The SBA dollar was the same size as the successful Canadian loonie. But they should have made it more distinguishable by making the color and edge different from the quarter the way Canada did.
My recollection is that early images showed the SBA dollar was planned to be polygonal. If so, I wonder why they dropped it for the quarter-like milled edge. (Itself a vestgial artifact of precious metal coins, where it was a guard against clipping.)
More recently, they made gold-colored dollar coins with smooth edges. But those didn't catch on either. The key to the loonie's success was that Canada got rid of paper dollars.
Just because I tend to miss "the the" in your writings doesn't mean I miss it in other people's writings. Have you considered controlling for the writer in your duplication tests?
A couple years back, I was having a discussion in a travel forum about moving overseas, and to my surprise an Italian joined the conversation and made the argument that immigrating from one highly developed country to another on a whim is morally wrong. He argued that refugees coming to Europe from war-torn regions is fine when their homelands are inhospitable, but if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way, almost blind to/removed from the culture and nation that inhabits it.
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you'd say, "If it were America of 20 years ago I would agree, but with the way things are going lately..." - you get the idea. Anyway, it kind of shocked me and it's an idea I still haven't reconciled. Like lots of Americans, now and then I get those thoughts of various European countries I'd love to live in, and many of us actually do make that move. Still, when I think over my criteria for -what- country I'd like to live in, I run out of material pretty quickly. Why France? "Well, they have amazing food, the best creamy cheeses, killer wine, great labor laws, the country is beautiful...". Why Netherlands? "Great infrastructure, high HDI, they all speak English...". Across thousands of miles of ocean, you too can enjoy a life that's 10-15% better than life at home. Something about it begins to feel trivial. Now - this is not some rebuke against those who wish to immigrate. I'm still meditating on my true feelings over this, because perhaps he had a point.
The argument seems to assume that immigration is basically free (for all parties involved) and indistinguishable with respect to the immigrant (meaning the host country can't distinguish between an American and someone from a war-torn country).
If we grant that, then yes, your Italian has a very good point. People who have no country or a very broken country should be prioritized over people who already have tolerable countries. I will note that this argument is ignored a lot by all people all the time, in matters both related to immigration and not. (for example, this argument would seem to imply that streets and other public spaces should be prioritized to homeless people, since they don't have any homes unlike the many people who have homes and still go to fill those spaces). But, it's still a basically good argument that should be followed if its premises hold.
The trouble is, its premise is huge. Immigration is not free, the African from a war-torn country is already 80%\90% will not succeed. The 10%\20% who will succeed can be comfortably hosted *in addition to* the Americans who want to live in Italy. Even then, the state governing Italy will probably huff and puff and make a big noise about "those damn poor africans degrading our infrastructure", and while this is immoral, it has *some* elements of truth and reasonableness and - regardless of anything - will result in the country being significantly more tolerant of Americans than Africans. So the host country itself wants some people and not others, and if wanted people refrain from immigration then this will not increase the likelihood of unwanted people.
I also disagree with :
>if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way
This seems to play a lot on the trope of the "Businessman American" who does everything for money and by the books. I see absolutely no reason why Americans, a pool of 300+ million people, should be subjected to this stereotype. I see no reason why some Americans can't learn the native language and be emotionally and passionately involved in the country and culture they immigrated to. Because this is how humans work usually, they get attached to the land that welcomes them. (even more so if a previous land exiled or repulsed them)
Meanwhile, I can equally well say that :
>if say an African from a war-torn country were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their survival-chance per location in a kind of detached analytic way
And it would be no more false than the original claim. If this claim sounds racist or unacceptable to someone but the original doesn't, then this is an indication that there are serious problems with this someone's racism intutions, they are biased against a huge pool of humanity. To me, they are both racist and unacceptable, at least without overwhelmingly strong evidence.
Immigration is a hard moral problem, and the more general problem of "Being somewhat rich or at least well-off in a world where people can't find food or basic shelter" is even harder and depressing, and it torments me every waking hour to think of all the things I have but others don't for no reason but raw brute chance. But the way your Italian approached this doesn't impress me in the slightest, it's a very shallow and cherry-picked viewpoint that demeans an entire continent-worth of people while elevating another continent-worth of people to the status of cultural angels who will never make troubles or have integration difficulties with the host country that accepts them.
I think your vision is getting clouded by the inclusion of nationality here. Any stereotype about Americans is irrelevant here - if we accept the Italian's viewpoint, Europeans would be more culpable anyway since there's 3x more Europeans in America than the other way around. Essentially it's a screed against superficial migration, be it economic or cultural. Superficial economic migration is motivated by a desire to gain a slight edge on your income, in such a way that it will not critically affect your quality of life (e.g. only boost your power to consume or something). Superficial cultural migration is motivated by a desire to become a member of another country's culture without real ties to it. By contrast, the "authentic" forms of migration would be (a) leaving your country because it's impossible to maintain a basic livelihood, or (b) leaving because you have a genuine connection (e.g. your mother is a native and you want to experience it). There is no assumption here that the "authentic" migrants would integrate better, of course, and there is also no judgment passed on the quality of people from any country that would produce "shallow" migrants. The point is that unnecessary or trivial migration itself is a shallow activity, and (implicitly) any migration with no real purpose behind it is vain. Anyway, I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's still interesting. No one ever brings it up.
I don't see why that argument wouldn't apply equally to moving between cities in the same state.
I'm in favor of people moving around a lot; the more places you go, the more cultures you run into, the more your culture rubs off on them and theirs on you. If you want to avoid cultural blindness, you need people travelling abroad and spreading the cultures, otherwise people are stuck with the local stereotypes as their only reference.
Is it okay to store physical US fiat coins inside of my physical leather wallet*?
I got into an argument over this with my dad earlier this week. My dad argued that the coins could damage the surface of the wallet since the coins have sharp edges. However, I argued that the wallet is probably strong enough, and that storing my coins elsewhere would make it much harder for me to find them/mark them as mine. After looking this matter up on my dad's command (and filtering out the content relating to the other kind of coins and wallets), the only relevant result I found was a guide for coin collectors (https://www.preservationequipment.com/Blog/Blog-Posts/How-to-store-coins-full-guide ) which suggested that whatever I put my coins into should be acid-free.
*I deliberately added the extra words to make it clear that I am not discussing the other type of coins and wallets.
American custom, as I understand it, is to keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket. When you get home, put the change in some kind of container on your dresser; periodically convert this to paper money or deposit it at the bank.
> keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket
Interesting; I might try this. However, I am in the habit of showering after I come home and so I tend to throw my clothes into the laundry basket oblivious to their contents (they usually don’t have any). I might have lost money this way.
Huh? I don't even understand the question. Where *else* would you possibly store the coins? There should be a part of the wallet that is designed to contain coins, and if something is designed to contain coins, I would assume that it is in general safe to store coins there.
Before reading the rest of your comment I honestly thought that the question was a parody on questions about cryptocurrencies, or something like that.
Perhaps it is a cultural difference and the American wallets do not have a part to store their sharp-edged dollar-shurikens? Or do the kids these days only use credit cards and cryptos, and the coin is something they only see at a museum? I feel quite stupid now, because I must be missing something obvious.
Checked my wallet: it currently contains 30 coins with total value €11.42, plus a few banknotes, an id card, debit card, medical insurance card, and driving license. It is perhaps bigger than it would need to be, but it's winter and I have large pockets on my coat, so it's okay.
My current wallet doesn't have a place to store coins. You can put them in with the bills, but they tend to fall out. I haven't looked closely my friends' wallets, but I don't think any of them had coin pockets either.
It’s at least partially a cultural thing. Like the game the rest of world calls football and the metric system, for some reason dollar coins never gained traction in the US. No looneys or twonies for us, thank you.
I’m not sure exactly why.
For years I’ve been in the habit of carrying coins loose in my pocket till I get home when I put them in a can on my dresser. When the can gets full I bring it to the coin counter at a bank and exchange it for folding money.
The story I've heard (but haven't seen an international survey to confirm) is that countries with successful higher value coins discontinued the equivalent bills, while we never did the same with the $1 bill when initiating the Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea, or Presidential dollar coins.
Since inertia and established infrastructure favored the bills (e.g., more vending machines take bills than dollar coins, and there was no feedback mechanism to speed retrofitting) bills remained standard and the coins were relegated to curiosities.
(We do seem to have unusual inertia re currency, given our loyalty to minting pennies as their value dwindles into nothingness.)
Anecdotally, the one place dollar coins reliably showed up was as change at Post Office vending machines, I assume due to some mandate.
I suspect another factor is that a transition from bills to coins for the major currency unit (dollar or similar) faces a lot less pushback if it happens when existing coins have enough purchasing power that people are still in the habit of carrying around a significant number of coins rather than just dumping them on the dresser at the end of the day. This makes a big difference because without this, introducing a coin big enough to be worth carrying around routinely would cause an annoying inconvenience at first and require a change of cash-carrying habits to accommodate.
The US has long since missed this window, although a new window might be coming up as inflation erodes the value of a dollar to the point where the coin would just get dumped on the dresser anyway and the bill would be increasingly seen as annoying wallet-clutter. And as more and more people abandon cash entirely in favor of cards and direct electronic payments.
The Susan B Anthony dollar was early enough that it should have been able to hit the first window, but it was a particularly bad design, being too similar in size and appearance to a quarter. It would likely have been better accepted had it been either a bit bigger like the contemporary Kennedy half dollar (the slightly earlier Eisenhower dollar had failed to circulate because it was too big, and because it was desirable as a minor collectable), or at least a different color like modern dollar coins.
