bad side effects.
The general strategy is to eliminate the unnecessary sources of stress, and only do the harmless things that reduce your stress, but do them a lot. Hopefully the overall result would be that you can deal with whatever stress remains.
A lot of stress is caused by specific people. Some people just *love* drama; they will create a conflict even in a situation where anyone else would just relax and enjoy a beautiful day. Some people are assholes; they reduce their own stress by stressing out others. If possible, avoid them. If not possible, try to reduce your time spent with them, and stop thinking about them when you don't have to (unless you are calmly strategizing how to further reduce your contact with them).
On the other hand, there are people who are great at making you relax, or great at helping you. (These might be two different types of people.) Try spending more time with them; maybe do something nice for them in return.
Some people do not realize that they can be strategic about who they spend their free time with. For example, instead of picking up a phone and calling other people, they wait until someone calls them. Problem is, sometimes it is the wrong people who call you all the time; you could call the right ones instead.
The same is true about internet debates. Some places are just horrible, and the winning move is not to visit them. Even in a relatively nice place such as ACX sometimes bad things happen. You need to realize that "not responding" is a perfectly valid option, and often the right one.
For me, the stress-relieving human interactions typically happen *offline*. There is something nice about being fully in the moment, instead of having 20 browser tabs open. Another activity that works for me is taking a walk alone.
Some stress is caused by things other than people. In such case, try asking a friend for help. Or just talk about it, any someone may offer a useful advice. Sometimes there are people able and willing to help you, they just do not know that you have this problem.
Avoid addictive things. If you start fighting stress by taking drugs, overeating, or debating online, there is more stress coming in the future as a consequence of your actions. (Nothing wrong with browsing the web once in a while, or eating once in a while, per se. Problem is, if you do it as a way to cope with stress, so you increase the dosage when the stress increases.)
Don't panic. If you can't fix the big things, at least try fixing the smaller ones. (Do the dishes. Clean up your room.) It might help build you the right attitude.
Sometimes the stress is caused by stupid ideas of other people. Maybe you worry a lot about achieving something you actually do not care about, only because someone else told you that you should. (Problem is, this is sometimes difficult to distinguish from a genuinely good advice.) Sometimes, abandoning the whole idea is the right option.
There is a checklist "HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired". If you feel bad, check if you are not in one of these conditions; if you are, address it directly. (Take a healthy snack. Breathe deeply. Call a friend. Take a nap.)
I avoid stressful situations. This may not always work but it's working okay for now.
I'll post here mostly to be notified about other people's answers, I can use them myself. But, I'm not one to let a massive lack of knowledge stop me from giving advice.
For acute stress, like worrying that your work won't be up to par, I think the most stress-relieving option is to just assume the worst outcome as the default, and plan for it. So if you're worried about work problems, look up other jobs hiring in your area, and do your work with the knowledge that you have a fallback job if you crater badly enough to get fired from this one. Then when you don't crater, it's all gravy.
For more long-term stuff like unemployment, cleaning seems to help. Clean, call people you've been meaning to talk to, do things that can at least reasonably be interpreted as productive. Get enough productivity under your belt and your stress will ease. I assume.
For stress from people, avoid those people.
Rationalizing probably won't work. Exercise is probably the best cure, but it takes time and repetitive practice to really embed itself as a positive addiction.
What kind of stress are you talking about? Is it situational, related to something in particular? General?
Generally, I think SSRIs are the miracle cure for how to live in the 21st century. They'll make your daily anxieties and depressions seem not so awful. That's the only thing I've tried that is good for relieving stress long term, as in anything else I've tried hasn't really worked for more than like 20 minutes.
Actually detoxing from screens in general helps. Social media is toxic, we know it, yet here we are.
A quick question for the people living in California (and/or any other high tax US state). I am having a genuinely hard time understanding how the tax rate there is so high, and yet the public goods are so… non existent.
For reference: with Germany’s tax rate, if you are making about 100,000 euro, you pay 36.5% taxes (https://incomeaftertax.com/100000-after-tax-de). If you live in California, and make $101,100 (aka about 100,000 euro) you pay 30.1% (https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=101100&from=year®ion=California). (And I think California tax rate exceeds German tax rate in the top income brackets). They get free health care, free university, pensions, actually working trains, great unemployment (the government will give you unemployment for life, if you need it), maternity/paternity leave etc.
Small differences, I understand. Differences in priorities, I understand. Low tax rates/Thatcherism, I hate (but understand). But I really do not understand how two places with comparable tax rates and ideals can be THIS different. Is it a culture thing? Corruption?
An alternative question: is there anything that California’s government does better? Like at all? Is there something that I am over looking here.
I friend recently asked me this question, and I don't have a good answer-- any thoughts?
Edit: first, some detail on German income tax and social security schemes. If not interested, skip and go directly to last paragraph.
As for German income tax, there are six tax categories or classes, depending on whether you live alone, are married with both earning, live alone and raise a child and so on. And then there is a progressive tax system for the income tax. Plus, there are so many exceptions and occasions to deduce tax. So overall, one simple rate at a certain point of income might be not enough for comparison, not even for income tax alone.
Maybe even more importantly, healthcare, pensions and unemployment in Germany are all based on so called social security schemes.
For a few examples: if you earn 60 000 a year, in tax class 1 you'll pay roughly 11 k in income tax and 12 k in social security. The other half of the social security was already paid by your employer. So if your gross income is 60 000 and your net income is 35 000, than the employer's gross is roughly 74 000.
If you're earning 120 000 a year, your income tax might be 40 k including 2 000 Euro for supporting the eastern states in Germany and 3000 Euro for the church, if you're a member, and an additional 14 k of social security. So the tax has risen quite a bit, but the social security only somewhat - there is a cap on the latter.
I didn't look up the newest numbers, but overall it's sth. like unemployment insurance: 2.4% per half employee / employer, long-term care insurance: 3.05% each half employee / employer, statutory health insurance: 14.6% + additional contribution (depending on the health insurance fund), half for employees / half for employers, pension insurance: 18.6% borne half by the employee and half by the employer.
Also, just for the record, unemployment payment is not for life - it once was - now it's for about a year. You only get it if you paid into the unemployment insurance scheme before. Whoever is in urgent need gets social security money, whether they worked before or not, and yes, this is for however long you need.
Well, I had fun looking that up. But honestly, if you want to compare state income and state output, don't look at a single tax. Better have a look at state budgets, both on the income and the expenditure sides. Obviously, you need to consider all the state levels that are relevant to the issues you're looking at (federal, state, local).
IIRC California is a net producer of taxes to the federal government treasury, while some other states are net consumers. Californians' taxes go in part to paying for these other states' federal public-works projects; federal disaster-relief efforts; federal military bases (and payments to military contractors); upkeep of other states' national parks and forests; etc.
California is a net producer of transfer payments. In other words, California pays more into things like social security or food stamps than it receives.
It is not a net producer of taxes but a net recipient. In other words, it receives more money in purchases or payments for things like military salaries, infrastructure projects, software purchases, etc than it pays. It's about average in terms of percentage of budget received from the Federal government.
The "welfare queen red states" meme is actually rather awful. Red states in the sense of the actual government tend to be less reliant on Federal dollars than blue ones. It's the poor people in red states who receive those transfers, not the state itself. And most Republicans in those states would be very happy to cut those benefits. So when some California liberal sneers about welfare queen Louisiana and how they should be cut off they're not threatening to hurt the elite of Louisiana. They're threatening to withhold food stamps from the poor.
My biggest objection the "welfare queen red states" meme is that most of the money is going to individuals, not states. This has two major implications. One is (as you brought up) that the people paying the taxes and the people getting the money are generally not the same people even if they live in the same states, so a programmer paying income taxes to pay for a poor person's food stamps is a very similar transfer whether they both live in California or if one lives in California and the other lives in Louisiana.
The other big problem is that individuals are not statically tied to a single state. Two of the biggest categories of federal spending are Medicare and Social Security, where the beneficiaries are primarily older retirees. Since it's common for people to move upon retirement (and generally moving towards southern red states or southwestern purple states for combinations of climate, tax level and structure, and cost of living), then you wind up with people paying taxes in New York or California during their peak earnings years, then collecting federal retirement benefits in Florida or Arizona. Combine this with people being at different life stages, and at any given time the "donor state" map looks like people in Sun Belt states are mooching off of the Northeast and the West Coast.
Neither of those things (transfer payments; balance of state taxes + federal state-level grants for execution of programs that are federal mandated but are state-level executive responsibilities) were quite what I was referring to, though, no?
I was speaking more of the spending the Federal government does _at the Federal level_ (i.e. not by giving money to a state government to disburse, but by the Federal government itself directly cutting cheques to private contractors), where that spending happens to end up having its _effects_ in other states than the state in which the (Federal!) income tax to fund it was collected. California ends up funding a large portion of Federal spending, simply by having a large portion of the country's GDP inside it, and so its individuals in aggregate paying a large portion of the country's Federal income tax. That's not a California-specific thing, though; Federal income tax is the same wherever you are. That's just a "where the people who make the most money happen to live" thing.
This is why I mentioned tried to use e.g. national parks and forests as an example — these are Federally-controlled land within a State's borders, not State-government-controlled land; and so the _only_ spending that happens to these, is direct Federal spending.
If I understand you correctly then I think my fourth sentence addresses that. California is a net recipient of Federal taxes in terms of purchases/salaries/etc. It has a bunch of large military bases, Silicon Valley, a bunch of Federal government hiring/infrastructure, a large amount of Federal land, etc. You're right of course it's also a very large tax base.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally
I am not sure your calculation of relative tax burden actually makes so much sense.
From a "taxes to GDP" perspective, the US definitely under taxes.
From a spending perspective, the US's massive spending on military seems to be a key issue.
I don't have the time to fact-check carefully, but the incomeaftertax website seems rather opaque.
Mandatory insurances (Lohnnebenkosten, which pay for health care, unemployment) are 21% of your salary in Germany. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:ESt_D_Splittingtarif_2022_zvE_bis_150000.svg suggests a 32% tax for a 100kEuro income. In total, I don't see how this gets you to 36.5%.
You are very right. Those websites were really sketchy. The more I look into it the more I realize how off they are :).
Calculations around the web yield wildly different results. Still haven't quite figured it out yet.
According to https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I5, the tax wedge for someone who makes 167% of the average in Germany is 50.7%. The calculator you used for Germany doesn't include payroll tax.
So I think it's better to compare the US as a whole to Germany, rather than CA individually. Tax comparisons are tough because states can get you through income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. Texas has no income tax, for example, but it has a decent sales tax and I'm seeing property tax rates of 2% or higher. Oregon, by contrast, has a 9-10% income tax rate but no sales tax. California has fairly high income taxes but it's property taxes are relatively low and stay low through prop 13. The only state I've found that doesn't get their money somehow is Nevada, where the casinos make so much money that the local taxes are legitimately low. But overall, just looking at income taxes will throw off the comparison.
As for why the US gets so much less benefit than Germany, per Krugman, the US government really only spends on three things: Medicare, Social Security, and the military. And while Social Security and the US military aren't efficient, they are fairly effective. Medicare, meanwhile, is tied to our nightmare healthcare market so...uh...that's doomed.
Thanks! I will have to check out Krugman.
Even looking at it from a national level, I just find it slightly strange that there is such a gaping difference in the quality of public good provided. Germany has its own Social Security system and is now hiking up military spending (Still not nearly US-level, but not THAT drastically off either).(https://www.sipri.org/commentary/blog/2022/explainer-proposed-hike-german-military-spending).
With regard to health care... yeah... that is a massive mess. But it seems that nearly everything is a mess:
ie. infrastructure spending just seems to do less in the US (https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america).
Higher education: Germany spends $9,000 per student. (https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/wis/20925479.html). Federal funding for public postsecondary institutions averages $3,417 per student. State funding and local funding to postsecondary institutions averages $7,373 per student. (And probably a lot more after Biden's whole debt forgiveness thing). But, US students are WAAAYYYY more in debt. (https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics#:~:text=At%20the%20postsecondary%20level%2C%20public%20colleges%20and%20universities%20spend%20%2433%2C760,institutions%20averages%20%247%2C373%20per%20student.).
Usually the rhetoric is "Europe has more taxes" but from what I am seeing that is just not all that true. Sorry for the rant. It feels like there has to be something fundamentally wrong with the US's spending. (To be clear not all government spending, just the US's government spending). I know this is a larger topic than I started out with :). But from my perspective it makes NO sense and is super annoying.
"Usually the rhetoric is "Europe has more taxes" but from what I am seeing that is just not all that true"
Except the post from "little water piglet" (capybara) suggests your information is not totally correct. See also https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-compare-internationally
On the other hand, "military spending" seems to be the key differential, on what is being "obtained" for the "tax".
According to this (https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/) California gets $0.65 from the federal government for every $1 its citizens pay. So a large portion of that %30.1 of taxes doesn't even go into the California budget.
That has to do with federal taxes and spending though. OP is asking why his state taxes are so high and state services are not commensurate with that.
Yes they did ask about state tax rate, but the tax rate they cited (30%) and the link they gave (https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=101100&from=year®ion=California) included federal tax, which is half the tax bill.
Would a states per capita budget be a better measure of how efficiently they spend?
I see, my mistake.
Good point! Thanks!
Corruption for some value of corruption. California civil servants are extremely well paid and their contracts are extremely large and all that.
To take a simple example: The average California schoolteacher makes about $86,000 not including benefits which push it well into six figures. The average German schoolteacher makes €42,000 and has worse benefits. Germans can get two schoolteachers plus change for every Californian teacher and the German schoolteachers produce better results on average. And you can find similar statistics for most positions, private subcontracting, etc. Though teacher's are notable as one of the biggest line items.
Europe has a class of relatively low paid but efficient civil servants. America has a class of extremely well paid but relatively inefficient civil servants. The reasons why (or my opinion of them) are probably a bit culture war.
42 000 seems too low, where did you get this from? Also, I can't compare the benefits for German teachers to those of Californian teachers. However, in Germany, if you have civil servant status, which you usually do if you *studied* for being a teacher, this comes with a lot of benefits.
>Germans can get two schoolteachers plus change for every Californian teacher and the German schoolteachers produce better results on average.
No. German students perform better than Californian students. Whether this has anything to do with the quality of the respective teachers cannot be inferred from this. When you control for student race, this education gap would likely be greatly diminished.
There are Black Germans you know. Both recent arrivals and people who have been there for over a century. Comes with having African colonies. "Would likely" is just you assuming you're correct. Feel free to do the research if you want to. Until then I'm going to assume you're wrong.
>There are black germans
Okay, so what? This is a basically meaningless statement without numbers. Germany is around 87% European, 9 % Asian, and 0.6% black african (the majority of whom have not "been there over a century"). It doesn't matter how low the black germans score, they aren't meaningfully impacting German schooling scores.
Meanwhile, California is 39% hispanic, 37% white, 14% Asian and 5.5% black, 4% mixed and the rest other non-whites. It's demographics are vastly less white/asian than Germany, and are going to have an enormous impact on schooling scores. And yet somehow you think the fact that there are some finite number of black people in Germany invalidates this. Bizarre.
>"Would likely" is just you assuming you're correct.
First of all, you're the one who simply asserted that teachers are the ones who "produce" superior results between countries with no evidence whatsoever.
Secondly, I don't have data for California specifically, but white US students beat the pants off German students despite the fact that the US performs worse overall, meaning that the overall differences between the US and Germany in schooling are mostly a product of Germany being much whiter than the US: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
And you can see that hispanic US students perform much worse than US overall and Germany, meaning that the gap between California and Germany is going to be driven by non-white students to an even greater extent than US overall compared with Germany.
> Okay, so what?
So if it was caused primarily by genetics you would have groups with similar genetics under different systems and could run the numbers Which you haven't. You've instead latched onto a minor point about why California takes in so much taxes to climb on a hobby horse. I'd be interested in seeing your full argument if you could articulate a well cited and argued one. But I haven't seen it yet.
>So if it was caused primarily by genetics you would have groups with similar genetics under different systems and could run the numbers Which you haven't.
Don't you think its weird that you don't need any of this to substantiate your assertion that German teachers are better than American ones?
White American students do better than German students. German students do better than non-asian minority American students. There's absolutely no reason to assume that German teachers are better.
>But I haven't seen it yet.
And again, you haven't offered a damn bit of evidence for your assertion that German teachers are superior to American or Californian ones, which was the claim I was responding to in the first place.
Not sure on teachers but CA civil servants are not well paid and it's going to be a big problem in the next ten years.
Bottom line, most civil servants are Office Technicians or Staff Service Analysts, making $30-$60k. The more senior ranks are Associate Governmental Program Analysts or Staff Services Managers making $65-$90k/yr. Add on $700-$1500/month for each in state contributions to the pension system and you've got decent money but nothing fantastic and people at the Associate Director level are only making $130k/yr.
The problem is that a house in Sacramento with minimal gunfire costs $400k, Elk Grove is running $600k, and Midtown Sac is a mil plus. So your executive team can't afford to live near the offices and most line staff are looking at houses at 10x their annual salary. That's not sustainable. How you bump salaries without blowing up the pension system through, I dunno.
At any rate, it's significantly higher than Europe. But the statistics do not bear your anecdotes out. The median/average bureaucrat (who admittedly is mid-career because they're average) costs the state six figures. Here's, for example, a breakdown from a California newspaper that ranges from $121k to $214k total comp. (https://californiaglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-21-at-7.20.11-PM.png)
Did you intend to link to that? Because I'm pretty sure those are municipal salary ranges, not state, and weird ones at that. Police and fire are generally city things, not state, and they've got to be an overwhelming % of what they're looking at if everyone else is "misc".
And there's no anecdata here. The CA Secretary of State has the data here, they pay ~$2.3 billion/month in gross wages to ~700k employees, so ~$3.3k per employee in gross wages(1) (this does include UC, CSU, and JC salaries). If you think they're lying, literally every single state employee's salary is available online in a searchable database (2).
Also, I know why you're referring to total compensation instead of pay, but my impression was total compensation is usually 50% higher than salary, roughly in line with what you showed. (also, that seems weird to me. Civil service benefits are exaggerated but they're definitely better than the private sector.)
(1) https://sco.ca.gov/ppsd_empinfo_demo.html
(2) https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay
Are city employees not bureaucrats? We're talking about the general quality of civil servants in California and I'm pointing out they're much more expensive and that creates issues. We've been talking about teachers, who are municipal, from the start.
For (1) why are you calculating per deposit and not per employee? That could easily be wrong due to, for example, two week pay periods vs monthly. Per employee it's $118,399.05. I don't think they're lying. That's entirely in line with the data I found. And that's just wages.
I'm less certain about benefits in general. But we seem like we're more in agreement there.
Not really, city employees and state employees don't mix anymore than local police and the FBI mix. Different pay scales, different missions, different benefits, no real crossover. I think county and city governments do some cooperation but state and feds really don't. And the state bureaucrats get paid out of state income tax and sales tax, I think city/municipal gets paid out of property tax.
I'm calculating off pay warrants because, well, paychecks are easier to track than employees and basically everyone gets paid monthly. The problem with doing it off pay warrants is that it includes part-timers and seasonal guys. The problem with doing it with just employees is that the pay warrants include the Judicial Council salaries (minimal) and the UC/CSU colleges (big). Based on the pay scales I provided I think that's far closer to accurate but, to be fair, without downloading the whole dataset and running it ourselves, I'm not sure how I'd prove it.
Yeah, benefits are a legitimate concern. Honestly, less the pension system and more the health care benefits. The state has done a decent job getting more money out of the workers, I think it's a mandatory 2% contrib now into OPEB/CERBT (1), but with health care spiraling so fast and retired workers looking at 80%-100% of medical benefits covered in retirement...it's just a financial nightmare.
(1) https://www.calhr.ca.gov/employees/Pages/opeb-faq.aspx#:~:text=OPEB%20contributions%20are%20deposited%20in,one%20of%20the%20participating%20employers.
Interesting. Thanks for your answer! So are school teachers just rich in California? (Is it a very sought after job?). Or is the cost of living just higher leading to higher salaries being needed?
And, if you don't mind me asking, what do you mean about the culture war? How does this relate to gov spending?
They're much better paid compared to their society's average. German teachers are paid below the German average (42k vs ~48k euros) while Californians are paid above ($86k vs ~$54k). As to whether it's sought after I can't say.
It'd involve some unkind words about significant factions on the American left and making claims that, while true, they find rather upsetting. I can go there I suppose but I don't want to derail this. I prefer the technocratic discussion.
That is definitely concerning. It is strange though that salaries for mediocre work remain that high. You would think higher salaries lead to more qualified applicants, and thus better schools.
There must be some sort of inefficiency or misalignment of motivations in the system. The only other explanation is that US workers are just on net less capable (which I doubt).
I mean: 86k.... and "California ranked 38th" in the nation (https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/study-california-schools-earn-low-grades-compared-to-nation). Yikes.
(I worked at a Starbucks while living in Chicago rather than teaching there, despite already having a teaching degree and making probably a third as much as I could have)
I'm not sure what German schools are like, but American schools tend to be highly constrained in ways that result in rather low overall job satisfaction. Especially, the teachers and students are not permitted to choose or leave each other by mutual consent.
It's common to have a few young people in each class who are intent on frustrating the teacher's plans each and every day, and it's not possible for the teacher to do anything about it other than attempting to employ psychological tricks, while the young person talks over them and challenges at them to their face, and utterly disregards their attempts to teach. When this dynamic is found out, the administrator might chew out the teacher, and tell them to do better at employing the psychological tricks, which the young antagonists know quite well and don't care for all that much. Even if there are only two such people in a class of 30 where the others are students who are trying to learn, there is no possible force other than that of personality and stern looks that can be exerted against it. This is very common in bad schools of all levels.
So, for instance, someone had a desk thrown at her, the young person who did it came back the next day without an apology, and she left to become a fire dancer. It isn't unheard of for teachers even in basically normal suburban districts to quit midday without notice. Administration tends to react to struggling teachers with hostility and the implication that they should develop more forceful and engaging personalities Nobody knows how, personalities don't chance all that much, most people can't perform a charasmatic persona 7 hrs a day.
Americans also have the expectation that all students should be above average and college ready, and this inflicts some misery on both low level students and their teachers.
Pay to some degree reflects these kinds of problems.
Also, there's a lot of gatekeeping and pickiness despite supposedly wanting more teachers.
Again, if you control for race, most of this goes away when comparing to Germany.
> I'm not sure what German schools are like, but American schools tend to be highly constrained in ways that result in rather low overall job satisfaction.
My brief teaching experience in Slovakia did not seem fundamentally different (only there was no violence involved). Some kids misbehave all the time, you are supposed to "do something about it", but you are supposed to figure it out on your own. The solution seems to involve some psychological tricks because anything else is forbidden; the problem is that the problematic kids already know that. The advice to develop a charismatic personality is probably the #1 solution offered in online discussions.
So I suspect that this is universal (or at least, universal in countries with universal school attendance), only the specific type of misbehavior at school reflects the misbehavior common in the country in general. (Like, in USA, the misbehavior is more likely to include bringing a gun to the classroom.)
How much the teachers are paid, is therefore probably unrelated to all this. Probably a result of something else, such as how the state regulates the teacher salaries in state schools, and what proportion of the population attends private schools.
Thanks for sharing! I guess the US is just paying a massive externally in the form of teacher salaries for all of our social issues.
Germany does have a trade school system that acts as a release valve on their education system-- there is a place to put problematic students that probably is actually a lot more effective at educating them for post grad.
As for gatekeeping... I don't know about Germany, but I would think it is better? More regulation/standardization.
Is that German tax rate just federal taxes? I would guess that Germans have to pay state taxes too. Is that California tax rate just state taxes? (The link doesn't work for me.)
In addition to that issue, the U.S. spends, proportional to GDP, more than twice as much on the military as Germany does.
Hmm. Good point. Those online calculators were a lazy solution.
I am not sure if this is right, but I found this:
"There are no local or state income taxes levied in Germany." (https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/taxes-on-personal-income).
I am not sure if this is right... I will have to dig into German tax law more.
I believe that is correct. But only because Germany doesn't have an equivalent of "states".
Germany has sixteen states. It's "Federal Republic of Germany".
Yes you can translate it that way but the systems are quite different both in their constitutional setup and their history.
I am no expert in German tax law, but I think the national gov collects them then they are distributed to the states.
Really need to do more research though-- I am probably missing some major tax and my calculations are perhaps off.
Yes, exactly, the national government collects the income taxes and redistributes them. (Or at least a single authority does that; I think the tax offices are actually run by the communes; but it's based on national law.)
There are consumption taxes, like VAT and taxes on gasoline and some alcohols, which are paid in different ways. And some exceptions like taxes around pets and cars.
Yeah OP didn't give nearly enough details for their calculations. Did the german calculator include VAT on everything?
https://ground.news/
They'll let you know about the political orientation of where news stories are covered.
I subscribed, but I eventually found I wasn't getting around to using it. Still.... they *notified* me when my subscription was coming up for renewal so I could make a choice about whether or not to keep paying, and I think they deserve some publicity for that.
Cautiously endorsed. I haven't spent enough time with Ground News since I first became aware of them a few weeks ago to get a detailed feel for how they deal with the more difficult media dynamics, but their approach is theoretically very interesting and I haven't seen any missteps.
Question for y'all, only a little inspired by Scott's recent house parties posts.
How does one go about hosting one of these? I spent most of college studying, and now that I actually have: a space to host in (in a few months hopefully), people around me who seem fun who I'd like to get to know better, and a few years spent working on social skills; I'd like to host a party.
Do I just... send an email? This feels almost like an ugh field to me, like I really don't know how it works but maybe it's not as complicated as it seems? Is there more to making it half-decent than getting food/drink, putting on some music, and being welcoming? Is there some form of social capital that drives whether people actually want to come, or is an email going to land in inboxes & invoke an "ew" in the recipient? Do I have to state a socially acceptable reason for hosting to get invitation responses?
Are these even the right questions?
And if it's not actually complicated, is there a way I can make it... fun? I.e. with as little material for another post like Scott's as possible
Really just out here yeeting questions in search of advice for someone who's never been too skilled socially. Anything helps!
Thank you all! Really appreciate the insight - this is excellent advice. I feel quite encouraged. Hopefully y'all will hear a report back before too long about some measure of success.
My wife will usually ask a few people first that she really wants to come to find out when they're available. Then she texts everyone to let them know, ideally about a month beforehand. Sometimes as little as a few days beforehand, but then we get a small turnout. Sometimes there's a reason, more often there isn't. Day of, we buy some cases of beer, some kids drinks, forty hot dogs, and smores stuff. I try to drink at least two beers before people come to help with the socializing. When people start to turn up, I light a fire, set out some chairs and benches, and crank up the boom box. This seems to work well if we have two guests or fifty (well, I buy fewer hot dogs if we're only expecting two).
Tossrock's advice covers what I had started typing earlier.
I think, activities for a come-and-mingle-with-strangers party, like a housewarming: places for people to sit and talk; if you have a yard with a fire pit, you can have yard games there (ring toss, darts, that type); trivia games and party games are good. Cards Against Humanity for the right crowd, but if not - Taboo, Charades, Pictionary.... there are a whole bunch of phone-based ones these days. You can have the games happen later on in the day, after people have had some alcohol and mingled a little bit and ate.
On the food: the main "hot" food, like the pizza, can be delivered a little later after the party starts, so that it can be an event during the party.
Refreshments: for food, depending on your budget, have a main "meal-ish" item, pizza being a good and inoffensive option - get plain and one other topping set. Supplement with a fruit tray, a veggie tray, a charcuterie board (cured meats and cheeses); maybe also snacks like pretzels or cheese puffs in bowls that you refill, or chips and salsa. Also cookies and sweets - Oreos, brownies (store-bought or made from a mix), elephant ears - 2-3 kinds. With the large assortment, the nice thing is, not everyone will eat everything, so you don't need to get enough of EACH all the secondary things for everyone. And it ensures at least some kind of nibbles for people with food sensitivities you didn't know about.
Drinks: get a pallet of water bottles; more beer than you have guests; a non-beer beverage is optional (e.g. hard cider or White Claw) and a soft drink option (e.g. cokes or sprites). Get more than enough; you will find a use for them later, even if (as will most likely happen) you will have plenty left over.
At least this is what I like to do, but I also have maybe up to 10 people, not huge parties with lots of people. But it's also what I like at a party food- and refreshments-wise.
Good luck!
I recommend reading The Art of Gathering! Or at least looking at a summary to see if you're interested
Just sending an email could theoretically work, depending on the existing dispositions of the folk involved, but I'd recommend doing a little more homework to improve your chances of good outcomes. First, a fun wiki link (mostly because I like it, but it's also relevant): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi - basically, getting buy-in in advance of any formal invite raises the chances of the people you want to attend actually attending.
Concretely, first think about the core people you really want to be there. Approach them individually (ideally in person, but a private message of some kind can work too), and say something like, "Hey, I'm thinking about hosting a get together on <arbitrary weekend about a month in the future> and wanted to invite you - is that something you'd be interested in?" Oftentimes you'll get something like, "Oh that sounds really cool, but I'm doing <other thing> that weekend!" Because you haven't firmly committed to a date yet, you have the opportunity to change the time to pull the maximum amount of your core set of folks. As you start to get the soft, informal 'yes's, you can then use those while proposing it to other people, ie "I'm thinking about hosting a party on <new date>, <interested persons A & B> said they're in, would you be down for that?"
Once you've got your nemawashi covered, then you can send the wider formal invite describing the date/time/location/etc, confident in the knowledge that there will be a good base of people who show up. How you do that depends on the community norms - in some places email is perfectly appropriate, others might use Paperless Post, Facebook events, Partiful, plain MMS, etc.
Especially among nerds and when forming new groups, an activity or reason for the gathering can be helpful. Some basic ones include holiday parties, televised sports, media consumption, games, etc. More advanced stuff (and relevant to the kind of parties Scott is describing) might include flash talks, fundraisers, launch parties, performance art, etc.
It's easier if you have an occasion. Board Game Night! The Superbowl! St. Patrick's Day! The weather is cold now and I want to make chili! The occasion doesn't matter, but it makes it easier for people to attend. Like, the occasion provides an easy first topic of conversation with strangers, beyond "So, how do you know An ACX Commenter?" It provides guests a way out of conversations they'd like to leave ("Well, nice to meet you, I'm going to check out this chili")
But no, you don't need a reason, you can just invite people to a party at your house. It's just regular social capital that drives whether people want to come: do they want to spend time with you? Do they think they'll meet other interesting/fun/socially valuable people there? You probably already have enough social capital with the people around you who you'd like to get to know better to invite them to a party without it being embarrassing for any of you. Whether they'll come is another matter.
Also, I think it's perfectly okay to use a dorky / cliched means of inviting people like an "e-vite" (like greetingsisland.com) Part of what cliche/etiquette/formality is for is letting people know you aren't weird. A formality like an e-vite spares you having to write an email, and spares them feeling bad turning you down when you went to all the trouble to write a nice personal email.
I'm a big believer in games. Rules-heavy, nerdy games for your nerdy friends; funny, silly, easy games for your more socially extroverted friends; videogames for your gamer friends. It's very easy to say yes when you get invited to game night, and it's also very easy to say no. If people feel socially uncomfortable, they can focus on the game. And if it's going to be just games and pizza, you can skip the evite (that'd be too formal) and just start a group text.
(PS, one of the reasons it's great to host parties is that you yourself can escape any conversation to go take care of other guests ("I'd better check on the drinks, see if anything is running low", etc).)
Oh! Of course! If you're getting a new space in a few months, invite them to a housewarming party! (If you don't mind giving "the grand tour" and your guests spending the whole evening talking about their own housing searches past and future)
Not exactly the same thing, but I used to live in an international community house and parties were kind of similar. (less techy, but still nerdy and just as interesting)
It helps when there are 5-10 diverse people already living in the house. So, if each of them brings as a +3, you already have 2 dozen people at your house party. We lived near a couple of world class universities, so a lot of guests were grad students doing really cool work.
The most important part is how you select roommates. We used to do 1 hr long interviews, with a 2 stage elimination process based on introductory messages and the vibe we got from them. We also enforced gender parity, age range 22-35-ish, a vague sense of avoiding formation of any homogeneous group and a strong desire to build a community.
Honestly, it is hard. Because it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you have this sort of situation created, it is self reinforcing, but the first year or two takes what can seem like a lot of deliberate effort.
If you're starting something like this, find a partner who is your polar opposite. (man vs woman, stem vs humanities, artsy vs sporty, that kind of thing) and be very deliberate in how you choose the first few roommates. Once initialized, you can't really control how these things develop. So you have to very careful about how you initialize it. Also, be located somewhere accessible. No one wants to drive 1 hour to come to your party.
In our case, we were doing meetups for SSC readers back when SSC was still live. I think we announced on SSC initially. At this point I have an email list of people who wanted to be notified, so when we do one — ideally monthly but in practice a good deal less — I sent a notice to the list.
My complete lack of knowledge in this field will in no way stop me offering advice.
Start small. Invite a couple of friends for a gathering, invite them to invite their friends next time. Repeat until you hit the fire code.
https://interessant3.substack.com/
Three interesting things, once a week.
Anyone here a fan of Star Trek? The DS9 episode 'Statistical Probabilities' reminds me in some ways of the rationalist-adjacent community (no insult intended, as I include myself in this group). Lots of success in forecasting and understanding things that most people wouldn't see, but excessive confidence in longer-term predictions and overreliance on game theory. Curious what others thought of the episode, and also happy to hear other Trek-related thoughts.
(From my memory of watching it years ago, refreshed by reading a wiki page) It seems clearly intended as a parable about overconfidence, though it seems notable to me that the forecasters' recommendations weren't rejected BECAUSE they were over-confident, but because the recommendations were weird and made large short-term sacrifices for very long-term gains. No one proposed, say, testing the forecasters' accuracy, or asked what quantitative level of certainty would be needed to justify the plan. So I am not impressed with any party in this episode.
I think a lot of our fiction (and especially family or children's fiction) teaches the unfortunate lesson that, when the stakes are high, you should never cut your losses, but should always gamble on the longshot of getting everything you want, no matter how implausible it is or how disastrous it will be if you lose that gamble. For example, if two of your friends are in mortal peril, you should take a million-to-one shot at saving both, instead of a ~100% chance of saving one. I notice some reflection of that philosophy here, in the refusal to even entertain a temporary surrender.
Interesting! I agree that the recommendations were rejected on the basis of weirdness and not overconfidence, and that confidence is usually the "right" metric when forecasting. That said, it also seems like weirdness can be a sign of inaccuracy? It intuitively feels like any strategy that is too strange is probably not robust to small changes in one's priors on e.g. the Dominion's battle tactics and governance strategy.
I also agree with you about this property of fiction. I guess on one hand, I agree with you that it is unrealistic that things will work out in most cases, and so realistically you should depict more failure. On the other hand, I think sometimes when you analyze the situation in more depth, it sometimes turns out to be logical to not cut losses. E.g. say a terrorist group captures hostages as a bargaining tool, knowing it will take you a huge loss in manpower to recover them, possibly exceeding the number of hostages. In a single situation, given that they have done this, it doesn't make sense for a utilitarian to rescue them. However, if you retain the policy of always mounting hostage rescue attempts regardless of the expected casualties, then after a few such situations, terrorist groups will be less likely to take hostages as they will realize that there is no point in hoping they can bargain with you. This thus decreases casualties in the long run.
I'm not sure to what extent this applies to DS9....as I recall, the Federation would have been conquered had it not been for the wormhole aliens, so a bit of a deus ex machina. So maybe in their absence, the forecasters' suggestions would have saved lives after all! In any case, thanks for the interesting discussion.
I have some requests for fiction / surprise that they don't exist.
I've had a recurring fantasy since childhood of showing magical modern technology to various people in the past, or explaining recent history to them and seeing how they react. I'm not essential to this picture, just the fact of seeing someone having to absorb all the stuff that's happened in the however many hundreds of years they've been gone. I get that this has been done for present-day protagonists adapting to the future (e.g. Futurama, Samurai Jack, Idiocracy). However, I'm not aware of any past-into-present stories other than the film "Er Ist Wieder Da" (Look Who's Back) about Hitler waking up in modern-day Germany. But that's a comedy with a deliberately controversial premise while what I really want is a non-comedy about someone like a famous scientist or philosopher, a random peasant from the middle ages, or an ancient Assyrian king. Doctor Who might be an obvious place to look, but it's optimised for different stories to this. The TARDIS auto-translates languages which deprives us of an entire host of interesting issues to do with language evolution, improvised communication, themes of being alone in a familiarly human yet incomprehensible modern environment. I'd want to see those, the point being it's set in the *present* with no sci-fi besides whatever mechanism caused the time jump in the first place. Premise: so-and-so from the past wakes up in the modern world. Then ask: what would happen next, realistically? (if the answer is "die of shock / a modern disease" then we relax the realism to get an interesting story.)