A wallet can't hold more than a trivial number of coins anyway, and US coins have a maximum value of 25 cents, meaning that you're making your wallet uncomfortably bulgy to hold an extra few bucks at the most.
I remember that Hamilton (the musical) got some interest in the SSC comment field back in the days. So if you have missed it, let me tell you about "Scamilton". A Texas church put up their own Hamilton production. It's surprisingly ambitious, unauthorized and totally illegal. The cast is not-great, they cut out some songs (for brevity I assume), censor all the bad words and add a new little segment about Hamilton finding Jesus. And the post-show sermon offers help to those struggling with homosexuality. Ergo, it's a glorious trainwreck. Plenty of youtubers have been on it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GLBEBCwqp4
Wow! These things belong to the genre "so bad that it is actually quite fascinating to watch", although I suspect that watching the entire plays would get boring again... unless you watched them while stoned.
They can't be made anywhere near as small or as fast as electronic transistors, they leak, they have very little in the way of compensating advantages and there are few if any applications where those dubious advantages would make them the preferred option. If there are a few, it's not enough to pay for the research, development, and manufacturing base to support them.
They're nifty and clever and cool, yes, but so were Zeppelins.
Fine-Grained feedback on online comments and its challenges.
At some point in internet history, probably beginning with Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), some genius figured out the idea of self-curating online communities. That is, give every user the ability to "vote" for a comment, post, reply,etc..., and by the magic of "Wisdom of the Crowd" and other such dynamics you can obtain useful signals about the quality of those things. Basically, make the entire userbase an auxiliary network of moderators\curators operating in parallel without communication.
This is a good idea in the abstract, any idea that treats humans as dumb cells\units\components in a big network that is much smarter than the sum of its constituent humans has an intuitive appeal to me, I see it as a good approximation of reality and it has pleasing parallels to computer science and biology that I love.
The idea is sometimes criticized, however, as too crude. To take the 2 online communities with upvote-downvote systems I'm most familiar with, Reddit and HackerNews, a heavily downvoted comment can mean that the content of the comment is any of lots of things. Some are, ranked from most-deserving of downvoting to least-deserving according to my subjective view, :
1- Spam and obvious off-topic nonsense ("Come chat with hot single girls at scam.sexxxx.totally.not.a.scam", or "GO TRUMP 2024" in a non-politics thread)
2- Trolling (saying something while meaning something entirely different or opposite or not meaning anything at all, for the sole purpose of deceiving and upsetting people) and obvious bad-faith takes
3- Incorrect claims presented as facts
4- Mainstream opinions or facts phrased aggresively and\or personal insults
5- Controversial opinions (whether in general or just relative to the subreddit\thread it's posted in)
6- Comments that indicate the commenter hasn't read the article\video\etc posted
7- Jokes (on reddit, the overused ones, on HackerNews, nearly all)
And possibly more. It's obviously suboptimal to imply that all those things are the same and treat them uniformly, but that's exactly what upvote/downvote does. Suggestions to reform the system can be classified into 2 categories :
A- [Often Suggested] Fine-Grain the feedback. Instead of a generic yes/no counter, or even 2 yes/no counters (as in old youtube), make the feedback much more varied and high-dimensional. A button for spam, a button for overused jokes, etc... Optionally offer various filtering algorithms and other user-modifiable configuration that punish those things differently or not at all. Optionally offer buttons for positive things as well as negative things ("funny", "factual", ....). Basically, move the simplistic up/down mentality to a rich tag system with all its associated paraphernalia.
B. [Original To Me, as far as I know] Fine-Grain the *applicability* of the feedback. Instead of upvoting or downvoting **a comment**, you should really only upvote or downvote **a selection of text inside the comment**. In an ordinary politics thread, "GO TRUMP 2024" shouldn't really be a punishable thing to say (or, in an A-system, should only be tagged with the "Obnoxiously Capitalized" or "Trump Fanboyism" tag). It's probably the "TRUMP WON 2020 !!!" part before it that should be downvoted (or tagged "Non-Factual" in an A-System, along with the obligatory reference to the legal machinery that rejected the claim). This also opens the door to "vote-restoring edits" (or tag-revoking edits in the A-system generalization) : If you delete the non-factual trump claim, all the downvotes due to that claim instantly disappears, or at least decrease in effect. If feedback is tied to the content of the comment, then it makes sense that deleting content invalidates or dilutes the feedback.
Systems A and B are orthogonal as far as I can see, and they are very customizable and full of degrees of freedom. You can mix and match tons of unique cocktails from them as basic ingredients. They potentially offer massive improvments in the quality of signals on online comments.
The difficulties facing those systems, however, are legion:
1- [Applies to A and B] People won't use them correctly, Anti-Trump users will see "TRUMP 2024" and mash all the negative buttons without thinking, people will see spam and downvote as many selection of text as humanly possible thinking that will make it disappear faster. (and probably they would be right if there is a "master" ranking algorithm that averages all the downvotes\tags over a single comment, but they are still corrupting the signal)
2- [Applies to A and B] It's exhausting to use them correctly. This is a subtly different point from (1), but it reinforces its effect. It's not fair to ask people to consider all 5-10-20 tag we came up with (system A), or all possible selections of text in a comment (system B), or every possible combinations of both (hybrid). People will just focus on the most popular 3 or 4 tags, and the most eye-catching selection of text in a comment, and ignore all the rest, making it useless or worse. Even if different people focus on different things, this differential "sparse" feedback feels wrong somehow, like if 50% of people only ever press on "unfunny" when applicable and 50% of people only ever press on "non-factual" then some non-factual comments won't be labeled as such and some non-funny comments won't be labeled as such and..., so heckin complex. And what if the percentages of people who care about each tag is different as well ?
3- [Applies To B] What is the granularity of "claims" ? I handwaved this away with "Selections of Text" but this is clearly nonsense, it will allow some mad anti-trump users with too much free time to downvote "T", "TR","TRU","TRUM","TRUMP","TRUMP W",etc... in a "TRUMP WON 2020" comment. The issue comes back in the "revoking" feature too : if the pro-trump user deleted "TRUMP WON 2020" and instead wrote "THE DONALD TRIUMPHED IN TWENTY-TWENTY", should that revoke or decrease the effect of the downvotes or "non-factual" tags ? should it notify the users who downvoted to consider un-downvoting instead of doing it automatically ? (and how many would care and actually go back and read again? and is that fair for them even if they do?) how similar should two snippets of text be to be considered the same (and what if the original claim was at the top of the comment but the new claim is now at the bottom instead?) how.... oh holy heck this looks like it's AGI-complete.
1,2 and 3 are complete deal breakers that significantly nullify the possible benefits of the 2 systems or any hybrid of them, and - worse - they all look like extremly gnarly "people's problems" that require Politics-Heavy or AGI-complete machinery to solve.
My intuition is this would be too burdensome. Facebook did expand to some amount of emojis beyond the thumbs up and down. I notice Discord and Google Chat allow for this too. Yelp has a wider selection of tags. Perhaps with Yelp and Facebook they serve some sort of algorithmic sorting function. You might start by adding one or two symbols at a time ('M' for Misleading, 'laugh emoji' for Funny) and build up to your complex vocabulary of tags over time. Starting with a complex menu is a recipe for choice paralysis.
Set up an economy instead, so you don't have to program all the subtlety of human judgment. Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like. So people who make comments readers value, for any and all reasons, complex or subtle, will earn more tokens, which they can then use to post additional comments.
The reason to insist on readers needing to pay their own tokens to reward a comment they like is to avoid the piling on, either positively or negatively, that happens when there is no cost to the reader to upvote or downvote. If you allow readers to award a varying number of their own tokens, people who feel really strongly can have more influence (at a higher cost, of course), which means a comment that affects a few people strongly can "sell" for as much as a comment that affects a lot more people but kind of meh. Writers can choose to specialize in high-volume low-innovation but popular comments, or in low-volume high-innovation comments that strongly appeal to a smaller, more discerning crowd -- be either Hyundai or Bentley.
You could also vary the price for posting a comment, make it so that unusually long comments, or comments that contain swear words, or which have/dont have assorted keywords matched up to the topic subject cost more/less.
You could also avoid free-riding by allowing writers, if they are sufficiently confident, to charge a certain price for seeing their comment at all -- meaning, the reader has to pay a certain price to even see the comment in the first place. You better have an awesome reputation as a writer to try this, but some people could pull it off no doubt.
Over time, some writers will become "rich" through making comments that are sell well, and others will become "poor" through making Edsel comments. Then we can set up a taxing authority that will redistribute wealth on the basis of assorted social justice nostrums, leading to class warfare, bitter recriminations, revolution, all the rich tapestery of human society.
I did not suggest tokens had any meaning or life outside of a given account, meaning if Carl Pham is impoverished in tokens that have meening in the ACTX ecosystem I didn't suggest any method by which ol' Carl could be given tokens by his cousin Enoch Root who has tons.
But I'm curious: let's say that's possible by some mechanism, tokens can be freely traded back and forth between writers. How does this incentivize the creation of multiple "writer personalities?" And if people created multiple personalities under this economy, would that be bad?
"Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like"
This requires an account to have tokens before it posts, which means new accounts are going to have to start with some, or possibly accumulate them over time. So people will make several accounts to generate extra tokens to fund their posts so they don't have to worry about running out.
I am curious of how many physicists are present in the rationalist movement (compared to other studies)?
I ask because when I was an high schooler i was attracted to transhumanism and rationalism and i assumed that studying physics i would have found more people interested in it. However, some years later, i know noone in my institute that knows what rationalism, effective altruism or ssc are.
(Personally, studying physics made me grow skeptic of some of the "accepted wisdom" (coff drexler coff) so maybe this has some selection effect)
Here is a rough answer. Take the petition asking the NYT not to doxx Scott Alexander (https://www.dontdoxscottalexander.com/signatures). Look at the full list of signatures. Ctrl+F+Physics. 93 out of 7500 signatories are physicists. Of course, some (many) may simply be fans of Scott's writing without considering themselves `rationalists' (and there may be others who do consider themselves rationalists but were too chicken to sign the petition).
Few physicists I know really give a rat's ass about the structure of human society beyond some vague wish that it not be too intrusive or too shocking to inhabit, and even fewer are strongly interested in subtle issues of the philosophy of justice and equity -- if you loved that stuff, you'd go into the liberal arts instead and revel in it.
That includes me. If I feel like I should spend part of my dough helping others, I might be willing to spend 20 minutes listening to an argument about why I should give it to Charity A versus NGO B, but not much more. And chances are I'll just use it to help out a person I already know anyway. So subtle questions about how to best distribute charitable giving are not very interesting to me, certainly not enough to participate in an organized movement.
None of the other formal paraphernalia of the movement seem that interesting, either. As an empiricist I find most attempts at predicting Black Swan (low probablity high impact) events, like AIs becoming intelligent and evil, to be functionally sterile -- I just don't believe the chances of the predictions being accurate are sufficiently greater than zero to be worth any action in particular, and even the discussion seems a bit angels on the head of a pinnish. I'm also not that interested in promoting broad "rational" public discourse, on account of (1) people aren't really like that, so it's ultimately futile, and (2) "rational" discourse can easily fall into a Wikipedia style where mindless rules ("a citation, however lame or unrelated, always improves the argument") substitute for quality of logic, and (3) its not obvious that rational beats emotional all the time anyway. A lot of what we need to communicate with each other as human beans is actually emotional, or gets across better if colored that way, so I'm dubious of the broad social value of making communication more colorless and suffused with syllogisms.
The only reason I would interact with rationalism movement folks is because, on the whole, they tend to be smarter, with a greater variety of experience, express themselves better, and are more tolerant of intellectual diversity -- all of which means they're more interesting to talk to. As a parallel, I find it interesting to talk to seriously religious people, even if I don't share their faith, because they have thought more deeply about subtle existential issues than people who have no religion (other than standard-issue default-mode weak hedonism-materialism-sentimentality).
I don't have an answer, but I would warn against taking a probe of this blog as a general indicator of rationalism or EA, I expect it's much more diverse owing to the larger variety of topics.
Does pregnancy mess with your immune system in any direction? I have a kid and am pregnant with the second, and my subjective impression is: I was healthy before the kid (including through first pregnancy); I caught a lot of whatever the kid caught as he started going to daycare, including the wave of catch-up infections as people came out of COVID quarantines; I seem to have dodged the last two infections that the kid brought home from school. As an isolated observation, it could have a number of causes, including random luck or the kid recently bringing home kids' diseases that don't jump to adults as much. Or it could be pregnancy ramping up the immune system (if that's true, I'd expect a lot of women to complain of allergies during pregnancy). Or it could be lifestyle choices -- I might be sleeping more, and I'm dutifully taking multivitamins which I normally don't do -- and if that's what's going on, I'd like to know so that I can keep doing it! Statistics probably can't help me disentangle "luck" vs. "I normally run a mild vitamin deficiency," but it might be able to weigh in on whether pregnant women have better immune systems?
The coolest thing that I found with my second was how different they turned out to be from the first. Not necessarily in looks, but in temperament, interests and behaviour.
"A long time ago in the 50s it was suggested that maybe in pregnancy a woman's immune system would be weakened to help her to tolerate the fetus...but actually we now know that really the immune system doesn't get suppressed during pregnancy but it does get changed in some ways. So some people with certain kinds of autoimmune diseases that are really dependent on antibodies will find that their diseases get worse during pregnancy, so you're getting a stronger antibody response. But people who have autoimmune diseases that rely on things more like T-cells, might find that their disease gets better during pregnancy. And similarly we see that pregnant women are more susceptible to some infectious diseases and for some infectious diseases it makes no difference. And for some infectious diseases, actually they seem to do a little bit better."
I found this interesting treatise about magical fantasy settings -> http://jbr.me.uk/mytho.html (especially parts 5-6), describing how a world that was created ex novo -- without needing to arise from natural/evolutionary processes, or to imitate one -- might look; extremely different from what we are familiar with, in which life is shaped by natural selection, geography by plate tectonics, and so on. (It also contains some IMO less-than-perfectly-fair criticism of traditional fantasy and Tolkien in particular that might rub people here the wrong way; I hope they will not turn you off from the rest.)
Some choice quotes:
"After all, there's no reason to imagine the first appearance of the “gene for magic” would be in a sapient species. [...] So feel free to go and visit some biosphere where the wildlife has developed thaumaturgical powers, but don't come back. If you arrive early enough to find it ruled by parasitic para‐wasps that can turn you into a willing host for their larvae, you're relatively lucky, because all the non‐magical parts of that insect are vestigial. Give it another million years and the place will be a witch's cauldron of cell cultures whose sole purpose is to pump out clouds of retroviral hex‐chromosomes."
"Earth's flora and fauna naturally fall into families sharing large sets of characteristics (toothy, furry, viviparous mammals versus beaky, feathery, oviparous birds) just because all the members of a given family share a common ancestral bodyplan. A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way. [...] Folkloric secondary worlds do often seem to nod in this direction by having furry/feathery hybrids like griffins and owlbears and whatnot, but there shouldn't be any coherent taxonomic groupings to hybridise – the things that look something like lions and something like eagles are liable to turn out to reproduce via acorns."
"... we should anticipate that the creatures tailor‐made for domestication by a beneficent providence would resemble perambulatory mushrooms rather than geese or goats. [...] If predators and parasites and prey aren't all locked in an eternal genetic red‐queen's‐race, there's no point leveraging chromosomal variability with a fancy diploid reproductive mechanism. In other words, there's no practical need for sex [...] Elves themselves [...] aren't going to have any evolutionary vestiges like tailbones or wisdom teeth; everything's there because it's biologically or aesthetically appropriate. [...] Their hands aren't feet that have been put through a minor redesign to make them work better as manipulatory appendages, they're organs designed purely for their current role. And similarly, while we upstart monkeys do our talking with repurposed masticatory organs [...] they have articulatory organs that were designed with that function in mind all along."
"In such a cosmos, living things are special because they're full of élan vital; caterpillars turn into butterflies because they're attracted to the right Platonic form by morphic resonance; and magic works because the meaning of your incantation is a thing in its own right that can have a direct impact on whatever it refers to. [...] If organisms are animated not by adenosine triphosphate but by a ghostly vital essence, having a cerebral cortex as well as a soul is redundant – look at ents, which are remarkably nimble thinkers when you consider that their heads are made of solid wood. [...] that the simplest and most obvious way for messages to get from one mind to another is for them to hop across psionically without ever going near the material plane. That sounds as if it would work much better, but it would mean a setting with no need for conlangs."
I remember reading a fantasy setting that had this as a bit of backstory flavor. The first magic users were single-celled organisms that assembled teeny-tiny ritual circles out of proteins, which became the ancestors of all life on Earth.
For the most part this didn't have a lot of impact on evolution (only humans are smart enough to *consciously* use magic, so all the powerful spells are human-only), but it means that you can do cool "biological magic" like altering your body's cells to secrete magic potions.
> A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way.
Nonsense. It would be organized however the Creator wants it to be organized. It might have no coherent taxonomy, it might have extremely coherent taxonomy, or anything in between.
Likewise, from the quote about the magic, it looks like this writing is making a lot of assumptions about how magic would "really" work and then crapping on fantasy authors for not following those assumptions.
Sure, but that would only happen if the Creator was deliberately trying to hide the fact that it was designed intelligently (i.e., the "Satan put dinosaur bones in the soil to test your faith" model of creationism). It's the sort of fact about the Creator that cries out for an explanation, and ideally we'd have a better one than "Because the Author wanted an Earth-like world with a cool creation story, and Last Thursdayism is the only way to reconcile that conflict."
The article does bring up the possibilities you suggested for a Creator in a fantasy setting, but the whole thing is really just a digression. The author's main point is that trying to theorize about how the Elvish language evolved over time is in some sense completely pointless, because it will inevitably raise even bigger questions about about how *anything* in a high fantasy setting is supposed to have evolved over time.
Similarly, the part about magic is saying that you can't solve this problem by removing the Supreme Creator and going "it's a normal evolved world like ours, but with magic" because a world where magic exists isn't going to evolve the same sort of life that Earth did without it.
The bestiary is divided into categories because that means your spells can target the categories and not just be one-enemy-specific garbage. "Effective against flying creatures" is a lot more fun to play with than "effective against bald eagles". And then you can overlap them. Look at Pokemon's mass of intersecting enemy strengths and weaknesses.
And the complaint about creation not allowing the ecosystem is silly, because fantasy stories don't have the big ecosystems with lots of overlap, they have very unique creatures with unique skills and stats. Even in videogames where you have strict palette-swap upgrades of previous creatures, they're unique because they have different stats.