Another spin on this would be a present-day person surviving in the distant past, maybe trying and failing to make interventions like advocating the germ theory of disease. Or if they have an extensive knowledge of history, compiling a huge list of very specific predictions for future wars or disasters (we'd obviously have to do something about the fact that such an act might itself change the course of history and render most of the predictions false, but this won't be the case for astronomical events or scientific knowledge.) The Man From Earth (highly recommended) didn't do this, but it's in the same ballpark and I enjoyed its story.
Perhaps all this is stemming from a desire for fiction that requires me to put myself in the shoes of a completely different person with different values in order to even comprehend the story. To truly experience a concrete example of the past being a foreign country where they do things differently. The same feeling Scott's Tumblr pills story gave me at the beginning:
> Nobody is the villain of their own life story ... Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.
(from https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/)
I ache for the opposite of the bullshit mindset that "depiction = endorsement"; that a protagonist must be *good* or likeable or not have any weird or immoral beliefs. To me, Starship Troopers is valuable as showing you what fascism must have felt like from the inside: your enemies appear to you like irredeemable non-human insectoid monsters who need exterminating. I want to see what life was like from the POV of some Bronze-age patriarch --- perhaps hallucinating command spirits a la Jaynes -- in a world where both men and women would laugh at the idea of gender equality; where you could just invade and conquer a land because you get resources and slaves and that's seen as a perfectly normal thing (rather than having to couch it as "self-defence" or "Special Military Operation".) Not that I think we'd be better off with any of that, it's just fun to inhabit that distance and feel the poignant WTF factor referenced by the quote.
Finally, what about "return to monke"? Imagine living in the environment your body and mind actually evolved for! At least, as a knee-jerk reaction to our modern problems. Constant exercise; you only have to worry about the opinions of less than Dunbar's number of people; insert something about mating. I hear some amazing things about dental health compared to agro societies. And everything has an explanation! Anything weird happens because of spirits, your dearly beloved recently-deceased aren't truly gone. Slaughtering the outgroup is as moral as it is fun! Do moral quandaries even exist in this world? I envy this "fit" of mental architecture from my position as an atomised 21st-century materialist schlub in a vast world of superstimuli, quantum mechanics and half-decent moral principles.
Obviously this is a rosy picture and others have said it all better. The relevant point is I would certainly enjoy sampling the perspective our distant ancestors had on the world. The thing is, there are all sorts of historical dramas set in various civilizations ... but not so much for hunter-gatherers and their even less relatable lives. What sort of problems did they have to solve, what metaphors and jokes did they use? Could you write a decent romance in this setting? There should be enough man-vs-man and man-vs-nature conflict there for something interesting. In the worst case there needn't even be a "story" but just a documentary following (fictional) people through the events of a day or year.
So, does this resonate with anyone or remind them of stuff they could recommend? Movies or TV shows preferred, but written stories or other formats are OK in second place. If all else fails, and I'm patient enough, then maybe one day I can just type a prompt into an AI movie generator...!
For present day person surviving in the past have you read the free short story The Man Who Came Early?
Doctor Stone is an anime about building modern technology in a primitive world. Technically, it's set in the future, but so far into the future that all traces of modern civilization have vanished, and it's up to our protagonists (a group of talented high-schoolers preserved from the modern era) to rebuild civilization with their knowledge of science.
It doesn't really fit your other criteria of "trying to get in the head of someone from ancient times," as the protagonists are from the modern era and have a pretty normal moral code, but the antagonist is definitely a "return to monke" sort of person - he's disillusioned with the modern world, and wants to build a "kingdom of might" where they can live as hunter-gatherers without all that technology making things complicated. Not that he's stupid, he's a smart and tactical opponent, he just doesn't think modernity was good for people and sees an opportunity to avoid repeating that mistake.
Anyway, it's just a really awesome show. It successfully combines shonen action with surprisingly realistic science (basically, the technology is real, but you'd have to be an improbably talented anime protagonist to build it with stone-age tools), and it really *gets* what "the power of science" really is. It's not the cliche "civilize the natives with gunpowder and steel" power fantasy, it understands that science isn't just a list of facts, it grows from our desires to understand the world and make our lives easier. Senku does mix up a batch of gunpowder, but he gets a lot more results from being able to make eyeglasses, antibiotics, and coca-cola. So on the whole, a very optimistic show - it is a shonen, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_Gods_(novel)
This might be the kind of thing you're looking for.
TV show: Vikings
-Try searching "Modern-day Rip Van Winkle" to find stories matching your first criteria.
-Return to Monke -> I guess Clan of the Cavebear? It was fine when I was 12...sort of doubt I'd still like it as an adult, but maybe someone else can comment.
You can read what ancient people wrote about themselves. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Tale of Genji, The Iliad, The Kalevala, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bible, all that stuff.
The Kalevala was written in the 19th century.
I would add the Icelandic Sagas.
At least one of your requests already has a category on Google and a Wikipedia page: "Books / Fiction / Prehistory" & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_fiction, the most famous of which is Jean Auel, (who I haven't read).
I like The Name of the Rose for accurately putting you in the mind of a medieval person (unlike, for instance, Pillars of the Earth)
Can you expand on Pillars of the Earth?
I'm maybe being a bit too flippant. Here's a more detailed story: I read Pillars of the Earth in high school and loved it. Then I went to college and read a bunch of actual medieval writing (Canterbury Tales, Augustine, Aquinas, The Divine Comedy, etc) and thought seriously about medieval European people's worldview. Soon after graduating, I read the beginning of World Without End (the sequel to Pillars of the Earth) and couldn't stand it. It felt monstrous to me: the protagonist had a modern mind, thinking modern thoughts, in a medieval setting. Much later, I read The Name of the Rose, and loved it. All the characters think the way that kind of person would have thought at the time. There's even a character who's more modern than all the others, whose thinking is situated at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and he contrasts really well with the genuinely medieval thinking of the other characters around him, without being an actual anachronism.
So I may be falsely attributing anachronistic foul play to Pillars of the Earth which I should be attributing to the World Without End. When I actually read Pillars, I didn't know any better. Also, I might have been much more sensitive when I read World Without End, having the actual medieval authors closer at hand than when I read Name of the Rose.
I liked Pillars of the Earth-- it seemed plausible enough, but I'm no expert.
The main story was about a man from a poor family-- the father had worked all summer for a pig, but it was stolen. They had nothing. Somehow (this is from memory) the son ended up as a designer of cathedrals.
The big social shift was from a world where civil disorder (like the pig getting stolen with no hope of recompense) to one where the church became dominant. As I recall this was either neutral or described as good.
The most unmodern thing was the main character's efforts to learn enough algebra (it wasn't common knowledge even among educated people) to help with designing cathedrals.
I couldn't get into the sequel.
I've also read *A Bridge to the Sky* by Margaret Ball, and I may have conflated the books.
Thank you for the explanation!
On the hard side of “moderner survives in the distant past”, there's the novel *Lest Darkness Fall* by L. Sprague de Camp. Archaeologist gets dumped into ancient Rome and combines his historical and modern knowledge to make his way in the society of the time.
"To me, Starship Troopers is valuable as showing you what fascism must have felt like from the inside"
Are you talking about the book or the movie? The society in the book isn't fascist.
The idea of a modern person finding himself in the past and trying to change it has been done. The earliest version I know of is Mark Twain's _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_. A good more modern one is _Lest Darkness Fall_ by L. Sprague de Camp, whose protagonist is trying to prevent the Dark Ages from happening.
> Are you talking about the book or the movie? The society in the book isn't fascist.
I haven’t seen the movie but isn’t that the book where mistakes during a military operation were punished by flogging? And NCOs used quirts as motivational tools?
If I’m remembering this correctly I wasn’t thinking of fascism so much as sexual kink on Heinlein’s part.
Sorry if I’m misremembering this.
I have a related fantasy of traveling back into the past and kicking up a scientific/industrial revolution. I'm pretty convinced that the main blocking point would be metallurgy/chemistry.
On to a recommendation : the Quest of fire by Rosny aîné is a pretty great novel in a palaeolithic setting. Great writing but obviously the scientific background is completely outdated as it dates from 1915.
Are you aware of the book "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler"?
The Knowledge might be a handy resource as well
Iceman is the most serious one I can think of, about unfreezing a caveman in the 1960/70's; I remember nothing about its quality.
The main problem with bringing a past person into the present is that both the writers and the audience are intimately familiar with the present and not the past, so any awe a character feels at modern-day stuff is going to result in chuckling. So you get comedies; Austin Powers, or Kate and Leopold. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, in the other direction (with emphasis on technology). Timeline is a darker version where the modern day guys are completely out of their depth (in the book; never saw the film). But it does involve specific predictions of the current medieval war.
If you just want a sense of alien-ness, read The Decameron, and marvel at the massive differences in morality between the 14th century and the 21st.
Kind of like Canterbury Tales. But in Italy. During the Black Death.
I keep forgetting all the old stuff is public domain and I can just link to it.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23700/23700-h/23700-h.htm
This kinda fits with a number of Isekai which is still rather popular in Japan as Light Novels and Manga/Anime. Or it's side genre, reverse Isekai. You'll need to be a bit more specific if you want any recommendations.
Basic premise is that the protagonist(s) is somehow transported to a completely separate world/time (think Alice in Wonderland). Or in its reverse form, a fictional character gets transported to a modern setting.
A frequent narrative beat is that they use their memories of the "real" world and introduce them to the often medieval worlds they end up in. Like modern food, or guns, or printing presses.
The premise is often either a power fantasy or a pseudo educational presentation of modern ideas.
To be frank, a lot of it is rather patronizing/idealistic of how superior things are to those built-to-be-strawmen backwards civilizations especially with how close it sometimes hits to colonization/new world globalization. For example, I mentioned food, and as these are Japanese media, naturally they are Japanese foods, which somehow always "works" and is the best thing these people tasted, often putting in extra effort to have it retain the authentic flavor (ie. recreating/finding the spices rather than using local ones). And while food exchanges are very common on Earth, they almost always include some kind of alteration (using ketchup instead of tomato sauce)/don't work initially (Sushi)/go two ways (British Indian foods and Indian British foods)
Also note there are a lot of other kinds of Isekai. Some of the more common being trapped in a game, getting superpowers to live a easy new life, creating a harem or other power fantasy stuff.
I used to fantasize about bringing a hand held calculator 50 years into the past. Then the smartphone came along and blew that out of the water. Although if you brought an iPhone back to 1970 most of its functionality would be nonfunctional.
I recall an Asimov short story about a far future society discovering how to do long division on a piece of paper. Not the time travel direction you are looking for tho.
Automated drone swarm over North Sentinel Island.
How carefully is their isolation actually protected? Have linguists been allowed any access?
Wikipedia says some limited contact with anthropologist in the 90s, terminated in 1997 without language learned. I believe some passive audio recorders were dropped onto the island.
It is illegal to go there, and the residents tend to kill those who try.
"I recall an Asimov short story about a far future society discovering how to do long division on a piece of paper. Not the time travel direction you are looking for tho."
"The Feeling of Power"
But more a 'rediscovering a lost ancient technology' theme than a time-travel story in either direction.
Yep
test comment: <i>italics</i> <b>bold</b> <a href="www.example.com">link</a>
> quote
(Sorry, I've barely commented before and I want to make sure I can do these things)
Nope no HTML markup. But yes you can embed links.
I think half the regulars here do their own internal processing of markup tho.
Also, ACX Tweaks by Pycea is a thing. Works well enough after some initial config that I keep forgetting half the features aren't vanilla ACX!Substack.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acx-tweaks/jdpghojhfigbpoeiadalafcmohaekglf?hl=en
Thanks Dan and thanks Pycea
Yeah, but it looks like I have to write the link out in full. Or otherwise, cite like this [1].
What do you mean by internal processing of markup?
[1] www.example.com
They see <b> this </b> and know it should be thought of as if it were bolded. A lot of developers on this forum.
For links I think people mostly just copy and paste from the URL they are referring to.
Ah right. Thanks for helping me.
Damn. Can anyone tell me if it's possible to do formatting in these comments?
[i]italics[/i] [b]bold[/b] [a href="www.example.com"]link[/a]
I believe an asterisk before and after a word makes it *italic*.
Yes, it worked.
Maybe a pair of asterisks before and after will get us **bold**.
Do _underscores_ do anything?
EDIT: Well, that's stupid. How about /slashes/?
I just see the word "italic" with an asterisk before and after it. Is this a plugin issue?
I just see the asterisks too.
I don't use any plugins. My asterisks disappeared and the characters became italic. I have no idea what's going on.
I was actually playing around (in my head) with an idea for a forum that lets users comment with scripts that are ran everytime the comment they are inside is viewed\liked\endorsed\replied to. The language will have an API for programmatic access to the forum, like how VBA has acess to the spreadsheet it's running inside or emacs lisp has access to the buffers.
It's useless, but I love it, running arbitary user code inside applications is so underrated.
Yeah, the biggest hurdle to running arbitary user code in a networked application is denial of service and tragedy of the commons type of problems.
I'm not convinced they can't be solved, for example, what if I ran the code *on your computer*, the code stays on your computer and everytime the triggering event happens I just call it over the network with any necessary data from the server. If you're offline I either (1) delay the run till you're online (2) run it on another computer in the network or my own servers, but "charge" you for how much time it ran, you owe me that much compute time, and I can redeem it when you come back online again. If you keep racking up compute time without paying, I disable your ability to submit scripts till you pay.
Does anyone know of a history of bounty hunting for animals? It seems like an interesting chunk of history, and sometimes has driven animals to extinction or lowered their population a lot, but I've never seen a resource on the subject.
David Quammen's Monster of God includes some discussion of this, iirc.
My father, who served in WWII to place this in time, had told me of small bounties on nuisance animals that would not cover much more than the price of a shotgun shell.
This is the canonical example in Canada:
https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.aspx
I don't know a lot about it, but it's often risky with pests because bad actors will sometimes breed the animals deliberately and then turn them in for the rewards. Sometimes, they'll even actively release them into the environment to make it easier to catch them- in other words, they're enhancing the problem that they're the solution to so that their role is secured.
This isn't an issue with larger animals like deer, I assume.
You mean the "cobra effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
Any thoughts about how to avoid hiring people who are likely to do something awful?
I don't have any silver bullet advice, but maybe:
1. Really pour over their social media, going back a few years. If they seem like they're trying to launch a career as an influencer, and/or they get in a lot of petty squabbles, or something else seems unreasonable/unpleasant/volatile, it might be a good sign to give them a pass, especially if they weren't self-aware enough to sanitize their presence or go friends-only.
2. Are you familiar with the Ask A Manager advice blog? https://www.askamanager.org/ It's a terrific read and might be a good resource. You can search by keyword for "hiring," but "how to avoid hiring someone who will be awful to customers?" is a question I don't recall ever seeing, so I'd say, send it in.
Make sure they have lots of references, and that at least one of these is very recent.
Ideally, hire someone who already has a real job somewhere else (not a desk job twice a week for 3 hours). If they don't have a real job somewhere else, try to make sure that the reason they no longer have their previous job is not that they were awful.
Avoid people who don't have and didn't recently have a real job, unless they have obvious family reasons for this.
If you feel there's something wrong about the person, even if you're not sure what it is, always listen to yourself.
Executive recruiters if you can afford it.
People don't change, they carry the same moral compass their entire life.
Seems a bit reductive, as someone who's moral compass has changed and has witnessed it in others...
You suddenly discovered that hurting people, stealing or adultery was OK?
There's not much you can do because generally going off on a customer or co worker is based on variable life stresses. At least in acute situations. Being generally harassy or something is more feasible to avoid.
Credit check?
Hire a better class of people, wealthier, from better family backgrounds. Run criminal background checks. Get real personal references and follow up on them.
If you're willing to wade into some serious legal questions (worth it for certain positions, like the police) you can get psychological evaluations and do some really intensive background checks.
Wealthy people from "better" family backgrounds are surely less likely to do certain awful things and more likely to do other awful things. So it depends on which sorts of awful things you want to avoid.
Good point. I suppose it's more accurate to say that hiring wealthy/good family people are less likely to get caught and less likely to bring condemnation on your business. Or as Nancy clarifies downthread, less likely to yell at your customers.
> less likely to yell at your customers
Ah, you mean mute people. That was simple.
Depending on your customers, people from wealthy families may be a lot *more* likely to yell at your customers. And depending on what sorts of awful behavior your worried about people condemning, they might be *more* likely to bring condemnation on your business.
That depends on your definition of "good family." My definition of good family is a group of people that consistently show well adjusted social behaviors. Wealthy can play into it in terms of learning what socially adjusted behavior is, though that has its limits. The very rich may not play by those rules, but I sincerely doubt the very rich are an option for a customer-facing front line employee anyway (it sounds like retail/food service).
Yes, good family. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.
Most people don't do something awful, so you should play it safe (low variance) and hire the most unremarkable person you can find. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
(this is an answer to your question but I would not generally recommend doing it IRL because you're giving up a lot of upside as well as downside. Really depends on the job though. Hire boring people to run nuclear reactors and interesting people to think up new marketing campaigns)
http://openpsychometrics.org/tests/NPI/
What kind of awful?
Being nasty to customers or co-workers is what I had in mind.
Probably something akin to the fizz buzz test for coders - give them a practical exercise.
More seriously- nasty to customers is work behavior and can be fixed via training & supervision.
Hostility to coworkers is more likely intersocial behavior and is much harder. Often means completely retraining and changing world views, +/- resilience and stress techniques.
Added to this - its really helpful for retraining if the employee understands that they can be fired for not adapting their work behavior. So it's important to have at will work laws so the employer can fire bad actors and so that (other) employers can give the allegedly reformed employee a shot without being locked into keeping that worker if they are in fact not reformed.
Depends on what you mean by "awful". Married people with kids are much more likely to cause deep-seated lasting psychological harm to kids than people without kids.
Well sure, but mostly their own kids. If you’re hiring for anything else, they are probably more reliable.
"Reliability" is usually why people *don't* want to hire parents, because they're worried that parents will have a "sick kid" or some other excuse for why they don't want to come in to work.
I think one needs to have a much more specific conception of what "something awful" means in order for any particular demographic property to be clearly relevant in one direction or another.
Parents might take time off to treat sick kids, on the other hand they tend to be more rooted in an area and less likely to peace out on a whim.
Yes. If you care about one thing, parents will be good, but if you care about the other thing, parents will be bad. I don't think there's a simple heuristic of either form "if you care about not doing awful things, then (don't) hire parents".
I appreciate not wanting to unduly bias reader judgement by showing a comment's likes, but I wish that it were possible to ❤️ comments in a way that only the commenter could see that others appreciated the thoughtfulness/work that went into their comment. Currently I have to either give them $10 or clutter up the comment thread by praising their comment.
As other commentators have said, this exact thing is indeed possible. I am constantly seeing emails about the likes my comments get. Frankly I wish that system would get done away with two, it reminds me of when a YouTube video creator likes your comment and YouTube sends you a notification that starts with "Congratulations!". Just feels a bit dopaminergically unhealthy.
FYI to anyone that cares enough to install a browser plugin, you can get Pycea's ACX plugin and it will allow you to unhide the like button. It also reformats everything to look like the old SSC comment section which is even better.
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
And BIG THANKS to Pycea for putting the effort in
I've been notified of likes through email. Don't know how they sent them, maybe you have to be subscribed for the option.
When someone gets an e-mail notifying them of a reply to their comment, or a sibling reply to a comment they left, that e-mail contains a "like" button. If people click that button, then the person who wrote it gets a notification (unless, like me, you've set up a filter to send all "like" notifications straight to trash - relevant for other Substacks where likes are enabled on-site).
Nope, you're subscribed to likes and replies by default. See my earlier comment.
For the posterity, if Sovereigness happens to read this: your comment https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-247/comment/9951877 was what made me wish I could like your comment without cluttering the conversation. Twas a very measured & interesting response informed by a lot more knowledge than I possess.
The 'like' button still works here, it just isn't displayed by default. There's some plugin trickery you can do to restore it and 'like' comments as on other substacks. ACX Tweaks does that iirc, but I'd have to double check.
I believe you can still "Like" a post in your email as well.
Same.
Upvote
I would "like" this comment if I could do so. :)
So I came across this story in my news feed - https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3701369-california-baker-wins-case-over-same-sex-wedding-cake/ - and I wondered, as I have previously whenever such stories about wedding cake baking come up, not about the legalities of the claim, but rather why this is a battle worth fighting at all from the perspective of the plaintiffs - i.e., why not just go to another bakery that aligns with your beliefs, rather than incur significant additional cost to force someone you disagree with to accept money from those with your beliefs in the future? Is there something about wedding cakes that's inherently "important" enough to be worth fighting over? Is the niche so small and bakers so hard to find that it's worth fighting over? It doesn't seem like it would be that small a niche to me, but I'll admit to not having researched that side of the issue at all.
I'm probably blind to something here, coming at it from a cis white dude perspective, but "wedding cakes from THIS SPECIFIC BAKERY even if they don't want to sell to me" seems like a particularly weird piece of ground to battle over.
So if a Muslim baker refused to bake a Jewish themed cake would anyone change their stance?
How about if a Jewish baker refused to bake a Muslim themed cake?
Hell, nobody even tries to force Muslim bakers into supporting gay weddings. This is overwhelmingly an anti Christian thing.
I mean, the actual cake isn’t the issue generally. The issue is creating standing to challenge a law in US court.
I really don’t like such “test cases” because they seem really unfair for the defendant. At the time they denied the cake, the bakers had no reason to believe what they were doing was illegal (in the most famous cake case, it occurred while the state in question still did not have full marriage equality - if the gov’t can discriminate against gay marriage, isn’t it reasonable for a private bakery to believe that they can?)
So basically some small business gets sacrificed on the altar of generating standing to challenge a law.
On the flip side, the plaintiffs have to show they are directly harmed by the law to challenge it. But of course, in a case like this they can’t really be made whole - the harm was time dependent and that time has long past.
Wouldn’t it be better to find a way to allow questions of constitutional law to be raised without necessitating legal cost and jeopardy for someone on the wrong side of it?
Of course the bakers in Masterpiece Cakeshop knew what they were doing was illegal; the law clearly made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and at no point did the baker claim either that he did not know it was illegal, or that he was refusing to bake the cake because the marriage was not recognized by state law. Moreover, the couple was planning to get married in MA (a marriage that CO was almost certainly required to recognize under the Constitution, not that it matters), and wanted the cake for a subsequent celebration.
Nor does it matter that the couple could not be made whole; injunctive relief is a thing, and besides, they might want to buy a cake for their wedding anniversary.
Having a way to litigate issues without someone on the other side might work, though the Court has held that the "cases and controversies" clause means that it cannot issue advisory opinions.
“ the law clearly made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation”
If this were true, the case would not have gone where it did. The whole point was that the applicability of the law, and whether a custom designed cake was a public accommodation, was not “clear”.
No, that was not at all the issue. The baker did NOT claim that he was not a "public accommodation" but rather 1) "that it did not decline to make Craig's and Mullins' wedding cake "because of" their sexual orientation. . . . Masterpiece asserts that its decision was solely "because of" Craig's and Mullins' intended conduct --entering into marriage with a same-sex partner"; 2) that the law compelled him to speak in violation of the First Amendment; and 3) that the Colo Civil Rights Commission was biased against him on the basis of religion.
The Colorado statute obviously applied to him, because it says: "'place of public accommodation' means any place of business engaged in any sales to the public and any place offering services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to the public, including but not limited to any business offering wholesale or retail sales to the public . . . "
The BAKERY was a public accommodation. But whether a custom designed cake was a public accommodation or compelled speech was the crux of the bakers argument. A custom cake is arguably not a retail or wholesale product, being essentially a commissioned artwork.
However you want to slice it, the point remains that whether or not the cake baking act in question was covered by law was an open question that had to be decided by the court.
I'm sorry, but it makes no sense to say that the cake was or was not a public accommodation. A public accommodation is an establishment that sells certain goods and services to the public. And a custom cake is obviously a product.
And, no, whether a custom designed cake was a public accommodation or compelled speech was NOT the crux of the bakers argument. Go read the case. He did not make that argument, and in fact he could not, because it is incoherent. The petition for writ of certiorari makes very clear that the question presented was: "Whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel Phillips to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/16-111-cert-petition.pdf
Finally, "I think the law cannot be constitutionally apply to me" is pretty much the opposite of the original claim that somehow it was unfair to charge the bakery with violating the law, because they had no way of knowing that the law forbade them to discriminate. That simply was not an argument made by anyone at any time.
I think this sort of question of standing is often an important matter of legal strategy. If you can pass a blatantly unconstitutional law, but written in a way that ensures no one has standing to sue, then it can stay on the books for ages. The sodomy laws lasted for decades like this - they were used to deny people employment because the fact that they were gay made it likely they were engaging in illegal activity, but for 20 years between Bowers v Hardwick and Laurence v Texas, no cases were brought, because basically no one was actually charged under the law.
Right, that’s another reason I don’t like it. The upshot of standing is that it prevents thousands of frivolous challenges to every law, the downside is some actual person has to be the Guinea pig on which the law is tested, with potentially life-altering consequences depending on how the question falls.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given the forum, that the vast majority of comments in this thread are of the form that just read bad faith into everything they disagree with, rather than trying to actually answer the question.
Wedding cakes are in fact a smaller niche than bakeries in general, and if you don't live in a major metro area your choices are often extremely limited. Even if you do live in a major metro area, if your tastes are at all discerning, your selection might be limited - a friend of mine decided to bake her own wedding cake, despite all the work that would entail while preparing for the wedding, because she disapproved of every wedding cake baker in Los Angeles. (She had the level of discernment that she wanted a cake that tasted good as well as looking nice, while all the bakers seemed to focus on making cakes look excellent and taste a little better than cardboard.)
She should have tried a Japanese bakery, there are some excellent ones in West LA and Santa Monica. I guarantee that they sell nothing that tastes remotely like cardboard. Their cakes are lovely -- visually pleasing, delicate and delicious. She didn't look very hard.
Those sound good. I wonder if the date, and/or the Pasadena location of the wedding was relevant to why those weren't selected. I bet she would actually have an answer for me.
If a world class painter is offering to paint wedding portraits, it would be somewhere between "not cool" and "illegal" for them to refuse to paint a portrait for someone on the basis of sexual orientation (assuming this is paid work as part of a business or other neutral exchange, not just doing favors for someone).
You aren't entitled to force a specific individual or company to work for you under your terms or none at all. You're just entitled to do business with individuals or companies on the same terms they do business with the general public.
And even in the more common case where the "ceremonial" cake is edible, the bakers often also bring at least one sheet cake in the same flavor and with similar frosting. The sheet cake provides a margin if guests want to eat more cake than was planned for (and may allow the main cake to be smaller and thus cheaper), and it serves as a backup in case some mishap befalls the main cake before it can be served.
That's actually an Orthodox Jewish wedding! The real wedding is the signing of the marriage contract followed by leaving the couple alone for while. The rest is, religiously speaking, celebration -- including the march down the aisle, the vows, whatever.
I'm not saying that she's indicative of what the average same-sex couple is facing. I'm saying that there are very few wedding bakers, they often have a lot of things in common, so anyone who wants something a little unusual may find themselves with *very* few choices. If a picky person can find themselves with no acceptable bakers in a city the size of Los Angeles, then I suspect a gay person who isn't picky could easily find themselves with no acceptable bakers in a city the size of Bakersfield, let alone Chico or Arcata.
Kenny: "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given the forum, that the vast majority of comments in this thread are of the form that just read bad faith into everything they disagree with, rather than trying to actually answer the question." Seems to me your response to Kenny is an example of reading bad faith into his remark. I see his remark as an example of a good-faith effort to alert discussants to a feature of the wedding cake shopper's situation: How many choices of bakers a person has is a function of how many bakers are in the area, how picky the person is about cakes, and what fraction of bakers are willing to make a cake for that person's wedding, given the person's sexual orientation. We can now discuss the issue of gay couples shopping for wedding cakes with that in mind, and think about not only whether gay couples have a right to have a local baker do their cake, and also whether picky gay couples get to have a lot of possible bakers to choose from.
I am not taking a position on this question, and Kenny isn't either (at least not in this post. I haven't read his other ones on the subject). I'm just pointing out the good-faith nature of his comment. What he points out is relevant, useful to consider. He is clearly not defending some picky gay cake shopper who might say, "my standards are too high so this vast array of options isn't good enough, we need to sue the one option which probably isn't good enough either but also wouldn't serve me. does not feel compelling enough to justify all this grief as well as strangling people for having unpopular political views."
You're getting irritable and sarcastic in response to a bad-faith comment that he didn't make. It occurred in your head, not here on the page.
When good faith fails, fallback to bad faith and see if it helps.
Here's a very common story :
(1) There is a giant piece of machinery that (or is supposed to) solves some problem, you're being paid to maintain or operate it, but it's no longer needed. Maybe the problem was solved (with it or without it), maybe it was discovered it's not a problem to begin with. Long story short, you're being paid to do a thing that is not needed anymore.
(2) If you're a good human, you will tell the payers "This is no longer needed, my job was maintaining\operating it, therefore I'm no longer needed. Thank you for paying me when it was needed, it was good while it lasted, don't stop writing the emails, bye".
(3) More likely, you will start *manufacturing* a problem where none exist, you will creatively interpret vaguely related existing problems as your problem when they aren't, you will start getting catty (not in the cute way) and troublesome, you will start actively manipulating the world so that your problem happens again and you can swoop in to solve it.
If you want to be really *really* extra charitable, you can say that (3) is a systemic cognitive shortcoming instead of a deliberate act, stupidity instead of malice. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.", per Upton Sinclair. Or "You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.", per Mark Twain.(http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html) One can no more admit that one's job is no longer useful than one can look at the sun at 12:00 pm.
This is an extremly powerful (and bad faith) way of seeing motivations and understanding incentives, it can explain everything from why the clergy keep insisting that you *need* their magic words and their supposed understanding of their religion to survive and thrive, to why the USA - home to the largest and most profitable weapons manufacturers worldwide - love wars so damn much, to why programmers are so fucking fond of creating new tools and frameworks that are twice as complex as the old ones and do the exact same things.
Put simply, humans deeply want to feel useful, but also hate learning\doing new things, breaking perfectly good brain patterns whose only fault is that reality no longer require them. The only solution implied by the constraints is bending reality so that the old things are\seems-to-be useful again.
Bakery fights (and many many other things) is just a special case of this general pattern, the american progressive machinery is experiencing an Upton Sinclair problem. Too many "non-profits", too many "NGO"s, too many (wo)men(x) getting their corn pone from "defending civil rights for the LGBTQ++ community" for you to simply come here with your bullshit about this being not needed and counter productive. They have to do it for the same reason the javascript framework author need to write one more framework other than the 12 we already had this year. People Like To Feel Useful, and they Don't Let Reality Get In The Way.
I like this take a lot and only want to push back by insisting on the added nuance that some important does genuinely exist to be done and I'm fact the spandrel useless class manufacturing problems to fix can only exist on top of it and not on nothing at all.
Let's be discerning about who is a useless spandrel and who has a legitimate cause. It's typically pretty easy to tell.
In addition to what a sibling comment notes about prejudice being normal and the default for a lot of people and identities, I will also note that if you have a problem, people who benefit from the continued existence of the problem do not share your enthusiasm for ending it.
Weapons manufacturers end wars, but never in a way such that no more wars happen.
What problem ? that some people don't want to deal with some other people ? This is universal, I don't know how to solve it, I know of ways to reduce its effects, such as being a free and decentralized society with extremly small political entities (~1000 person per polity if possible) that have open communication and immigration between them, preferably based in space, and preferably with not too deep division of labor. I know it's a Utopia, some elements are long into the future and some are probably never going to happen. But what can I do, Life Sucks.
It's simply not possible to live in a society and not be forced to comply with the herd, I'm forced to do it everyday on at least 3 major belief clusters of mine. The most you can ever ask for is for it to never escalate beyond silly unfunny jokes. Demanding that people *do* things for you is far far beyond the pale, why would you even want things from people who hate\disagree with you ?
Smallpox is pretty much gone.
There's a sort of "background noise" of prejudice though, so no prejudice will ever be gone. Prejudice against Volvo drivers, or uptalkers, or bodybuilders are all out there somewhere, but we don't have special social machinery devoted to fighting them.
Given the confounders of mental illness as comorbidities with homosexuality, it is difficult to determine how much of the social conflict described is due strictly to sexual orientation and how much to other factors.
> "reported that they..."
This is a group that is not exactly known for their understatement of things.
Note that the plaintiff in that case is the State of CA, not the lesbian couple.
Why does that change a thing? If anything, it seems to me it would suggest even more careful weighing of the return on investment, since the plaintiffs aren't even spending their own money, but money that is extracted from the taxpayers. Does the CA Dept of Fair Housing and Employment have *nothing* of more pressing importance on which to spend limited time and resources? All the bigger evils of housing discrimination, slumlord neglect and abuse, discrimination in employment, hiring and firing, and so forth -- these are all solved already?
This reeks of whoring after headlines, the kind of stunt an agency does to make it seem they're of some use to the large majority of taxpayers who aren't personally experiencing any particular housing and employment discrimination, and which is much cheaper and easier than getting down to the difficult and complex and much less headline-grabbing spadework of actually helping the minority that is.
You are taking issue with the State of CA enforcing its laws? That seems a bit odd.
And, I am a taxpayer who AFAIK is not personally experiencing discrimination, yet that hardly implies that my interests are not served by actions by the state to ensure that ALL laws are enforced and that society is made a more just place. I once voted to increase my own taxes in order to fund repairs to a public swimming pool that neither I nor anyone I know ever used or will use. Because I think that providing such resources is sound public policy. So, I see no problem with using state funds to pursue public policy that is supported by the majority of the state's voters.
Yeah. Until the State of CA has a budget of $infinity and Panopticon is a reality, it has to pick its priorities in law enforcement. That's why I don't think it's reasonable for the state police to spend its entire budget writing tickets for people going 1 MPH over the speed limit on well-lit straight level interstates at 4 am with zero traffic, and thereby fail to do squat to interdict or solve kidnapping, hit-and-run fatalities, drunken driving, unlicensed drivers, and people and drug smuggling.
When California is a blissful haven free of unsolved murders, rapes, and arsons, when nobody sleeps on the streets or dies of a fentanyl overdoes from some laced pills, when slumlords can't fuck over minorities for exorbitant deposits because they don't have cash to pay a lawyer, when no cute girl anywhere in the state is fired for declining to give her manager a beej -- why, then, you'll find me right there with you wanting the state to ensure that ALL laws are enforced with equal vigor and the big remaining problem of two lesbians not being able to get a nice custom wedding cake from the baker of their choice gets squashed.
That seems to imply that, until the state has a murder case of zero, if should not enforce any laws at all, including laws about arson, and rape, let alone racial discrimination in hiring, or pretty much anything. So, that is not much of an argument. All it is is a claim that the state should ignore laws that you, personally, don't think are very important. But, the legislators elected by the voters have different priorities, as reflected by the budget they pass every year.
And, one thing one can say about enforcing discrimination laws: It actually effective at reducing discrimination by imposing costs and altering incentives. Which is more than can be said about a lot of efforts to reduce drug abuse. That seems to be an argument for spending more on the former, and less on the latter.
Yes, and the state was correct to enforce its segregation laws, unless and until they were deemed unlawful by higher laws. That is what rule of law means.
As for whether the state is using its limited resources badly, do you have any evidence that that is true? Have you looked at reports of how the relevant agency spends its resources? Because if you have, you have not linked to them.
I hadn't noticed that - key distinction. Thank you.
I think that's because the couple brought a complaint to the State agency and the agency brings the suit on the couple's behalf as the bakery is alleged to have broken a state law.
I can completely see people wanting to live as ordinary members of society, which includes being able to generally buy what one can afford without having to look for a vendor who is willing to deal with one's kind.
Whether the cost is worth it to force vendors to sell to people they don't want to sell to is another question, but there's nothing weird about wanting to be able to just buy things.
Rationalists have had a lot to say about status.
"Your money is no good here" is a significant status hit.