Nothing needs to evolve in a fantasy setting with gods. It's the way it is because the gods knock things into proper orbit whenever it tries to go off-track.
If you are optimizing for that sort of thing you'd probably make categories that are orthogonal to each other with as many combinations as possible, not the tree-like hierarchy produced by evolution. (You make a good point, though: this *is* closer to what fantasy games have than the essay's author suggests.)
Having read that, my conclusion is that the author doesn't really like fantasy and would be much happier with a nice, tidy, hard-science SF doorstopper based on proper physics with plenty of equations peppered throughout, rather than all the icky magic.
To which I will recommend a SF story the author would probably hate:
This person seems to have little to no tolerance for *myths* in world-building, which is rich coming from someone insisting on a naturalistic approach based on how things went in our world. Creating myths *is* how things went in our world and nobody much cares about "so how did the dragon fit in the cave, then?" because it's all about the archetypes, innit?
As to the conclusion:
"How would languages work in fantasy fiction if they followed the conventions of European folklore the way the rest of the genre does, which means without overthinking the logic of it all and in particular with no anachronistic linguistics? It seems to me the answer is that things would look something like this:
...Alfese/Angelic: some otherworldly entities communicate via inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter. Fortunately when they want to talk to you they can probably do it in Everyday Speech (but that doesn't mean they're going to be regaling you with thousands of years' worth of Chronicles of the Golden Age Before You Lot Turned Up, because they don't need any of that backplot)."
*Somebody* hasn't read as deeply as they claim to have done! 😁
From "The War of the Jewels", 'Quendi and Eldar', Note on 'the language of the Valar':
"Pengolodh cites a ‘Saying’ of Rúmil: ‘The Eldar took few words from the Valar, for they were rich in words and ready in invention at need. But though the honour which they gave to the Valar might have caused them to take words from their speech, whether needed or not, few words of Valarin could be fitted to Elvish speech without great change or diminution. For the tongues and voices of the Valar are great and stern, and yet also swift and subtle in movement, making sounds that we find hard to counterfeit; and their words are mostly long and rapid, like the glitter of swords, like the rush of leaves in a great wind or the fall of stones in the mountains.’
Pengolodh comments: ‘Plainly the effect of Valarin upon Elvish ears was not pleasing.’ It was, he adds, as may be seen or guessed from what survives, filled with many consonants unfamiliar to the Eldar and alien to the system of their speech."
So Tolkien is ahead of you there, Mr. Ray, on 'inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter.'
I suppose all the references to Tolkien are because he really is the 800lb gorilla of invented fantasy languages, and can't be dismissed as just another author pulling it out of the air because he was a philologist, so Mr. Ray's disagreement really comes down to "Well *I* wouldn't have done it that way". But if he's sniffy about Middle-earth, I'd love to dump E.R. Eddings' "Zimiavian Chronicles" on top of him and see how he feels!
Maybe. I'm unpersuaded, because I think the author has entirely failed to consider the quite considerable problems of logical self-consistency. For example, it's just not logically consistent to imagine an ecosystem made of perfect predators and hapless prey, the former will just eat all the latter and then starve to death. It's not logically consistent to imagine a world with infinitely puissant and wise benevolent Elves and also hobbits that struggle with assorted economic, existential, or practical problems, because the latter would just apply to the former for help and not have any problems any more -- there *has* to be some reason why the Elves can't or won't solve all the problems, e.g. they're assholes, they don't get it, there's some karmic reason why it's bad.
Coming up with a fully self-consistent and very complex ecosystem is very, very hard. (And indeed many story-telling failures are rooted in implausible levels of logical inconsistency.) This is probably why most people tend to hew pretty close to reality, which has the virtue of being ipso facto logically self-consistent.
More interestingly, it is possible that improving self-consistency remorselessly drives you to something that ends up looking more and more like objective reality. We don't actually know whether a form of existence that is radically different from the one we see around each other is even possible. For all we know, what we see around us is the way it is because it is ultimately not possible for any fully self-consistent system to be nontrivially different.
Poor Tolkien! He suffers from having been the forerunner or influence on a lot of fannish material since his time, so his use of a term like "common speech" got turned into D&D "Common Tongue/Common Speech/Common" and so people are a little led astray by that.
To quote at random from the letters where he briefly discusses language:
"What I have, in fact done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in the Westron into English terms, with some differentiation of style to represent dialectal differences.
Languages, however, that were related to the Westron presented a special problem. I turned them into forms of speech related to English. Since the Rohirrim are represented as recent comers out of the North, and users of an archaic Mannish language relatively untouched by the influence of Eldarin, I have turned their names into forms like (but not identical with) Old English. The language of Dale and the Long Lake would, if it appeared, be represented as more or less Scandinavian in character; but it is only represented by a few names, especially those of the Dwarves that came from that region. These are all Old Norse Dwarf-names.
...The Westron or C.S. is supposed to be derived from the Mannish Adunaic language of the Númenóreans, spreading from the Númenórean Kingdoms in the days of the Kings, and especially from Gondor, where it remains spoken in nobler and rather more antique style (a style also usually adopted by the Elves when they use this language). But all the names in Gondor, except for a few of supposedly prehistoric origin, are of Elvish form, since the Númenórean nobility still used an Elvish language, or could. This was because they had been allies of the Elves in the First Age, and had for that reason been granted the Atlantis isle of Númenor."
"In Gondor the generally used language was 'Westron', a lang. about as mixed as mod. English, but basically derived from the native lang. of the Númenóreans ; but Sindarin was an acquired polite language and used by those of more pure N[úmenórean] descent, esp. in Minas Tirith, if they wished to be polite."
"That the Hobbits actually spoke an ancient language of their own is of course a pseudo-historical assertion made necessary by the nature of the narrative. I could provide or invent the original Hobbit language form of all the names that appear in English, like Baggins or Shire, but this would be quite pointless."
So people speak Westron mainly because it *is* a lingua franca like English, due to the influence of Gondor and Arnor in their heydays. The Rohirrim speak their own tongue, but also Westron, because they are allies of Gondor. The Gondorians speak Westron but also Sindarin, at least the more educated and the noble families still do.
The Hobbits speak Westron because (1) they are a branch of Men and (2) they picked up the languages of Men as they migrated westwards and adopted them for their own use. In Bree, Men and Hobbits mingle, so they keep with the 'common tongue' everyone speaks. 'Ancient' Hobbitish is going to be a language equivalent to Old English, see how the word "Hobbit" in Westron was derived from Rohirric "Holbytla".
Mr. Rye seems to be confusing Tolkien's plan of linguistic spread with the SF fandom trope of a Common Speech everyone uses, so since he knows this is a contrivance of convenience, he imagines Tolkien did the same to have a tidy set-up. Since Tolkien was writing stories in English for English-speaking readers, he naturally used English and had the Hobbits speaking English and everyone else speaking English instead of putting in everyone speaking in their own native tongue and needing to be translated. For in-world purposes of explaining 'how does everyone speak the same language, or at least a language everyone understands?', hence Westron.
I've just realized the very obvious kabalistic/punny connotations of "Bangkok", after being in the city twice, and I can't help but be surprised at how long it took or how well it fits.
So it's that time of year when I wonder whether it was really such a great idea for mankind to migrate past 40° N.
Personally, I want this for the circadian effects rather than SAD. For this reason, I'd consider it useful to be able to fade on the light shortly before I need to wake up.
People around here have been DIYing 10klm SAD lamps, capable of irradiating a 1m^2 area as brightly as daylight (not direct sun) on a clear day for a long time. But LED technology has come far since then so I don't think the traditional LessWrong solution of spamming two dozen domestic lightbulbs is necessarily optimal. So what is the current state-of-the-art?
This preprint promotes the moar dakka approach, cranking the brightness up to 100klm.
One of the big challenges seems to be thermal management. By volume, these things are 90% heat sink. Assuming a luminous efficacy of 100lm/W (this is kind of worst-case nowadays) and a brightness of 10klm, we need to dissipate around 100W of heat. The LEDs don't want to go much above 80°C so we have a ΔT of around 60K to play with. Apparently that's close enough to what CPUs need nowadays that you can use heat sinks designed for them. The other, crazier idea I just had was to get a small radiator (either one meant to be on a wall filled with water or a freestanding oil radiator) and dump heat into there, as they are often designed to output a few hundered watts of heat. This could be done either by attaching the heat source directly or using it as the reservoir for a liquid-cooled system.
I'm not sure how best to orient the lighting. I want to make sure a lot of light reaches my eyes but not to dazzle me. Perhaps uplighting would work. I also have plans involving fresnel lenses.
Colour Rendering Index may or may not be important. I'll be buying cheapo LEDs for now but they could be easily retrofitted with ones that produce a more realsitic sunlight effect.
N.B. Links broken to make this post look less spammy. Products are random ones I saw. Not necessarily the best or even good.
So does anybody here have experience with stupidly bright LEDs and/or SAD lamps?
Most of humanity's great achievements happened north of that parallel. I grew up at 59° N (Stockholm) and later migrated to 36° N (Malta), and the move does appear to have had a strong positive effect on my mood, but it might also have made me more inclined to enjoying a drink by sea as opposed to spending time on some nerdier pursuit more likely to benefit humanity.
A nice benefit of the Euro Zone. For humanity’s sake you should really go back to the cold and dark and put the finishing touches on safe cheap cold fusion though. jk
I'm at 47.5° N too. I've used the SunUp dawn simulator for years - it's basically a programmable dimmer with a 400W receptacle, into which I currently plug a 150W halogen. The only problem is that they aren't being made any more, but I hear that you can get them on eBay sometimes. (There's also a lesser version called the SunRizr, which isn't as programmable.)
For interior lighting, I have track lighting, and I've gone in the direction of lots and lots of fixtures, rather than single super-bright lights. It's a 2-track setup, so for one track I have 5000K temperature bulbs, and on the other I have dimmable 2700K bulbs. And the great part about LEDs is that I can add *even more* to the tracks. In the day I turn on the daylight bulbs, and maybe the yellow ones as well, and as it gets dark, I turn off the daylight bulbs, and then dim the yellow ones. The bulbs can be a bit bright for naked eyes, so when possible I shade them, or bounce the light off a wall or ceiling.
After doing some research, I've been going for Philips LED bulbs, especially the 2175 lumen BR40s. They seem to last long, have 90+CRI, dim smoothly and without flickering, and are widely available. From what I can tell, the limiting factor in LED bulb lifetime is not the LEDs themselves, but the circuitry in the bulbs, which is damaged by the heat. So no matter how good a particular light-emitting diode is, if the company that assembled the circuitry doesn't have experience, the bulbs will die faster. Also, the brighter they are, the faster they die. And the more complicated the electronics inside, the faster they die. From what I've heard, anyway.
I grew up at 47.5 but relocated to a noticeably warmer area at 45. I get a bit down when the sun sets before 5 PM but it never turned into anything like SAD.
Yeah the difference between northern Minnesota and the Twin Cities is most noticeable at the beginning and end of winter. Generally being a couple degrees North of where I live means the first snow is a couple weeks earlier and true spring is a couple weeks later. The lilacs bloom in mid may in Mpls and in late May to early June in ‘Frostbite Falls’ territory.
I’m talking about climate in this case not weather. As Red Skeleton used to joke “Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.”
I didn't really get any SAD symptoms until I lived around 47.5° N for a couple years. That was a while back, before LED bulbs were available as more than an expensive novelty. I did get marginal improvement by swapping all of the dim CFL bulbs the landlord had installed in my apartment for 100W equivalent halogens.
I currently live at about 37° N, which isn't far north at all: only half a degree north of the Missouri Compromise line. I do have some super-bright LEDs, though, since I like my workspaces nice and bright. For general illumination in existing light fixtures, the search term is "corn bulb": these have standard Edison socket attached to a big, honking heat sink with lots of LED chips mounted all around its surface. It's a quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to retrofit a fixture designed for incandescents or halogens with something considerably brighter. I've got a two-bulb wall sconce in my office loaded with a pair of 200W-equivalent (6000 Lumens total) corn bulbs.
I'm constrained by the size of my fixture, but without that constraint you can get corn bulbs in the 15-20 klm range. Since these have the heat sinks built in, you shouldn't need to rig up custom cooling as long as there's relatively free air flow around the bulbs.
If you do want to play around with computer heat sinks, Noctua's generally considered the top brand for air coolers. NH-D15 is their top-of-the-line model, consisting of two big bricks of cooling fins with a pair of 140mm fans forcing air through them. It's designed with an overclocked top-of-the-line consumer desktop CPU in mind, so it should handily deal with 200W or so of heat. It's a little on the spendy side, though (about $US100), and you'll need to rig up a power supply (12V DC) for the fans somehow.
Noctua also makes a passive cooler, the NH-P1, which relies on convection only with no fans. It's pretty big, though, and can't deal with quite as much wattage as the fan-driven air coolers.
I’m at about 45 degrees N. I’ve found that if I get together with my friends on December 21 and bang on pots and pans real loud, the sun will start to come back. It’s worked so far anyway.
Any recommendations for what could be called a "recreational chemistry" nonfiction book or blog? Basically, I feel like I have a huge hole in my knowledge of chemistry, and that bothers me since chemistry underlies so much technology. I don't have the will to self-study chemistry textbooks, so I was wondering if there are any "fun" books that could also improve my chemistry literacy. In case it matters, I'm good with math and physics, so not afraid of seeing equations in the text.
"Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" is written in a very casual-friendly and entertaining style, but will teach you plenty about the chemistry of various things that go 'boom' 'foom' or various other entertaining noises. and you can get a pdf version for free legally here:
Theo Gray's books might be good. I haven't read them myself, but they sell very well, he knows his chemistry decently -- he went as far as a few years into a chem PhD at Berkeley -- and the books are heavily and creatively illustrated. Lots of big-name endorsement, too:
If you want to wander around a webite that was assembled over many years, starting back in the dark ages of HTML v2.0 or so, probably once had a <blink> tag or two, which digs into all kinds of odd little corners, Jim Clark's website is fascinating and does not patronize, the way far too many pop-science resources do:
I ran across this article: There is No Liberal West (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west). I suppose I always thought freedom of speech for example was seriously under attack, but seeing it all laid out like this is rather striking:
> Of course Yousaf and his comrades argue they have no intention to chill freedom of expression, but few can take this seriously, given how many people in Scotland have already been arrested for speech and thought crimes – people like Marion Millar, a feminist who faced prosecution this April for the “transphobic” act of tweeting a photo of a suffragette ribbon and “#WomenWontWheesht” (women won’t shut up). Already, between 2008 and 2018 there were 7,618 convictions for speech under the existing Communications Act of 2003, which the new legislation seeks to significantly strengthen. In Scotland, even filming your pug doing tricks can lead to the police showing up at your door. Maybe we should head south.
> But it would of course be untenable for England – home of John Locke and John Stewart Mill – to be left behind by the Scots, so the rest of Britain is rushing to catch up. Britain now launches manhunts for 12-year-olds who allegedly send racist messages on social media, convicts teenagers of hate crimes for quoting rap lyrics in general circulation (fitting them with ankle monitoring bracelets for extra public safety), and jails people for offensive jokes. But the real innovation of the nation of George Orwell has been the invention of the “Non-Crime Hate Incident” – a brilliant category encompassing anything the police deem to potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere. That was the lesson learned by the unfortunate Harry Miller, whose 2019 tweets about gender were reported anonymously to police, who then quickly stormed into his workplace to “check his thinking.” Some 25,000 such incidents are now investigated by UK police each year, with each case filed in a permanent record that shows up in employment background checks even if no crime is ever prosecuted.
So what can be done about the massive homeless encampments in America? My brother recently went to Denver and was quite shocked by them. He also commented that they seemed to be populated by the mentally ill (unlike in Puerto Rico, where there are no encampments but the homeless seem to be mainly drug addicts, sometimes falling apart with disease), which jives with what I saw in Portland. I once heard that this happened because the big state psychiatric hospitals were forced to shut down, so maybe the homeless do need to forcibly interned?
I am somewhat skeptical about the provide housing solution. I happened to have a neighbor who both went insane and became a drug addict and he completely trashed his house (which was paid for and maintained by his dad) and became homeless all the same.
It would, however, shed some light on why there are all these encampments. Or maybe where. They're renowned in LA, SF, and NY. Are they rampant elsewhere? Were the people in tent cities today on scattered park benches previously? And did they all gather to LA/SF/NY from somewhere else? Did Somewhere Else's homeless count drop -way- down in the past few years as a consequence?
Indications from my city are that a lot of them come from elsewhere, but mostly regionally connected. Like rain in a watershed basin, all flowing into the same river that goes by the same port city. Probably people in this situation gravitate toward the closest big city that offers social services and low enforcement of drug laws. Mild winters are a plus.
I kinda suspect that there's a ongoing crisis in America of people slipping into homelessness and drug addiction, but that it isn't very visible where it's happening. Instead it looks to an observer like major blue cities are having an eruption of homelessness., but that's just because that's where they all end up.
Melvin hits an interesting point. I used to live in Denver, a long time ago, and it had no such problems. But then they legalized weed and got flexible on drugs in general, and shazam parts of Denver have turned into weird little Red Lectroid nests. I don't know, maybe assuming absolutely everybody over 12 is fully competent to deal with mind-altering chemicals isn't the best public policy, even though it makes the life of suburban middle-class recreational stoners much easier, but I think we're all a little baffled by what would be provably better.
I'm by no means an expert, but my vague impression is that the bulk of the chronically homeless are some combination of drug addicted and mentally ill, and nothing will ever change until those twin scourges are dealt with in less of an ad hoc or fitful manner.
I'd suggest that causation might work slightly differently - if a city legalizes weed, that makes existing homeless people more likely to go there. I can tell that this is thing where I live, because there have been complaints about it, and the pushback has quoted statistics about 90-some-% being local, and then a bit later it came out that living here for 6 months is enough to count as a "long-time resident".
Yeah that makes sense. I'm sure it's a fiendishly complex problem, with many intersecting lines of causation, 'cause it involves people, which are complex creatures.
No, I don’t think it was the weed. Homeless encampments started to spring up in the Twin Cities about the same time that Colorado legalized pot. Minnesota just made THC gummies legal in July if this year.
Well, I'm willing to believe Minneapolis/St. Paul is in its own special category of urban crisis, like Portland and Detroit. Seems unusually dysfunctional these days for a Midwestern city surrounded by Ole and Lena types. Maybe SAD has finally unhinged everybody, or it's something in the venison.