People run into restrictions on the places they can go all the time. I am not a member of the local country club, so I can't go there. I'm not a member of the Methodist Church, so I can't fully participate in their organization (and maybe very little at all). I don't culturally fit in at certain bars, so I either get asked to leave or made to feel really uncomfortable about it. I'm not a veteran, so I can't go the VA.
Part of growing up is realizing that not everywhere can or will accept everything about you. Also, that is both normal and okay.
Anti-discrimination laws are about when *no one* will accept you, and you don't have any options without such a law.
They might be thinking of victory as doing something for other gay couples.
It's a test case to try and write anti-orientation discrimination into the Civil Rights law. Currently sexual orientation is not written into anti-discrimination law. Various constituencies tried to get it written in but couldn't muster the votes. So now they're trying to get it interpreted into existing law by suing. So while I'm sympathetic to the aim the point here is not actually that they care about the specific bakery. They're purposefully seeking out people who will refuse so they can have standing to sue.
EDIT: Apparently this is a state case in a state where such discrimination is banned. So I'd guess it's a test case in the opposite direction? Or some third thing?
The case at issue is re CA law, which does indeed ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. https://www.dor.ca.gov/Home/UnruhCivilRightsAct
And it's a state case and not a Federal one?
Yes. Per the article: "A California state judge on Friday handed a victory to a bakery owner who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, citing religious objections."
Note that it's not that they can't get a cake made to their liking at all. It's not "this is the only school in the area" or "this is the only Harvard on the planet".
It's 'this person has thoughts we don't like, and those thoughts must be eradicated'.
Not at all. It's "this person claims to run a wedding store that doesn't serve weddings we like, and therefore this wedding store must be eradicated". The law doesn't require that you like gay people. It just requires that if you serve weddings as a business open to the public, then you should serve same-sex weddings to.
It's no more accurate to read this as demanding the eradication of homophobia than it is to read the bakers as demanding the eradication of lesbians.
No. The baker is not forcing actions on anyone. The activists behind the lawsuit are attempting to force compliance on the baker.
This is wrong, this is anti liberty, and it exposes the lie of 'homosexuals only want to be left alone to live their own lives' - some might, but many are power hungry attention seekers who want to tear down the liberal society that shelters them.
If that's what you mean by "eradication", then yes, people who refuse to bake cakes are interested in eradicating the gays.
There's the concept of trivial inconveniences being significant obstructions.
Organizing a wedding is hard enough already.
...no, sorry, I don't buy having to select another baker as a significant obstruction. I don't even accept 'having a cake' as a major part of constructing a marriage.
This is bullshit harassment of the baker, and people who want fair treatment of other humans should be willing to call out the agitators for what they are doing.
The CA law in question does not apply to "public accommodations" but rather to "all business establishments of every kind whatsoever," as it has since at least 1959. Flores v. Los Angeles Turf Club, 55 Cal. 2d 736, 748 (1961).
Moreover, I am about to go to my local art supply store -- not a core service. Do you really think it is ok for them to refuse to serve me because of, say, my race? Or my religious beliefs?
> Do you really think it is ok for...
The issue here is a failure to distinguish between "This is immoral" and "This should be illegal".
I don't think many people actually believe that these should be the same thing, but I think many people will tactically blur the line between them on occasion.
To clarify, it is not simply immoral; it is harmful to those being discriminated against.
And, no, it is not sufficient to say, "they can go to other bakers." Eg: On the end of my street is an entrance to a local park, If my neighbors and I block black people to use that entrance, I don' think the fact that there is another entrance two blocks north and another two blocks south would be much of a defense to a cease and desist order from the city. (And, before someone points out that a public street is different from a private business: I know, but that is irrelevant. "Private businesses are different" is not the same defense as "there are other ways for the victims of discrimination to access the services.")
The point is that the discrimination is itself the harm. Just as the police stopping me without reasonable cause, even for 2 seconds, is the harm. See https://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/sites/ca3/files/6_Chap_6_2020_August.pdf ["[Where appropriate, the jury may award punitive damages even if the plaintiff suffered no actual injury, and so receives nominal rather than compensatory damages."]
What you are talking about, such as re the thirsty man, goes to the extent of damages, not the existence of the violation.
I personally think it should, yes.
You *think* that is the issue, but some people actually believe that this should be illegal. Some people might even think it should be illegal *without* thinking that it's immoral.
Well if you asked them to draw something against their religious beliefs then maybe not. It’s a tricky area.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that it tends to refute your specific claim that this case is an example of "the leftist cultural agenda [attempt] to have "public accommodations" be as ludicrously sweeping as possible" -- the fact that the law has been around for more than 60 years implies that you are incorrect, at least in regard to this case.
I will admit to being a little disappointed in my own cultivated sense of cynicism that this particular possibility never even occurred to me until I posted here.
Should Internet platforms be allowed to refuse service to Jan 6 "insurrectionists?" To people who think vaccines cause autism or that the efficacy of ivermectin treating COVID was deliberately suppressed by public health authorities?
Sure, why not?
Do you think that a baker should be forced to bake a swastika cake for Hitler's birthday if a customer asks for one? If so at least you're consistent.
It seems to me that there's two consistent positions you can take: either the baker can pick and choose with whom they do business (allowing them to refuse the swastika cake or the interracial marriage cake) or the baker can't (meaning they must bake both, if asked). Of the two consistent principles, I think that "my oven, my choice" is the lesser of two evils.
There is also of course the inconsistent principle, the one that states that people should be forced to do things for politically popular groups (like homosexuals) but not for unpopular groups (like Nazis). This seems to be the law of the land in many places, and if people want to support it then I guess that's fine, but I hope they would be open about it.
No, you are again not holding to principle but are opting for special pleading for your own value set.
This is a dishonest and undemocratic world view and you should abandon it.
Consider a group of neo-nazis who join together and open The Church of Adolf Hitler, Modern Day Saint. Same reprehensible beliefs, but now they're a protected group on the grounds of religion*, and they want a swastika cake for their "the holocaust was a lie" day festivities. Should the baker be forced to bake the cake?
* Assume they all totally believe it in whatever way and to whatever extent is necessary to count as a "real" religion.
I'm not arguing about what's legal under current law, I'm arguing about what's right.
Yes I think that is actually a much better and healthier society in the long run. Poeple should be able to discriminate and hire/fire serve/not serve on whatever basis they desire.
The market can sort it out, that is one of the things it is actually pretty good at. Of course I would also be much more of a hardass about having real markets. No more bailouts and no say "Comcasts" lobbying to setup effective monopolys.
So in the real world it is more of a mixed bag. I certinaly see zero issue with it for things like bakeries where there is effetcive competition. It gets hard if it was AT&T or Comcast or whatever, where people might not have effective alternate options.
Except that historically, market forces have done a terrible job of sorting things out. If they had, we wouldn't have had to use the government to integrate things like lunch counters, hotels, and other service industries—and the hiring practices of corporations in general. If money were a motivating factor, you would have thought that in the deep south, in counties with large African American demographics, service industries would have been eager to cater to black customers. But social prejudices were more powerful than cash flow. Likewise, finance industries discriminated against blacks. So, the market forces—driven by societal prejudices—were actually restricting the ability of blacks to start their own businesses or purchase homes.
"Show me on the doll where the Invisible Hand groped you."
It is not at all clear that we "had to" use the government to integrate things like lunch counters, etc. We *chose* to go directly from the government keeping those things segregated, to the government mandating that those things be integrated, without ever trying the "let people decide for themselves" market-based solution.
Some people ever since have been arrogantly certain that if left to the market, the result would have been eternal segregation. The rest of us can't help but wonder why, if the market would have segregated everything on account of white business owners all being incorrigible racists, the South ever needed Jim Crow *laws* to enforce segregation.
I mena a lot of things were integrated? The market wasn't totally failing. The deep south, I agree was an area where markets weren't solving the problem... Or were they as huge portions of the black population fled north?
Also it is not as though there is much dnager of widspread dsicrimination of this type today.
If we got rid of civil rights laws you would anticipate a lot of businesses with official/unofficial "no blacks" policies? I would not.
As for "Likewise, finance industries discriminated against blacks."
I haven't ever seen very convincing evidence this was really happening. Remember they didn't have computers and data sceince was much more primative. Black borrowers really were in actual fact MUCH worse bets than white borrowers in general 9just as they are today).
In such an environment it really isn't clear to me that some of the restrictions didn't make sense. The same way you might not lend to unmarried people, or unemployed people. Sure some unemployed people have other means and could support the loans, but when you make exception you find out often these are lies and it is more trouble than it is worth.
If I am a bank in 1905 and have a limited ability to parse data on creditworthiness, eliminating the blacks/laborers/Finns/Chinamen/Catholics might be a pretty effective sorting tool. its one of the things that has always frustrated me about the "redlining" story. Depending on what phase/era of it people are talking about it, the decisions being made weren't necessarily "incorrect".
People now find them ethically wrong, but there is also this implied premise that not only was it wrong, but that it was "incorrect" and that these were not good discriminations to be made at the time. Which 20 years ago I was totally on board with that story.
But the limited extent to which I have loooked into the particulars (which has invovled some reading of source materials from 100 years ago), and my experience with how much progressives (who I had thought were my allies) like to misuse the concept of discirmination or even paint things as discrimination which make perfect sense has made me skeptical of this element of the story.
Take sentencing of criminals. There are a whole raft of previously progressive, very reaosnable sentencing policies that progressives now work to eliminate because this have disparate racial impacts. Except people cannot even bring themselves to make the concession that they were a good idea in practice, so they act like it was pure racism and nonsense.
Does the offender support a family? Does the offender have a reliable job with a legitimate source of income? Does the offender have a history of past offenses?
These are all super relevant and worthwhile things to consider while sentencing, but because they have very bad racial gradients, there is a large groups trying to get them eliminated or acting like they are only about racism.
TLDR: I don't really have any problem with a banker in 1905 not lending to blacks because he doesn't think they are good loan risks even if his basis for that belief is pretty poor. Probably the basis for a lot of his decision making was poor. Or becuase he doesn't want to hurt the value of the othe properties he has leins on through loans. I do have a problem if he is doing it "because he hates black people".
And I feel like there has been very little effort to figure out how much redlining was column A, and how much column B, and it makes a real difference. In one scenairo he was perhaps mistaken, in the other a jerk. And the story gets told as though it was ALWAYS B. And it also gets told as if that was all bankers everywhere, which isn't true.
Hmmmm. The railroads may have filed friends of the court briefs, but Plessy was challenging the segregation of passengers by race using the Equal Protections Clause (14th Amendment). Plessy was a member of the Comité des Citoyens, who wanted to create case law that would overturn Louisana's statute that forced the segregation of passengers by race. The Comité hired a private detective with arrest powers to detain Plessy to make sure the charges would be for violating state law rather than just misdemeanor trespass. Whether the RR's were funding the Comité des Citoyens, I do not know.
The initial case was State v. Homer Adolph Plessy. When Judge Ferguson, a parish judge ruled against him, Plessy filed a federal lawsuit—which was Plessy v. Ferguson.
That was a fairly common problem in the South - individual companies were fine with integration, but state governments prohibited it.
The longer answer to that scenario involves the following:
-Surplus black laborers can be hired elsewhere, including in other states/regions/countries, who will be at an economic advantage and outperform places that discriminate.
Right now people can (and do!) regularly discriminate against ugly people. What, if anything, should be done about that? If something, do you worry that it might cause more issues to fix than to leave alone?
(Not relevant, but I do support anti-discrimination laws generally. I just recognize that they do cause a lot of problems, are very poor tools for fixing problems, and strongly believe that anywhere they don't absolutely need to be in place they should not be in place. In this case, if a gay couple can go to five different bakeries for a cake, but another one will not serve them, I say that's perfectly fine).
If the discirmination is "working" then it sounds ike the discrimination is justified and not bad.
As for the former quesiton, you know, evaluate whether particular consumers who complain have relevant recourses or not. Seems not that diffuclt, and certinaly an easier court case.
I wanted to eat at this PotBelly and they wouldn't serve me because I take my dog everywhere. There is a Jimmy John's across the street that serves people who bring dogs into the store, you are fine.
I wanted to get a new TV installed from XYZ TV place and they said they don't deal with my kind. This is a rural area and they are the only installer for 2 hours around. Ok they need ot serve you.
You know use common sense. Are there effective alternatives?
>If the discirmination is "working" then it sounds ike the discrimination is justified and not bad.
To be clear, the example you were responding to was racial segregation in the pre-CRA South, and you're saying it was "justified and not bad" because it served companies' financial interests? As long as a separate (implicit "but equal" here, that I'll do you the favor of assuming you meant) service or establishment existed?
Am I reading that right?
By my read of the article, the reasoning used by the court would have yielded the same result if it had been an interracial couple rather than a lesbian couple that wanted the cake. The baker still wouldn't have had to make one for them.
Ehh, I'm on the same general side of the fence as you on this issue, but this is a bad argument. Serving interracial couples would indeed constitute an ideology, especially in a place and time where interracial couples are a taboo.
My own answer is "yes", anybody is allowed to refuse or accept anything. For this not to turn into a defacto self-imposed dictatorship of the majority, there has to be some kind of an exception rule that says "Not if you're only provider of $SERVICE for X km^2". Ideally we should become a libertarian Dyson Swarm civilization of decentralized polities and never need this, but right now that exception is needed because sometimes people are stuck in a place that doesn't like them and they can die if the only hospital in town refuses to treat an atheist or a gay man.
Most notably, this rule is blind to identity or belief. There is no such bullshit as """Protected Classes""", anybody can discriminate against anybody if there are alternatives, nobody can if there aren't.
> right now that exception is needed because sometimes people are stuck in a place that doesn't like them and they can die if the only hospital in town refuses to treat an atheist or a gay man.
Funny that you chose those examples, when the last time that has happened is around 40 years ago. Meanwhile, hospitals *today* are denying treatment to people for holding libertarian political beliefs.
Interesting. Link, please. A web search found me nothing.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if somebody wanted a cake with a decorations celebrating something loathesome.: let’s
say a cake for a child molester’s
group, with frosting spelling out “after 8 is too late.” Can the baker refuse to produce that cake? Can he still refuse if the clients say, ok skip the decorations, just give us a starndard white wedding cake?
Yeah OK. How about this, then. When Dan Savage married Terry, their wedding cake was topped with a golden cock. Should a baker be allowed to refuse to provide a cake with a golden cock on top?
Well, if it's a handsome cock like this? No problem.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/db/30/3cdb30597425bbb2b2bdd5be7e2b0e86.jpg
But if we mean "erect human male penis", then that's a matter of personal taste. Me, were I a baker, I'd think it so incredibly tacky I'd refuse (but then again, wedding cakes always run to the tacky, and since it's Dan Savage I certainly don't expect anything but vulgarity and crassness from him). Personally, I'd bake gay wedding cakes or trans cakes, but my own opinion would be "Eh, it's legal - but you're still a guy/girl, and all the cakes in the world won't change my mind on that".
And that, I think, *is* the deeper meaning to the push about "bake the cake, bigot!" That it *does* mean forcing a change of mind/opinion; that simply baking the cake and taking the money is not enough, you must think gay marriage/trans rights are the normal, natural, right and proper thing. If the baker baked the pink and blue trans cake for Scardino, but said "You know this doesn't mean you're really a woman, right?", I don't think they'd be satisfied merely with the cake. I do think they would still go to court about hurt feelings or feeling unsafe or hate speech or whatever.
Not really germane but . . . I didn't say a GIANT cock, just a cock. But yeah.
>Race, gender, and sexual orientation are a different matter
I have heard a lot (though I don't have the knowledge to actually judge the truth value of) that pedophilia is a "Born This Way" trait. The latest I remember is a German psychologist advocating for a new way to treat it. (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/16/how-germany-treats-paedophiles-before-they-offend).
We don't even have to go that far, 14-16 teenage girls are *sexy*, hellishly so. It's the normal and healthy male heterosexual response to sexualize girls this age, no matter what the man's age, it's literally the "correct" evolutionary response. What if a group of 40 years old men decided that the stigma against desiring 14 years old girls is too stifling and start asking for the right to freely practice a relationship that a *lot* of men arleady fantasize about ?
And don't gender re-assignment surgery undermines the "Born This Way" argument for gender and sexual orientation? A gay man can simply choose to be a straight woman, a woman can simply choose to be a man. Makeup does a similar thing for skin color.
If race-hiding makeup and gender re-assignment surgeries are currently too disruptive and\or costly to be choices for ordinary people, the principle of The Least Convenient Possible World says you should *imagine* a world where they are not, would it be okay in that world to discrimnate on basis gender and race and etc ?(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neQ7eXuaXpiYw7SBy/the-least-convenient-possible-world)
> And don't gender re-assignment surgery undermines the "Born This Way" argument for gender and sexual orientation? A gay man can simply choose to be a straight woman, a woman can simply choose to be a man.
Every trans person I've ever talked to would strongly object to characterizing their situation as a choice. GRS is meant to make physical sex align with the given mental facts, not be a choice.
Okay, I will not open the can of worms that is the T debate. But I will simply note that GRS can be used for more than one thing. The relevant fact is that it can (however imperfectly and with high variance) change physical sex, even if people *right now* aren't doing it out of choice, other people can.
But why ? people despise each other for their choices all the time. Why is despising, say, Trump voters or Putin supporters okay but not gays ? I can anticipate the "Gays don't harm anyone" arguments and, while I agree, I can point to tons of people who believe very fervently otherwise. I reject most of their reasons, but some (e.g. gays are more sexually promiscuous thus spreading more diseases) I'm sympathetic to.
Note also that the abstract quality of being gay is different than the actual concrete gays in the world. If somebody says, on e.g. the internet or live stage, that they're gay, it's very likely that what follows would be a tedious and condescending sermon from the progressive religion, which people hate for other reasons. As an analogy, many people hate the middle east and by extension also hate Islam. Or people hate Islam and by extension the place it's most prominently associated with. Gays and progressivism might be in a similar relationship, even in our world where being gay is (probably ? I don't actually know how I can trust claims like this in 2022) not a choice. I imagine, in a world where being gay is a choice, choosing to be gay would be like screaming *I want special treatment and love lecturing people*, I think we already see this in our world with meaningless "Spicy Straight" identities that go something like "I'm straight and I do 99% of all straight things but I'm you know like ⭐⭐⭐Queeer⭐⭐⭐ or something like that" and so on.
For more examples, people hate vegans all the time. Football fans, hundreds of millions worldwide, go berserk over what other people choose to watch and cheer in their own living room very frequently. All of those are personal choices, what the vegan chooses to eat on their own dinner table really affects 0 people, and yet some people still hate the digestive bacteria in their living guts. Why would choosing to be gay be special ?
Is there an objective criteria for what are "political or social opinions" instead of one of your other categories? You don't have to go very far back in time (10 years, maybe 15?) before homosexuality itself was a "political or social opinion" that could be safety ignored. Even the rest of your categories were opinions alone 50-75 years ago.
I think you're being pedantic about "opinion" but to follow that thought - does it really matter if it's an opinion instead of an inherent characteristic? See Deiseach's question about pedophiles/"Minor Attracted Persons" below. It's entirely possible that being attracted to minors is in fact deeply felt and immutable, should we normalize it?
"Pedophiles are not a class we need to protect from discrimination"
Are you positive about that? The Science is moving in the direction of "Minor Attracted Persons" should be protected from discrimination:
https://www.mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/242357/minor-attracted-persons-neglected-population#:~:text=Sexual%20attraction%20to%20peri-%20or,the%20legal%20age%20of%20consent.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7145785/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10538712.2019.1663970
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3317&context=gc_etds
After all, it's only a cake, not a real child porn piece! And studies show... etc. etc. etc.
Keep up with the times, Unsigned Integer. Sooner than you think, *you* are the bigot who persecutes a class of vulnerable minority persons.
There definitely exist people who are sexually attracted to children but do not act on their attraction. I think there's a good case to be made for society's viewing these people as worthy of respect and compassion. I'm quite sure none of them would be ordering a pedophilia-celebrating cake., though.
Are they now? I have a hard time keeping up with what the "studies" departments have decided this week on whether these are 100% biological or 100% political/social.
Sorry, I think that's factually incorrect. He was willing to sell cakes to whoever, but drew the line at making cakes designed to express a certain opinion (celebration gay marriage in Colorado and I think this one was about supporting trans issues).
So in these cases, it would be more like the opposite. They would happily make cakes for gay people, but not people who support gay marriage.
My half-formed, weakly-held take is something like: "The case of racial discrimination is special because the Civil Rights Act was what the US did instead of reparations. The ideologically pure solution to racism in the US in the 1960s would have been to reinstate to the descendants of slaves 100% of the wealth stolen from their ancestors, which would cause the average wealth of black Americans to rise much closer to that of white Americans. Due to political and practical considerations this was impossible, so black Americans got the Civil Rights Act as a (significantly worse) consolation prize. No comparable "bargain" was struck regarding sexuality-based discrimination, so the law doesn't need to make it illegal to refuse to bake gay cakes."
The best defense I've come across for the CRA is David Bernstein's:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/16/david-e-bernstein/context-matters-better-libertarian-approach-antidiscrimination-law
The idea is that informal violence as well as Jim Crow laws maintained segregation. If a single business defected from the order, they would be targeted for that informal violence. Thus, a law was required to push all businesses to "defect" at once, and thus no single business could be coordinated against.
> The ideologically pure solution to racism in the US in the 1960s would have been to reinstate to the descendants of slaves 100% of the wealth stolen from their ancestors, which would cause the average wealth of black Americans to rise much closer to that of white Americans
Wouldn't it cause the average wealth of black Americans to fall to the level of black West Africans?
To my way of thinking, "reparations" was paid in the form of US citizenship. The alternative, circa 1860, would have been to give them some money and resettle them in Africa.
Seems to me you forgot to count the value of the stolen labor. A LOT of labor; usually generations of it.
I think that debt was paid long ago, in blood. 2 million white boys, almost none of whom owned slaves themselves, volunteered to free the black man, and 400,000 of them made the ultimate sacrifice before the job was done, and another quarter million were permanently maimed.
If there were remaining pureblood descendants of the slaveocracy who weren't expropriated and disenfranchised after the war, who still today held onto some secret gold stash for which black blood was traded, I'd be first in line to kick their God-damned asses, strip them naked and hand it all over to black schools or something.
But there aren't. There were 400,000 owners of any slave at all in 1861, and that number is dwarfed by the millions who fought them. Any random white person alive today is much more likely to have the blood of a liberator than an oppressor in his veins -- and of course even more likely to have descended from people who immigrated decades or a century later, who had nothing even distantly to do with slave-owning, indeed who may have been slaves themselves somewhere else.
Frankly, I was more responding to the very strange notion that U.S. citizenship was adequate compensation than making a declaration in any actual reparations debate. The idea couldn't be made to work so I don't see the point in trying and have not attempted to fully parse the morality of it. Your points have merit; so does Nancy's; Lincoln also spoke of paying the debt in blood, though in a somewhat different way. As for descendance, it being as long ago as it was, I imagine many of us come from several of the different actors in that piece of history & others; personally I know I'm descended from at least one minor slaveowner as well as from later Irish immigrants. I don't think that makes me guilty or something, but I'm pissed at them and at the self-congratulatory tone of the one family story they passed down to me (they were *good* slaveowners, doncha know.) My whole reason for engaging here is that I don't like people minimizing the horrific things that were done; as for what I think ought to be done now, I think some sort of truth and reconciliation process would be best, but I'm also very pessimistic that the time for it has long passed.
Some fraction of the Union army was drafted.
Minus the cost of generations of free accommodation and meals, of course.
In the end, the value of basic manual labour minus the cost of room and board is not all that high, which is why non-slave labourers don't manage to save up a whole lot of money and get rich.
Again, like I said, US citizenship is far more valuable.
Having replied off the cuff, allow me to correct my previous phrasing to "wasn't all that economically beneficial to the owners." The central point remains. Frankly, I think you're overvaluing the "room and board" which was, to put it mildly, of extremely low quality, as well as the sheer amount of labor. (People will work livable hours when they have the option, even if it keeps them fairly poor. Slaves don't have options in that regard.) Not to mention: are we including compensation for wrongful deaths? There is clear precedent to do so in U.S. law. I'm not an experienced accountant or anything, but the bill does seem to be mounting.
Your math suggests that slavery wasn't economically worth it to the owners. I wonder why they held onto the institution so hard??
I suppose some kind of calculation would be needed, but I don't think yours is correct.
The most logical, to me, would have been for former slaves to each get something of the same value as their unpaid labor previously rendered (40 acres and a mule, but you know, actually give it to them). I suppose the option of a free trip back to Africa and a little set up money could have been an alternative, but by 1860 there were few to no black slaves directly from Africa and even those that had come in their own lifetime had spent many years in the US and lost all connections to the continent.
Dealing with this in 1960, it's a non-starter to offer to send people back to a land of their great-great-great-great-grandparents and wish them luck. Forced servitude in order to get an US citizenship is also a bad solution, as they were not allowed to make that choice and we wouldn't allow that choice now either.
Personally I think the idea of reparations is silly and a non-starter anyway, because then you have to sort out the people who were responsible and the people who were mistreated from every similarly-situated-but-not-mistreated-people-who-have-similar-characteristics. This would happen on both ends of the equation. Take a rich Nigerian immigrant from 1995 and offer him reparations? Make a Polish immigrant from 1988 pay for it? Should Barack Obama be paying or receiving, or both?
It seems like there's a general principle here about letting people refuse to do work they are morally opposed to.
Then don't be a baker.
To expand on this, enabling the strong variation of this principle would lead to court officers refusing to grant a marriage license to a gay couple (as has happened), or to people refusing to serve a minority (as has happened). If you have a moral opposition to serving certain members of the public, go into a profession where you don't have to do that.
"Then don't buy a cake."
Look, I can also say things in the imperative mood.
The only professions that serve "the public" in any sense are in government and the military, because government and the military are the only professions that are employed by an abstract entity called The People. The governor works for no one person in particular, but rather The People. So does the highway patrolman, the detective, the Superior Court judge, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Every other profession exists as a series of private contracts between individuals. A baker is a person who offers to make individual contracts, one at a time, with other people -- his customers. Each party to the contract is traditionally free to make, or not make, the contract at his or her own discretion, for any reason or none, and it's no more anybody else's business than it is someone else's business who an individual want to befriend or fuck or marry or become business partners with.
At no point ever does a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker work for "the public" in the same sense as a policeman or USMC lance corporal. At least...not in Western legal canon going back a millenium or more. There are certainly other forms of social organization in which *everyone* works for "the public," and there is no such thing as an individual contract -- every citizen is a party to every contract made by any other citizen, and there are no individual choices, only collective choices about what "we" want to do here or there or anywhere.
Fortunately, almost everyone in the West finds such a system repugnant, if for no other reason than its record of misery, oppression, and carnage in the 20th century.
Maybe that's how you wish things were, but federal public accommodation laws supersede contract law.
If it's illegal to get gay married, and if you got gay married in another state but the state where you live does not recognise it and says you are just cohabiting with your partner, how did the baker infringe on any rights by not making a cake to celebrate a gay wedding which was illegal and could not happen and did not exist, by the law of the time?
The strong variation of this principle would entitle me to walk into a Jewish deli and demand they cook me crubeens, or else I am being discriminated against, and no it doesn't matter that there are six Irish butcher shops where I can buy crubeens, I insist this business serves me because their conscientious objections based on their religious faith don't matter in secular society.
Or you know, that might make me an asshole if I did that, rights to buy crubeens if I want be damned.
But isn't there a distinction between those working for or on behalf of a governmental entity vs. those acting purely in their own private capacity? Someone gets denied a marriage license is being denied a fundamental function of county (or whatever other local government handles it in their area) government to which everyone is entitled. Someone being denied a cake by a particular bakery has to drive another 10 minutes, or do another google search. Yeah, the baker may be an asshole, but that asshole is also a private citizen - absent a specific statute/law/regulation (the establishment of which may ultimately be the goal here, as Eurasian notes in a separate reply) that person is under no LEGAL obligation to do business with anyone for any reason. Maybe there are moral/ethical/some other sort of obligations at play, but the resolution there isn't "force this person to do business with me because it's the "right" thing to do", it's "don't deal with this person because they're objectionable, find someone who isn't."
There are many jobs where someone does not have to deal with the public at all. For example, I know someone that has avoidant personality disorder and she works in the back room at Walmart, where she does not have to deal with the customers. Or take any other job where someone's sexual orientation would simply not some up, such as just about any white collar or even blue collar job that is not customer-facing. Hell, you don't even have to quit being a baker. Just stop offering wedding cakes. Wedding cakes are a low margin product anyway, as they take too much labor for how much people are willing to pay.
Running a social media platform.
Journalist, obviously, they're allowed to be as biased as they want.
What I found particularly egregious about the Colorado baker was that at the time, gay marriage was illegal in Colorado. So he was being asked to bake a cake celebrating something that by state law did not exist. And yet the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found he had violated their rights. So when did the CCRC take a case against the Colorado state legislature? Never happened.
The Autumn Scardina case is mischief-making. This person is not just taking a case about "I wanted a birthday cake and they refused me". It's a political act. It's been agreed that when Scardina rang up to order a cake that was pink inside and blue outside, the bakery was happy to do so. It was only when Scardina made a deliberate comment about this was to celebrate being trans that they refused.
So if Scardina 'only' wanted a pink and blue birthday cake, no problem. If they wanted a trans birthday cake, no problem so long as they didn't say it was trans. But then they wouldn't have had their big lawsuit about "bake the cake, bigot! you must approve, tolerance is not enough!"
Anyone know any good, up-to-date, research about how to accurately discern domain expertise? Or how differentiate experts from novices? I've read most of the classic papers on this topic, just wondered if anyone knew any less well-known papers, or blog posts, or books that are worth reading?
I don't see how there could be a domain-general answer to this question. It seems that each domain would need its own way to identify expertise.
There are some broad heuristics you could use - ask the people whose expertise you trust most who are the experts you should ask in the domain in question, and then have those people evaluate the person whose domain expertise you want to evaluate. But this method doesn't tell you anything about how to resolve disagreements, or how to identify the first person to start your chain, or how to even identify the domain in question.
I don't see how you can discern domain expertise unless you yourself have expertise in that domain. Other than that, you have to find someone you trust as an expert in that domain, and trust their judgement of the expertise of others in that domain.
I have a quick-and-dirty method I used when interviewing job applicants: I'd ask them to tell me about some work they'd done in their domain, or some way they'd applied their expertise, /for fun/. Not for work or for school. Anyone who has no answer to that question might be an "expert", but they're no good.
(This works very well for technical staff. I don't know how well it would apply to managers.)
I think this can rule people in but not out. I don't do a lot of coding for fun any more, because moving my body enough to maintain my mental health takes up nearly all my available energy and leisure time.
I mean a smart person might navigate that, but I am absolutely a topic expert in a little tiny field of consulting, and I can gaurantee you I do ZERO of it for "fun"/personal projects. I would barely read news article about it for "fun" (maybe once or twice a year). It is work for pay only.
I don't find the field particularly interesting and the skills involved are used for lots of personal projects, but aren't really related to my "expertise" they are just generic thigns like (can use a spreadsheet, and knows how to lead/train adults effectively).
I am really good at managing and organizing things and am the leader of several orgs/entities, but that is hardly me doing things in my "domain expertise" as a personal project.
Yes, there are probably exceptions. Do you want to say what your tiny little field is?
Umm no. but I would imagine a lot of jobs are like this. Commerical bankers? Underwriters?
All sorts of stuff.
There was a study of underwriters, done partly by looking at the distribution of insurance premiums asked for the same insurance at different companies. I forget who did it. It's described in a popular book, "Noise". The conclusion IIRC was that most or all underwriters have no expertise. But I don't remember the specifics nor the qualifications on that conclusion.
"Read *Noise*" would be a good answer to the original question. Although there are a couple of egregious errors in that book, the most-important one being the claim that scatter due to bias and scatter due to noise are equally important -- based on circular reasoning.
I find the idea that no underwriters have expertise kind of suspect. Maybe in actual fact few do, but the job is certianly one that is tractable to skill.
You may miss out on old, tired, experts, like I was before I retired.
40 years ago, I loved both my job and my field. I did hobby projects a lot, though often restricted by employment agreements from doing anything, even as a volunteer, that might possibly compete with my then current employer.
But in my last decade, I believe I started exactly one hobby project, and didn't finish it.
Of course I could have answered your question, citing my past, and there's one particular project that had come up in many interviews. But nothing recent, and even now that I'm retired, I'm still doing just about anything other than work in my erstwhile field.
"I have a quick-and-dirty method I used when interviewing job applicants: I'd ask them to tell me about some work they'd done in their domain, or some way they'd applied their expertise, /for fun/. Not for work or for school. Anyone who has no answer to that question might be an "expert", but they're no good."
This seems like an approach that might work for engineers and artists/musicians/etc. but would fail for trauma surgeons. Would you insist that an expert pilot fly for fun as well as for Delta?
The distinction that you can make here is that the latter categories require certification, and the former (in most cases) do not. In other words, distinguishing domain experts is more or less a solved problem (certified or not), unless you're looking for something specific.
I'm afraid I don't, but the topic sounds important and useful - which of the classic papers did you find most useful or insightful?
One of the most highly cited ones that I thought was interesting was a Michelene, Feltovich, and Glaser (1981) study that looked at the differences in how physics experts and novices approached solving physics problems.
(https://asu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/categorization-and-representation-of-physics-problems-by-experts-)
The TL;DR of it is that novices appear to solve problems by focusing on its unique features, whereas experts seem more inclined to work forwards from first principles (i.e the laws of physics) to solve problems.
I liked it because it kind of corresponded with Telock's research on the traits of good forecasters- who are less likely to be swayed by the idiosyncrasies of events, focusing instead on the base-rates that such events happen.
(https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/journal/16/16511/jdm16511.pdf)
I wonder if the expert approach can be taught.
Thanks!
Any recommendations/suggestions for book that look at the phenomenon of the global 19 and 20th century Indian diaspora/migration? When I say this, I’m thinking of the grand flows of migration settled the Indo-populations of the Caribbean, Southeast-Asia, and Africa. Less so the post WW2 migration to US, UK, etc.
I’m thinking particularly something along the lines of Grand histories such as Replenishing the Earth, Fischer’s Albion’s Seed or the Formation of New Societies.
I would not want anything ‘ethnic or critical studies’ and the more stodgy facts or numbers, the better!
Part of me feels like I came across such a book and forgot, or I dreamt it..
This sounds like an interesting question!
I haven't found a book on it, but a search finds several articles that might help:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2172323
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2572530
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780367818043-3/british-colonialism-international-migration-india-four-destinations-prakash-jain
Thank you! The first one from 1956 is very interesting and kinda what I was looking for, book-wise.
And yes, its certainly an interesting one! Like the Jewish and Irish diasporas, they went quite far and wide, with significant and varying influence in the histories of some countries (Fiji, Mauritius, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago). The fact they often straddled market-minority and plantation worker, settler and subject, makes me wonder if we underrate how interesting migration was in 19thC.
Has anyone ever heard of Naboso insoles?
https://www.naboso.com/
I wear minimalist/barefoot-style shoes because I have ankylosing spondylitis and for some reason zero-drop minimalist shoes reduce my back and hip pain. These insoles seem popular in the barefoot shoes community, claiming to help with posture and foot fatigue, but it all looks like snake oil to me. Is there any reason that these "proprioceptive" insoles would actually help with posture and reduce fatigue?
[Also, is "bad posture" actually a thing?]
They look kind of pricey for insoles. Especially when it is a single textured foam sheet cut into a foot shape.
If you look at the (abandoned) patent application, the active ingredient seems to be the little pyramids that cover it.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180243166A1
What I'm wondering now is whether it's be cheaper to 3d print that geometry in TPU.
"bad" posture is any posture that causes you pain or discomfort. There is not 1 posture that is best for everyone. People don't sit or stand with one posture for very long under normal circumstances. A posture can feel great at first and then cause pain or discomfort over time. Was it "bad" to start with or was it the time in that position made it "bad"?
Generally, the human body is quite adaptable and able to perform under many conditions.
I love the idea of people getting shoes without soles, and then getting socks with mini soles in them so they can kid themselves about liking soleless shoes.
Right? If these insoles help you, maybe just… don’t wear minimalist shoes in the first place?
Anecdotally only, I feel like "bad posture" is a thing, at least in some sense.
For example, when working on the computer, I used to lean in too much and hunch my shoulders and I'm pretty sure this contributed to a lot of discomfort (after the fact, not so much during).
I lowered my desk to be proportional to my height, got a better chair, and started using a split keyboard. This helps to place my shoulders and back in what feels to me like "better posture", and has caused me to feel less pain and tension after work.
Another example - if I spend too much time sitting, it seems like I start to stand 'wrong' and walk 'wrong', and this contributes to back and hip pain for me. Doing yoga about it seems to help to 'reset' my posture, so I stand 'better' and walk 'better'. Even more subjectively, I just feel better and more confident when I have "good" posture.
What's objectively good or bad? I am not qualified to say. It seems like when your posture is compensating for stiff/tight muscles, that's usually a bad thing.
Anyway - no comment on the insoles. I always figured the barefoot people would believe that being closer to barefoot is better? I actually wear barefoot shoes exclusively, but I've never looked into what people actually say about them.
I don't know if bad posture is a serious health risk, but it can devastate your social and professional life. Even if it's a cultural construct, posture which people recognize as "bad" marks you as a bad sexual partner or manager.
Peter Zeihan put out a video recently on the Jones Act: https://youtu.be/Sc128K695R0. I tend to agree with him, but am finding it hard to play devil's advocate--I may have a blindspot on this issue. Can anyone tell me why we shouldn't significantly update the law, or why congress can't or won't (other than low-priority/laziness, and perhaps a small union lobby)?
BLUF: The US Merchant Marine is critical to the US military. Allowing foreign competition to undercut US shipping is a national security threat and gets treated as such because the US military will not depend on non-US citizens to deliver critical military gear in wartime. While there's definitely an economic cost, US national security interests will almost always beat it.
The reference case for this is, as always, WWII. The Jones Act gets passed in 1920 specifically to protect US shipping from foreign competition and, within 20 years, the Merchant Marine is supplying Britain and the Soviets with critical arms to fight the Nazis. This was incredibly risky for individual sailors (1) but also probably the most the most important front in the war; D-Day and Hiroshima get more attention but keeping Great Britain in the war and the Soviets supplied with arms and equipment for that brutal warzone is basically what won the war.
Post-WWII US commanders aren't looking at the US Merchant Marine as an economic unit, they're looking at it as a key part of their post-war logistics infrastructure, especially as US military bases spread across the globe. There might be clever ways around these concerns but...most references I see to the Jones Act and similar laws aren't focusing on the Jones Act itself but more as a reference class for bad laws, which means strategies for seriously revising it aren't really there.
Which is fair because I'm not sure there's a better solution. Without the Jones Act, US shipping will basically die because foreign seamen are so much cheaper. And make no mistake, the Merchant Marine seamen are absolutely what is being preserved here; we can build new ships much much faster than we can train seamen and officers. The Navy could take over this function but...god, the US military is already a bureaucratic mess and adding the US Merchant Marine fleet would more than double the number of active ships to handle. Bottom line here: the US military needs thousands of experienced sailors it can trust in the event of war to ship goods through warzones. They don't trust foreign sailors and having the Navy do it would be a nightmare. In order to have US sailors do it, you need to subsidize the industry, so they do. Baring some fourth group of sailors becoming available, I don't know how you get out of this.
I might change my mind if @bean or someone else does a really in depth take on it but I have family working in this industry and from them it's a pretty open secret that the US military is keeping US shipping alive.
(1) https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/merchant-marine-world-war-ii
Counterargument: The US Military can not depend on the US Merchant Marine to deliver critical military gear in wartime, because the US Merchant Marine is a small handful of mostly outdated ships that are all going to be booked solid keeping e.g. Hawaii from sinking into anarchy and ruin no matter what war we are fighting. I'm *pretty* sure our allies will come through for us if we need them to deliver critical military gear in wartime, and there's also the Military Sealift Command, but it's those or nothing, or close enough to nothing as makes no difference. The Jones Act has *failed*, and there is no credible plan for resurrecting a substantial fleet of US-owned, US-crewed private merchant ships. We're going to have to learn to live with that.
Alright, so several factual disputes here, and then a broader point that isn't being picked up.
First, the US Merchant Marine isn't antiquated, they work the same ships as everyone else with basically the same equipment. US merchant mariners work for companies like Maersk all the time and there's no major quality gap in equipment.
Second, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan shows that even if US allies are willing to help, they're not often able to help to US military standards. Additionally, we'd be talking about sending unarmed ships with tens of millions of dollars in military and relief supplies into a warzone. If there's a shooting war over, say, Taiwan, the US military needs those supplies to be delivered, if not to Taiwan, then to US bases in Guam, Korea, the Philippines, Japan, etc. They won't trust that to non-US citizens, especially not to foreign crews who will start to see lots of their crewmates dying as the Chinese will absolutely try to sink these ships and interfere with US logistics. This also kind of runs into the idea that the US fleet is so far gone it doesn't matter. No doubt that the US fleet isn't where we'd want for an active war but the US fleet is somewhere between 200-500 ships, depending on how you define it. While there would certainly be some hard decisions in a war, there would be a lot more if we had no US fleet.
Third...Military Sealift command kind of is the Merchant Marine, or it's basically a contracting agency that only hires merchant mariner. I'm struggling to find firm number: Wiki says that 88% of the Military sealift staff are civilians, but that could be non-merchant marine (1). This letter to US Military Sealift Command states that 20% of all US naval vessels are crewed by merchant mariners, including all the auxiliary supply ships (2). I do know that USMSC hires so many merchant marines that the Pacific Run is mainstay of west coast shipping. Basically, USMSC hires a ship to carry military supplies to a Pacific military base, stereotypically Busan. Once that shipment is done, the crew are no longer USMSC, so they travel up to Shanghai and load Chinese goods for the US market. Once they're back in LA or Seattle, the USMSC hires them out to move more military supplies to Busan.
Finally, I think a lot of people are caught up with the ships but it's not the ships, it's the people and more importantly the skills and culture. Let me give an example with Chief Engineers, although I'm getting outside my comfort zone.
Chief engineers are critical on big ships because the run the engine and their duties basically boil down to performing as much maintenance as possible while in operation, because time in drydock is time not shipping goods for money, and fixing this giant monstrously complex engine in case something goes wrong. Both of these things are critical on a ship with a total value (ship, engine, and carge) of a quarter billion +. This blog (3) has a decent rundown of the requirements to be a chief engineer but it boils down to taking a mechanical engineer and throwing him in a ship for ten years. This is a highly technical and highly specialized skill set, foreign chief engineers can expect to make $100-$150k and US chief engineers usually make $300k/yr for 6 on, 6 off.
And here's the thing, you can't get these guys in a hurry. In a worst case scenario we could just buy container ships from our allies or neutral shipyards; this is a money solvable problem. But if you don't have US-national chief engineers, no amount of money will solve that in less than 4-5 years. You can't train them that fast, not without seriously compromising quality and a lot of the stuff can't be taught in the classroom, it needs to be picked up not just through experience but from "passed-on wisdom", for lack of a better term. Extend this out to US-national captains, chief mates, senior mates, etc and all of sudden you realize you need this entire ecosystem of different high-skill positions to make it work.
And I think that's the guts of the thing. International shipping is hard, but it's also profitable so lots of foreigners do it and do it for cheaper. The US Military, however, doesn't trust foreigners in a war with their key logistics. And using protectionism to keep a rump US merchant fleet around is cheaper and simpler than building a whole second navy just for shipping. And when people complain about tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in economic costs, the US military just laughs because in their world serious costs are denominated in trillions.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Sealift_Command#Command_structure
(2) https://cimsec.org/why-military-sealift-command-needs-merchant-mariners-at-the-helm/
(3) https://www.merchantnavydecoded.com/how-to-become-a-chief-engineer/
So, the plan is that during war we're going to put US Merchant Marine crews on foreign ships and have them deliver critical military supplies? Because I think there are some problems with that. Otherwise, the US Merchant Marine is limited by its ships. The Jones Act, does not incentivize US shipowners to maintain enough of the right kind of ships to perform the states mission. The MSC perhaps does, but it does so by paying taxpayer dollars for ships and sailors, not by waving the magic "Jones Act" wand.
No, I've got no special information on what the plan is and, while the Pentagon has probably wargame-d out a bunch of different scenarios, they're going to do the best they can with the specific circumstances of a very bad series of events.
And while the US Merchant Marine doesn't have as many ships or crews as the Pentagon would like for a full conflict, it's a heck of a lot better than having none.
Without the Jones Act there would be very, few perhaps no, US flagged civilian cargo ships. Not US owned. There'd still be plenty of ships owned by Americans and American companies. But they'd be flagged in other countries. Plus the usual arguments for protectionism and the fact of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Though not so diffuse for Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. But those aren't exactly electoral powerhouses.
On the whole, yes, I think it's a bad law.
I'd assume it's for classic public-choice reasons: a small tight community would lose out a lot from reform (or at least thinks they would lose out a lot) and so are motivated to lobby intensively against reform; the community who would benefit are much larger but also more diffuse and the individual benefits are smaller.
Yep. Its also a really hard political sell for any one in an election year. "My opponent hates American industry" is a terrifying slogan to campaign against. (I support Jones Act repeal)
There must be better, or at least more direct, ways of subsidising the US shipbuilding industry.
Well said. However, I think the same thing can be said of U.S. manufacturing. I don't want to argue about protectionism vs a freer market, just that there are lots of persuasive security arguments for protectionism, and it almost always ends up being really bad.
Etiquette question. How do folks feel about starting multiple, controversial comment threads within six hours on an open thread?
Yes, this is about le_berger_des_photons. At this point, approximately a quarter of the comments on this thread are them, or people responding to them.
I think the commenter needs to seek some professional help to reduce their paranoia and I think the posts should be removed as they are low quality.
Unfortunately, they are BY FAR the most commented on posts in this open thread. :/
That's two distinct questions and for me generates two distinct responses.
(a) In general, one user starting multiple controversial/challenging comment threads within a few hours on an open thread is one of the potential joys of participating in a comment board. BUT....my lifelong experience with this sort of system (google "Usenet newsgroup" kids) has made it clear that "potential" is the keyword. The number of users who can actually do that in a way which adds value is small. Much smaller than the number who are certain that they can do so, which leads to...
(b) le_berger_des_photons is clearly not one of that small number. And another part of my long experience an online discussion systems is that allowing such users to "go to town" is a sure way to kill off an online discussion system. Been there, seen that, multiple times. My libertarian leanings are pretty strong so this reality saddens me quite a bit. But it is the reality.
I think you should phrase your question either as a general question, OR as specifically about le_berger_des_photons, but NOT as both. Doing that leads to the construction of social norms which are actually maximized for one peculiar edge case.
I think their earlier posts were interpreted as being in good faith and answered in good faith. The other post other post was plain terrible and IMHO worthy of an instant ban. Them resorting to name calling after the replies came just proved that point.
The probability of a discussion with an anti-vaxxer, Holocaust denier or a believer in antisemitic conspiracy theories creating any light instead of just smoke are basically nil. Just a waste of everyone's time.
We need a browser plug-in that will spot this stuff and auto change the user name to jewish_space_laser_guy.
A good early application for AGI. Before the paper clip thing that is.
You might get a little bit of light from one or two of those in isolation, but all three together and it's just heat with no purpose.
Wasn't this just a transparent attempt to stir up some shit? My guess is that some bored 14 year old or mentally ill loser decided to see if he could troll everyone with the most offensive possible topics.
Seems like it.
Hm, haven't read down that far yet, just opened this thread. Since I have the bad habit of commenting multiple times on a thread, I can't throw any stones. Let me read down that far and I'll think about it.
Eh, to be clear, it's the multiple controversial top level comments within a six hour period that's setting off alarm bells.
Okay, I've read them and yeah. This is not someone trying to share thoughts in good faith, it's tinfoil hat time. We *must* believe viruses do not exist, vaccines are death-jabs, and their selection of Covid fanatics are telling the truth Big Pharma/the Rockefellers/maybe the Dero inhabitants of the Hollow Earth don't want us to know!
I can't in good faith call for a ban, but this is not going to be any kind of productive interaction.
Ah, yes, because if you just put something in the same sentence as "Hollow Earth", that makes it false. Doesn't matter how overwhelming the evidence is - just say the word "microchips" and you're good.
So I take it from this that you do believe the Hollow Earth theory is correct?
What?
It's not a problem if your comments are good, you are engaging in good faith and bringing something interesting to the discussion.
It's a problem if you are an arrogant antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a tenuous grasp on reality.
I doubt this guy believes the stuff he’s spouting. Just having a bit of malicious fun.
If anything, that's likely a bigger problem.
+1
"Multiple threads on controversial topics" shouldn't be a problem, but antagonistic tone + conspiracy theories + bad faith "just asking questions" very much can be.
Seconded. It's true there can be a fine line between spouting rambling conspiracy theories and being an interesting-to-speak-to divergent thinker, but this guy is nowhere near that line. I've already reported several of his comments for him unproductive and antagonistic.
That's a long way of saying these threads need extra moderators as Scott cannot be expected to do the heavy lifting. All comment sections need mods IMHO.
There's a report option under every comment, report the bad ones.
Agreed. Mods are almost never the answer. Mod bias is far worse, and probably more prevalent, than nasty comments, which one CAN ignore if one is an adult. And websites that get mods often move on to banning comments altogether.
That sounds like a "disagree", not an "agree", because the comment you are replying to asks people to "report" comments, which is part of moderation.
That isn't what people mean when they say "moderation". I've had numerous discussions and arguments about the need for moderation, and the two sides in these arguments aren't "No moderation" vs. "Reporting of comments", but "Reporting of comments" vs. "Administrators obligated to read comments and empowered to delete comments and ban users", or even (as in the case here on AC10) "One adminstrator who reads comments and sometimes deletes them and bans users" versus "MORE adminstrators who read comments and sometimes delete them and ban users."
I believe mods are the only answer. I've been in some good unmoderated newsgroups on usenet, but nothing since then.
And I don't believe that "just ignore it" is an adequate answer. Having things you need to ignore is a cost. Low enough if the problem is just a moderate proportion of things you aren't interested in, but higher for emotional provocation.
I find that ignoring things can also lead to becoming numb.
This is a lightly-moderated blog, and you seem to like it. I see no terrible problem here that requires more modding.
Light moderation is enough here. I'm contrasting it with no moderation.
Sorry, to be clear, I think there's also a broader question which is the one I asked, with le_berger as the example.
It makes me glad there is a collapse thread option. Yeah the guy is being a real dick. The ideal response would be to not to take the bait.
For the broader question, I'd say it's fine; open thread is for talking about your interests, if you have a lot of interests why not start a lot of threads. But, I'm new here, don't actually know the decorum.
If you have a lot of interests, fine. Do tell us.
If you have a lot of interests that make people angry, or worse, a single strong interest in making people angry, hold back.
What are we all doing for legal drugs, for entertainment/killing time on a weekend night? Emphasis on the world 'legal', please. To date I've tried experimenting with marijuana (legal in my state, I enjoy the drinks much more than the smokeable form), small amounts of alcohol (I don't enjoy more than 2 drinks), kratom, and kava off and on. I do like kratom probably most of all, but it's chemically related to opioids, and it also makes me nauseous after a couple of hours, so I tend to be sparing with it. Kava can be quite fun but requires drinking a large gross-tasting concoction, it's rough on the digestive system, and it doesn't last that long.
A couple of drinks and 25mg of CBD seems to be a nice combination to mellow out, watch Netflix etc., while not being super-strong. I've tried making experimental mixes of half a marijuana drink (so 1.25mg of THC and CBD all-in) and a small amount of kratom, haven't quite found the perfect combination there but I'm working on it.
Does anyone else have anything different they use to while away a Friday or Saturday night? My apologies to Scott if it's an inappropriate question, I can delete. Obviously this is not meant to be an illegal drug discussion
I think you'd be better off staying sober and trying to improve the quality of the activities you're doing, if you find that you're "killing time" on weekends. Get better hobbies or friends or a girlfriend or something.
Food, whiskey, sex, participating in team sports.
What's the legal status of nitrous oxide in your jurisdiction?
Ooh, I forgot to mention nitrous. Yeah, I experimented with it several times earlier this year. It only lasts for an incredibly short time period of time, even a few of them give me a hangover, and I feel uncomfortable with basically 'huffing' drugs. I mean, what's the difference between doing nitrous and huffing paint or glue? So I peaced out on NO
Utterly unhealthy amounts of caffeine. Two or three pots of coffee a day, plus three or four sodas usually.
Marijuana is excellent for enjoying art, listening to music, and watching some movies - in particular those with slow pacing (2001: A Space Odyssey is magnificent in that state). I'd say using it for random Netflix trash is a waste.
A friend of mine wholeheartedly recommends painting minis (Warhammer etc) while stoned - the states of mind are apparently very compatible.
THC is great for hours long conversation with friends too. They tend to play out like the friendlier long exchanges on ACX.
Disc Golf is alway good too. Got a nine basket course a couple blocks from where I live. Sometimes I’ll jus sit in a tee box and describe the goal ahead.
Hey guys, you got a dogleg left here. Either lay up by that tall pine or if you are feeling lucky and have a good arm go straight past the tall oak.
I can count on most of those fellas being high too.
I'm sure this is not what you're looking for, but I find the high from extremely intense physical activity + adrenaline from related risk (such as in fight sports, heavy lifting, sprinting, etc.) to be far superior to anything the more gentle drugs can provide. And the afterglow from these activities is very similar to what I usually feel from 1 or 2 drinks + CBD. Not meant to be a moralizing answer, just one that I think a lot of drug users don't take very seriously.
"I'm sure this is not what you're looking for, but I find the high from extremely intense physical activity + adrenaline from related risk (such as in fight sports, heavy lifting, sprinting, etc.) to be far superior to anything the more gentle drugs can provide."
I have been trying to understand "runner's high" for a while. Maybe you can answer a question for me. Does 'extremely intense physical activity' include something such as 'hit ~80% of max heart rate and stay there for an hour'? Does this generate the high you are describing? Or does one need to be more intense? Or is there some other component needed?
For me the "runners high" usually comes with time, not intensity (though duration of exercise does increase intensity). Im also more likely to experience it by pushing my self beyond some limit or barrier. Quieting that annoying voice in my head telling me to stop feels great mentally and physically.
I concur on time, though intensity is important as well. I'm not a runner, and I don't regularly exercise, but I do like to take hikes. If I do a 5 hour hike, I usually don't get anything like a runners high. However, one time halfway through the hike I realized I miscalculated the time and needed to turn around immediately or I'd miss an important deadline. All the way back I pushed myself to go fast, so the second half of the hike was significantly more intense than usual. After the hike was done, for about two hours I felt extremely relaxed, stress free, and happy. It was directly comparable to when I was put on oxycontin after dental surgery a few years earlier. Felt good.
Thanks.
How long? Two hours? Less? More?
A pint of beer after a hard workout is even better than either on its own, though.
If I’m honest, that’s probably the only time beer tastes good to me. After a long bike ride it really hits the spot.
I will usually have one after shoveling a lot of snow too. I’m a heavy sweater and get dehydrated easily.
I absolutely concur with this answer. Though it does depend a little bit on taste and opportunity, meaning I can't currently do the activities I like all year round. And even if its the right time of year, you might not be able to do it on a given work day. But this can be mitigated with experimentation with other "drugs", to find something for every time and place.
I experimented a bunch with kava a couple of years ago. It's very very very picky about how you make it, if you don't get the steps right it doesn't get you high (and then you've consumed this foul-tasting brew for nothing). It's been a while, but originally I used the strainer method plus hot water- later I purchased this thing, the Aluball (1) If I were to make kava again, I'd say hot (but not boiling) water and shake the Aluball vigorously for 60 seconds
1. https://www.getkavafied.com/collections/the-worlds-first-kava-makers/products/aluball-pro-kava-maker-alubottle
I like the effect. The taste of the brew I make is pretty awful though.
trigger warning: suicide, drug abuse, pregnancy, irresponsible parenting
I know a woman who is a former opioid addict who raised healthy and happy children. Bless her heart. I also know another former opioid addict who killed herself after miscarrying. She's finally found peace.
I also know a third former opioid user who seems to be struggling with some sort of drastic personality change in the first trimester of pregnancy: it's looks like something overrides her decision making and emotional self-regulation, in a way that might be acutely detrimental to the well-being and mental health of a young child. And I worry about her, as well as about her unborn child: what sort of life would that child have? Would parental trauma doom that child to repeating the same self-destructive patterns?
I am still working through the consequences of being born to a mentally unstable mother, who only mellowed out somewhat after entering menopause, and to this day refuses to admit that certain traumatic episodes that have burned themselves into my memory took place. So I suspect that a culture-bound self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing acts as the triggering factor: anxieties about child-rearing and self-worth in a patriarchal society, and persistent failure of loved ones to respond appropriately, could definitely drive someone to self-harm, drug abuse, general risk-seeking behavior, and (perhaps most harmfully) a sort of persistent psychological blind spot that would negatively affect a child's upbringing and initial psychological makeup, perhaps to a crippling degree.
So I came here to ask: does my model of the above make sense? Furthermore, is there a biochemical connection between the effects of opioids and those of pregnancy on the human brain?
I hadn't connected the dots in this particular way - my suspicion was more along the lines of hormonal changes eliciting the same behavioral patterns as drugs. But what you're saying definitely makes sense. Truth be told, if that turns out to be the case, I'd have no idea what could be done without antagonizing her or victimizing her further: she has already responded with hostility and duplicity to outside perspectives on her situation, and in our community there are hardly any sources of support for people with such problems.
Suppose we rule that out, though. Suppose she is well aware of the dangers, responsible enough to stay off the stuff, and her erratic behavior can be attributed to a preexisting personality disorder that she is working to mitigate - where does that leave her then? Is there literature that suggests a possible biological connection between, let's say, maternal instincts, and opiate abuse in particular?
It feels like a strange coincidence for Scott to have a "HOT or not?" discussion this week, me feeling pretty ambivalent either way, and then suddenly this OT has caused me to update strongly in a decisive direction. All part of the plan!
(Counterpoint to more frequent OTs: some other blogs do them super frequently, like one a day, and those get basically ~no traffic despite similar sized readerships. The 1k+ comments on ACX OTs are intimidatingly numerous and cause technical problems, but I'd much rather have that sort of lively activity than a dead mic. Lends a certain liveliness to the place, rather than feeling like a passive commentariat that just comes out of the woodwork to react to author posts.)
Anyone here read this pair of posts? The blog is only a couple of degrees separation from this one, so apologies if this has been discussed before.
https://wonderlandrules.substack.com/p/the-kindly-ones
https://wonderlandrules.substack.com/p/the-shimmy
I can't tell if this is like, insane or not. I can totally buy that skilled people can use body language, suggestion etc. in order to manipulate others. But the effect claimed here seems very large. And even if it works, would being able to make people feel terrified without them actually knowing why be a generally useful tool for getting your own way?
He describes this killer PUA-adjacent NLP technique as a "weapon of the woke" used intuitively by gay, lesbian, and trans people and transmitted by... some kind of autism-mediated osmosis, I guess? Like crows learning from each other to steal pensioners' glasses or something.
Even correcting for the fact that it marks him as my outgroup, this punctures the credibility of his account for me. I'd have seen it work by now.
Well damn, how come I have missed out on all the cool autism-related superpowers? I just got the overwhelming social anxiety and weirdo vibes! I didn't even get the mathematical ability!
Walliserops covered the point with more flair, but for what it's worth (said the Marxist to the Catholic) you've never come across as serving weirdo vibes, especially against the backdrop of the local menagerie. Always remarkably human.
Oh, please. Being a local legend in a community best described as "SEELE but not evil, we hope" isn't enough for you?
I bet you get one bright-eyed, EA-adjacent Percival Tsarevich type at your door seeking wisdom each week, and there's a 50/50 on whether you solve their quest with a medieval anecdote that is somehow perfectly tailored to fix their problems, or kill them on the spot for their insolence. And you want this guy's socially transmitted terror beams on top?
Gentlemen, ladies, reverend fathers, reverend mothers, my lords, your eminences, your graces and fellow-peasants:
My online persona is *extremely* different to what I am in real life. Believe me, nobody is asking me for advice or even taking notice of me besides occasional "who's the oddity in the corner?"
Online is *easy*. Reality is - well, I make hermit crabs look like gregarious jet-setters.
Yeahhhhh.... no thanks. "I've figured out a secret psychological superweapon which I am going to tell you all about how it worked on *me*, and I'm an Alpha Alpha, so just imagine what you poor inferior specimens will be like if anyone tries it on you! Of course, for global security, I'm not going to tell you anything concrete about it, but if Really Important People in scientific fields want to contact me, I'll consider it".
Nice piece of fiction writing, but not a genre that interests me.
The second linked post is him posting the actual technique, due to this kind of backlash on the first one.
Well there's only one thing to say in response to that second article:
I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgPweZX9JxI
Hum, both posts are so obviously ridiculous that I have some difficulties understanding why they can seem convincing.
Because yes, mirroring, in the general meaning of matching the other person way of speaking, emotional tone, level of gesture, etc., is a very real and natural component of social interactions. Most people do it most of the time, to some extent, when talking with someone.
But as mirroring will not magically convince someone, "freezing" someone by "compensating for and neutralizing the other person's motion" will certainly make them uncomfortable (they were having a normal conversation and the guy is suddenly acting very weird!) but it will not magically induce a panic attack!
I'm skeptical but curious.
Keith Johnstone's "Impro" goes in depth into body language and various messages subconsciously sent via side channels - this anecdote would fit right in there.
I've definitely experienced people completely hijacking my will to resist their influence in ways that are hard to explain and leave me very confused later. I think it's more about what they say than their body language - but probably both.
As for the use, being able to unsettle someone on demand seems great to end any unpleasant/dangerous interaction.
I've watched people (including some well-known in the rationalist community) hijack the wills of the people around me, but never felt the effect on myself. Perhaps a degree of Asperger's shields one from such emotional attacks. Intensity and conviction in one's views, even past the point of rudeness, even if devoid of supporting evidence, seem to be inordinately convincing to neuro-normies, as if they weigh their updating by the speaker's probability estimate. Perhaps this is a good heuristic in a Dunbar-number-sized group. The dynamics also seem to depend on the genders of speaker and listener.
Interesting, I searched under mirroring and found lots of similar stuff. I just want to add that I've always found it easy to get along with people... And thinking about it it is likely that I'm mirroring them... unknowingly on my part. Two stories:
I'm sitting in an airport bar with several hours to kill, I'm talking with the bartender who has a thick Irish accent. An hour or so into our talk I notice that I'm also using a thick Irish accent... "Huh" I think to myself, but I don't stop it.
In grad school I worked in a physics lab that had mostly foreign students. When talking with the foreign students I'd often notice myself using their same speech patterns... none of this was conscious. I'm not sure about the physical part of mirroring, I'm even less conscious of that.
It seems extremely implausible to me. And the whole "I know about this amazing super weapon but I'm not going to give away any information about it because it wouldn't be ethical" thing is very "middle school". It reminds me of a classmate who always explained that because he was so good at karate, he could never use it - he could have killed someone, you know!
To me, the messages give a bad overall impression, the guy keeps making very strange generalizations.
Search under mirroring body language. (my first hit.) https://www.scienceofpeople.com/mirroring/
To my knowledge, there is not the slightest indication that mirroring has the kind of dramatic effect described here.
Yeah IDK either, it just seems like something I do naturally to connect with people.
"I wanna be like you, walk like you, talk like you..." The Jungle Book Disney version... 1967
That jazzy orangutan? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOTZJ8EFgpk
I believe it would be able to induce panic, at least for some people. Mirrors not mirroring properly is classic horror. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkYtflr1KsM)
This is a predatory interaction; anything that messes with their ability to reason is going to help you get your way. Long-term, though, no, you'll make enemies everywhere you go.
It sounds like a souped-up version of the idea that you can tell when someone is observing you, even if you cannot see them (e.g. standing behind you). That supposedly triggers a feeling of being stalked/hunted, which triggers prey behaviour like freezing up, etc.
But I thought that was a discredited notion? People don't have that kind of peripheral sensory awareness after all?
I'm 5'10" and I've been fluctuating between 205lb and 230lb since 2019. This comes after I was 260 to 280lb for about a decade previously. Obviously I'm thrilled about having lost so much weight from my previous state, but I get so frustrated by being unable to get below 200lb.
There's been a good deal of talk lately about new weight loss drugs, like semaglutide, which are really repurposed diabetes drugs. The scary thing about these drugs is that they all seem to come with an increased risk of thyroid cancer, at least in animal trials. Can anyone speak to this? It seems to me that unless I were so obese that I could barely get up stairs, the prospect of thyroid cancer is so scary that it doesn't seem worth it to try such drugs. Am I overestimating the risk? Is there anyone here who knows more about these drugs that can speak to the risk benefit trade-off?
Personally, none of these "try this and the weight will just melt off" recommendations I've gotten over the years have worked. One doctor put me on a particular diabetes medication and told me that the happy side-effect was weight loss; a former patient of hers, indeed, had lost *too* much weight.
I assured her there was no danger of that with me. And yes, I am still as chunky afterwards as I was before. So "current/former diabetes meds makes the weight fly off" stories leave me very dubious. I imagine they do work for *some* people, but *only* in conjunction with what you generally have to do when you have diabetes, anyway; go on a diet, cut out sugar, cut out carbs, take exercise.
There is no magic pill where with no effort on your part the fat just melts off (except for amphetamines, and those explode your heart; and the last wonder drug when I was younger also turned out to have bad effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine)
I've read some accounts of those drugs quieting constant hunger so that people can move to a normal hunger/satiation cycle. This can cause people to lose weight, but it's not a matter of eating less than they want.
That is interesting, I'm not sure to what degree my weight loss stalled due to hunger, vs something else. In losing my initial weight, getting from 280 to 220ish, I think I largely managed to numb myself to the pain from hunger. I am able to go long periods without eating, because I can just put the hunger pangs out of my mind. I think most of my current problems are from the simple joy and love of flavor, which causes me to have very big cheat days, where I eat all the foods I didn't get to eat throughout the week. Though maybe it's amplified by suppressing my hunger so much, maybe if I were less hungry, it'd help. Don't know.
Yeah, that's the problem. Were it simply hunger, then munching our way through a head of raw broccoli would be just as good, but it's not. It's cravings for a particular food, or a particular taste.
I get terrible chocolate cravings, which are bad for me, and before anybody says "just get used to the pangs", thanks, I've tried that and it doesn't work. I can get used to having a toothache or a headache and ignore the pain, but the signals of "you have to eat RIGHT NOW" are on a different level.
And those people fortunate enough not to experience that, be thankful to nature and your genes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Olivier Ameisen, an alcholic surgeon (he says he never operated while drunk, a claim I mistrust on general principles) found that Baclofen, a muscle relaxant, stopped his cravings. He even found out he'd been addicted to spending money and hadn't previously noticed it.
He was unusual in thinking that the cravings were a quality of life problem, not just the drinking.
Unfortunately, it took him a long time to raise money for a randomized trial of Baclofen, the results weren't clear, and he died before he could pursue the matter further.
You'll find yourself less able to and substantially less interested in eating as much on the cheat days.
Flavor isn't absolute or objective, there's a huge degree to which things tasted good is because your body's craving them or your hungry.
You won't miss out on the joy or pleasure of eating in any way - you'll just find it doesn't take nearly as much food to totally satisfy it.
You're absolutely right. The glp-1 agonists drugs like ozempic, semaglutide, and mounjarro do not make you lose weight, they just make it much much easier to eat less.
You will still have to diet - but these meds make it substantially easier to do so by making you feel much less hungry. For some people that may not work - for others, including my partner, it made it trivially easy.
Eat Slime Mold Time Mold's potatoes. Seems to work better than anything for some weird reason.
Disclaimer - I am not a doctor. (I'm a med device engineer which might make me smart enough to be dangerous)
The benefits far outweigh the risks.
These new drugs are "glp-1" agonists. Don't need to know too much about that except it's a hormone related to blood sugar levels. The agonists dont drop your blood sugar but they do prevent it from raising too high and so you naturally just don't feel hungry. They have an incredibly safe risk profile otherwise, and have been around for like 15 years or so.
Rat thyroids have a glp-1 receptor that humans simply do not have. There is no clear mechanism of action for how a glp-1 agonist would cause thyroid cancer in humans, but it's extremely obvious in the rats. But, the way these trials work, if you see it in the animals you must include it as a risk. It seems extremely unlikely that it would actually cause it in humans, and these drugs have been used in humans for a while now and so far as I know there haven't been any associated cancers.
Finally - thyroid cancer is just about the least scary form of cancer. It is extraordinarily treatable, and even if you totally lose your thyroid, you can fully replace it with pills. Lots of people have auto immune disorders that prevent their thyroid from working right and love totally healthy from thyroid replacement.
Being chronically overweight however is really bad for both health and happiness. So, of you're worried about the risk I'd still say go for it and just get regular thyroid screenings.
Family Medicine Doc here. I didn't know about the different thyroid receptors between rats and humans, although I always assumed it had to be something like that. I use GLP-1s in people all the time (and as soon as I find someone who's insurance covers Tirzepatide, I plan on using that one too). I've found it safe and pretty effective.
I wouldn't say thyroid ca is the least scary cancer (that honor belongs to Hodgkin's Lymphoma), but that's just nit picking.
> I’m wondering if the open threads would be more manageable if they happened more often,
Why not just add an additional OT (and leave the HOT as it is)?
Seems like the obvious solution to me. I understand there is some regular weekly schedule of open threads, but I don't know what it is. Maybe to people who do know, there's a good reason why putting one on weekends, or Thursdays, or whatever, would be problematic.
Agree, odd change.
I've liked the gain in privacy I get from hidden open threads, so I'd also rather if there's still one per week.
Agreed
I second this.
Agree or disagree: all reasoning is motivated. The real difference between the rationalist movement and other groups is our particular value system that emphasizes map-territory alignment as good, instead of the things other groups say are good.
Maybe in a "all conscious actions are selfish" kind of way?
I mean, devi'ls advocate or steelmaning the opposition (if you use them the way they were originally meant to represent) is literally do the opposite.
I'm not sure how to define the "rationalist movement" but I do not believe they have a particular value system (consequentism?) or they are the only ones that go for that kind of philosophy. I guess you can start looking at things that try to emphasis low context like KISS or simple english?
You, of course, can define "motivated reasoning" in a way that would make all the reasoning motivated. This wouldn't be a helpful or interesting definition, though.
A common and useful definition of motivated reasoning distinguishes between reasoning focused on finding the truth whatever it is vs finding arguments in favour of something you want to believe regardless of whether it is true. This definition is meaningful regardless of whether you value finding truth or not. It is still a distinct type of reasoning which we can talk about.
But isn't the fact that we distinguish specifically reasoning leading to finding the truth, compared to reasoning leading to say... mentioning red objects, saying something about us valuing finding the truth more than mentioning red objects? Well sure. So what?
All reasoning is motivated by something, and it's a trivially true and useless idea. Which is why "Motivated reasoning" don't mean "reasoning you got a motive to do", but "Reasoning that is motivated by a specific goal you want to reach before you start".
Either that, or I've been using the words wrong for quite some time.
> it's a trivially true and useless idea.
Hard disagree here. What exactly is motivating a person to reason is going to determine not just how they reason in specific cases, but - more importantly - what they choose to reason about at all.
> "Reasoning that is motivated by a specific goal you want to reach before you start".
This is a curious framing. It seems... motivated.
This framing implies that 'reasoning' is a process with a discrete beginning and ending. This framing implies that motivated reasoning only causes problems in particular cases, namely, when setting out to answer a _specific_ question, that a person would have a goal they want to reach _on that question_ before they start reasoning _about_ that question.
But does that ever happen? Do people actually, honestly set out to answer questions with any goal in mind other than the truth?
I think motivated reasoning is better understood as "reasoning that avoids asking certain questions altogether." In my expeience, everyone who bothers to ask a question then sets out to find the truth for that question.
What motivation really does, in my experience, is prevent people from asking questions in the first place. When people give their reasons for belief X, sure, many times that person set out to find reasons why X must be true. But this means they never actually asked themselves the question, _is X_ true?
So if we accept that all reasoning is motivated by something, we wouldn't' try to avoid 'motivated reasoning'. Instead, we would ask, what exactly are my motives?
Totally agree!
Can you define motivated reasoning versus unmotivated?
I think the standard distinction is between reasoning that is motivated to get at the truth (whatever it is) and reasoning that is motivated by something to get some answer (whether it's true or not).
I agree that this is the standard distinction. But is it describing a real thing?