Also I think the argument would be stronger if it went "Minneapolis legalized pot at the same time as Denver and did not turn into a dump." I'm pretty willing to believe there are additional reasons for visible Skid Rows, beyond a more relaxed social attitude towards drug use and easier access to drugs. In LA you can sleep outside year round with just a tarp and a blanket, so that probably has something to with it having a much more visible street person population than, say, Dawson Creek.
Anyway, the key proposition to test is: if you considerably reduced drug abuse, and got schizophrenics into treatment and/or homes, would you significantly reduce the population on the streets? If it's the case that Singapore lacks a big homeless population -- I wouldn't know, never been there -- and Singapore notoriously has the strictest drug laws in the world, vigorously enforced, then that's some formidable evidence right there.
Ah yes, we just need to fight the War on Drugs harder, that should work. Just need to throw another *trillion*[1] dollars of taxpayer money at the problem, it'll definitely work this time.
I would give a list of sources on why the economics on that really, really don't work out (and have been thoroughly demonstrated not to), but thankfully others have done that for me: https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/chapter/economics
For one thing Singapore is more or less an island, and pretty densely populated. I imagine smuggling the stuff in is a lot harder. And their government is far more efficient, so I’d imagine their war on drugs is more competently prosecuted
Singapore has about 1,000 homeless in a population of 5.5 million, which is about 70-300x lower than Denver's homelessness rate. However, in addition to differences in drug laws, Singapore also has an aggressive program of building cheap public housing, as well as having a border so it can have its own immigration policy.
Do you have an infallible omniscient list of drug traffickers we are supposed to shoot, or is it just anyone who looks like they're probably a drug trafficker, or who is carrying a lot of cash, or whatever?
And, if four college girls pool their money so that one of them can go buy some weed for their party, do we shoot that one girl for being a trafficker? Because one of those girls grew up to be a friend of mine, and a good mother and a skilled coder.
Putting drug dealers in jail for years at a time would be enough if we could do it quickly and reliably to all of them, but we can't do that because we'd get too many innocent bystanders at the same time. Shooting drug dealers *won't* work if it only comes at the end of a lengthy trial and usually not even then because the juries will nullify in this scenario, but we really do have to have the trials.
The only people we're allowed to gun down on sight, are the ones who go around the streets shooting unarmed or otherwise generally peaceable citizens on sight.
I mean, there's a lot of evidence it *did not* result in a more functional society. We have higher rates of teen and adult drug abuse, and obscenely higher rates of incarceration, than almost any first world nation. Yes, some of that is due to geographic distribution of drug production, but at least *some* of the blame has to fall on the policy we've had for 40 years not being effective.
You and I have very different perceptions of the world (as seems typical for our discussions) if you think the "current approach" is not still following the line of the war on drugs. (Those enforcement numbers keep going up, after all)
It's still very clearly focused on judicial and carceral solutions. I'd like the orders of magnitudes to actually be switched between that and "treatment and harm reduction" (maybe along with a touch of the housing model from Singapore, as another comment pointed out) and then see whether an *actually* different strategy pays off.
Maybe even try something truly wild - build a bunch of low/virtually-no cost dorm-style housing in the central valley, and legalize all drugs (even opiates), there, with harm reduction in place, ship druggies there for free if they want to work.
If you trace that back to the actual source[1], where they give a more detailed accounting, ~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*) and for "Criminal Justice System" costs, which are going have a huge overlap with that $40 billion above (otherwise ~$50b to persecute 1b of property crime doesn't seem like great ROI).
The only things which aren't an indirect cost of enforcement are the non-incarcerated labor costs, which they estimate at ~$30b, and health.
Although I'm skeptical of the "lost productivity" numbers, and you should also be more so, since "they would be perfectly productive member of society if they weren't on drugs" seems like a pretty leftist position.
(Maybe they go more into this in the methodology section, but I don't have time to comb through it. I'd love to see Scott do a more detailed analysis of this at some point, actually.)
"~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*)"
I somehow doubt that every single person convicted for drug possession/dealing would be a hard-working citizen instead. Some certainly would, but that would be *after* they get clean. Maintaining a drug habit *and* steady working is difficult, at least for working/lower middle-class level.
People who abuse drugs don't always, or even usually in my experience, go to jail because of the drugs per se. Prosesecuting low-level drug-only crimes is not high on any DAs list of priorities. People end up in jail because they commit crimes to support a drug habit, or because they do something bad while drunk or high.
So imagining that legalizing drugs across the board would magically prevent drunk driving deaths, or people stealing shit or committing fraud to afford a $1000/day coke habit, or murdering each other over drug turf wars, or for that matter make any significant desirable change in work absenteeism, failures in school or life because you're fucked up, or the implosion of marriages and famlies, is either naive or the result of being in the firm grip of ideology.
I know the mayor of Austin TX appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast a few months ago, talking about this exact problem. I *think* they got on top of it, and the lesson there was "early treatment" - they got on it before it got as bad as SF or LA. But I don't remember exactly what they did.
I'm sure it's addressable later; just more expensive per person. How many cities are at the level of "we need to drop everything else"? Or just "this is the #1 issue for enough voters for it to matter in an election"?
Hmm, I found this article about it: https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-mayor-tells-joe-rogan-what-he-wouldve-done-differently-to-tackle-homelessness, it doesn't seem they've gotten on top of it. But he does say there's "there’s a 90-95% success rate that the person can reintegrate back into society and sustain themselves in a positive way. " if they're housed. But I don't get it, how does that work with drug addiction and mental illness (even if the person developed the mental illness as a result of homelessness)?
Not all homeless people are drug addicts. In fact there’s a clear correlation between homelessness and house prices, and most homeless in San Francisco (for example) are in fact from the area - despite what is generally thought. Which means they were often priced out. These might not be the visible homeless however.
Without clicking the link, probably some sort of completion bias: if they define housed as stays in the home for some amount of time, people who can't manage that part don't get counted. Apparently that's what pads a lot of rehab/betterment program's stats (sorry, I don't know from where I know that -- likely SSC)!
Or maybe there are some people you can't get into a house in the first place, or maybe there's criteria for housing that excludes hopeless cases.
I've wondered this myself. Are there big homeless encampments in big European (or Canadian) cities? The most prevalent seem to be in California, so I don't know if that's just the weather or policy or something else.
There have been some encampments in cities in Sweden, but they've been populated by gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria who come to work as street beggars, not by the local homeless.
>Are there big homeless encampments in big European (or Canadian) cities?
Um, no? At least in Prague, we are somehow without homeless camps in real public spaces, despite the fact that we recently had an influx of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
Of course, our secret sauce is that homeless encampents are illegal, and would be quickly cleared by police if they would appear in public spaces. Our homeless people do live in squalid conditions, but their encampments are hidden in marginal spaces on the edges of the city.
You sure it's not just the weather? The Internet tells me it's −1°C in Prague right now, with highs tomorrow expected to reach maybe 3°C. Brrr. On the other hand, it won't fall below 10°C in LA tonight, and tomorrow it should reach a comfy 23°C or so.
But weather can hardly explain absence of homeless encampents from May to September, when temperatures seldom fall below 10 degrees even in the night, and many of our parks are packed with middle class picnic-goers. Like me; I was never afraid to go the park to do some reading or dining with friends in pleasant weather outside; from what I gather here, it does not seem to be common in American cities.
No kidding? That's pretty surprising. What do they do when there's 3 feet of snow on the ground and it's −5°F out? Light fires? Sleep in enormous piles? Just freeze to death and get shoveled up by the street sweepers during the next thaw?
Here in St Louis, where it's much warmer than St Paul but still gets cold from time to time, there'll be emergency warming centers. I don't know exactly how it works but it's seems to be a mix of public buildings and churches.
No kidding. It’s pretty sad. Not sure how they stay alive. I drove by a bunch of tents last week and spotted a couple of LP gas tanks so some of them are rigging up heaters I suppose.
The local news showed a religious charity delivering hot meals a couple days ago. These are broken people. A lot of them appear to be older.
"The State uses force (violence) to prevent the middle class from having to see the problem of homelessness (/poverty/etc)" seems to be a common theme in all liberal democracies.
I mean, it's still extremely common in the US. Just not as much as it was. In part because (arguably unconstitutional) excessive uses of force by the State have recently become a big part of the discourse. And the thought that "beating the poor until they stop being poor" might not be working so well, or might be slightly unethical.
The US in general is very exceptional among first world countries, so there's other factor too, of course.
The "unfortunate" side effect is that the middle class now has to *see* the problem instead of it being out of sight and out of mind.
Have you read 'The Road' by Jack London? It describes his experiences of being a hobo and is very readable, often amusing, and offers a stark contrast in police behaviour when dealing with the homeless to today.
"Destruction of the urban environment" is a great vague and non-specific euphemism for "having to see the effects of homelessness", yes. Having to actually see the poverty and squalor certainly detracts from the urban environment.
(But shitting in the streets, you say. You know what you could do to prevent people who live on the street from shitting there? Make it so they're not living on the street!)
Moving them someplace else doesn't fix the problem, it just prevents the middle class from having to see it.
I don't think you are being fair. The problem which trebuchet refers to is that it is unpleasant and unsafe for middle class people like me to share an environment with the homeless. And it very much can be fixed, or at least greatly ameliorated, by shuffling the homeless away via police violence.
Of course, that does not improve lives of the homeless. Probably it makes them worse, since apparently their revealed preference is to live in parks. But it does improve lives of people like me, which is an actual goal of the policy.