I agree that people often get attached to some ideas being true. I find these responses are generally in response to someone else saying, “your beliefs are wrong.”
How often do people ask themselves a question, and then go off looking for something other than the truth? My experience is that when people want to believe X, they simply don’t ever ask whether X is true. If you tell them, “there is no evidence of X,” this is when what is typically called motivated reasoning occurs.
When people say, “my goal is to believe the truth,” my question would be, “which truth is that?” A person can’t ask all questions simultaneously. Motivated reasoning, to me, really means, “ which question does a person actually bother to ask?”
hah, no, i can't, because the concept of 'unmotivated reasoning' doesn't make any sense to me.
You're expending energy to reason; there's going to be _some_ mechanism shuffling energy into the reasoning system and deciding what to reason about, what to consider, and what to ignore.
It makes a difference in the case of AI vs. human reasoning, perhaps? The human (or crow, space alien, whatever) has an internal motivation to reason (or to do anything else). The AI is turned on like a toaster and reasons at the behest of its user, without internal motivation.
Well then I've got to say I don't understand the post at all. "All reasoning is reasoned. The difference is in the various differences." It's tautology, so... I guess I agree?
Hard disagree that the rationalist movement has any sort of monopoly on less-motivated reasoning. It’s a large group of people trying hard to see the world clearly, but aren’t the first, last, or only to do so.
I agree with your hard disagree there.
What do you think differentiates rationalists from other groups, if anything? Is it a specific package of techniques?
It does seem that rationalists argue pursuing truth is the _highest_ goal, as opposed to other groups which generally, as far as i can tell, that pursuing truth is instrumental to higher goals.
I don't think Rationalists value truth above all other goals and I don't think most(any?) of them would claim that they do.
They see truth as a necessary but not sufficient means of achieving their greater goals. You need truth in order to make accurate decisions, but if they could make decisions without truth that accomplished their goals, they would just as happily do that. They do tend to value truth highly in practice, for materialist scientific truths. They seem to have the common struggles with metaphysical and non-materialist truths (maybe worse because they seem to deny that such things exist).
I’ve never spoken to the Rationalist Czar, so I don’t have an official answer, but in my experience rationalists seem to think all social problems are insufficiently solved natural science problems, leading to eg prioritizing mosquito nets for Africa over better food for poor people nearer to home. It’s an interesting and daring position, one that history may even remember fondly! But even when we sort out our micromorts, I think it does leave rationalists somewhat naive in the face of bad actors, because sometimes bad equilibria are stable for unspoken but locally well understood reasons. Or perhaps that naivety was a prerequisite for our optimism.
But more importantly, claiming to be the first or only rationality-first organization is … bold, at best. There are lots of science-adjacent societies, and historically some of the most strident (such as the Skeptics) have become the biggest hindrances to science.
This. I'm not a Rationalist or anything, but I've always found the comparison with things like climbing or martial arts to be useful. (If slightly cringe; cf. some of Yudkowski's early writings where he manages to sound like a katana-wielding anime protagonist.)
Anyone can do these things and has innate instincts about how best to do them, but taking them up as a subject of concentrated study, systematising, pressure-testing, and meta-learning can produce/select better techniques, even if (as usual) you first have to climb down from a local optimum to get there.
One of the better imho objections (see Gardner vs Pinker, which Scott covered on March 4th) is that the process needlessly discards useful heuristics that also add up to better ethics. Even the best established truth doesn't on its own tell us what to do about itself.
Brilliant comment imo. Your name here:. The only unsigned integer I'm aware of is zero.. a great name.
Probably should let the user explain it, but you are not getting the reference.
Unsigned Int is a variable type for computer languages.
It just means that the first bit of the variable, which is usually reserved to determine the sign of the integer, isn't used as such.
That's why you hear of overflow issues where 255 + 1 = -254 (cause it goes from x0111... -> x1000... when you add the 1)
Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't overflow for them. It just means, it goes from 255 + 1 = 0 or that 2 - 3 = 255.
Got it! Thanks.
> they take themselves to have actually *found* a better way to be rational
Is this actually unique, though?
I can agree that the _specific techniques_ rationalists are advocating are unique, but doesn't every group have a technique that they say makes their maps more converged than that of other groups?
I can't think of a single group that says something like, "hey our worldviews are less accurate that other groups, but accuracy of worldview doesn't matter to us, so much as how you act in the world, and our worldview promotes better actions."
From my own inside view, i think some aspects of the rationalist-promoted techniques really _do_ work better. But every group thinks this, so that doesn't seem so unique to me.
> Is this actually unique, though?
The unique part isn't that they *claim* that they found a better way to be rational, but that they *actually found* a better way to be rational.
It's a bit of a problem when so many of these "rational" sorts have the same dogmatic opinions as non-"rationalist" leftists on controversial issues
Either these "dogmatic opinions" are not as dogmatic as you thought them to be, and actually have quite reasonable explanation and it's your own irrationality and lack of epistemic culture that prevents you to see it.
Or politics is such a mind killer that even people who found a better way to be rational still fail to do it regarding political controiversies at their current level of rationality.
Personally, I count the fact that the majority of well educated, intelligent and rational people are somewhat left leaning as an evidence in favor of leftism getting controversial issues better than rightism, but I understand why you may disagree.
What are average wages for US computer programmers who know machine learning, are provably very good at math, and just out of a good state college?
http://levels.fyi is a very good source for programmer salaries broken down by company and pay grade. Looks like around $150k for entry-level positions at most Big Tech companies, closer to $100k for programming roles at non-tech big companies.
That's for software engineers in general, though. No breakdown for ML specific salaries, but anecdotally those seem to be similar to but somewhat higher that general software salaries.
I dunno about average; you can make $100k at many places, and possibly more at electronic trading places doing quantitative trading work. Let me know if you’d like to hear more about that last part.
Yes, very much. Could you please email me at economicprof@gmail.com. I'm asking for my son who is in an unusual situation. He will be graduating college with a degree in CS and some work experience in ML at age 18.
Congrats to your son. Pretty impressive accomplishment.
As a subscriber, I prefer the closed thread just for having a lot less activity. I’d be disappointed to see it permanently replaced by another open thread even if the open threads improve substantially.
Or just limiting the amount of comments free subs can post. Let's say 3 per day. If that's possible. Would force a high signal-to-noise ratio while simultaneously encouraging people to pay for being a subscriber.
Variant: must be a subscriber to post a top-level comment in an OT; responses are open to all.
No, I don't think we'd improve matters by making commenting "pay to play". "Oops, I really have a good and insightful comment to reply to this, but I've used my allotment of three comments per thread" is not something I want, nor do I want the division of the sheep (subscribers) versus the goats (non-subscribers).
First time posting to this site. Really. Amazing open thread. So many cognitive styles in evidence. The diversity of the human mind is incredible! Key to our species success, I imagine. Cognitive antibodies to any possible cognitive disease.
>Cognitive antibodies to any possible cognitive disease.
If only
"Cognitive antibodies to any possible cognitive disease."
Hell of a case of lupus, though.
Welcome to ACX, how do you want your complimentary infohazard? We can deliver it as an acausal trade or a counterfactual mugging. Warning: newcomers are advised to refrain from value handshakes with strangers in open threads!
I will have an acausal mugging with caramel swirl, no whip, please
I mean, really anything related to race or gender, and whether people are too nice or too mean about it.
I will step away from conflict at every opportunity since my reformed cyber bully vows are still in force. My future contributions will hopefully be all sweetness, light, fluffy bunnies, pretty little ponies and Rainbow Unicorns! Further, rather than say anything unpleasant to people I judge to be low grade morons, mental defectives, certifiable loons or mere trolls, I will reply, "Notable comment!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YYZQAXoghc
Recent interview with Robert Sapolsky.
Sapolsky talks about wanting to live in an empire as pathological, which it might be, but is there evidence that life in an empire is actually better? Worse? Good when it's good and bad when it breaks?
Interesting claim that some people don't just verbally agree with a group which makes false claims about which line is longer, some people affect their memories to eventually see the shorter line as longer. Sapolsky calls this "internal compliance".
A claim that desert cultures lead to monotheism and valorizing dying in battle, while rain forest cultures don't do either. Vikings seem like a partial counterexample-- plenty of water, but valorize dying in battle.
An account of the Christmas truce in WWI-- it's different than "Christmas in the Trenches"-- a brief truce was declared by the Pope for people to retrieve and bury their dead, and led to cooperation between the sides until the officers forced a resumption of fighting with threats of execution.
Disagreement with Pinker about when war was invented. And that peace was less stable that peace didn't become all that stable.
,
Suggests, using 1800s Sweden (a very violent place) that people may be continue to be arrogant and hierarchical, but can be convinced to be proud of different things.
Values and behavior can change a lot faster than genes.
Say you wanted to raise a genius. How would you go about doing that?
Assuming that your starting with an above average intelligence child with a greater likelihood of naturally becoming a "genius", can appropriate environmental/educational interventions substantially increase the child's potential for becoming one?
A couple of anecdotes say yes:
(1) Scott's review of "The Man From The Future" (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future) shows that Von Neumann, besides from obvious his obvious genetic advantage, benefited from growing up in a very resourceful family environment with rich exposure to top intellectuals & domain experts from all kinds of fields and private tutors.
(2) Laszlo Polgar's "Raise A Genius" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/) suggests that the key is "early specialization" in a subject chosen under the parent's discretion (as long as the child enjoys the subject) in conjunction with 1:1 tutoring and having access to peers that are "mentally appropriate partners."
The field of behavioral genetic paints a somewhat different picture:
Most if not all psychological traits including intelligence being highly heritable, as long as you don't severely mess up your parenting (eg abuse, malnutrition), the specifics of your parenting strategy won't influence your child's outcome that much. Social/educational interventions just ... aren't as effective as one may expect them to be a priori.
But these two views aren't incompatible; some possibilities include:
(1) Tail-effects in education: Since interventions have to scale, they end up being mediocre to "what could be possible." Perhaps having a Really Good Education (like what Von Neumann had) has disproportionate effects on one's life outcomes/genius-ness in a way that standard social/educational intervention RCTs can't capture.
(2) Tail-effects in genetics: Just like how people with very low-intelligence seem to be fundamentally bounded (https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara) in terms of the tasks they're capable of (regardless of the education they receive), a similar effect might be going on with normal intelligence folks where there's rapidly diminishing return to improved education—i.e. education scales better with individuals genetically predisposed to be smarter.
(3) Both (1) and (2), where geniusness is a "leaky pipeline (https://www.gwern.net/notes/Pipeline)" in which you need both tail-end education and tail-end genetics to become a "genius."
What is the actual underlying dynamic of "genius production"? My hunch is that things are closer to (3), considering how Von-Neumann-type intellect is much rarer compared to the number of individuals that grew up having access to his level of resources. Also remember, the causal influence is bidirectional (https://psyarxiv.com/pqf78/).
Is there any prior work on "designing literally the Best Form of Education that's conducive to genius production" (provided that the child is genetically predisposed enough to actually benefit from them)?
Longitudinal studies like SMPY (https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) comes into mind, but I don't know whether studies like these have been distilled enough to validate the practices of Neumann/Polgar, or produce novel insights for (non-mass-consumption) education.
The first step is to marry a very smart woman (or man if you are a woman).
The only step that matters.
I'd find a male genius and a female genius, have them mate and adopt their child.
Show them lots of cool shit and spare no expense in supporting their free exploration of whatever strikes their fancy. Minimize disruption caused by school, teach them ways to cope with living in a dysfunctional society and the inevitable mental problems, and turn their talents to their advantage.
As a kid I'd kill for someone I could look up to, who actually treated me seriously instead of trying to control me.
It helps if you're at least halfway there yourself, so you can keep up and engage them on their level (which midwit parents will find very difficult).
"Say you wanted to raise a genius. How would you go about doing that?"
It seems to me a very bad goal, as it is so unlikely to succeed. It seems a good way to be disappointed by your child eventually, which the child is probably going to realize at some point.
Why not have the usual goal of "how can I help my child be the best version of him/her self."?
Otherwise, my impression is that, at least in the scientific/tech fields, genius usually requires a combination of smart/drive/efficiency/curiosity which can not really be increased by education (as you mentioned, parents still need to provide a "good enough" environment). But I am a geneticist, so clearly biased in that direction!
The key verifiable mark of being smart is asking good questions, which is both a skill that can be taught and one that some people seem to be born with in at least some contexts. Everyone is right sometimes, but a smart person is often right when other people are unsure and a genius is often right even when others are sure the genius is wrong. After working at SpaceX, my standard line was “I don’t always bet on Elon, but I NEVER bet against him.” He was right frustratingly often about a dizzying array of technical and business questions.
To some degree, people who reach the rarified heights of genius are autodidactic, as demonstrated by them learning how to ask good questions in new contexts. But even the most famously autodidactic people (such as Elon Musk) struggle to generalize their genius beyond a categories. This may be inherent to the nature of genius. Over time, being right when other people are wrong is incredibly psychologically potent. They run the risk of updating their priors to “when we disagree, other people are never right”, and then they’re lost. If Elon isn’t careful, he may follow the path that Henry Ford blazed.
So if you’re trying to raise a genius, starting with a smart person, think very carefully about what kind of genius you want to raise. What do you want them to be good at? Who can preload them with the questions that will clear away all the nonsense that wastes the time of us mere mortals? How do you make asking those key questions a game they live to win? And how do you nurture their curiosity and competitiveness such that they never become complacent or arrogant?
The answers “specialization” or “range” presume different answers to those questions.
I think we need to rewind a bit. When you say "raise a genius," what do you mean by "genius?"
Is a "genius" is someone who stands head and shoulders atop others at the top of a field, like a Mozart or a Marie Curie?
Or is it one of those Ben Franklin polymath types who speaks 5 languages, designed and built all the furniture in their hone, and has published both fiction and non-fiction?
Or are we using a straightforward, easily measurable method and just defining a genius as someone with a high IQ?
It seems like under the 3rd conception, as you say, if you and your partner are geniuses, your kids probably have a good shot at being one too barring some gross parenting malfeasance like abuse or malnourishment, while under the first or second conceptions, it seems like education and access to resources are absolutely critical (and there's probably more wiggle room on IQ than we might think).
That might also sort out the incompatibility between your two paradigms. Both are aimed at understanding where "geniuses" come from but each has a separate and distinct understanding of what "geniuses" are.
Yeah, I should've phrased it a bit differently. I meant the type of "genius" normally associated with unmatched productivity & resourcefulness & novel contributions in diverse academic disciplines, like Von Neumann (I probably should've used a better example instead of Polgar)
By "raise a genius," I was trying to figure out how genetics would influence the effectiveness of the environmental/educational interventions provided to the child.
To quote my response to Mark:
> What would happen if we cloned Von Neumann and could afford *infinite resources* to put into his education? What if we took a ~100 IQ person instead? Of course it would yield worse results—but would the diminishing return to input education happen faster or slower?
> To phrase it differently: Does resource-input-to-education have different scaling properties (i.e. how fast is the diminishing returns) depending on the child's underlying genetic intelligence?
Speaking very very much as a non-expert in the field I would view IQ and environmental/educational interventions both as inputs, and I'd expect to see diminishing returns on both.
The difference between having $1B and $2B to spend on a single individual is probably not that much, and neither would I expect much difference between 130 and 140 IQ subjects both given infinite resources.
Also, since we're measuring genius based on "useful outputs" rather than direct IQ processing power, I'd also expect that someone well resourced but of average intelligence would probably outperform someone high-IQ but under-resourced by a greater margin than might be expected by others. But then, that's just my own personal opinion - I tend to believe that IQ is overvalued in these kinds of conversations, because they tend to take place among high-IQ (or professed high-IQ) communities, and smart people are just as prone as anyone else to overvaluing traits the possess in abundance. Everybody loves to measure with the stick that shows him in his tallest light.
Is there a difference between,
> the specifics of your parenting strategy won't influence your child's outcome that much.
and
> "no one has yet demonstrated a mechanism for reliably raising a genius which is not specific to that particular child, and which shows up in large scale randomized controlled trials "
Yes, because afaik most social sciences RCT on "educational interventions" are constrained by the need to scale to millions of students, and so of course it would be near impossible to run a large scale RCT on hyperfocused & well-resourced aristocratic tutoring.
... which leaves us with vague anecdotes and biographies of past geniuses, which is impossible to rigorously test whether they're a robust tactic or not (although that doesn't mean anecdotes provide ~zero information).
What would happen if we cloned Von Neumann and could afford *infinite resources* to put into his education? What if we took a ~100 IQ person instead? Of course it would yield worse results—but would the diminishing return to input education happen faster or slower?
To phrase it differently: Does resource-input-to-education have different scaling properties (i.e. how fast is the diminishing returns) depending on the child's underlying genetic intelligence?
I'm reading the book "Range" by David Epstein at the moment. The author argues against early specialization. But he mainly uses examples from sports or business. I.e. Tiger Woods, who held his first golf club at the age of 4 months, against Roger Federer, who sampled different sports until deciding for tennis in his teens. So there seems to be, at least anecdotally maybe scientific, evidence for getting a broad education. Instead of a hyper focused one. I don't have any details on this topic but you might want to read up on that.
Also i'd like to question your definition of genius and the general usefulness of this status. Is a genius just really smart? Can he solve differential equations in their head? Can he beat chess grandmasters? While all of theses skills on their own are impressive their real world use can be limited. For me it's much more useful (and pays very well) to have a very wide range of domain knowledge over many disciplines. Paired with actual experience in these fields I can combine different ideas to generate new value. Which for me is better than just raw intelligence. But maybe you are working with another, very specific definition of genius.
Thanks, I will check out the book, sounds interesting.
I was using the term "genius" as the ability for an individual to make disproportionate contributions to a given field (or multiple fields, as was the case with Von Neumann), which is probably a correlate of a bunch of things like raw intelligence, resourcefulness, ambition—which I guess is similar to the definition you seem to be pointing at.
(now that I think about it "Raise a Genius" is probably a bad example for this definition of genius because Polgar definitely had a big focus on single core discipline (chess) aside from other "auxiliary" ones like language).
Despite this dissimilarity I still think there's something similar between Neumann/Polgar, in that Neumann did in fact "specialize early," although the scope of that specialization was way larger than that of Polgar (i.e. "diverse mathematical subjects," while still mathematics, is way broader and more interdisciplinary than "just chess").
A better way to characterize this situation is to taboo "early specialization" and instead talk in terms of "intensity" and "scope," where Neumann/Polgar both was high in "intensity" while different in the size of "scope." So in this view, broad education isn't necessarily in conflict with hyper-intense aristocratic tutoring, it's just that broad education—which normally manifests in the form of (1) public schools or (2) lax parenting with a focus on "many-facetedness"—is high on "scope" but very low on "intensity." (sorry if I'm motte-baileying my usage of the term "early specialization" here)
I think the above point might be counterintuitive (at least to me) because broad education generally goes together with "low intensity" i.e. lax education.
So, in this usage of the term "genius," I wonder whether educations that are BOTH broad and intense can have disproportionate effects. (does "Range" argue in favor of "broad education" in the sense of high-scope-high-intensity, or high-scope-low-intensity? If former, I would agree with its conclusions)
I can't talk about the conclusions of the book since i haven't finished it yet (started yesterday and literally just read the first chapter).
But there is a graph showing the intensity of education/training over time. This graph suggests that a very high intensity early on can lead to a kind of burnout or loss in motivation. Children that start with a lower intensity and then ramp up over time will overtake the high intensity children when they lose motivation and stop their training. I can't provide proof of that here. But that's at least what the book says.
I also find it interessting that you call language an "auxiliary" discipline. In my work on AI (especially large language models) it seems to me that language is a core discipline of intelligence. But that's a whole different topic.
On the point of disproportionate contributions to a given field i like to repeat my earlier argument: after a certain point raw intelligence runs into a wall which need to be overcome by experience. This is just my personal observation with N=1 (me). I think i'm somewhat smart and did well academically. But at the PhD level there were just so many things which were not easily solved with pure intelligence: some things are counter-intuitive and logical fallacies are abundant, some problems require knowledge/math from an adjacent field, a lot of it is conventional rules made by humans which you can't deduct from reason but need to look up. Some of these contradict each other or only make sense in the historical context they were written. And some things just seem to be known by everyone who worked in this field since the 80s but are never expressed anywhere in the literature.
All of these problems can however be mitigated by a competent teacher. Which brings us to the same old question: nature vs. nurture.
I tend to lean more on the nurture side.
The UK's in a rough spot economically, on top of a decade of stagnant growth, and several decades of stagnant wages. A lot of young people are living materially poorer lives than their parents and maybe even their grandparents. Most of the western world is similar.
I'm wondering if there's any disagreement that we need a change of economic system comparable to the New Deal/post war consensus or the neoliberal revolution. If so what what sort of system do people favour?
It seems like our options are to be more free market then neoliberalism, return to social democracy, or move to something even further to the left than that. All those possibilities look quite radical or tried-and-failed. And there doesn't seem to much political pressure for reform, beyond just expanding the money supply.
Does anyone think this crisis will work itself out or is overblown?
sorry if it's too broad a topic for an open thread.
Oh look, here is an article about this topic that you might find helpful: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/
You are reaching back a decade, or maybe decadeS, and Brexit isn't quite 4 years ago, but it feels to me like the elephant in the room - no one's mentioning it in this thread, but it's likely to account for some proportion of differences between Great Britain and continental Europe.
Other than that, there are things changes of economic systems can probably fix, and things they probably cannot fix. Sometimes you need changes of political system, or new technology, or new territories to exploit. I have no idea what would work for the UK, if anything. But I suggest thinking very broadly.
I also have no opinion on the current crisis, except that some of the UK's current politicians missed their natural calling as clowns and stand up comics ;-( (Sadly, the UK is not alone in this, and better clowns than tinpot dictators.)
>some proportion of differences between Great Britain and continental Europe.
What differences? Do you imagine continental Europe is thriving right now?
No, but the OP seemed to me to be implying that the UK situation was uniquely bad. Which it might be, for all I know, so I didn't question that.
Well, I've mentioned it, at least :-)
And another underlying factor is that the British yellow press is particularly bad and surprisingly powerful. It seems to have had a strong influence on the people to vote for Brexit, among some other bad decisions.
"anyone who disagrees with me is brainwashed by the media. I am very smart"
Do you have any points here? I assume from the sneering you disagree, but I don't know because you don't even bother with something as simple as, You know, Brexit was good, actually.
Covid and the related worldwide economic and fiscal disruption is also worth considering as a contributing factor.
Here's a comparison of real GDP in the US and UK for the past decade, scaled in both cases to 2012 = 100: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Ve0c
The two lines look very, very similar to me until 2018, when the preparations for Brexit were well underway and the UK line starts lagging behind the US one. Both countries have a nasty notch in the graph corresponding to the first wave or two of Covid, although the UK seems much harder hit than the US.
Here's a zoomed-in look at the notch, rescaled to Q1 2020 as baseline:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Ve0U
Q2 2020 was a huge dip for both countries, with the US losing 8.8% of real GDP and the UK losing 18.5%. Both countries bounced back in Q3, but not completely, with the US returning to 98.7% of baseline and the UK returning to 94.2% of baseline.
Unfortunately for ease of analysis, Q1 2020 was also when Brexit went fully into effect, so it's difficult to disentangle the effects of different Covid impacts and responses from the short-term effects of Brexit.
The fundamental issue with the UK is low labor productivity. It has relatively low hours worked and labor force participation but so do many European countries. Indeed, all of Europe has a low labor productivity issue but Britain's particularly badly off. (Contrary to your claim, the west does not have these problems generally. It's mostly a European issue.)
The big government and high taxes are probably creating issues. The UK is still very much a social democracy with government spending with a government spending to GDP ration similar to Denmark. But the more specific issue is almost certainly that the UK does not have a good education system and has much more interventionist/hard to deal with state. This creates a large body of relatively low skill workers who cannot profitably hired with all the additional costs due to regulation. These people in turn drag down productivity and creates all kinds of social issues.
Deregulation can solve this by making it cheaper to hire. But the reason this doesn't happen as much in Scandinavia or Germany is because the state has better educational systems that are explicitly focused on employment/work (rather than general enrichment). That's probably a better solution. But that would require such a fundamental restructuring of their education system that I'm not sure it's possible. There are other things that can be done as well. But Britain doesn't lack financial capital or technology. It's mostly a human capital thing imo.
Very interesting take and matches many of my friends experiences of state school education - it's mostly crowd control and a syllabus designed to dull you into a life of menial service work. Also the decline in technical/vocational colleges which, from casual chats with Germans, seem to be much more highly regarded there. (Perhaps a certain intellectual elitism coupled with industry decline led a lot of people to push their children into university education rather than a trade college)
Wasn't this true in the post war period as well? why growth and rising wages then but not now?
Are you suggesting that the UK thrived following WW2?
Wasn't what true? Low productivity growth leading to lower productivity over time? No, it wasn't. Average productivity growth for the past 20 years is something like a quarter to a third of what it was from 1945 to 2000-ish. (Excluding the pandemic where it hugely dropped off then returned to normal.) The 1960s and 1980s were particularly strong periods but even the weaker decades from that period were significantly stronger than now.
no, the social democracy causing low productivity growth. Saying there's low productivity growth feels a lot like just restating that there's low growth.
It really isn't and you might want to look into labor productivity as a statistic if that's your sense of it. I also didn't say that social democracy was the main issue, specifically pointing out other social democracies do not have this specific problem.
ok yeah, I misunderstood you. I still don't think low productivity growth explains very much, it's essentially the same as just "growth" - total time worked. Low growth is what we're trying to explain and working more is a cost in itself.
Scott's opinion is that education is a lot less economically useful than generally assumed (for Case against Education type reasons), that's kinda the received wisdom, and I tend to agree. I don't think education is going to be a very likely candidate for explain economic trends as dire as the current ones.
Big topic indeed.
There’s going to be a lot of restructuring either formally via government / BoE intervention or informally via inflation / currency devaluation / default. In that sense I think the crisis will work itself out and also be very painful.
I think one’s preferred solution depends very much on the problem you’re trying to solve.
So I’ll ask: what problem do you want to solve?
I think Picketty (and Marx I guess) is probably right that median living standards have dropped/stagnated, because of inequality, despite past growth; and that it's a natural result of running a market economy with private capital ownership. Also the loose monetary policy has exacerbated the problem. so fix that first I guess.
That would still probably leave us with no growth though.
I'm also kinda sympathetic to Tyler Cowens "great stagnation" theory though, so more scientific innovation please, if you could.
You might find this retort to the inequality = badness narrative interesting:
https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-spirit-level-ten-years-on.html
I'm not sure if public capital ownership, i.e. nationalizing corporations, would decrease inequality based on state owned enterprises in PRC, India, KSA, etc. I'm pretty biased against SOEs though so maybe I'm missing why they're actually awesome.
Fixing central bank balance sheets really just requires a balanced budget till the debt terms out. I think the UK government debt terms out in 10 years so you can work yourself out of that mess by just spending less than you collect.
"Innovation" - or total factor productivity - would increase if laws & regulations automatically expired. I think Thomas Jefferson initially came up with that idea and seems relevant now.
Yeah it's probably better to be poor in a rich country than just poor.
I still think it would be desirable to raise median incomes (you'd get way more utility than from concentrated incomes), and inequality sucking up almost all the gains from 40 years of growth seems like a bit of a disaster.
Some kind of redistribution would do that, all else equal (i.e. no loss in total output), it's just difficult to know how to accomplish that, yeah probably emulating some third world country isn't a great idea. But it still seems more doable than the "rising tide lifts all boats" approach we've been trying and failing.
I'm confused by your phrasing.
> "inequality sucking up almost all the gains"
Are you claiming that the economy is zero-sum? Otherwise this is a non sequitur.
> Some kind of redistribution would do that, all else equal (i.e. no loss in total output)
A large portion of wealth inequality is simply due to real estate value increasing. How do you redistribute the concept of a place being valued higher than it used to be?
What I'm getting at is that consumption inequality is vastly lower than wealth inequality. The wealthy tend to hold their wealth in speculative assets and investments rather than spend it on perishable consumables. If you ignore money for a second and just think about goods and services, seizing even trillions of dollars from the rich would not at all affect the actual amount of goods and services being exchanged in the economy.
Imagine you had a society that you thought was really equal, but then you discovered that there was actually one ultra rich guy with 100 quadrillion dollars hidden under his bed. The whole time, your Gini coefficient was basically 1, but this massive inequality did not harm anyone because he wasn't consuming anything. Obviously, redistributing this money would be functionally equivalent to just printing 100 quadrillion dollars and would lead to inflation, but it would not noticeably change the distribution of goods and services in the economy.
I think there has been a stagnation in median living standards, despite gdp growth, but I'm not certain inequality is the cause, for reasons like this (also not many people seem to actually work serving the wealthy), I still think it's should probably be the leading explanation though. Cowen's Great Stagnation is probably my second preferred answer.
The most viable redistribution policy looks like a wealth tax like a higher property taxes offset by low/no sales taxes or a 100% estate tax above some level.
Neither of those are popular.
Society is bifurcating. Most of young people are living materially poorer lives while others are making money hand over fist with ridiculous ease.
I think we have reached the point where large segments of the population are no longer economically viable, and all other issues are downstream of that. The table stakes to contribute to a modern society are above what most people can bring, largely because of their terrible education that squandered all their talents. It wasn't that big of a deal when you were supposed to be a subsistence farmer, but it is when you can either be a domain expert or flip burgers.
If this was the case shouldn't we have strong growth (or at least some). It's not like a couple of geniuses are programming robots that are putting all the builders, cleaners etc. out of work because clean houses are so cheap and abundant.
Rejoining the EU would help.
It's not helping the countries IN the EU....
You might consider the bitcoin maximalist perspective here: "fix the money, fix the world."
Let me know if you'd like to hear more.
I have a hard time imagining people in the UK adopting bitcoin as the country's main currency because it has the practical drawback of irreversible transactions. I'm not sure what day-to-day benefits of using bitcoin would outweigh the increased risk of accidentally losing your money.
> practical drawback of irreversible transactions
these are a huge feature to lots of merchants who'd rather not pay the 3% fees they pay on every transaction
> not sure what day-to-day benefits of using bitcoin would outweigh the increased risk of accidentally losing your money
this depends on how bad inflation is, and how confiscatey your government is
if your government does things like seize money from peaceful protestors, using bitcoin lowers your risk of having your money stolen from you
that said, i think most people will end up using federated chaumian mints, so they'll get reversibility subject to local government rather than whoever happens to currently run their national government
Is it the usual stuff about fiat money and fractional reserve banking etc.?
I suppose this probably depends on what "the usual stuff" means to you. I'm more than happy to share or answer questions about this perspective, from someone who's been better on major inflation for years, who bet on trump and brexit and bitcoin prior to 2015 - if you think that's a good use of your time.
Yeah ok, if you want to give an overview.
In particular I'd like to know if crypto has any advantages over gold, other than low transaction costs? economies on the gold standard haven't done fantastically historically.
What you'd do if there's a Keysian style slump in demand and you can't just pump liquidity, like in 2008 and 2020. Pretty sure you'd get a 30s style great depression if you get stuck in a low spending>low income>low spending feed back loop.
Also wouldn't the costs to the US be huge from loosing the purchasing power of the dollar for imports, if they just used the same currency as everyone else. No more petro dollar etc.
Condensed version, lmk where you'd like to expand:
> if crypto has any advantages over gold, other than low transaction costs
Bitcoin maximalists like myself see bitcoin as a groundbreaking innovation, and all of "crypto" as a series of scams, rug pulls, and copycat projects by people who didn't really understand nakamoto consensus. So i'll focus on bitcoin here.
The advantages of bitcoin over gold are, in order of least to most important are:
1) vastly lower transaction cost and risk
2) vastly lower storage cost and risk
3) totally inelastic supply and 21 million hard cap
4) trivial for any party to prove to another party how much they hold
With these in mind, i'll give a bitcoiner's retelling of 20th century financial history, which hopefully addresses both this statement:
> economies on the gold standard haven't done fantastically historically.
as well as questions around:
> Keysian style slump in demand
From my perspective, the 19th century had higher average growth than the 20th century. The main problems with the gold standard were the absence of the properties listed above, which lead to boom and bust cycles caused by banks printing receipts in excess of their holdings.
My belief is that the gold standard acted as a check on the power of both governments and banks. This check was unpopular with the banks, as well as with state progressives who believe that states are not merely constructs for securing God-given rights (ie. what is written in the declaration of indepdence) but, rather that states are primarily agents for technologically driven progress. Keynes' theories were sought after by british government leaders who wanted to justify the money printing they did to back world war 1; it wasn't that a new theory was developed and then people started acting on it, rather, the british government wanted a way to recharacterize a fraud (printing money on a gold standard) as being a kind of sophisticated new technology. American central banks were more than happy to print money as well, leading to the boom of the 1920's. The bust in the 30's was thus caused by the inevitable unwinding of the credit-driven expansion of the 20's.
the drop in demand in 2020, for example, wasn't caused directly by covid. It was caused by government lockdowns, which were undertaken both n response to covid, and with the belief that they could be 'paid for' by printing money. I think unchecked governments are dangerous as unchecked AGI's, for more or less the same reason: alignment is tricky.
> ouldn't the costs to the US be huge from loosing the purchasing power of the dollar for imports
I think massive changes are inevitable, as the entire global system is unsustainable. I think american elites will suffer the most in financial terms, since they have the most to lose. The "global south" will, i think, benefit tremendously, as will americans who just want to work hard and save.
I agree fiat currency creates instability.
But if instability is also a natural feature of markets or there's an exogenous shock, you're in a really vulnerable position with no control of the money supply.
Yeah Keynes was probably promoted for cynical reasons, but his core logic seems pretty solid to me. A low money velocity equilibrium seems perfectly possible, and there's a lot of latency in the markets' calculations, especially with a constrained money supply, it could take a long time for it to run through the feed back loops to return to the optimum equilibrium, assuming it doesn't just get stuck there because of low "animal spirits" or whatever.
Another awkward question: how do you stop the last 500 years of financial history repeating itself, but 1000x faster because everyone already knows all the innovations?
Can't I just print notes saying "I owe you 1 bit coin" and start trading them above my reserves? Then once my notes get established the state thinks it would be useful to take me over, and we're back to where gold is now.
"A lot of young people are living materially poorer lives than their parents and maybe even their grandparents."
Sorry for the tricky questions but what do you mean more exactly by this, and how would we go about measuring it?
Yeah definitely tricky, which is why I deliberately left it a bit vague.
Maybe things like number of hours of work needed to afford housing or other necessities.
If you compare nominal incomes, it's basically the same problem as estimating inflation.
I think it's fairly well established that median incomes now are about the same as 10 maybe even 20 years ago, in the UK and US especially, but also Europe to a lesser extent.
Generational inequality has also risen (i.e. the young are worse off), and you can look at graphs that show stagnate wages since the late 70s (main income for the young), which is why I say "maybe even their grandparents".
One of the many challenges with this assumption is that it fails to take into account substantial improvements in the quality of living. A good deal of the UK budget goes to the NHS which is supposed to provide healthcare. And undoubtedly the quality of healthcare available to the public has substantially increased over the past decades.
But the counterfactual, where the NHS stuck to providing 1960s-quality medical care at substantially-reduced costs isn't being considered.
The same applies for just about every other government service provided.
Planning restrictions strike me as the main driver of this in the UK at least.
In the countries I'm familiar with that have stagnation, the problem is usually bad regulations (or bad government contracts) that benefit some insider or concentrated lobby group at the expense of large deadweight losses. Occasionally there are regs so stupid that they're a net loss even to the rent seeker responsible for them (cf. Jones Act).
Hasn't this always been the case though?
But there are more and more of these every year. Throw enough stones in a creek and you'll eventually get a dam.
I would be curious- what precisely prompts you to call the Jones Act a "stupid rent-seeking regulation"? (I assume we are talking about the Merchant Marine Act of 1920). Is it because you do not buy that non-monetary benefits (e.g., existence of a domestic commercial shipping/shipbuilding industry) should be included in regulatory design or because you think this particular Act has specific flaws/has costs outweighing non-monetary benefits?
The jones act doesn't produce non-monetary benefits. It has not helped grow domestic ship building industry or grow the ocean going shipping capacity of the US like it was supposed to.
Regardless of our system, one factor is working against the Western world: Demography. People are not getting any younger.
Another one is energy stagnation: We just not have the energy availability nor energy efficiency increases we had in the post war. This restrict the amount of things you can do, can consume, and I think we are reaching the limits of spinning restrictions as if it was a chosen lifestyle improvement. First it was stagnation then decrease of energy availability, then asymptotic leveling up of efficiency gains, and finally it's then realization that living the frugal/ascetic life sucks, even if it's marketed as moral and progressive.
This seems like a distinctly UK phenomenon to me, rather than "most of the western world is similar". From what I see in the rest of north western Europe, there certainly is growth (in general; probably not right now), and relative losses are limited to a small underclass. I don't see a broad societal decline.
From the inside (continental western Europe - Belgium) It does not seems UK-only, it is exactly what I feel (so do my French friends and some German acquaintances). I would not be surprised for the US to be different, but it's a least Western-Europe-wide. Southern Europe too for sure given how Greece or Italy fared those last decades.
To answer the original question, I do not think things will resolve on their own. Apart for a new tech that is really disruptive (and not only hyped so), I do not see bright days ahead....By new tech I could see cheap fusion, cheap (safe, and accepted) fission and/or much better batteries (much cheaper per kWh*number of cycles than they are), this would put us back on track of more energy / people trend... And IA take off or non trivial genomics, after those 2 anything goes anyway so living standard downward trend will not be high in the priorities one way or another :-)
My perspective comes from having lived in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, and friends in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. The UK struck me as remarkably stuck in the past on so many levels, with innovation or infrastructure improvements failing to find traction in the country, low state capacity, and a health care system which doesn't deliver. Like, where else do you need to check if your apartment has double-glazed windows?
In the other countries, infrastructure is generally on a good level, even though Sweden has remarkably little housing isolation for its latitude. Health care mostly works fine and digitization in Sweden at least is off the charts.
On a more individual level, all these countries have some underclass, but those are relatively contained and not a large chunk of society. Especially in the Nordics, some people have trouble integrating into the highly skilled labour market and form ghettos. Happens in Germany as well. But there's not such a strong barrier between lower skilled and higher skilled jobs – maybe it's because of the education system / vocational training? The reasons behind this are a bit beyond my expertise honestly.
It doesn't surprise me that Belgium is somewhat similar to the UK – I apologize in advance for getting facts wrong, I'm not really well informed on the country. My impression is that the political system is quite deadlocked and stifling the economy. Tax rates are highest in Europe, with >50% of median salary going to state systems in one way or other. Housing stock seems similarly in decay, outside of cities. Until recently, Eastern Germany looked like that, too, but minus the areas which are getting abandoned they're fixing this with transfer money. Not sure about the education sector, but I was surprised as a tourist in the south-east of Belgium that people generally were monolingual. I couldn't get by with English, German, and Dutch. Again, similar to the German east but without the upwards trend.
Excuse the rambling, maybe it provided some insight into why I think there's not a general European trend downwards. At least until very recently, Ukraine war and all.
The NYTimes has a good article about impediments to solving the homeless problem in LA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/23/opinion/los-angeles-homelessness-affordable-housing.html
In 2016, the people of Los Angeles overwhelmingly passed Proposition HHH, a ballot measure that raised $1.2 billion through a higher property tax to create 10,000 new apartments for the homeless. “The voters of Los Angeles have radically reshaped our future,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said, “giving us a mandate to end street homelessness over the next decade.”
Six years later, neither the mandate nor the money has proved to be nearly enough. In 2016, Los Angeles had about 28,000 homeless residents, of whom around 21,000 were unsheltered (that is, living on the street). The current count is closer to 42,000 homeless residents, with 28,000 unsheltered. Prop HHH has built units, but slowly, and at eye-popping cost. The city says that 3,357 units have been built, and the most recent audit found the average cost was $596,846 for units under construction — more than the median sale price for a home in Denver. Some units under construction have cost more than $700,000 to build.
Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, the candidates vying to replace Garcetti, don’t tend to agree on much, but they agree that HHH hasn’t lived up to its promise. “To spend that kind of money per unit makes no basic common sense if you know anything about building,” Caruso told me.
Bass wasn’t much kinder. “If I’m elected as mayor, I want to go in and deal with homelessness like it’s a hurricane,” she said. “I want to say: In ordinary times we have all these requirements, but this is a hurricane — we need to get people off the streets immediately. A lot of the rules and regulations that are there in ordinary times need to be relaxed.”
Make flophouses legal. Orwell describes housing for very poor people as he experienced it in _Down and Out in Paris and London_.
The insane thing is that anyone is worried about the whys and wherefores of actually doing it, when it's an obviously insane plan.
Give marginally-housed people an incentive to become homeless to collect their free apartment, and what the fuck do you think will happen?
Does the plan actually give anyone a negative marginal value of income?
Is that the right question to be asking?
You have to take into account the opportunity cost of working rather than sitting around all day getting drunk or high.
It's not about me or you, it's about the guy currently sitting on the margin between "just keeping his shit together enough to do his minimum-wage job to stay housed" and "just fucking giving up on life, sitting on the street all day, numbing the pain with drugs". If you make the latter more attractive then you get more of it, if you make it less attractive then you get less of it.
You can have waiting lists, and you can have rules.against making yourself intentionally homeless.
Right, so the "waiting list" becomes a bunch of people sleeping on the street, which was the problem we were trying to avoid in the first place.
And the "rules" are unenforceable, you can't prove someone's intent, especially the intent of a person with pretty sketchy decision-making capabilities anyway (that being the sort of person most likely to be sitting on the margin of housed vs unhoused).
I'm not saying that ordinary middle class me is going to put all his money into a Cayman Islands account so he can appear to be broke so that he can sleep on the streets for two weeks so that he can get a free apartment. I'm talking about Mr Margin, the addict who is just barely keeping his shit together enough to stay off the street.
The country live in has a rule against making yourself intentionally homeless.
How does that work out in practice? What is the punishment for making yourself intentionally homeless?
Probably because of (very understandable) NIMBYism. Who wants to live near a concentrated colony of mentally ill people?
Until you have to live near a large colony of mentally ill people. I think when doing something like this it should be done in an intelligent way instead, so that there is no incentive for NIMBYism.
Concentrating a large amount of mentally ill people in one or few locations is not an intelligent solution.
NIMBYism isn't necessairily bad. It is basically people looking out for their own self interest. There are plenty of positive sum solutions to societal problems.
Dispersing the population that would benefit from social services is also not an intelligent solution.
So will you live right next to it then? It is easy to be against NIMBYism when it is not your backyard.
It's also easy to be against effective social services when you don't use those social services.
I'm not claiming there's an easy solution here - I'm just claiming that banning large homeless shelters isn't an easy solution.
The obvious solution seems to be to have them, but to not have them near anything. Build shelters in the desert, not the city.
Universal Basic Income eliminates any effect on employment. UBI, not unemployment benefits.
Fans of truly niche games may be interested in the Finnish Army Simulator, which aims to recreate the experience of Finnish conscript service, including the parts that suck.
https://finnisharmysimulator.com/
Hi. I just came by to say thanks for sharing a link to our game! I have no idea what website this is but it's always nice to see people talk about the game! :D
- Jeri, Lead Producer, Finnish Army Simulator
Any Finns here? I'm trying to understand the origin of the word "intti", the word for Finland's system of compulsory military service. It's not obviously related to any of the nearby words.
My etymology source says it's from intendentuuri, meaning "commissariat." Specifically, Suomen Armeijan Intendentuuri (Finnish Army Commissariat). Finnish equipment was stamped SA Intendentuuri (SA Commissariat). Apparently a lot of Finnish people found the word Intendentuuri awkward/long/hard to pronounce and abbreviated it to Intti. Intti was the Finnish equivalent of GI from the Winter War onward.
Every now and again do you get invaded by Stalin?
Looks like it could be fun. What I’d really like to see is a pesäpallo simulator. That’s a crazy fun looking game
Makes me want to sit in an insanely hot wood fired steam sauna and jump in a cold lake. Something that is a lot more fun than it sounds.
For curiosity, i was looking at the site of my country's EA organisation and its list of suggested charities. In particular, for AI and x-risk they suggested MIRI.
But how effective is MIRI, really? I personally don't think AI foom is possible and i don't think AI is an x-risk, but let us accept the argument that it is an x-risk and we need alignment reaserch. How much has MIRI practically accomplished in terms of alignment reaserch? Is MIRI reaserch well established in the AI field, since they don't seem to publish that much in peer reviewed journals? How much ideas and techniques developed by MIRI are being used in practice to align current day AIs?
There are several approaches to avoiding AI X-risk.
1) Try to align neural nets, since that's what we're currently building.
2) Try to align something alignable while trying to beat neural nets to AGI.
3) Ban neural nets while trying to align something alignable.
4) Ban AI in some general sense.
MIRI is AFAIK doing some decent work on aligning plausibly-alignable AI (i.e. not neural nets). This means they have had near-zero impact on current-day AI because big tech companies use neural nets. This doesn't necessarily mean they're doing the wrong thing; if you believe neural nets are fundamentally non-alignable (and, to be clear, I think this is probably the case; the entire point of NNs is that they work without you needing to know how they work), then any and all alignment research on them is at best useless and at worst actively harmful insofar as it leads to complacency and/or draws researchers away from things that have a hope in hell of actually working.
The elephant in the room is that MIRI is not going to beat Google and Microsoft to AGI with any attainable amount of money, so approach #2 is doomed. Approach #3 is plausibly not doomed, but MIRI's only part of the solution there; you also need to Fucking Kill Google (and others, but meme), which requires a lobby group, and whether MIRI or the lobby group is more in need of your money is in question.
(Approach #4 probably raises X-risk in the long-term, so it's at best a patch until #3 can be implemented.)
I really enjoyed the recent Bay Area House Party post, and I was thinking about how you could write a similar Foreigners in Korea House Party piece while I was reading it, but then I realized I'm a decade or more out of date and I had no idea of what they're like these days. Do the Seoul Players even still write and perform plays? Are any of them still in Korea? They would have been one of the groups.
It was interesting to reflect on that idea, in the context of the aging self, and on how while once I may have been horrified to be so far out of the loop, these days I have made my own loops and I am more than content to be headed in new directions. Really fun to think about how my points of reference have changed, and how personal growth is an uneven process.
This is an update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-241/comment/9002861.
20 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 15 % on September 12).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
45 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (unchanged).
35 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 40 % on September 12).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Main news now is that usually reliable Institute for the Study of War reports imminent Russian withrdrawal from their large bridgehaead on the western side of the Dnieper river (around Kherson).
This is important for two reasons: a) until Russians are squatting on the west bank, key Ukrainian industrial cities of Krivij Rih and Mikolajiv are in jeopardy. If they were made to withdraw, it is unlikely they will cross the Dnieper ever again. Ukraine would be thus free to pursue more aggressive strategy and less inclined to negotiate under duress. b) it destroys Russian credibility among local collaborators, whose, um, collaboration, they need to govern occupied territories. Few days ago Putin declared that Kherson is forever part of Russia, now apparently not.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
Ups, so ISW partially retracted their prediction that Russians are going to withdraw east of the Dnieper: "Russian forces are likely preparing to defend Kherson City and are not fully withdrawing from upper Kherson Oblast despite previous confirmed reports of some Russian elements withdrawing from upper Kherson Oblast." (https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-24). I am still going to wait with subsequent update, slash retraction, until situation becames clearer, probably till next week.
I think you're overly optimistic on Ukrainian victory. It would require a complete collapse of Russian forces in Ukraine, and willingness on Russian side to just accept it. A far more likely scenario in case of Ukrainian success in Kherson is the second wave of mobilisation in Russia and prolonged war with uncertain result. However, the latest news from Kherson are more optimistic for Russia than for Ukraine: several probes were repelled, and the city is being prepared for defence. Of course, it's not certain it can stand for long, even with all preparations, because of logistic problems, but it does seem that Russia is prepared to make a stand there.
Or maybe not. The talk on Russian war forums right now is about possible new offensive from Belorussia, directed toward Kiev or Chernigov. It might require to sacrifice Kherson, to make Ukrainian forces overcommit there. Or the possibility of this strike might be enough to prevent a full commitment in Kherson by itself.
I'd rate the probability of Ukrainian victory as described by you as close to zero. Maybe if Putin suddenly dies and the chaos of internal struggle follows. Possible, but not likely. Here's what's wisdom of the forums whispers to me:
1) Soon (if not already) rains will make the ground unsuitable for any large-scale action on any side. This might freeze actual battle lines until the winter.
2) Meanwhile, drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure will continue. I'm not certain if they will have any effects on the fighting troops, but they will hinder Ukrainian ability to repair or build new weapons and transport troops and munition.
3) By the end of November, most of mobilized Russian men should arrive into newly captured regions and be prepared to defend them against any counter-offensives. This, according to forums, is the cut-off date for any possible Ukrainian territorial gains, and it makes sense: in situation where Russian side has overwhelming artillery capability and advantage in the air (though not domination), Ukrainian offensives mostly succeeded because there was not enough actual warm bodies on the ground to defend against them.
4) When the ground freezes, a new Russian offensive is likely. Maybe it will be two-pronged, with the second force driving from Belorussia, as mentioned above. It still will not have enough force behind it to capture Kharkov, Odessa, or any other major city, but it might be enough to complete conquest of Donetsk region, and maybe drive Ukrainians away from Kherson. Some dream of Nikolaev, or even Odessa, but I can't imagine what should happen to Ukrainian army to lose so badly, short of betrayal of some key force commander, but such things could have happened in the Spring (and didn't), certainly not now.
So if I were to place bets:
5% on Russian offensive in the winter stalling without any noticeable results. The war goes on for longer than, neither side willing to negotiate in the near future.
25% on Russian forces getting bogged down near Kramatorsk for months, maybe capturing it by the Spring, but without impulse to go any further.
65% on Russian forces on the borders of Donetsk and Kherson region, but no further.
5% on more success (either a capture of a major city, or large new territory without major cities)
When that offensive winds down, it will conclude the exchange of blows that started with Ukrainian counter-offensive. What happens next depends a lot on mood in the EU and USA. Ukraine will need more weapons to recover the losses, and the reserves of Soviet-era tanks are coming to an end already. Yet, EU is reluctant to part with even the older NATO tanks. If the West does nothing new, Ukraine may finally sue for peace in good faith (e.g. largely agreeing to to Russian demands). I'd say Russia will accept the offer - the war didn't go the way Putin planned, and I don't think he has a new plan to conquer the whole of Ukraine, or even to take Kiev. The details might vary, but at least recognition of all conquered territories and neutral status are a must.
And if the West steps up its help, well, things could go in a lot of different unpleasant directions, depending on the nature of that help. But short of nuclear war, I think it still ends up with a defeat for Ukraine, the question is just the cost to Russia, Ukraine and EU.
Well guys who think it is a good idea to sacrifice bridgehead in the strategically vital southern location in order to conquer some backwater in the northeast are just stupid.
As I explained in my previous update, part of my change of opinion is that since Balaklya fiasco I take more seriously the possibility that Russian army is commanded by idiots.
Ukrainian victory imho most likely involves change in Russian government; that is however far from impossible.
Obviously, Ukrainians are not going to reinhabitate Kherson any time soon, but also, they don't have to. IF they manage to take it back, it will untie their hands in a major way
If I recall correctly, each time your probability estimate for a Ukraine win have increased and your estimated for a Russian victory have decreased. Are you sure your updating are strongly enough ? Well calibrated estimates should move randomly rather than in a predictable way, shouldn't they ?
With respect to Ukrainian victory, this is true about only last two updates. It looks worse if you include movement between Ukrainian defeat and compromise, but still, sample size is so far small.
Also, if Republicans win the House elections, I am definitely going to update in the opposite direction (they have 80 % chance to win according to 538)
In some situations this isn't true - if you asked me every day for the rest of this year for my probability that I will get covid at some point this year, those probabilities would almost always decrease.
No comment on this particular situation though.
The expected future value of a well-calibrated estimate should be the estimate, but this doesn't mean they should move randomly. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lto9awEYPQNu9wkdi/rational-predictions-often-update-predictably#fnref6am2fn0yyve
(This doesn't mean sluggish updates aren't a thing, though. They are a thing.)
I'm kind of baffled what these probabilities mean. If you were buying or selling options on Ukrainian or Russian war bonds, and these were your current prices, that would be interesting, because we could find out later whether you made or lost money.
As it is, one expects both percentages will tend to 0% and 100%, as the conclusion eventually emerges. So we already know what will happen to the numbers, and the only mystery left is -- what is the shape of the trajectory? Do the numbers change smoothly or not, monotonically or not, et cetera?
Is there something about the shape of the trajectory that is interesting? Could we somehow draw conclusions about whether you are a good prognosticator or not from this shape?
Jeremiah 31:37 feels very Unsong-y, but I don't remember it being mentioned. What are other verses remind you of Unsong?
37 Thus saith the Lord; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord.
There's this idea that strife in post-colonial Africa is primarily a result of Europeans "drawing borders" in Africa, resulting in the creation of countries that do not correspond to natural boundaries between tribes/ethnic groups, meaning these groups were forced to live together in the same country together. This is almost universally believed by people on the left (and is even common amongst people who are more or less apolitical) and is a "fact" recited entirely uncritically virtually any time there's a discussion on why decolonization has been a monumental failure (in producing the kind of functional, progressive countries western liberals were so confident it would). It's the received truth about the world and you're some kind of weird racist if you don't see its obvious accuracy.
This is really kind of insane to me. Just think about what being said: Ethnic diversity leads to political conflict, war and even genocide. This is the barely implicit belief being held by the same people who think diversity is the greatest thing in the world. This is the belief being held by people who think there should be virtually unlimited immigration to western countries regardless of the racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic differences between immigrants and the existing populations of the countries. This is the belief of people who think race is a "social construct" and the only reason "black people" are viewed as being distinct from "white people" is because of racist white eugenicist ideologies.
Imagine if somebody in Minnestoa said they want to commit genocide because they're being forced to live around Somalians. They would be considered demented psychopaths for feeling this way. But for Africa, this is not simply an understandable kind of mindset, it's the "expected" outcome of postcolonial diversity. OF COURSE there's war, of course Africans are butchering and raping each other, you made them live alongside a different tribe!
Now, it's at this point I usually get some kind of reply where people attempt to say that I'm misrepresenting what is being argued, and that "I think what people are actually saying is [insert unrealistic steelman position here]". No, that's not what they're saying. They say that drawing borders in Africa has caused its massive problems because different ethnic groups are made to live together. This is exactly what they're saying. And this is not compatible with fundamental liberal narratives around diversity.
It's an obvious double standard that exists to shift the blame for the problems in Africa off of genocidally intolerant Africans and onto Europeans. If liberal narratives were correct, making Africa more diverse should have been an unequivocally GOOD thing! But when diversity-induced conflict is manifest amongst non-whites, then temporarily abandon their previous narratives used to justify third world immigration to the west and create some other narrative where people who are different (but much more similar than e.g. black muslim americans and white christian americans) need to be kept apart, and where hating people who are different from you is perfectly understandable. But then e.g. a white Englishman says he doesn't want to become a minority in his own country, then the regular narrative gets brought back and he's a far-right racist nazi. It would be one thing if this were some fringe, far-left belief that only true radicals believe, but it's not, it's basically a mainstream belief at this stage. I think I even remember my history teacher in high school saying something to this effect.
"This is almost universally believed by people on the left (and is even common amongst people who are more or less apolitical) and is a "fact" recited entirely uncritically virtually any time there's a discussion on why decolonization has been a monumental failure (in producing the kind of functional, progressive countries western liberals were so confident it would)."
This just blatantly seems false. I don't know of anyone on the left who believes that European-drawn borders are the *primary* cause of strife in Africa. Most people I know on the left would think that European-drawn borders are below several other things on the relevant list - the legacy of colonial institutions, global market forces (controlled by corporations and/or the IMF), colonial imposition of laws and languages that don't have local history (but are now enshrined), Cold War era interference by Soviet and American strongman dictators, etc. I could see that some *centrists* might think that the borders are the primary cause, but I would appreciate some evidence that anyone on the *left* thinks that the borders are a *primary* cause.
How would "colonial institutions" cause Hutus to genocide Tutsis, exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
"Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi were assigned to Germany by the Berlin Conference of 1884,[30] and Germany established a presence in the country in 1897 with the formation of an alliance with the king.[31] German policy was to rule the country through the Rwandan monarchy; this system had the added benefit of enabling colonization with small European troop numbers.[32] The colonists favoured the Tutsi over the Hutu when assigning administrative roles, believing them to be migrants from Ethiopia and racially superior.[33] The Rwandan king welcomed the Germans, using their military strength to widen his rule.[34] Belgian forces took control of Rwanda and Burundi in 1917 during World War I,[35] and from 1926 began a policy of more direct colonial rule.[36][37] The Belgians modernised the Rwandan economy, but Tutsi supremacy remained, leaving the Hutu disenfranchised.[38]
In the early 1930s, Belgium introduced a permanent division of the population by classifying Rwandans into three ethnic (ethno-racial) groups, with the Hutu representing about 84% of the population, the Tutsi about 15%, and the Twa about 1%. Compulsory identity cards were issued labeling (in the rubric for 'ethnicity and race') each individual as either Tutsi, Hutu, Twa, or Naturalised. While it had previously been possible for particularly wealthy Hutus to become honorary Tutsis, the identity cards prevented any further movement between the groups[39] and made socio-economic groups into rigid ethnic groups.[40]
The ethnic identities of the Hutu and Tutsi were reshaped and mythologized by the colonizers.[29] Christian missionaries promoted the theory about the "Hamitic" origins of the kingdom, and referred to the distinctively Ethiopian features and hence, foreign origins, of the Tutsi "caste".[29][41] These mythologies provide the basis for anti-Tutsi propaganda in 1994.[29]: 421 "
But the Hutus were the ones who committed the genocide, not the Tutsis. If anything, this supports OP's point even more - this group of people was so resentful that another group was favored by the Europeans 60 years ago that they committed a genocide against them. That doesn't sound like a group that would integrate well into other cultures.
Also, YSK that Wikipedia is worse than no information at all on politically charged topics. That passage completely ignores the 10 year period prior to the genocide that is overwhelmingly believed to be its cause. The only way it could be considered the fault of the Europeans is if you treat the Hutus as people with no agency, who just inevitably had to continue down the path of genocide for 60+ years after the Europeans came, and simply didn't have a choice in the matter of whether or not they committed genocide.
On Wikipedia: https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/
I'm astonished at the idea that everything would be forgotten after a mere sixty years..Some parts of Europe have bloody strife over things that happened centuries ago...eg. NI, Balkans.
> I'm astonished at the idea that everything would be forgotten after a mere sixty years
Did you respond to the wrong comment or something? I claimed precisely the opposite of that.
"this group of people was so resentful that another group was favored by the Europeans 60 years ago that they committed a genocide against them"
Just from the wikipedia article, it sounds like the Rwandan government set up the genocide, which might suggest that Hutus are alright as minorities in countries where they don't have control.
I think you're conflating two slightly different uses for the idea of ethnic/tribal groups. There's the narrow meaning of a set of people with a shared culture and identity, which is what we normally mean when taking talking about ethnic groups in stable societies.
Then there's the kind of communities we are often talking about in these cases who as well as that have their own existing defacto governments, dispute resolution mechanisms, etc. which are distinct from those of their neighbors. The process of then having to establish a set of shared institutions, or of one side trying to impose its own on the other is what causes conflict, not the proximity of ethnic groups in the narrow sense.
Okay, and the differences between e.g. native French people and Arab immigrants in terms of values, political beliefs, morality etc are much, much larger than the differences between any two neighboring African groups. The fundamental issue here is that is considered highly unacceptable by people on the left for the native French to oppose Arab immigration on the grounds of any differences between French and Arabs, but a pass is given to Africans who feel violence is an appropriate result to political disunity.
Not between neighboring groups. How many ethnic neighbors in Africa are of an entirely different race, culture, religion AND language to the extent that Europeans and people from the middle east are? None?
Diversity is more than one thing. There is just combining ethnicities,.and theres is combining ethnicities who have hated each other for centuries.
Why is it okay for African ethnic groups to hate each other, but not okay for Europeans to hate Africans?
Multiculturalism is combining ethnic groups of much larger differences, but its not okay to be opposed to it.
Could you try directing that comment to someone who ever saud it was OK.
It's not a strawman. Nobody on the left has ever called Africans racist or bigoted for their ethnic hostilities and conflicts.
> It's an obvious double standard that exists to shift the blame for the problems in Africa off of genocidally intolerant Africans and onto Europeans
Please look at what happened after European Yugoslavia was dissolved.
I think what you are describing is a right wing caricature of liberal thought. Liberals as defined by Sean Hannity. A millionaire paid by billionaires to drive up ratings by stoking white grievance.
>Please look at what happened after European Yugoslavia was dissolved.
Yes, diversity caused problems, exactly as right-wing ideology would predict.
>I think what you are describing is a right wing caricature of liberal thought. Liberals as defined by Sean Hannity.
I'm talking about my own "lived experience" of interacting with left wingers.
> A millionaire paid by billionaires to drive up ratings by stoking white grievance.
The left for years have been telling us about how great it will be once white people are a minority in the US. Then when people call this out, disingenious leftists like you call them conspiracy theorists.
> The left for years have been telling us about how great it will be once white people are a minority in the US
Citation please
Sorry, I was wrong. It's been over 20 years: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world
I don't have a citation, but it's seemed to me I've seen a lot of people on the left elated by the idea.
irl or on social media or television? I occasionally see a projection that this will occur in the next few decades but I haven’t run into elation over it.
The number of white people in the US declined in 2020 and you should have seen what twitter were saying when that news broke
Social media.
The best version of the arbitrary colonial border argument is not that this increased diversity in African countries, leading to dysfunction. Instead the issue is the ethnic groups that ended up split across countries have served as useful instruments for destabilizing neighboring rivals. Economists Stelios Michalapoulos and Elias Papaionnaou, in a 2016 AER article (complimentary pdf available https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20131311), provide evidence that "military interventions from adjacent countries are more common in the homelands of partitioned groups, rather than in nearby border areas where non-split groups reside." While there is a large literature on the consequences of ethnic fractionalization (ie diversity) in societies, untangling the directions of cause and effect remains challenging. For example, Pete Leeson of GMU has a great article on 'Endogenizing fractionalization' (https://www.peterleeson.com/Endogenizing_Fractionalization.pdf) where he argues that ethnic fractionalization is a consequence of poor institutions, not a cause.
So, I don't think anyone (for a given value of anyone that acknowledges the existence of the Lizardman Quotient) says 'diversity is the greatest thing in the world' (indeed, a google search for that turns up 4 results), unlike 'diversity is strength' which I have heard (and turns up several hundred thousand).
I think this strawman of what folks actually think about diversity is what's getting you in trouble. Especially with the expected implicit corollaries. Diversity is strength within the bounds of reason, in a modern setting where you're attempting to engage in problem solving of one sort or another.
No one thinks inviting a violent homophobe onto the board of GLAAD is good because it adds diversity.
Whereas including some black engineers in your facial recognition programming work may allow you to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Or not, nothing's perfect and black people aren't a monolith.
On the specifics of African nation creation, the obvious problem is that when people say diversity is strength, the implicit assumptions are about that being true in their environment, with the problems they face (where it probably is true). That's not necessarily the case in a place where the state doesn't have a monopoly on legitimate force and, indeed, may be viewed as an entirely illegitimate interloper. And attempting to force people to operate within governmental structures they view as illegitimate, almost always ends badly.
Diversity is strength, but it's not the only strength and it's not the most important thing in the world...which is okay, because that's a strawman you've made up.
>No one thinks inviting a violent homophobe onto the board of GLAAD is good because it adds diversity.
50% of muslim immigrants to the US think homosexuality should be illegal, and you're racist if you aren't okay with muslim immigration.
>Whereas including some black engineers in your facial recognition programming work may allow you to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Or not, nothing's perfect and black people aren't a monolith.
This is an INCREDIBLY narrow conception of left-wing support for diversity. What the left support in Europe is making sure that an ever increasing percent of Europre's population is non-white.
>the implicit assumptions are about that being true in their environment, with the problems they face (where it probably is true).
Okay, but the people who say this are completely opposed to any suggestion that non-white immigration to Europe could ever result in a "bad kind of diversity".
If you wanted to debate immigration, you could have just done that, without the hook of African history or the attempt to find hypocrisy rather than debate the topic that actually interests you.
Have a good one.
Lol, London is literally majority non-english, and will be majority non-white in the very near future. The left in Europe are obsessed with "diversity" and "multiculturalism", and these things are by definition "LESS WHITE PEOPLE".
Need a different example. London isn't in Europe anymore.
The difference that undermines all the thrust of your question is that the colonial powers specifically drew borders to group people together who already had grudges and feuds. Imagine grouping together a new state of Russians and Ukrainians, or Sunnis and Shiites, or Chinese and Japanese, or half a century ago Germans and Jews, and flippantly telling them to get along. It’s not a recipe for success. Of those examples, German and Jewish relationships are much less bad than they used to be because Germany and many Germans showed real remorse. The colonial pit-them-against-each-other model is designed to make that kind of reconciliation and healing difficult if not impossible by continually stoking the internal conflict so as to prevent them from uniting in external conflict.
Are there also patronizing double standards involved? Yes, absolutely. But you don’t need that to explain the strategy.
It’s also not a permanent strategy; Africa had some of the morally clearest things to say about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine precisely because they’ve spent decades thinking about borders and displaced ethnicities and coming up with solutions, so they were able to call out Russia’s excuses for what they really were.
>The difference that undermines all the thrust of your question is that the colonial powers specifically drew borders to group people together who already had grudges and feuds.
Why is okay for African ethnic groups to hold murderous grudges against each other? Why can't Europeans hold such grudges against immigrants?
And decolonization was almost entirely over 50+ years ago. They've had a long time to reorganize their borders in a way that doesn't play into whatever little conspiracy theory you have here.
No, they point the finger at Europeans.
I don't think people on the left say or think that ethnic hatred in Africa is alright, but they imply that ethnic hatred of whites against poc/non-whites is uniquely evil.
Russians and Ukrainians did actually live together for a very long time.
Regarding German/Jewish relations, one must note that a much smaller percentage of the German population is Jewish than there used to be. Similarly, for relations between Germans & eastern Europeans, there are a lot fewer Volkdeutsch in the east than there used to be.
Definitely meant those examples as moments in time and space. Before the Nazis, Germany was one of the least hostile places in Europe to Jews. As you observed, times change.
The Spartans and the Athenians didn’t get along for a while there either.
+1
The conventional wisdom as I've heard it isn't drawing diverse groups together, it's drawing *enemies* together to make administration easier. Occasionally with an explicit comparison to the Baltics, which worked fine as a South Slav province but fell apart as a South Slav country.
I think casting the conventional wisdom as being about diverse rather than enemy groups is just the OP setting up his argument. But it's a strawman.
Yes, but why is it just accepted that African ethnic groups CAN BE enemies? Why can't the French be enemies with Arabs and refuse to allow them into the country?
Besides what Viliam said, there's the simple matter of nearness. The French are us. We study their history alongside ours. Many of our grandfathers or great-grandfathers (or both!) fought there. Some of us live in places they named (Detroit, Saint Louis, New Orleans). Their language is almost always offered in our high schools. Many of us have vacationed there. We see their country in popular movies. We judge them by our standards.
With the Africans . . . we barely know any of the players. I didn't know the thing about Hutus and Tutsis being made up until literally today. We know none of the languages. We don't visit. The only part of their history we know is the slave trade, and most of us have this weird idea of how that worked that totally removes African agency and makes them strictly victims. We don't see their cities on TV. There's is no Rick Steves' Africa.
We just don't expect the same things from those people. They're strange and alien and over there and just don't matter to us. Describe a specific bad and you can maybe get our attention for a minute, but it's just not the same.
Honest to God, you could probably answer your question as straight up racism. We expect the French to behave as members of modern society in good standing. We don't expect that of Africans. And because just about the only thing we know about Africa is them getting slapped around by Europe, we make excuses for them.
It's the same thing with the Israelis and, like, all their neighbors.
Well, the African ethnic groups *should not* fight each other, too.
The difference is that they often *already are* fighting, and that is a different situation. The first thing that needs to happen is to *stop* the fight. Wait until people calm down a bit. After they calmed down, then you can tell them that interacting with each other is maybe better than not interacting.
It's like, when your house is on fire, you also do things that you normally wouldn't be doing, in order to stop the fire. Flooding your room with water can be a good idea in some situation, and a bad idea in a different situation.
1) People interacting with each other peacefully.
2) People separated from each other.
3) People killing each other.
Option 1 is preferable to option 2, and both are preferable to option 3. But you cannot magically go from 3 to 1 overnight, you usually need some period of 2 in between.
In almost all cases, colonial-era borders were administrative ones only, at a time when independence was not expected for decades, or even generations. These borders, especially in Africa, were not established de novo by the colonial powers at independence. For example, the existing federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland under British rule became independent as Rhodesia, Zambia and Malawi, according to the old administrative boundaries. If your suggestion is that the colonial powers deliberately tried to create unstable states, then there's no evidence for that at all. The same applied, by the way, in parts of Europe that had been in the Ottoman Empire. As that Empire slowly disintegrated, national boundaries had to be constructed somehow, and this led to a great deal of violence and many wars.
This is a different issue from the decay of multi-ethnic superstates - the Hapsburg Empire, the SFRY and the USSR, where (and especially in the latter two cases) the ethnic question had been suppressed and all sorts of boundary changes carried out for administrative reasons, which ultimately led to a number of independent states whose frontiers made no sense. So there's a series of different questions here.
>No, that's not what they're saying. They say that drawing borders in Africa has caused its massive problems because different ethnic groups are made to live together. This is exactly what they're saying.
Do you have a link to people saying this?
Most conflicts in human history have been caused by the incompatibility between territorial control on one hand, and natural communities on the other. This is not something as crude as "ethnic hatred" or even religious differences, it's just a question of two different ways of dividing up geographical space. In Empires, the problem doesn't really arise, because Empires are possessions of individual rulers and dynasties, and boundaries, such as they are, are just administrative. The problem is the rise of the nation-state, which assumes a one-for-one correspondence between ethnic/religious/cultural identity and political control. In practice, this never completely happens, and most of the blood-letting in Europe over the last few centuries can ultimately be traced to this incompatibility. In reality, borders in Europe (and the US I would suggest) are just as irrational as those in Africa, and just as often established by violence, if not more so. As I explain to African audiences, you could have our degree of relative internal stability if you can wait a few hundred years for the wars, devastation and massacres we've been through to make that possible.
The real problem comes with the attempt to export this nation-state model to new countries which were parts of empires of one sort or another for centuries, as is generally the case in Africa. In spite of the enthusiasm of first-generation Independence leaders to construct European style states, the result has been generally pretty negative: where you have frontiers you have barriers, and where you have barriers you have problems. Incidentally, whilst I think immigration is something of a red herring here (movement between regions and even districts is much less common in Africa, because of problems of communication and language) it does exist as a problem. The Ivory Coast civil war was ultimately due to immigration from poorer countries around, such as Burkina Faso.
"incompatibility between territorial control on one hand, and natural communities on the other"
Note that this doesn't have to involve anything about the *people* involved. There are "natural communities" based on geographic space (e.g., the people who happen to live along the same river and thus have easy transportation and communication between them) that have divided control (in this case because rivers, despite facilitating ordinary transportation, can be fortified into difficult barriers in case of a conflict, and also provide easy Schelling points for drawing peaceful divisions of land). As a result you get all kinds of perversity, with different tax laws in Jersey City and the West Village, and different labor and immigration laws between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
Borders drawn on the basis of lines of latitude or longitude are often even worse (there's that strip of northern Arizona that used to be primarily inhabited by polygamous Mormon breakaway sects, because they were outside the jurisdiction of Utah, but across the Grand Canyon from the Arizona territorial government).
Might be going off-topic here, but: "you could have our degree of relative internal stability if you can wait a few hundred years for the wars, devastation and massacres we've been through to make that possible. "
I've heard this often, but just as often people leave it at that. Would anyone care to speculate on what, in concrete terms, those centuries of violence actually got us?
Because, you know... if it could be identified, we might find it could also be constructed through quicker or at least cleaner means.
In an existential war, people tend to come to value meritocracy. Incompetent and corrupt officials get replaced by competent ones, and societal trust can rise as a result.
I don't think anyone has yet figured out "the moral equivalent of war".