I live in Denver, where the problem has gotten pretty bad. And I was just in DC last week and couldn't find a single square foot of public park in the entire city that wasn't occupied by a homeless person. So it's clearly not just the good California weather that's driving the homeless encampments.
"I suspect that's because until recently people who frequently violated the law due to their addictions/mental illness ended up in prison instead."
I think that's the worst solution for everyone. Someone who is mentally ill shouldn't be in an ordinary prison, because the jail is not set up to handle them, the staff can't be expected to be trained psychiatric nurses on top of everything else, and well, the other criminals that they are locked up with.
They certainly may *need* to be locked up due to crime, but in specialised units. And if we're sending people to jail for lack of any other option, because a combination of bleeding-heart idiots thought "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" was a documentary and greedy idiots thought those big old Victorian institutions with their ample grounds could be sold off for property development and $$$$$$, then that was a very bad decision back then and we need to look at going back to "so how about someplace secure but where appropriate treatment can happen?"
And maybe some people will never be fit to live on their own and will end up homeless, crazy, criminal, and on drugs if they're let out, so institutionalisation is the lesser of two evils there.
I once talked to a guy who helped close Minnesota’s ‘State Hospital’. He helped discard the restraints and electro convulsive apparatus. He knows it was just a movie but nurse Ratched still scares the crap out of him.
The one part of this that bothers me is where it appears to accept that ordinary (non-obviously-mentally ill) people convicted of crime can (or even should) be subject to an inhuman and degrading situation -- which I agree is quite often what an ordinary prison is.
I'm actually not OK with that. People who are convicted of crimes are still people, and because they have some debt to work off does not mean they can or should be treated like orcs where it's generically OK if they are terrorized or abused, because they are just inherently evil. (I might deviate from thinking they're not orcs in some harsh cases, I think there certainly are people who are deeply evil, but even then I think allowing random abuse and torture is wrong, because of what it says about us, the people in whose name that abuse is being done, or allowed. Execute them, perhaps, or lock them up safely forever, but do not abuse or allow to be abused.)
So in some sense I would say that concluding that the mentally ill should not be confined to a prison is also equivalent to an indictment of prison per se: it means the prisons we do have are inhumane institutions, which allow the abuse and degradation of its inmates in a way that is not consistent with full respect for, let us say, the fact that every man is made in the image of Christ, even if his decisions have been deeply evil. He has abused himself (and others of course), and that calls for correction and punishment, but does not give license for degradation and abuse in return.
Ideally, we should be indifferent to whether a person is confined to a prison as punishment for a crime, or because he cannot live on his own and must be treated for mental illness against his (dysfunctional) will, because it should not be the case that confinement necessarily means degradation and abuse. The fact that we accept that it *does* is, I think, a significant indictment of our failure to be our brothers' keeper, even when -- perhaps especially when -- he is an unsavory bastard that we also need to keep locked up.
We've come a long way when we actually execute people -- we almost all agree it should be done with respect for the soul of the person being put down, even if we do not flinch from the action, we do not condone torturing or degrading executions, and there's a lot to be said for that. But when it comes to less drastic punishment, we haven't done as well. Indeed, there are too many of us who take sadistic pleasure in knowing (or assuming) that imprisonment carries with it the promise of degradation, humiliation, violation, as well as the loss of freedom that is inherent. We're a little better than the ancients who threw criminals to the lions in the arena so their screams could amuse spectators -- but not as much better as we might think. Certainly less better than we could be.
(1) Agreement on "prison should not be abusive". This is a whole slate of problems ranging from societal indifference to the fact that prison does need to be punitive in some degree (not abuse, but deprivation of freedoms) and prisoners will break rules to get around that and then we have the whole set-up of violence
(2) Prisons are not hospitals, and the mentally-ill need hospitals. Even if they have to be secure hospitals, and even if the inmates are the criminally insane (or whatever the up-to-date term for that is). There is a basic difference between someone in their right mind who steals for a living, even taking into account the circumstances that brought them there and even if it is All The Fault Of Society, and someone not in their right mind due to organic illness or drug abuse or abusive circumstances in their family life.
Yes, I'm not really in strong disagreement, but with respect to (2) I think we should probably observe that there is a significant overlap between criminality and drug addiction and mental illness. A lot of people are ciminals *because* they have the latter two problems.
In actual practice I think there is a fair amount of "hospital" like activity in (at least American) prisons: there are drug treatment programs, and people get psych meds and assorted (usually impoverished) treatment. These things are fouind to be just necessary for the prison not to be an absolute hellhole, although they are neither of them done to anywhere nera the degree that would be sufficient to address the need.
I don't have any great ideas for solving this or any of its related messes, that is not something on which I have the slightest amount of talent. And there is a difficult inherent tension between "medicalizing" socially deviant behavior, so that we decline to judge it morally, decline to put sufficient pressure on individual choice, and being inhumane and treating people with severe mental illness as if they had the full ability to judge right and wrong. (Parenthetically one of the strangest and disquieting things about American capital punishment law for me is the fact that the Supreme Court says you cannot execute a criminal who doesn't understand his own execution enough to be afraid of it. I can follow the legal reasoning easily enough, but the outcome -- we will only kill you if you're afraid of being killed -- seems ugly and sadistic.)
I wish I could be as confident as you that there is a clear difference between people who do bad things because they freely chose to, and because they had some demon riding them and had hardly what we could reasonably call a free choice. I totally agree it's easy at the extremes, but the closer you get to any bright dividing line the more arbitrary and difficult it seems.
In some sense we would like not to even have to make the decision. We could judge the action independent of the actor's intent or awareness, and act in whatever way is expedient to prevent repeats of it, or incentivize people to not do it in the first place, and then simultaneously we could treat any underlying sickness to the extent we could. But that does kind of imply a pretty significant degree of fusion between a prison and a mental/drug (involuntary) hospital.
And I recognize this is all pie in the sky as far as economic and social psychology reality goes, but...dunno, I think we could probably do better than we do. Perhaps it's because I live in the US, and we are a very judgmental nation, and the way we sometimes just throw people away because they have problems that could possibly even be fixed is a little disheartening. Goes with the whole predestination thingy, but I don't like predestination.
Scott has written about the closing of state mental institutions in the past[1][2], and specifically said that he "think[s] closing the institutions was the best thing Reagan ever did."[1] (he wrote that in 2016, but referenced those articles recently and gave no indication his opinion had changed).
The reason "care in community" became a joke in the UK and a term used instead of crazy (e.g. "watch out for that guy, he's care in the community") is because this was the ideal behind closing down the big old institutions (which *did* have their problems, let's not deny that). The *ideal* was that people would go back to live with family support and support from the local government such as nurses, social workers, etc. to be helped live independently.
The reality was that families couldn't cope with, or didn't want to take back, members who were erratic, difficult, and liable to go off their meds, and local councils didn't have the money or resources to provide all the supports needed. So vulnerable people fell through the cracks and ended up the crazy homeless guy ranting in the street.
Proper social supports are needed to help people live outside of institutions, but that kind of support is also expensive, and taxpayers don't like paying high levels of tax.
I think you're accidently doing a motte and bailey here. I think most people would agree homelessness has far reaching consequences. No matter how severe these consequences it doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is institutionalization, and certainly it doesn't follow that reduced institutionalization should be viewed as the causative effect.
I'm going to push back slightly on some of this, based on my experience living in one of these cities. There are definitely activists who believe everything you say, but they're not writing the script. They're pushing their agenda, and the left-wing politicians react to that agenda. Some are sensible adults and give lip service to the activists while maintaining relatively competent governance, others are cynical manipulators who push the activist agenda to get ahead but ignore it if it won't make the news, and there are a few true believers who are basically useless in government but impossible to get rid of. We had a BLM-related situation in 2020 that our white lesbian former-prosecutor mayor did not have the political capital or intersectionality points to do anything about immediately, so she had to sit back and wait for the situation to implode badly enough that she could declare it a failure and move in. (That's my interpretation, anyway.) Our new mayor, also a left-wing Democrat, is a half-black-half-Japanese man, and he does have the political capital and intersectionality points to shut stuff like that down, to increase police funding, and to resume "sweeps" of homeless encampments. And the city has gotten better. (I don't know whether the lives of the homeless people in the city have gotten better, though.)
It's not that the activists changed what they believe. I think it's a matter of whether there are enough sensible politicians who feel empowered to ignore them. I'm tempted to credit our "jungle primary" system, where there's an open primary and the top 2 candidates go on to the general. For my city, that seems to mean that we'll get 2 left-wing candidates, but the more centrist of them will win the general. But I don't follow what happens in other cities enough to tell whether this is actually a real factor.
"The activists who write the script most cities' governments follow... [who] don't think there are real societal negative consequences with encampments full of mentally ill drug addicts [who are free to commit crime.]"
I think my point here is that real people, including myself and Fang, are making reasonable arguments. You're ignoring our arguments and swinging at ghosts.
> The activists who write the script most cities' governments follow
> don't think there are real societal negative consequences to letting
> the streets fill up with encampments full of mentally ill drug addicts
> who have a get-out-of-jail-free pass to commit any crimes they want;
> or if they do, they see the encampments as useful accelerationism
> towards whatever utopia they have in mind.
(Or find five, particularly people who demonstrably have some influence on city policies).
I think that there are lots of people who think that homeless encampments are *better* than the alternatives that they think are possible right now. I don't think any non-negligible number of people think that they are *good*, or that they have no negative consequences.