Exhaustion, I would suspect, and the realisation that some other mechanism than war would have to be found to resolve the issues. For example, after WW2, the issue of whether France or Germany would be the dominant power on the Continent, which had caused three wars in 75 years, had obviously not been settled in the long term, and equally obviously never could be. The first, despairing moves in 1948 were actually to create the Brussels Treaty Organisation, a new military alliance against a one-day resurgent Germany. In the end, the answer was to change the question, and try to create supranational structures which would do away with national rivalries as a factor. The EU has largely been successful in this, although not without problems. I've had these conversations often in Africa (and in the Middle East) and the reality is that no state there is yet ready to compromise its sovereignty in this way.
This fits with how I understand America worked as well: they all saw themselves as separate states, they had a big war that killed all their menfolk, after that they saw themselves as the USA.
The next question is why stay together once the exhaustion has worn off? At a guess, at that point everyone who remembered the old way is dead and you've had a chance to raise a couple of generations who remember nothing else.
I love that word menfolk. Not sarcasm.
Make a note of it. Use it more in conversation. Gobble a Duke.
This is by no means a complete answer, but part of it is views from different eras being viewed as one system. The misdrawn borders issue is something I think I've been hearing my whole life. Does anyone know a history for the idea?
I do know that the construction of national identity goes back centuries in Europe, and I'm not sure how much was imposed on groups that were fighting each other rather than imposition on groups which were simply distinct from each other.
The idea that diversity is essential rather than merely good (I'm thinking of merely good as being something like the someone from every ethnicity units in WW2 movies, or an elf and a dwarf becoming friends in LOTR) is pretty recent. It just occurred to me, but LOTR had an elf and dwarf becoming friends, and whatever you want to call the good will between Gimli and Galadriel but not, as I recall, a general rapprochement between elves and dwarves.
Catholics and Protestants have figured out how to share countries in peace, but it wasn't easy.
I feel like I'm just noodling around rather than presenting a conclusion, but still, what is the history of the ideas?
"whatever you want to call the good will between Gimli and Galadriel"
'Do not repent of your welcome to the Dwarf. If our folk had been exiled long and far from Lothlórien, who of the Galadhrim, even Celeborn the Wise, would pass nigh and would not wish to look upon their ancient home, though it had become an abode of dragons?
'Dark is the water of Kheled-zâram, and cold are the springs of Kibil-nâla, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dum in Elder days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.' She looked upon Gimli, who sat glowering and sad, and she smiled. And the dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes; and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and there saw love and understanding. Wonder came into his face, and then he smiled in answer.
He rose clumsily and bowed in dwarf-fashion, saying: 'Yet more fair is the living land of Lórien, and the Lady Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth!' There was silence.
I think you are just strawmaning or at bast grossly weakmaning. Not a very productive comment, I know, but discussions about evil leftist "them" don't usually lead to productive discussion anyway
Care to add something? I think OP is bang on the money and from the looks of it so do most of the people who responded before you.
That makes you a valuable bulwark against bubble formation, if you can tell us how you'd challenge this post.
The OP summarizes the post colonial border thing in Africa and then says: "This is almost universally believed by people on the left"
Seems like a straw-man because there is not some grand leftist narrative about this.
Most people spend very little time thinking about postcolonial borders in Africa.
Tribalism is distinct from diversity too. Tunisia was Roman and more cosmopolitan, and due to this history Tunisians don't affiliate with tribes. Right next door in Libya there is still tribalism and civil war. I think the left sees tribalism as being bad, but is going to look for reasons to blame colonial powers for third world problems.
>Most people spend very little time thinking about postcolonial borders in Africa.
Okay, I believe that is almost universally believed by anyone who thinks/talks about this issue. The practical difference is immaterial.
>Tribalism is distinct from diversity too.
What? Tribalism is an anti-diversity attitude. The left thinks African tribalism is fine or at least entirely understandable, whereas European tribalism is absolutely unacceptable.
The OP frames this as a "gotcha." But with something as large and nebulous as "the left" you are easily going to find inconsistencies in thought, especially when you bring in something like "colonial borders in Africa" which is not a political issue in the US. Political issues are painfully hashed out in the political arena, they include is policy and people with skin in the game. Leftists tend to look for external excuses for the suffering of downtrodden groups. "Poor tribes in Africa, forced by Europeans to live together." "Hey it is cool to live in a 'diverse' neighborhood, especially when everybody is forced to hang a rainbow flag and drive a Prius and recycle." There is nothing incoherent or incompatible in these beliefs.
>Seems like a straw-man because there is not some grand leftist narrative about this.
"Grand leftist narrative" is a fuzzy term prone to motte & bailey re-re-re-definitions, but frankly, have you heard *any* other narrative around post-colonial borders & African conflicts? I don't think I've ever seen the topic mentionned without the "europeans drew straight lines on the map" line, including in schoolbooks. In fact there is rarely more to be said on the subject.
Stock far leftist response is that it is about greedy post-colonial corporations, I guess.
"Straight artificial borders" is imho more of a neutral conventional wisdom. It had not occured to me that it is a leftist perspective until I read this (no comment on what if anything is correct)
Poverty, disease, , aids, malaria, parasites, lack of resources, drought, no drinking water, global warming, Jihad, Boko Haram, apartheid, no infrastructure. I Hear about these things in Africa more than I hear about colonial borders.
I don't think there is really all that much disagreement about that being a cause of post-colonial conflict in Africa. (The power vacuum from colonial powers leaving and no existing authorities having legitimacy is another big factor). The interesting insight from the OP is that there's a new narrative for Western countries that diversity is good, despite the existing narrative that (at least sometimes) it's really bad.
Douglas Murray treads similar territory in his book "The War on The West."
The grand leftist narrative is certainly a thing, but I'm arguing that colonial borders in Africa is too small an issue for a grand narrative. This is far removed from public consciousness and public debate.
On the meta level.
OP noticed an apparent contradiction in leftist narrative. Now it can be either a problem of the territory - an actual contradiction in the narrative or a problem of the OP map - his misunderstanding of the leftists argument.
The fact that OP initially approaches this with high confidence that his understanding is correct and his outgroup is just stupid is already a worrying sign. But even more so, the fact that he preemptively claims that any explanation are actually unrealistic steelmans. This is not approaching the issue with curiosity and good faith, this is pushing your own narrative and refusing to update on the evidence - not very inviting for a productive discussion. As a rule of thumb: if actual explanations by people who hold the view looks like steelman to you, you may be strawmanning them.
On the object level.
There is an important difference between voluntary immigration to a country and being enforced to live in the country by a foreign power.
Likewise, there is an important difference between ethnical tension and territorial tension. They can increase each other but they are not the same thing.
>The fact that OP initially approaches this with high confidence that his understanding is correct
This is special pleading.
>But even more so, the fact that he preemptively claims that any explanation are actually unrealistic steelmans. This is not approaching the issue with curiosity and good faith
I am not opposed to explanations. I am against people steel manning the claims I am referring to, because I'm not interested in the alternative arguments that they will respond to, I am interested in responses to the argument I presented. If people think these arguments are ubiquitous then our understand of the world is too divergent for a fruitful conversation to occur.
>There is an important difference between voluntary immigration to a country and being enforced to live in the country by a foreign power.
This is confused.
The people being forced to live in a country with foreigners are the native inhabitants of the country being immigrated to, not the immigrants. French people are the ones being forced to live amongst Arabs and Africans. My point is that African groups hating each other is considered the expected response to diversity+proximity, but if a Frenchman doesn't want to live amongst Arabs and Africans then he is called a nazi, and his opposition to this diversity is seen as a violation of the natural state of man (despite the differences between french atheists and muslim africans being vastly greater than between any two neighboring African groups).
There is nothing special in basic conversational hygiene of not assuming people you disagree with to be stupid with high probability. When I don't understand something about a right-wing political narrative I ask for explanation and not for counterarguments to specifically my version of misunderstanding, discarding everything else as steelmans. It's not special when expect other people to behave likewise.
> The people being forced to live in a country with foreigners are the native inhabitants of the country being immigrated to, not the immigrants.
Again there is an important difference between being forced by a foreign power and being a citizen of a democratic country, which representative goverment has some kind of emmigration policy
But even if there wasn't any difference, in case of border drawing its about two groups of people being forced to live with each other against their own will and in case of immigration it's about only one group of people being forced to live with another.
The situations are quite different even if we look from the "ethnical tensions" lense, which is only the minor part of the picture, anyway.
Well, for starters, I don't think that mainstream left in the Western countries is in favor of "virtually unlimited immigration regardless of the racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, political and linguistic differences between immigrants". This is a radical, fringe position, useful as a rightwing bogeyman, not something you win elections with.
Okay, the absolute norm amongst the left is that restrictions on immigration based on those factors is absolutely unacceptable, so perhaps there should be a limit on how many immigrants per year, but if all of
And importantly, to the extent the left support immigration restrictions, it is almost always on an ANNUAL basis. They may want to restrict how many come per year, but there is no point at which they will say "okay, that's enough immigration, let's close the borders". They support the same level of immigration as currently exists or higher *in perpetuity*, which means ultimately, yes, there is no limit to the number of immigrants they support bringing in over the long run, which also means that Europeans will necessarily become minorities in all western countries if this continues.
You may think this is a good thing, but the point is that the difference between literally unlimited immigrants and reality is meaningless over even a medium time horizon.
As I replied to your ideological fellow traveller previously, if you think that difference between current immigration regime and full open borders is somehow negligible, we really disagree about basic facts of reality to an extent that makes productive debate almost impossible.
To me it sounds like someone would say there is a human colony on the Moon, or something like that.
Europeans are going to become minorities in their own countries at current rates. Open borders would simply means this happens sooner rather than later.
>Immigration policies in Europe have only become more restrictive in the 21st century
No, most non-white immigration to europe has occurred IN the 21st century (Merkel's great syrian immigrant intake was in 2015!), and to the extent it has become more strict in certain places, this is almost entirely a product of the right, and centre-left parties trying to keep right-wing parties at bay. Ideologically, they have no point at which they will decide that "enough" or "too many" people have immigrated to their country unless it costs them elections.
>The second half assumes that immigrants never assimilate and never intermarry, which is basically the opposite of the truth as far as the particular group you appear to obssessed with is concerned: "Arabs" in France (which really means overwhemingly Algerians and Tunisians, who come from countries where French-style intitutions French-style clothing, French culture, French media and the French language are already omnipresent) overwhemingly are French monolinguals and are the most exogamous community in the country.
1. Do you have a source for any of this?
2. My claim was that French people will become a minority. That you imagine that arabs (and for obvious reason chose to ignore africans) are competently aping "french" culture is irrelevant to this.
3. Most of these people are muslims. Islam is not part of french culture and muslims by definition cannot be "assimilated". France is a secular/catholic country. Africans in Africa butcher each other over much smaller differences than these big categorical religious differences.
4. A majority of crime in France is committed by immigrants and their immediate descendants. This is the opposite of assimilation.
>You might as well say that Americans are now a minority in their own country since Proper White Germanic Americans are now only 30% of the population.
Why White Germanics? Why not, you know, the NATIVE AMERICANS, who are absolutely a minority due primarily to mass immigration. Are you going to say "oh, stop whining, we're all americans now!".
That's a fair point. However I do think its a mainstream liberal belief that drawing the African borders without regarding ethnic boundaries was a significant cause of bloody conflict in Africa. I also think its a mainstream liberal belief that diversity is a strength and not a weakness.
So I think it's very fair to better understand how liberal would square this.
I'd really like to hear your view on the two statements above.
My assumption is that "diversity is always a strength" is a pretty meaningless platitude and indeed there are many times and scenarios when increasing diversity can be harmful. I think many mainstream liberals would agree with this and it's hardly a groundbreaking statement. But it would be nice if they were clearer about the complexities and nuance instead of just blindly pretending "diversity" is obviously always a good thing.
Also it would be healthier if we didn't attribute all African problems to colonialism but that's a separate conversation.
Yeah, I largely agree, except you cannot expect nuance from social media mob, regardless of its political persuasion. That is just not realistic
Yeah, 100%
That's why we're having this convo in the ACX thread instead of screaming at each other on twitter lol.
In the right communities there's tons of space for nuanced discussion still.
To me that feels like avoiding the OP's main point, which is that the reasoning for one leftist talking point is incoherent with the reasoning for another. Instead of addressing that, we're now talking about a technicality of how much immigration is being conducted.
But to follow you along anyway: from where I'm standing, the difference between "virtually unlimited" and "too damn high" is negligible; I don't care if you wish to dismiss the existence of the first position when the second one is very real and functionally identical.
See, this is what I had in mind when I wrote that posts like usually don't lead to productive discussion. You and I evidently have very different ideas about what is important.
I think that difference between current immigration regime in both US and EU and open borders regime is huge, you think it is negligible. This is a chasm in a perception of reality which is very difficult to bridge.
I am not sure whether the thing about "badly drawn borders" is specifically leftist talking point, more like conventional wisdom. In any case, I doubt that most supporters of open borders subsribe to that. Probably you could find someone who incoherently believes both positions, but it does not seem fair to evaluate political movements based on their dumbest members.
Perhaps we can make this conversation more productive if I start by mentioning that I'm a big proponent of increased immigration as a general rule of thumb.
I certainly think that increasing immigration is going to become increasingly important in the western world as birth rates drop.
I think that countries that do immigration smartly are likely to outcompete countries that reduce their immigation blindly.
I'm not a US citizen but from my standpoint it feels like increasing legal immigration and reducing illegal immigration can and should be a bipartisan view in the US.
I really would like to delve deeper into "diversity" as a general value. Do you think it's always good and never harmful to increase ethnic diversity in countries?
When do you feel ethnic/cultural diversity is a problem and when is it not (or indeed an asset)?
(Unrelated aside: I don't see this as particularly unproductive - we've revealed a scope of immigration where "open borders" is on one end and "too damn high" is (in your opinion) a significant distance away from it but (in my opinion) still too damn high. This is wider map is good for both of us to know about. But my main response was:)
Do you personally disagree with the badly drawn borders talking point? It's absolutely something that's taken for granted by everyone I meet, including myself before I read OPs post. I would definitely be surprised to hear that a leftist didn't believe it, and that's without making any assumptions on the intelligence of said leftist.
I think the OP is right, that (even strong and steelman) progressive leftism has this blindspot that he has exposed, and I haven't yet heard anything to contradict that.
What I would expect from someone who's just had a serious tactical blindspot revealed is an immediate emotional reaction, an attempt to divert or end the conversation as soon as possible, and possible scorn, dismissal or aggression directed to the one who exposed it.
I can't prove this is a blindspot, because I don't tend to talk politics in person and I can't expect any triggered leftist to come on this thread and admit to having this reaction in front of a gang of their perceived enemies.
But I can absolutely have it disproved, if a leftist showed up to calmly explain why OP is wrong.
Your explanation, as I understand it, is that only stupid people believe both of OP's positions at once, and therefore the smart leftists must only believe one or the other.
But I really don't think this is true.
33% of Americans are in favor of removing “all restrictions on immigration”, a number that isn't usually associated with "radical, fringe positions".
Source?
https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-72-americans-say-immigrants-come-us-jobs-improve-their-lives-53-say-ability-immigrate
I've looked a bit for similar polls, but apparently it's an uncommon question to ask, the usual being "do you want More or Less immigration?", with the More share having steadily grown to 30-ish percent. It's plausible that at least some fraction of them would prefer at least some restrictions, but like trebuchet says, there's no mainstream leftist position on what might those be.
I really doubt that number.
It obviously depends on the country, and as a non-American, I am ill-positioned to speak for Democrats. But, it seems to me that Biden administration does not exactly welcome recent surge of asylum seekers with open arms
We're not talking about the Biden administration, we're talking about left-wing americans generally. Who do they support not allowing into the country?
I think this is about Schelling points.
If you have a state that is already functional, then it is relatively easy to keep it going. You have an army and a police force with decades of training, they will easily defeat any mob. Revolution is difficult.
On the other hand, if you have a deeply dysfunctional state, containing several different tribes with strong tribal structures, then it is relatively easy to keep the tribes doing their thing, but making the state more functional is difficult. All people who are good at violence are trained to be loyal to their tribes.
My honest opinion on diversity is: "it does not necessarily have to be harmful". I can imagine it work, in a society that is already functional, if all groups are willing to play by its rules (and those unwilling are small enough so they can be defeated). Especially in a modern society, where the tribes are not the source of... well, pretty much everything. People will side with their former classmates against their tribal elders, when it is convenient for them. But they need to be able to survive *economically* outside their tribe first.
So, the colonizers can be blamed for creating *dysfunctional* states, which otherwise would not have existed at all. Imagine some powerful aliens coming to Earth, creating a new state that contains a half of USA and a half of Mexico, keeping it together for 50 years, then leaving Earth. Would it make sense to blame the aliens for having drug cartel violence in California?
Sounds like you're saying diversity need not be harmful so long as it's trivial. I like chocolate ice cream and you like vanilla -- yay! We can live in peace!
I think it's more complicated than that. It's not "small differences like ice cream preference are okay, big difference like race or religion are not." The *same* difference can be more or less salient as part of someone's identity depending on their culture and circumstances. There are countries where being Christian or Muslim can get you killed, and countries where being Christian or Muslim is a minor difference that determines which days you take off from work.
(Really, "trivial" is a tautological description - if a division causes strife, then it's not trivial, if it doesn't, then it is.)
Colonial states have a disadvantage here because colonizers aren't trying to get the colonized people to invest in a new political identity - they have the military force to draw borders wherever they want and don't care if there's some sort of internal division that would make it difficult to govern in the absence of that force. This means that when the colonizers suddenly withdraw, those older divisions haven't gone away, and might be too much for the new government to handle.
(They might even intentionally stoke those internal divisions to promote their influence, like Belgium did in Rwanda. Hutu and Tutsi are mostly-constructed identities - there were some existing economic and social divisions, but the Belgians turned them into a rigid, hereditary racial system, which laid the groundwork for civil war and genocide a few decades later)
>don't care if there's some sort of internal division that would make it difficult to govern in the absence of that force. This means that when the colonizers suddenly withdraw, those older divisions haven't gone away, and might be too much for the new government to handle.
The point is precisely that these "internal divisions" are treated like a force of nature by many leftists, whereas if a Frenchman doesn't want millions of Africans and Arabs coming into France, his views are treated by these same people as being some repulsive abberation from man's natural state of being.
Look at Switzerland, a country that has *four* official languages. In other parts of the world, speaking a different language is often a pretext for a war. Yet it works for them, I guess because the people see something that unites them, which makes the differences in language trivial.
Another example is how religious or political conversions can remove old conflicts (and replace them with new ones). The same difference that was a big problem before the conversion, becomes trivial after the conversion.
If we ignore all the imperfections for the moment, European Union is built on the idea that "Europe" is more important than individual countries. A few decades ago, the most important thing for Europeans was to fight for your country and kill the neighbors.
...so, whether some difference actually becomes a problem, depends on context.
I think you've got a very strong point and I'm not arguing. However the steelman I would use that I actually think tracks reality is the following:
At earlier stages of societal development, ethnic/tribal boundaries are super important and conflict is very likely if they're forced to live together. After a prolonged experience of peace these ethnic and tribal differentiations tend to blur in favor of a larger national identity making a larger multicultural society possible. So maybe people think the borders were simply drawn too early?
In addition, there seem to be many cases where redrawing borders around ethnic borders is very beneficial in modern times. I understand this worked well in eastern europe (Kosovo, Serbia etc.) but I'm really no expert. All I know is this is the reason why Avigdor Leiberman the Israeli politician born in Belarus is a big proponent of using land swap agreements as part of a future israeli state. Basically giving uncontested territories with mostly muslim populations in exchange for annexing contested regions with mostly jewish settlers.
Proponents of the two state solution is another example of liberals acknowledging that diversity isn't always feasible.
It could also hinge on economic development.
The following is first-pass train of thought speculation. I appreciate all sincere attempts to refine or counter my logic.
At a certain point in a groups development, the value of an individual worker gets to the point where the cost of group violence massively outweighs the potential benefit.
If your group is a hunter-gatherer tribe, the economic value of a tribe member might not be significantly greater than their cost. This is especially the case if your supply of food is more dependent on the number of animals you have or the competition from other tribes for prime hunting or gathering space. Losing a few tribe members for a net gain of animals or space is likely a long term net win.
As you start getting more productivity for the average group member, the economic cost of violence goes up, both because the loss of the group member and the cost for maintaining the superiority in violence over your rival groups. At the same time, you get a point where maintaining that superiority in violence is expensive, and if you can find a way to use it, you're better off for it. Your average subsistence farming peasant in a feudal state still isn't producing much more value than he consumes, so losing a few to gain some doesn't hurt too much. What you'd see in this era is either big stupid wars between nations or the conquest of tribal societies which would be relatively cheap (ie, colonization).
We're now at a point where for the West where group violence (war) is so incredibly expensive compared to the potential gains as to be stupid to start, and we've realized that it's better if the tide raises everyone's boat than if our boat sinks slower than the other guys. Once you're at this point, you can argue that diversity is a benefit. Other groups aren't potential sources of violence because it would cost them too much, so cooperation and trade are the orders of the day.
At the same time, we forget that much of the world is still in a state where this isn't the case. There's a (possibly Russian) joke that goes like this: "A magical fish offers to grant one wish to a peasant. He is wondering which treasures he should request from the fish. Then, the fish explains that whatever the peasant wishes for and receives himself, his neighbor will receive double. The peasant says, “Ok, then I want you to poke out one of my eyes.”" Twenty idiots with boxcutters killed three thousand productive workers and cost us a relative fortune in lost productivity, and then we blew a significantly larger fortune in stupid attempts to reduce the likelihood of this happening again.
> a larger national identity making a larger multicultural society possible
Are there examples of actually successful multicultural societies? Where "multiculturalism" extends to something beyond traditional dresses being put on for a holiday once a year?
Singapore and Australia
The Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Romans and to a lesser extent the Byzantines. The British too, depending on how you mean it. Basically, before the rise of modern nationalism in the late 18th century, you could run a multinational - and hence multicultural - empire pretty well. This got a lot harder through the long 19th century, and finally they all collapsed in WW1.
Unless I am totally missing what you mean by ‘multicultural’, I would argue that many European nations bridged important ethnic, linguistic and cultural divides. France comes to my mind as an example of a notably multicultural region; modern French identity fairly recently coalesced around a set of ideals and institutions heavily promoted during the third republic.
China, India, and Russia are other countries you might be interested in. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of examples, at any rate.
China is a country utterly dominated by one ethnic group and where minorities are often heavily repressed. It's absolutely not a case of multiple cultures getting along in peace.
Like ReformedHegelian says, I mean the replacement of the former "melting pot" approach by the current "multiculturalism" one. To the extent that the West was successful in integration, it was through convergence to the mainstream culture, and whenever these days this doesn't happen, there inevitably follow deep-seated problems (since you mention France, they're pretty used to riots in Parisian suburbs by now).
As for the others, in China there's Xinjiang, in Russia there's Chechnya, and in India - the constant Hindu-Muslim strife.
> since you mention France, they're pretty used to riots in Parisian suburbs by now
I am flattered by the implication that Parisians were ever halfway reasonable.
This seems like the David Sedaris take on Parisians. :)
I think the US is the boring example but still applies. Even if you claim it's not ethnically diverse, there are certainly a large amount of competing "cultures".
Also, I was making an even more boring point thinking of countries like Germany that used to be made up of many smaller regional powers who hated each other but ended up merging and creating a shared national identity.
If we insist on multiculturism meaning multi-ethnicity (imo how its usually used actually), I think the anglo, western world does a fantastic job at accepting new immigrants and integrating them into the country. One of the top contenders for the UK prime minister is an Indian for example.
oh looking at your message again, I think you're focussing on the word "mulitcultural" as opposed to more of a "melting pot" system.
i'm not wedded to the concept of sharing and preserving specific cultures in a specific type of government policy.
I'm more thinking about how hispanic republicans feel equally "American" as asian democrats for example
I think the non-dumb version of this argument is that empires could and did suppress local disputes, like keeping Muslims and Hindus under the same empire in India. When the imperial forces went away, those local disputes could flare up again. The partition of India really did happen, after all.
But mostly, I think it's mood affiliation. You know colonialism was bad so decolonization must have been good, and so anything bad that came with decolonization must somehow be the fault of the old colonial powers.
Referring to countries such as Finland and Romania where nine out of ten belong to the majority ethnic group as "multicultural" seems pretty weird. There aren't that many countries that come closer to being an ideal nation state.
"Starkly different" is a phrase I'd expect applied to say Somalis in Japan, not to Swedes in Finland or Hungarians in Romania.
That's a pretty amusing contrast to highlight. I always assumed people who weren't complete naifs were sincere when they suggested the post-colonial borders in Africa led to strife, because they understood that it's a greater challenge living with people that have quite different cultural assumptions and shibboleths, and that when they turned around a yammered about diversity = strength it was just transparent bullshit in service of some ideological goal they felt could not be said outright or discussed honestly.
Do you think there actually are people -- outside of students and other naifs I mean -- who truly think a more culturally diverse group is *less* prone to tribal conflict? (A reasonable man well might agree increased tribal conflict *does* happen but is a price worth paying to achieve some other putative benefit from diversity, but that's not who I mean, I mean someone who thinks the diversity *by itself* reduces -- or at least does not increase -- social friction and conflict.)
The argument goes that a more diverse society *eventually* leads to less tribal conflict. The society needs time to develop the tolerance adaptation, but when developed it can be used to accept more diverse people in the society and decrease conflicts between different societies.
>The argument goes that
Does it?
Unless they're being pragmatically insincere, I've literally never heard anyone on the left say anything to the effect of "Yes, I know it's hard accepting in these foreigners with whom you have so little in common, but we need to stick at it". People who have a problem with foreigners are pathologized and called xenophobic bigots, and its treated as some weird aberration to not be welcoming to people different than you. It's *surprising* to them that diversity doesn't instantly work.
> I've literally never heard anyone on the left say
Maybe it has something to do with the way you approach leftist views. As long as you are in the "outgroup ridiculing mode" your picture of their views will be skewed and making little sense. Try to approach leftist narrative with curriocity and figure out the nuances of the views of actual leftists. You may be quite surprised.
One of the core ideas in modern leftism is that we are all have some racism/sexism/classism/transphobic/etc. That being somewhat bigoted is an inherited part of all of us. And that we can fight it in ourselves and thus become better people. Liberals are not born. They are made through overcomming our primitive xenophobic intuitions. And this of course requires some work, in a sense it is a constant struggle against entropy if you want to achieve perfection, but you can achieve good result even with small amount of effort if you put your mind to it.
I'm not sure whether it's malicious mischaracterisation or an honest mistake, when conservatives assume that being called bigoted is a pathologization and uneascapable sentence. After all conservatives have being shaming and pathologizing people for unchangable qualities throughout the history. Maybe they just project the same way of thinking? But it's not what is going on here. Liberals expect people whose bigotry is revealed to simply change their ways, as liberals have already done themselves. Now when people understand what they are doing, how harmful is that, they can just do some work to become a better. This is the desired and expected behaviour. If we all cooperate and overcome our primitive xenophobic intuitions me can build the better world. Imagine there is no heaven... it's easy if you try...
What is surprising and enfuriating to liberals is meeting people who endourse and identify with bigotry. Who knowingly refuse to cooperate to try to become better people. Who instead of doing the necessary work, become offended at the assumption that any work needs to be done. Previously liberals naively thought that everyone can become a better person if they just knew better. And now they are shocked to find that some people are knowingly choose to be evil.
'Better' meaning 'just like them'.
In some regards. Because they actually became better, not because whatever they are is considered better no matter what.
I guess, conservative really want this to be about aesthetics, up to the point of endorsing the most strawmanish versions of postmodernism reasoning. But it's very clearly is not the case. You may be 100% aesthetically blue tribe, as soon as you are revealed to be sexual offender, you are totally cancelled. Or you may love your superbowl and fastfood. If you managed to overcome your bigotries you are a better person than you used to be and will be happily accepted in the liberal society. You may not be able to play the status games of the elites but you do not have to. How do you think blue tribe managed to unite both rich elites and poor minorities, otherwise?
Ah, well, I'd say so far the empirical evidence isn't making that argument look great. I wouldn't say tribal conflict in Africa has markedly decreased since the 1960s[1]. There's also the interesting experiment of the USSR: for 70 years tribal conflict was ruthlessly suppressed, and a broad cultural uniformity imposed from above. Everyone had to learn the same language, have the same politics, worship the same shibboleths and Olympic sports teams. And yet...when the USSR dissolved, it turns out the tribal conflicts were still there and many of them erupted rather violently[2,3,4, and perhaps the current exceedingly violent Russian-Ukraine conflict].
These are both experiments that have been running for a very long time, by social science standards: 50 years and up. One would think if some kind of tolerance were going to set in, however slowly, it would be visible by now.
One can of course just argue they're all doing it wrong, but that tends to sound like special pleading, or at the very least it calls into question the proposition that diversity *necessarily* leads to strength -- if it only does so when you "do" diversity just right, then maybe diversity per se is neither here nor there -- maybe what *is* true is that some kind of social structure reduces social friction from whatever cause, and it works on tribalism as well as any other random source of intrapersonal irritation.
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[1] https://reliefweb.int/report/world/conflict-trends-africa-1989-2017
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_South_Kyrgyzstan_ethnic_clashes
I'm not sure how to properly account for USSR example. It actually somewhat succeded in creating new identity of soviet people and all the conflict erupted only after the collapse of the union and copromisation of this identity. It all actually worked for quite some time untill it didn't. Do we consider this a success or a fail? Something inbetween? Other similar example is Roman Empire. It was quite stable, partually because people could become roman citizens no matter their ethnicity. And of course Roman Empire eventually collapsed. But it fared quite well, much better than most. Quite mixed evidence here.
What complicates the issue even more, both roman and soviet model of overcoming ethnical struggles were not exactly the same model that diversity supporters push now. They simply replaced ethnical identity with a new empire identity, which is a step in the direction of more diversity, compared to ethnostates but still just the middle ground, not the end of the spectrum. So people with different narratives can account of this quite differently. Those who oppose diversity may claim that of course these empires collapsed because of diversity, but they were somewhat successful because they at least had singular emperial identity, while diversity supporters will contribute the success of the empires to the diversity and failure to this manufactured singular identity instead of developing propper tolerance adaptation.
We can also have a look at USA. It also has imperial identity: no matter where you came from you can be american if you support american values. But also a more liberal openness to different values. In a sense the current conflict between republicans and democrats is a conflict between supporters of american imperial identity and more general liberal one. And USA is pretty successful.
And closer to the end of the diversity spectrum we have such cluster of ideas as liberalism/modern leftism in general. You can have any religion or none thereof, all kind of beliefs and values, as long as you tolerate and accept everybody who tolerate and accept every other tolerating and accepting people, we are ready to tolerate and accept you and we will all cooperate for the greater good. This liberal identity is extremely successful in modern world. I think it counts as a strong evidence in favor of diversity.
OK the first part of this seems to me just moving the goalposts. Yes, sure, as long as you compel people to forego their tribal conflicts, restraining them with prison cells and guns -- why, that works. But your original argument was that, even if force was necessary at the beginning, its necessity would (or at least could) fade, because society would "develop the tolerance adaptation."
What I'm pointing out is that the USSR, for example, made strenuous efforts to "develop the tolerance adaptation" for 70 years, turn everyone into the New Soviet Man, and it was so manifestly unsuccessful that as soon as the enforcement was lifted, the old ethnic and cultural conflicts broke out again no less virulent than they were 100 years ago. If 70 years of enforcement aren't enough to "develop the tolerance adaptation" -- what would be?
I'm certainly willing to agree the United States is reasonably successful already, but it's the passionate advocates of diversity who don't think it is -- who think it is so riven with injustice and oppression that it needs massive revision to its standard social mythology, the kind of stuff that needs to be forced from above by law and fines and even prison sentences because mere persuasion and social pressure is wholly inadequate.
You can't have it both ways, you know: either the US is *not* a successful pluralitic tolerant society, and that's why we need massive DEI initiatives at all levels -- and eggs must be broken[1] to make the omelet -- or it *is* already a pluralistic tolerance society and diversity crusades are just the latest incarnation of tribalistic jockeying for political power by some special interest or other, and can be treated as no more deserving of general respect than the oil industry looking for tax breaks.
On the last, I disgree on two points: first, I don't think the modern liberal identity[2] is successful at all, which is why it faces increasing levels of political rejection and finds itself unable to generate a coherent stable governing philosophy, but rather stumbles from one urgent jihad to the next. It strikes me as in general just the intellectual narcissism of the upper middle class seeking some real-world basis for its desire to feel superior to the peasantry. Might as well be courtiers of Louis XIV sniffing at the uncouth speech of the sans culottes. And, second, almost no philosophy short of Stalinism is *less* ideologically tolerant. It practices acceptance on all the trivial forms of diversity -- skin color, sexual pecadilloes, styles of dress or salutation -- but rigid conformity on all the meaningful forms -- philosophy, political ideology, religion, private morality.
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[1] For example, some otherwise straight-A high-school graduates with a yellow skin need not to go to the most prestigious of colleges so that some people with a black or brown skin and lower grades can. Sorry, Charley, we'll get to the hypothetical judging by the content of your character rather than the color of your skin...soon. Not more than another 100 years, tops.
[2] Dating from roughly 2000, and as distinguished from a classical liberal philosophy, the kind of thing an old fossil like Jerry Brown or MLK Jr might have recognized, which apparently is a tea too weak for its soi-disant heirs.
It would be moving the goalpost if we had agreed beforehand on a specifics of USSR or Roman Empire social experiments, and then I declared that it was obviously flawed and didn't prove anything after it ended. As we are just speculating in hindsight - not so much.
>I'm certainly willing to agree the United States is reasonably successful already, but it's the passionate advocates of diversity who don't think it is
I concede that the blue tribe isn't good at celebrating previous achievements. This doesn't change my point, though.
> You can't have it both ways, you know
You very much can and actually should. We should celebrate current achievements of diversity and tolerance which are obviously better than nothing, but also be aware that there is still road to go and all the current successes can vanish if taken as something granted, not requiring to fight for. There is no contradiction here.
> I don't think the modern liberal identity[2] is successful at all
As long it's dominant in absolute majority of developped countries I think we would need stronger evidence to challenge it.
> It practices acceptance on all the trivial forms of diversity
Well, if the blue tribe is bad at celebrating achievements, the red one is bad at not taking them for granted. This "trivial forms" of diversity were fought tooth and nail for and are being constantly challenged still. Also I think you are plainly wrong by not including religion in the list. As a general rule "tolerance for everything except intolerance" also gives a lot of possibilities for philosophical views and political ideology, but I guess not the ones you would like to be more accepted. Sadly, I don't think it's possible to do better in current memetic climate. Maybe when the culture war ends, the dust settles and Ctulhu eventually moves even more left...
A history of conflict is also part of the problem, it isn't just a matter of different customs.
You are suggesting the cart pushes the horse?
Even if the cultural differences come first, the conflict can become part of the cultures.
I don't understand what that means. You're saying conflict could continue even if the cultural differences were removed? That seems counter-intuitive to me. Do any examples come to mind to illustrate how this works?
There's three things I want to say about this:
1. You make a good point
2. Think your mistake is at least partially taking the argument at face value. In my experience, their perspective is either a product of regurgitating what they think the statusful opinion or active self-preservation. As someone who is mixed (black and white), I get to experience a lot more of the latter when this topic is brought up. I watch well-educated white people do the whole colonial scapegoating dance and then look at me like "Now you see! I'm one of the good white people!".
3. I think one version of the argument you speak of blames arbitrary ethnic borders and colonialism not necessarily because they increase inter-ethnic conflict, but because they are generally destabilizing. In short, if there were no colonizers it is quite possible sub-saharan africa would've turned out a lot better. Imagine an infant that's growing up slightly slower than their peers, but growing up nonetheless. Then, all of a sudden, she is thrown out of her home environment and has much less security than she did before. Would you not expect this interference to have some negative impact on the child's growth?
This argument is slightly stronger and harder to disprove because it relies on a counterfactual world where colonialism never happened. Also, they can draw fairly close parallels to Iraq where Western influence in the area appeared to make the country more chaotic, leading to a lot of excess bloodshed.
>Imagine an infant that's growing up slightly slower than their peers, but growing up nonetheless.
This is not close to accurate. Sub-saharan Africa's economies were extremely small and stangnant before colonialism. They weren't slightly behind western Europe. Europe and sub-sharan africa were categorically different. Most of the continent had not even invented the wheel or written language by the time Newton had published his most important works. There's no reason to expect Africa would have ever caught up to Europe if they had never been colonized.
>Then, all of a sudden, she is thrown out of her home environment and has much less security than she did before. Would you not expect this interference to have some negative impact on the child's growth?
Yeah, being "thrown out of her home environment" is an extraordinarily poor analogy. For one thing, her "home environment" was an extremely primitive place where different groups would routinely kill and enslave one another.
But the reality is that Africa's economy grew rapidly under colonialism. At the peak of colonialism, several African colonies had some of the largest economies in the world. Colonial rule was a period of stability for Africa, not instability. And the environment was one in which industry, farms, mines, roads, ports, railways, bridges and so on were built. Colonialism was Europeans introducing the infrastructure and systems that facilitated economic growth in Europe. The expected outcome of colonialism should be rapid economic development. But the problems following colonialism are a result of Africans being unable to maintain what the Europeans had created, and their murderous ethnic rivalries and so on.
And in places like South Africa, the "most colonized" country in Africa, we see the most developed country in sub-saharan Africa, whereas in the least colonized African country (or close to it), Ethiopia, it is amongst the poorest countries. This is the exact opposite of what your hypothesis would predict.
And just to be clear, I don't support colonialism. I wish it hadn't happened (not least because it was not beneficial to Europe). I'm just pointing out that it isn't the reason why Africa is much poorer than the rest of the world.
>Also, they can draw fairly close parallels to Iraq where Western influence in the area appeared to make the country more chaotic, leading to a lot of excess bloodshed.
Africa was also chaotic. It's just that the population was sparse and the technology so lacking that there was never a chance for the kind of things in post-colonial Africa to occur. But once the population grew and they had guns and their run of the place, the chaos emerged again but on a bigger scale.
Why go to Iraq for the example, when Iraq was a relatively standard suppression of one ethnic/religious group by another minority group, when the more ethnicly mixed (and far more excessively bloody) Yugoslavia is already a byword for the bad effects of Western influences?
(Maybe it's because Yugoslavia shows it is human nature to have ethnic conflicts, and not something one can blame on the West.)
This is not a strawman though
Given MIRI-style beliefs about imminent omnicidal AI takeover, how much would humanity's long-term chances be improved by a global thermonuclear war? The largest impact EA intervention ever? (only slightly trolling)
A few clarifications would be helpful:
(1) What is a "global" thermonuclear war? Only two nations have substantial nuclear arsenals (Russia and the US) and it would be logical to assume that if they go to all-out war almost all bombs would be used on each other. That's a lot of people and a lot of land, to be sure, but well short of a major fraction of the globe.
Are you assuming there's some unusually wide distribution of attacks, e.g. the Americans take time to nuke China and Iran and whoever else is on the President's shit list as well, and the Russians send a bunch of warheads to Brasilia and Tasmania because nobody should have a good day? Or that the other 6-8 nuclear powers get caught up in the fun and start throwing their few weapons around in other parts of the world, e.g. the Indians figure they might as well wipe out Islamabad while no one will notice one extra kaboom in the middle of the Flame Deluge?
(2) How "long term" do you mean? If you mean "the next century" that's a very different thing than "the next ten millenia."
1) A declassified Cold War era US nuclear target map suggested that China would also be targeted even in a US-Russia war, and I think that would be true today as well, to prevent them from dominating the post-war world. Likewise, I think it's safe to assume that Russia will "spread the love" among the NATO.
Other parts of the world will probably be less affected, but they also aren't exactly on track for advanced AI deplyment, so far as I can tell.
2) EAs usually refer to "a billion years from now", which is just as well.
Pretty sure no genuine Cold War targeting protocols have ever been declassified, but I would be very interested indeed to hear of a counter-example.
Anyway, I find the proposition that the US would nuke Beijing on the theory that this might fashion a better postwar world to be a bit whimsical for serious military planning. I think it's likely strikes will be organized according to clear first-rank military goals, and there isn't a lot of firepower left over after that -- we should bear in mind stocks are 1/20 what they were in the 80s. Yes, I agree Europe would be included in any full on war, but it still means the conflict is hardly global. 90% of the world's land area and 94% of its population aren't in the target zones of either side.
That hardly means the world would be unaffected, of course, but not apocalyptically I think. In the short term the world would lose ~1/3 of its oil supply and probably 3/4 of its market demand, which would certainly cause a big recession, one that would perhaps last a decade or more. But there are plenty of dynamic countries that would rise to take technical leadership, I think. South Korea, Japan if it stayed out of the conflict, Indonesia, India, Chile, Brazil maybe, China of course. It would be a quite different world, but for those countries that weren't involved I can't see it being that worse than a really savage economic recession, sort of the Great Depression times 2-4.
So if fancy AI is possible and useful, I don't think the plausible kind of nuclear war would delay its appearance by more than a decade or two. At the outer limit maybe 50 years.
https://futureoflife.org/resource/us-nuclear-targets/
I agree that civilization-level delay to AI probably wouldn't be centuries-long, but apparently every year counts.
Ah so, OK, thanks. Yeah, that's a prospective SAC study, meant to inform actual future targeting decisions -- but whether the actual ultimate decisions matched up with the study, we don't know. We should at least bear in mind it listed ~2300 separate targets at a time (1956) when the United States only had about ~2500 nuclear weapons in total.
Why does every year count? I mean, I guess it does for people now alive, for whom every year of Skynet delayed means another year of sweet sweet bliss not being merely one of a mountain of skulls. But I thought the dogma here was concern over the future of the species per se. How does it change anything important if the species gets wiped out by Terminators not in 2035 but in 2085? What am I missing?
I'm not the target of your question, but I believe the answer is that more time means more ability to "solve" AI alignment and make them our friends instead of our enemies.
Highly sensitive to the outcome & effects of the war, but conditional on those views, I think most of the outcome distribution sees improved long-term survival odds. The main cause would be some slowdown in capabilities research, without there necessarily being (as much of) a slowdown in alignment research.
It doesn't follow that this would be a good EA intervention - beyond the obvious reasons like "nuclear war is bad", 2nd order effects are real and being the sort of agent(s) that would do that sort of thing is quite bad for your survival odds, so it's much better to not be that kind of agent.
> without there necessarily being (as much of) a slowdown in alignment research.
I doubt this part. I would expect a nuclear war to dramatically decrease everyone's quality of life, in various direct and indirect ways. Which means that much fewer people would have the luxury to think about abstract things such as AI alignment.
Yeh. Everybody in the northern hemisphere is toast. Starvation and economic collapse everywhere else. The modern world ceases to exist.
Well, EAs as they are now don't remotely have the capability, even if they had the inclination. A much more likely scenario is that the war would happen for unrelated reasons, but starting it could actually be a uniquely beneficial action, probably the most unintuitive idea that I've gotten through ratsphere reading.
I think if your philosophy thinks a nuclear war is a better outcome, you should re-examine your philosophy.
Oh, it isn't mine. I happen to think that a simultaneous painless extinction of humanity is a better outcome than most possible futures, which isn't exactly a popular outlook either I'd imagine.
I think you missed the part where actually doing the thing would not actually work out very well for your goals.
Relevant: https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/819678205900509184
Sure, I meant that something else would "oblige" to do the thing for them. I wonder whether they would be glad.
Improvement requires that the new civilization after a war would be for some reason better than the current one.
Survival is good in itself. I do think a WW without total annihilation of humanity will be beneficial for re-establishing aims of humanity in the long term. Important point is I'm talking about humanity; not for states, not for democracy, not for environment and so on. I can't help but think a devastating but not species ending wake-up call for humanity should be the last even of its infancy.
The trouble is in the aftermath of a nuclear war, people would very likely develop a violent antipathy for anything nuclear, including nuclear power stations.
Seeing as fossil fuels are increasingly rare and expensive and challenging to obtain (or will soon become so), the resulting shortage of reliable and plentiful energy would greatly hamper future modern life styles and technical advances.
I think consequent aftermaths of WWs provided more and more rule-based approach in international relations, even though I cannot cite any sources for this claim. My hope is that an international government/organization with executive power along with judicial and legislative power can be established. Then, political stability provided by srong measures against ear and power-struggles may lead over all betterment in long term.
Sustaining and providing energy is a bottleneck and nuclear energy is definitely among best choices in my opinion. But without getting into politics, I don't know what is best for overcoming the current and future energy issues.
When I was young (cold war childhood), I was also dreaming about a world government, as a natural way to get peace and no organized war. It was a given for many SF stories, the earth united and the nationial/ethnic difference transposed into interplanetary relations...
For me this "hope" culminated in the early 90, with the fall of the eastern bloc....
Since then, I have lived (in fact, live from) the IT revolution, with easier surveillance and push for a no cash society. I have seen Chinese social credit, Greek crisis and Cyprus confiscation, lately Canadian trucker bank freeze.... And IA is looming in the not distant horizon, except it does not look anything like Asimov robots, it's all big data and closer to his psychohistory stuff....
Let's say I am not so fond of the idea of a world governement anymore, even with Putin restarting the (not so) cold war....
After a world war the surviving world will most likely drop back into anarchy. It depends on how much china is affected - a possible outcome is they dominate the world. There won’t be any adults left.
Why have allergic diseases exploded in the richer parts of the world during the last few decades? And why do babies put everything in their mouths? Could it be that nature has given babies an instinct to put things in their mouths in order to train their immune systems? When people get higher standards of living and fewer children, one of the things they are suddenly able to do is to keep their babies from putting outdoor dirt in their mouths.
I wrote a blog post about it
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/outdoor-germs-and-allergies
In summary:
* Allergies have exploded in the rich part of the world. About 20-45 percent of young people have some kind of asthma, allergy or atopic eczema.
Within the rich world, urban children have more allergic diseases than rural children. Older siblings seem to protect from allergic diseases. Children on farms are known to have especially low rates of allergic disease.
* A study compared children on Amish farms with children on Hutterite farms. Both the Amish and the Hutterites are anabaptists, but they live differently: The Amish live in single-family households and are selective with technology use. The Hutterites are agricultural socialists who live in collectives of up to 150 people with very large-scale, modern agricultural operations. The Amish had low rates of allergic disease. The Hutterites had normal rates, more than 30 percent of their children were allergic. Researchers analyzed indoor dust and concluded that the barn dirt escaped into Amish homes but not into Hutterite homes.
* Does this mean that only cows protect against allergic disease? A study comparing children in Denmark and urban and rural Greenland found that a lot fewer children had allergic diseases in rural Greenland. Despite the lack of cows, then.
* A study comparing Finnish and Russian Karelia found that rates of allergic disease were multiple times lower on the Russian side. Finns started to get allergic in the mid 20th century, but Russians did not.
* My conclusion from this data is that the common denominator for people who get little allergic disease is outdoor dirt. Third-world dirt, Amish dirt, Greenland dirt, Karelia dirt. Our immune systems do not seem to be very picky. A study from 2004 suggests that babies take everything they see in their mouths in order to train their immune systems for the inevitable.
* When people get better houses and fewer children, they are able to prevent their babies from ingesting outdoor dirt. That could be an explanation why people get more allergic diseases when they get richer, more urban and have fewer older siblings. I can't find any study of how parents behave in this respect, but anecdotal evidence suggests that many parents prevent their babies from eating outdoor dirt.
What do you think? Could allergic disease be prevented if parents allowed their babies to crawl outdoors and eat things from the ground?
Umair Irfan actually wrote about this precise question in Vox last Friday: https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/23404983/food-allergy-allergic-reaction-peanuts-egg-soy-wheat-shellfish-health
The hygiene hypothesis is part of it, but he also mentions the hypothesis that people avoiding feeding their kids potential allergens means that they're more likely to get exposed first through their skin than their digestive system, which seems to trigger allergies. He also mentions potential genetic factors, and a hypothetical role for vitamin D, but none of these things seems sufficient (even if all are part of the story).
The idea that eating allergens is good is very interesting. I wonder if the same thing goes with allergens that are not food, like pollens and dust mites. Then that could be a reason to let babies taste (almost) everything they like: When they crawl around and eat everything, they might get the allergens in their mouths and not only on their skin.
My wife has allergies: I have none (except to mold spores, but I find that a very reasonable allergy). Nobody in my family has any food allergies. I have always assumed it was a hygine hypothesis sort of thing: I grew up in the woods (literally, my nearest neighbor was two miles away and the next nearest was 15 miles) and spent a lot of time as a kid playing outside. That included eating wild berries (without washing them) and wild plants (who knows what has peed or pooped on them? As a 6 year old I didn't think about it).
So I let my kids eat wild plants that I know are edible, and I let the baby crawl around putting stuff in her mouth without worrying too much. I really only care if she's putting something in her mouth that might choke or electrocute her.
Multiple sclerosis seems to be almost entirely prevented by living in a third world country (after adjusting for difficulties in diagnosis). Nobody knows why, but yeah, hygiene hypothesis is the leading one.
MS has recently been strongly linked to contracting Epstein-Barr virus as a young adult rather than as a child. That would probably correlate reasonably well with that observation.
I heard a theory that the reason Caucasians are much more likely to get auto-immune diseases is because of the Black Plague. While we mostly remember the big one in the 14th century, the plague would come back to Europe every decade or so for a few hundred years. Then it just stopped: we didn't cure it or anything, it just stopped happening. One theory as to why is that it simply killed enough Europeans over that few hundred year period that the ones who were left had immune systems resistant enough to prevent it from going epidemic anymore. The theory goes on to say that this shifted Caucasian immune system sensitivity enough that those on the high edge of the bell curve ended up with all kinds of auto-immune diseases.
Its a fun theory, I have no idea whether it holds any water.
That is very interesting. The upside of finding the germs we lack could be huge.
Somewhat related - peanut allergies are extremely rare in Israel, and it's theorized that this is because Israeli children often eat Bamba, a peanut-flavored snack food that's popular in Israel but not that common elsewhere.
I have now read an article about it and it is really, really interesting. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02782-8 Basically, the article says that eating allergens protects babies against allergies but inhaling allergens seems to increase the risk instead.
I think that this strengthens the hypothesis that children's habit of eating everything they see protects them against allergies. If eating peanuts protects against peanut allergy, then maybe eating pollen could protect against pollen allergy?
That is very interesting. Bamba looks exactly like my favorite snack, peanut rings. They are rather expensive in Sweden so I almost never buy them, but now I will buy a packet for my 11 month old baby.
Feels like an obvious confounder would be that in populations with high allergy rates it wouldn't have become popular
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
I read that. So now I wonder whether allowing babies to eat the dirt they want to eat could be the best way to stop being over-hygienic.
"I read that. So now I wonder whether allowing babies to eat the dirt they want to eat could be the best way to stop being over-hygienic."
I spent a lot of time saying, "It's clean dirt/sand ..." while my child was growing up. His mother and I were a lot more relaxed about sand consumption at the local parks (though we did check for cat poop ...)
Maybe. People have argued that in the past people ate a lot more soil-based microorganisms and the loss of their contribution to our gut microbiome matters in all kinds of ways beyond a greater tendency to allergies, e.g.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6780873/
This has predictably led to a boom in entrepreneurs hawking soil-based probiotics.
Personally, I'm all for infacts eating a little dirt if they want to, and I made no effort to prevent my kids from doing it. But the larger effect might be the way modern (plant) food comes to us, with a much lower diversity of soil-based microorganisms clinging to it.
And there are always other entrants in the horserace when it comes to biology, e.g. here's an interesting new article that says the population that survived the Black Death tended to have increased activity of genes that promote auto-immune disease (and I would say allargies can be regarded as a very mild form of autoimmune disease, as they are also a case of immune system "hysteria" = overreaction).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05349-x
Yes, I think you are right that allergic diseases are only a small part of autoimmune problems people in the rich world get, probably due to lack of certain microorganisms. I chose to focus on allergic diseases just because they are so common and easy to compare between different areas.
I find the hypothesis that soil bacteria is necessary for the immune system interesting. The anecdotes I gathered led me to the conclusion that some kind of outdoor dirt protects people against allergic disease. Soil is... definitely a kind of outdoor dirt.
I have no evidence for this, but I wonder if it's a dysgenic effect from the low infant mortality in the modern world. I'm asthmatic and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived without modern inhalers.
The children of third-world immigrants to the rich world tend to develop allergic diseases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4139367/
If that is the case, it can't be that third-world people are better selected.
ok, that seems pretty debunked then.
It might still be still be caused genetically through mutational load, which would be less hereditary. I've read immune disorders aren't very heritable in general. Maybe the immigrant parents had siblings who died from allergies without first world medicine.
If I'm reading the study correctly immigrant children have more asthma than their parents but less than native first world children, which could fit that story.
Edit: actually thinking about it, that seems like it would require a pretty large fraction of third world infants to be dying from immune disorder, which I haven't heard is happening.
Have a look at Eastern Germany. In GDR time they had very low allergy rates, but after the unification they went up quickly and reached the same level as the west. Possible factors:
- In the GDR, many children went to daily childcare groups, whereas in the west, they stayed with their mother.
- In the GDR, many people used stoves instead of central heating, and insulation was worse.
- Carpeted floor was uncommon.
- No fast food.
- All children were vaccinated in the GDR against whatever, no questions.
- Nobody can have kiwi allergies, if there are no kiwis.
- Air pollution was terrible in the east, brown coal and industry, sulphur dioxide, you name it.
I have to wonder how reliable such figures are. Juking the stats is a pervasive problem in authoritarian societies.
As far as I know, it was mostly after unification that researchers started to notice the differences between East and West Germany. That is, researchers in the 90s observed that children born in the East were much less allergic.
There we have a number of clues to what does not cause allergic disease: Pollution, vaccines, smoke from indoor coal stoves.
But at what age did children start attending daycare in the GDR? If they started very early they might have got ample opportunities to eat outdoor dirt early in life.
In the old days they started very early, then it became later and later. In 1950 a child could be admitted at 6 weeks old, then 1972 18 weeks, 1976 20 weeks. Since 1976 a mother could take off a year after birth of the second child; since 1986 also for the first child. Thus, most children would be more than one year old.
Source: https://www.kita-fachtexte.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Publikationen//KiTaFT_Israel_DDR_2015.pdf page 11
And definitely they had ample opportunities to exchange their pathogens at very early age. Not sure about dirt-eating, though.
Thank you! That looks similar to Sweden. In the 1970s people could leave babies to childcare when they were only a few months old (source: my aunt who worked in a kindergarten in the 1970s). Now there is no public childcare provision for children under a year. They probably found out that providingchildcare for the youngest children is rather costly.
The only way of preventing babies from eating dirt is to always keep them indoors or supervising them in a very labor-intensive way. So if the DDR kindergartens ever let the babies out, they must have eaten many interesting things.
I thought it was conventional wisdom by now that the first world allergy epidemic is caused by excessive cleanliness. I'm pretty sure that parents wouldn't voluntarily subject children to dirt en masse nevertheless, too icky. A viable long-term solution would probably be something like a vaccine - convenient, safe, orderly.
Back in the '60s, my mother believed in 'clean dirt', i.e. it was good and natural for kids to play outside and get mucky. Perhaps in those days it was conventional wisdom too, and only went away for a time due to a certain 'hygiene mania'.
It is conventional wisdom that the allergy epidemic is caused by cleanliness. The question is which cleanliness is excessive and which cleanliness is appropriate. I think the data suggest that avoidance of outdoor dirt could be the specific culprit.
People might want to wait for germ drops to feed their babies. But for those who have babies now I think allowing that baby to eat grass and leaves could be a good idea. Especially as it will make the baby happier.
Amusingly, babies have a hard-wired protection from eating unknown herbs. They would happily put everything else in the mouth, but will eat only those greens that they observed their parents to consume.
I've come across this claim in some book (I wish I remembered which one), and the observation seems far from universal. Back before my kid had reached the stage of "all green things are poison," he would put or not put herbs in his mouth for reasons of his own. They typically were herbs I eat -- I don't regularly have other kinds around -- but if I eat, say, sage, at its least processed it's cut off the plant, rinsed, chopped, then stirred into a dish; the inference gap from that to "I will chew on this sage leaf" seems rather large.
Now, it's true that the 3-year-old (who is well into the "all green things are poison" stage) will sometimes try plants that he's just seen me eat (e.g. sorrel), but 3 is well past the age of putting everything into his mouth.
Ha ha, how great it would be if my babies ate the greens they observe me eating! My latest baby chewed on all leaves he found, so probably he was missing that wire.
In my experience, babies seldom actually eat the things they mouth. They just suck and chew on them (in order to get the juicy bacteria on the surface, I assume). If they actually swallow pieces of herbs they tend to vomit.
Hm, that's sad. The CDCs advices parents to cover bare soil with grass, mulch or woodchips. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/sources/soil.htm
In best case soil germs can travel to grass or mulch woodchips. Then the babies could maybe eat grass and mulch and woodchips and get their bacteria without that much lead.
That's terrible. I have never heard of it, so I guess it is much better in Europe.
I've never heard that either and I've lived in America all my life (eating wild and garden plants without a care). Then again, I have always lived out West and never in big industrial or post industrial cities. It might be more of an east coast thing.
It makes perfect sense but is probably unlikely (a zebra to the horse of increasing awareness of Chinese tech threatening US security interests). It's certainly worth reconsidering any donations you make to AI safety over the potential for things like this to happen just in case, but I personally already don't donate to that field.
Hello
Compare two health surveys. BRFSS calls people and asks them questions. NHANES goes in person and measures people, rather than trusting their claims about height and weight. Also it does blood tests. But it only visits a few zip codes. This is a serious problem because different zip codes are systematically different.
They don't do this for the same reason that pollsters don't use larger samples and poll more often on a consistent schedule in all the key races. Money. It always comes down to money. Many pollsters even advertise their cost efficiency to clients.
For door knocking specifically it is also logistically challenging in many other ways. But the main limitation on polling is money, money, money.
This, and limit the questions. Pollsters called me once, and I was into answering, but the session ran way too long.
Why can't pollsters say "whatever biases are inherent in our methods have produced an average error of D+2 in the past three elections, so we'll just subtract 2% from the Democrats' predicted vote share"?
Pollsters often do various changes to their methodology, each election is really quite different, many polls miss in a random direction by a random margin rather than a consistent one. There's a lot of reasons a simple modifier doesn't work. Although RCP decided to just do that this election. Although ironically they don't accept all the polls and they don't make any effort to make their error modifier consistent with what polls polled each cycle so they are bound to be quite wrong.
Note that 538 calculates house effects (pollster bias) on a *per pollster* basis rather than applying it to an average or a model. Deciding that YouGov has a D+1 house effect and adjusting their polls before throwing those into the ensemble is *very* different than claiming that the final number needs to be adjusted to compensate for a D+1 skew.
Every field contains a bespoke, incompletely worked out theory of PID controls. (proportional/integral/derivative; I'd compose a longer explanation but the substack comment box is hanging every three seconds, and reloading takes 40 seconds, loses the in-progress comment, and doesn't fix the hangs)
Thats a very interesting concept. George Soros says everything has three wave frequencies acting on it: short; medium; long. One needs only to track the waves
The most important part of any poll these days is the "likely voter" screen, which is a set of questions pollsters ask pollees that are meant to assess the likelihood that the latter will actually vote. Since about 4 in 10 registered voters don't actually vote (in an off-year election), and the distribution is quite definitely not random (generally those on the left are less likely to vote), this is a massive correction, and it can only be done by sampling a crapton more people than you need data points, and then applying the filter after you get the answers to your screening questions. That makes door-to-door canvassing even more expensive than it might at first seem -- because you don't even know on how many doors in a given district or neighborhood you need to knock until after you have knocked on enough to realiably predict the percentage of actual voters. And since you don't want to wait a week or two to gather your data, the only way to do this is to hire way more doorknockers than you think you'll need, deploying them all simultaneously, so you don't accidentally run short of usable data. (If you're doing it by phone, it's very cheap and easy to add an extra 1,000 calls to a particular Zip Code if you find you need it.) Very, very, expensive. Given that most consumers pay $0 for poll results, the ROI here is pretty rough.
Visiting a thousand random addresses spread across the country would be incredibly expensive compared to phoning up a thousand numbers with a possibly-automated poll.
And it still suffers from all sorts of biases in terms of who is home and who is willing to talk to a random stranger at their front door.
I assume your polling agency doesn't have 10,000 employees, so more than 90% of zip codes won't have an employee living in it. For these zip codes, you will have to add travel time at the beginning and end of the polling hours for your employee to go polling.
Once they are there, knocking on doors is a *lot* slower than dialing random numbers. When you dial a number, if there is no response in 45 seconds, you can instantly move on to the next one, and can easily try over 60 in an hour. When you knock on a door, you probably need to wait at least 45 seconds to see if someone answers, you might need to knock again after 30 seconds, and once you decide no one is coming, you will have to take some amount of time to get to the next door. (Possibly 5 seconds if you're in an apartment building - ignoring how you got inside and onto the residential floor - but more like 30 to 60 seconds in a suburban subdivision, or several minutes in a rural area.
I'm not convinced that you're likely to get a response faster by knocking on doors than by calling. I think a few decades ago it used to be common for people to answer random door knocks, but these days people screen their knocks even more than their calls, even assuming they are home at the time someone knocks.
During early voting periods, and on election days, there are agencies that do "exit polls", where they wait outside polling places and survey people there. That eliminates all the time knocking, waiting, and figuring out how to get into apartment buildings, but it still has the problem of representativity. They tend to aim for a bunch of precincts that are known to have diverse demographics, and then they wait for actual election results to come in so that they know how much to weight each of these precincts, and then they use that to estimate the results they got on the questions other than the demographic and actual vote ones. Because it is so much more difficult, there is basically just one consortium that does exit polling, and they don't do it in every state.
Great speech!
Here is a slightly longer version:
https://youtu.be/Tf0gb0sQI40 (5:40)
This also has interesting implications for Jason Maguire's comment at the start of the thread...
Yeah, African democracies and the AU have been really good on this sort of thing. I'm not sure if we'll ever admit it but their take on how sovereignty and peace works in the 21st century is probably the correct one.
Yes, just ignore the fact that there have been countless wars in Africa over the past few decades, many of which with obvious ethnic influences. This speech is practically propagandistic. What he says does not describe postcolonial Africa, and to the extent things have gotten more peaceful over time, it is precisely because the ethnic strife played out already in a way that shaped many of these countries. It certainly wasn't any nonsense about Africans all coming together as brothers and deciding that peace is the way forward.
You keep claiming extensive knowledge of Africa and you keep on saying pretty objectively wrong things. In particular this speech, which I agree is a bit simplistic compared to the more thorough policy documents, is trying to explain not the conflicts that happened in the aftermath of European withdrawal (or during European colonization) but how Africa's become increasingly peaceful and internationally cooperative over the past few decades.
Yes, they've done a much worse job of it than Europe has, and you think we ought to praise them as our moral superiors.
Even this false reading of history is incompatible with what he said .
Good speech.
Only 2:39 minutes, and I don't know how well Kenya has lived by the ideas, but it's a fine example on focusing on how people live with each other rather than assuming that ethnicity is more important.
First time I've literally applauded a video.
I wonder if you graduated college, care to share?
Sure I have been vaccinated for a wide variety of things, including COVID a couple times (4?). Vaccines are generally pretty amazing and a huge benefit to global health.
I got the MMR when I was a kid, is that what you mean?
If this is more Covid scares and Ivermectin Guy-style hectoring, not interested in playing.
EDIT: Ai Eru melme, this *is* Ivermectin Guy Part Deux: our friend here reads a Substack newsletter put out by FLACC which is founded/headed by one Pierre Kory who is another "ivermectin is a wonder cure, I am A Doctor so you can believe me" type:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory
He/she/they also enjoy the productions of one Geert Vanden Bossche, who "believes the Covid vaccines will doom humanity":
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/doomsday-prophecy-dr-geert-vanden-bossche
So I think we know what our shepherd here is hinting at.
If you are going to use scare quotes around a standard term, I suggest being more specific about what distinction you are trying to make.
Then how do you explain the decline in infectious diseases, and the outright elimination of smallpox? Or how whenever a group of people choose not to be vaccinated against something an outbreak of that thing will most often follow?
sure, here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/nyregion/polio-new-york-eradication.html
anyway, how do you know that this so called “indoor plumbing” link isn’t a big plumbing psy-op designed to convince you to buy pipes you don’t actually need?
Against what? I'm vaccinated against many things and not vaccinated against some others (e.g. smallpox).
Smallpox is transmitted by air. Maybe you're thinking of cholera?
Mate, if we're talking the Brits and the conquest of water-borne disease, the famous story there is Dr John Snow and the Broad Street pump, and that was about cholera:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak
Can you offer this data from the British Army which you say you have in relation to smallpox, rather than just empty claims of "I know better"?
https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/transmission/index.html
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/smallpox
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/smallpox/symptoms-causes/syc-20353027
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/10855-smallpox
You've clearly fallen for the global Jewish conspiracy of fake evidence that, um, smallpox is transmissible aerially
If you've ever caught a cold you've done half of that experiment. The other half is to identify what was transmitted to you, and that's been done too.
Viruses cannot use energy, right; that's why it might take thousand viral particles so one can successfully enter cell. But then it can make millions of copies of itself.
honestly, it is amazing to see how brainwahsed some poeple are. I cannot believe you actually believe in the existance of cells.
Can you show me a clever repeatable controlled experiment that proves these socalled “cells” exist? And don’t bring up “we can look at cells through microscopes” because 1. how do we know the freemasons aren’t hacking our microscopes and 2. if you “did” believe that things seen through a microscope were real, then you would have to admit that viruses were also real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transduction_(genetics)
Done routinely on every biotech undergrad course, just enroll in your local university.
The existence of an entire industry of woodworking - which you can easily join, if you so choose - should convince you about the existence and usefulness of hammers and saws.
Now replace woodworking with sociology studies or philosophy or professional sport, does this argument hold? One can use hammer or saw without joining any industry.
> show me a link to the repeatale experiment which proves that inanimate "virus" particles
You're totally right that if a person believes this, they do so on trust. But this is true of many, many things.
For example, can you show me a repeatable experiment that demonstrates there is a consistent material reality outside my head that follows mathematical rules indepdent of my state of mind?
How does that convince me i'm not in a really bad dream?
Are you saying dreams don't feature violent philosophical interrogations?
Huh, 'Henry Ford started the Second World War' is not something I'd previously heard.
And having heard it, I will now forget it as speedily as possible.
If you're going to share your tinfoil hat pals' conspiracy theories on here, at least make them interesting? David Icke may have been crazy/a grifter, but the Lizard People are at least fun to contemplate.
Oh bébé, where did the bad man hurt you? Can you show me on the doll?
And did the bad man touch you anywhere else? Did he make you touch him?
Hey "le_berger_des_photons," I have a question for you that none of us is bright enough to answer :
If you had to choose between administering fake vaccines for the International Jewish conspiracy for 20 years while being fellated by Anthony Fauci, in exchange for the freedom to take multiple witless shits online afterwards for the rest of your life
OR
mortgaging your testicles to Elie Wiesel while forgetting not to drink from the place where the neighbor relieves his bowels (but you do get a smallpox shot to protect you) in exchange for lessons from Elie in how to be a witty and intimidating troll instead of one who sounds like a cokehead with a case of undergraduate arrogance . . .
which would you pick?
Please do us a favor: if you want to deny the Shoah, start your post with that instead of your theories of how covid is basically WW3. That way, we can update our probability estimate of you having something interesting to say and skip your post.
Having one of the most radical forms of historical skepticism is pretty interesting if nothing else.
On the other hand when he start with "COVID is basically world war 3 you can skip his post knowing there will be some holocaust denial in it
9 out of 10 people in my grand-mother extended family died in the Shoah so your fantasy really falls on deaf ears with me.
Even if any of that was true (we dropped a million tons of bombs on German cities, but you expect me to believe that hitting a few specific factories would have shortened the war by years?), I don't see how it denies the fact that the Germans were putting people into camps and killing them en masse.
And don't try to tell me that the Germans didn't put people into camps. I grew up literally down the street from a man who survived a concentration camp.
> Calls people brainwashed
> Uncritically regurgitates bog-standard talking points
👍
Hard to call something a "bog standard talking point" when its literally illegal in several countries.
In fairness to (((me))), those interest rates were too good to pass up
See, this is where you have an unfair advantage in being the possessor of testicles which can be mortgaged at great interest rates!
Those of us unendowed by nature with such appendages just can't benefit from these kinds of deals 😞
I think one difference is the increased privacy.
Also, Scott is putting most of his posts (and all of his important posts) out in the open, and his subscribers basically pay him so he can continue to do that, even though their marginal utility of getting access to a few extra posts and the hidden open threads is rather small in the first place.
As for the quality of the comments, I like to think that if people are wrong (IMHO) within the larger LW/SSC/ACX community, they are at least wrong in new and interesting ways. Not like your other comment, to mention an extreme example.
Of all the things that keep me awake at night, the ethnicity of the Saudi royal family is not one of them.
Can't you paint a wall and watch it dry, instead, if you're that hard-up for something to occupy your mind?
In the correct circumstances, it can be surprisingly soothing. A form of meditation.
https://www.goodtherapy.org/find-therapist.html
This is a fascinating justification for why other people should pay for you to get something for free.
I think that with open threads the question here would be more about who can write than who can read. I am not a subscriber myself, but I guess that quality of discussion among people ready to pay for Scott's work might be higher. So, unless Substack has a way to show comments to everyone while allowing only subscribers to comment, those commenters are better off in the sense of having a "walled garden" where they and only they can chat.
Another person who is better off is Scott: he has promised benefits for subscription (and those benefits have nudged some people into subscribing). If he unilaterally revokes some of the said said benefits, it damages his reputation for not upholding his part of the bargain. And damaging reputation is bad, as it is a valuable asset. Also, after losing some of the benefits some people might decide to unsubscribe, and Scott gains less money, so this is another way he is better off with us (unsubscribed people) not reading some of the posts.
"a way to show comments to everyone while allowing only subscribers to comment"
Oh no, that would only drive away people! There are several Substacks where it's "only subscribers can comment here" and I'm "good night, good luck and goodbye" because I am not taking out a subscription merely to be able to comment. I'm interested in reading your stuff, but not *that* interested.
And I think there are likely to be many people who would be interested enough to comment, but not if they have to pay for the privilege. And we might lose out on good, new, voices that way.
I don't mind sites where only subscribers can comment. But when I read the comments on such sites (assuming I can) they seem a bit siloed on average.
>a way to show comments to everyone while allowing only subscribers to comment
This is doable, yes. I don't really agree with the premise, though - limited sample size, but among the Substacks I've perused which do use this feature, the discussion is not noticeably better. Actually, it tends to be honestly quite bad! (I'm always amazed that some people derive so much utility from social-media-barrel-bottom-quality commenting that they're willing to pay for such privilege...Twitter etc. are free!)
And many blogs outside of Substack also disallow or disincentivize anonymous comments by default too, with not-particularly-good results. One could also compare discussions between similar posts which are locked vs. unlocked, although I suppose that's a selection effect...savvy blog authors tend to paywall posts that are particularly likely to be controversial or misinterpreted, so of course those discussions tend to get a bit spicy.
For ACX specifically: this is a fairly costly subscription, as far as Substack pricing goes, and the benefits are pretty meagre. Fallacy of EMT I guess, but it's hard for me to understand why someone would weight access to HOTs highly vs. more intangible values like "support favourite blogger/affective polarization (NYT Delenda Est)". Scott's also not someone I'm particularly worried about being in rough financial shape from a hypothetical small subscriber decline, either, not that it wouldn't make me sad. It's the bloggers who subsist entirely off Substack income who I worry about a lot more - they have to be a lot more careful around "customer acquisiton and retention".
As far as I can tell, the discussion in the hidden threads isn't obviously better.
I appreciate the slight increase of privacy in the hidden threads, so I would rather not have them go away.
I'd agree with your statement. In fact, for a community of soi-disant rationalists, we seem to indulge in poor reasoning, unfounded conjectures, and opinions as if we were ordinary non-rational people. Who'd have thunk it? ;-)
I'm not singling you out Nancy. In fact, I'd say you were one of the more thoughtful community members.
Could you be more specific about the errors in reasoning?
Sorry to dash your hopes, at least if you trust me..
So other people should pay for your increase in utility, with the goal of general utility maximization?
I was striving hard to be polite, but your second paragraph there put the tin lid on it.
"If I had to contribute to every poster, I would die of starvation."
A consummation devoutly to be wished?
Naw, I don't think you should be a paying subscriber for all that you read. I just don't think you should act like other people are obligated to pay so you can get content for free. You don't have to create a story where you're the rightful inheritor of other people's investments. You could instead try being grateful.
I didn't like your sexually charged insult earlier. If that's your normal style, I think trebuchet is right.