For whatever it's worth: my wife's entire career is in affordable housing, and she currently works for a county department that directly provides services for the homeless. She and her colleagues do not think anything resembling what you suggested above, nor do any of the politicians that she deals with, nor do people in the homeless-advocacy nonprofits that she interfaces with.
Why aren't the 11-15 million (almost universally) impoverished people who migrated into the U.S. illegally - often accruing a large debt to do so, frequently exploited by employers offering below-market wages - languishing in homeless encampments on the streets?
Could it be that they're meaningfully different from America's homeless population, in that they're (almost universally) mentally and physically fit enough to complete an arduous journey into a new country, highly motivated to work, and willing to share less than ideal housing to avoid languishing in encampments on the streets?
The causal relationship is not obvious, as there are all kinds of nudges for a homeless person to start abusing intoxicants even if their homelessness originally wasn't related to drugs.
How cheap would a house need to be in order for the average encampment-dweller to live in it? These people don't have jobs, nor do they have their shit sufficiently together to get one.
So schools abandoning the metric is a thing I'm happy about.
On the other hand... Yale's reasons are so mindbogglingly self-serving that instead of just being glad about it, I actually come away annoyed with Yale! Among the reasons they give that this decision had to be made:
- When Yale hires its own graduates for temporary fellowships (popular move schools use to inflate their "employment after graduation" statistics), US News is counting the fellows as unemployed, and refuses to stop doing it.
- USN keeps factoring in "how much debt does a student have at graduation?" as a factor in the rankings, despite Yale's demands to switch over to "how much aid did the school provide the student." Making that switch would allow a school like Yale, which charges $60,000 a year, to give a student a 33% discount, and then when the student graduates with $120,000 of debt, instead of being a negative in Yale's USN ranking ("student with huge debt load"), it would be a positive ("student who received a total of $60,000/33% in aid").
- When measuring "how much debt does a student have at graduation?" USN insists on using the actual amount of debt students have, rather than discounting it based on the possibility of debt forgiveness if a graduate manages to hold down work exclusively with 501c3 charitable organizations for 10 years.
Yale dresses all these things up to try to make them sound like they're about "encouraging public interest work," but they're so completely self-serving that I think I might have torn a retina rolling my eyes.
Yale can afford to ditch USN&WR because they're Yale; everybody knows they are among the top ten worldwide, and everyone will continue to "know" that for a generation or two after it ceases to be true.
Every not-uber-elite university, and every university-going student or parent thereof, still has the problem of ranking universities by some standard of merit. That's not going to go away, even if USN&WR does. So we should probably think about what will replace them if they do go away, rather than just saying "boo USN&WR, hurrah for their downfall!"
And it's not going to be every student and/or parent independently and carefully evaluating every potential university.
Surely, USN&WR can rank them whether they like it or not. Does "refusing to participate" just mean refusing to hand over data?
If I were USN&WR I'd just estimate whatever data points they refused to hand over. And I'd estimate them in just the right way so that Yale winds up ranking worse than Harvard (but not in an implausibly bad position, just rank them sixth or something).
I just found about https://neeva.com/, a no-ads, subscription supported search engine which I've found give much better results than google.
It's $6/month or $50/year. It promises privacy, but I don't know whether it's actually good on that.
As a side issue, the link includes google's vice-president in charge of search, and she's pretty classic marketing droid. She's got a plausible point that one of the reason google is getting worse is that there are more low-quality sites online to sort through, but infuriating with her attitude of "everything we do that you hate is really well-designed to give the public what it wants".
Everytime i move away from google I move back. Google seems right. It’s hard to explain that except that when I search for something, often mistyped, to retrieve an article it works for google - and google changes its results in real time. Googling the word canada today I got live time information about a game - which is what I wanted. That’s clever.
I tried switching to Duck Duck Go, and I even check on whether Bing has improved from time to time, but I keep coming back to Google because it finds what I'm looking for easier. Sometimes it doesn't show results that the others show easily, but most of the time with the others I'll search something and get 5 results that are SEO squatters trying to look like the result I want.
I'm feeling a lot less sure. I think my search results were good before I signed up, but now they're full of ads. They still might be better than google, but not as much better.
People who argue that voting is a waste of time generally point out that a single vote has a very small chance of making a difference. This paper puts the chance of a vote making a difference in the UP presidential election at one in 60 million:
It seems to me this argument fails to consider what the value of actually being able to flip the presidential election is, since the fair value of your vote is the expected value, which is the product of the chance you'll make a difference, and the value if you do. And make no mistake, the presidency is a big deal. Replace George W. with most any Democrat, and the Iraq war probably doesn't happen. Replace Obama with most any Republican, and the Affordable Care Act doesn't happen.
With that in mind, has anyone tried to put a figure on how much it would be worth to flip the presidency?
I shared a sleeper car with an Iraqi family from Amsterdam to Vienna in the summer of 2002. Everything was cordial while they thought I was British. Once they caught a glimpse of my blue passport, they forgot how to speak English.
Suppose an election had a margin of 7 votes out of several hundred thousand. In this case, you personally could not have flipped the election because the margin wasn't 1. But still, it seems incorrect to say that your vote didn't make a difference.
It's worth noting that it's not too uncommon for US House elections to be that narrow, and once you're already there for the House election you might as well vote for president.
The count will never be exact. It the true, unknowable margin is 7 votes, your vote will affect the probability of the count coming out in favour of your guy by some amount.
The expected value of flipping the Presidency is zero, since we have no way of predicting whether one guy will be better or worse than the other guy. Even in retrospect we have no idea because we can't visit the "Gore won" or "McCain won" timelines to see how things turned out.
That is obviously false? Like, in the extreme example, crazy death cult alien monster vs. boring normal sane human has a pretty clear EV difference in favour of the human.
Real world cases will have smaller, less certain differences, but there's a huge difference between saying that there's uncertainty and asserting that the EV is 0
Yeah, but Melvin probably assumed logical self-consistency. Like, if Candidate A is a crazy death cult alien monster and Candidate B is a normal sane human, what are the odds that both would get almost exactly 50% of the vote? I hold a very low opinion of the intelligence and sanity of my fellow voters, but even I would not expect a race between Cthulhu and Joe Biden to come down to the wire and depend on a tiny number of votes.
If you assume people are not entirely idiots, than it seems to me in the limit as the number of votes grows without limit, the expeccted value of a single vote that switches the election outcome trends smoothly to zero. It feels to me like you'd need to make some strange statistical or psychological assumptions to come up with a different result.
Well, the Nazis plus the Commies got 52% of the votes in the 1932 German election, and the sane humans got a bit less. So it does seem rather plausible to me that 50% could vote for something completely insane.
Well, let me advise you against republicanism then, and still more democracy, in both of which you would be putting your life in the hands of those people. A nice safe dictatorship or heriditary monarchy will avoid the problem.
Although...come to think of it, wouldn't that put you in the company of those voting for Nazi or Communist dictatorship? If memory serves, the 1932 election was in no small part driven by a terrible fear of what the other masses of stupid ignorant voters might choose, and a wish for some Strong Man to take charge. Hmm, tricky.
How do people here feel about compulsory voting? I’m an Australian, where attending a polling place is compulsory although you can leave your ballot blank. I, and a majority here, greatly support it: it ensures our politicians have to appeal to everyone, not just to their base. We rode out the Trump-Johnson-Xi years with only a small handful of crazy/overtly racist politicians (we also have preferential voting so minor parties can get in). I recently learned that it has actually been repealed in several places. The main reasons on Wikipedia were free speech grounds/refusal to support any party (but just submit a blank ballot?), or a sense that uninformed people might vote on simplistic grounds (surely that isn’t worse than a typical partisan voter?), or an estimated 10% swing to the left (surely that can’t be the real motivation for everyone opposing it), and the website didn’t make a big fuss but it’s also annoying sometimes to spend the time going to a polling place and voting.
How do people from places without compulsory voting feel about it? I’m mostly interested in people’s gut reactions about why this is a good/bad idea, or anecdotes or examples where it would be good/bad.
I'm against compulsory voting since the people who don't vote tend to be the least-informed and least-engaged people, and I see no value to having them wield political power. I can't see how forcing them all to vote would improve the quality of politicians, or of referendum outcomes.
For foreign readers it's worth noting that early voting is open for 2 weeks before the election, and polling places are really densely provided, at least in the cities - I usually have multiple polling places within walking distance of my house (in fact, the nearest one is usually next door, but my point is that the next-nearest in any direction is walkable). Thus, the time-cost to voting is much less than in the USA.
I also think this isn't a coincidence and that if voting in the USA were mandatory there'd be a lot less chicanery around making it painful to vote.
Compulsory voting is a bad idea and nobody should do it.
It is a form of involuntary servitude; a minor one, but you need a really damn good reason before imposing any sort of involuntary servitude, and you don't have one.
To the extent that voting affects policy, compulsory voting shifts policy in the direction favored by the lazy and apathetic, which is unlikely to be a good thing.
And to the extent that voting affects *legitimacy*, compulsory voting imposes a signal of legitimacy whether it is warranted or not. If the system is hopelessly corrupt in one of several common ways, refusing to participate in elections may be the people's last, best hope to signal their disapproval short of violence.
Any regime that institutes compulsory voting, should be presumed to be falsely and artificially boosting their claim to legitimacy unless proven otherwise.
>To the extent that voting affects policy, compulsory voting shifts policy in the direction >favored by the lazy and apathetic, which is unlikely to be a good thing.
I think voluntary voting shifts policy, or at least campaigning, in the direction of the Toxoplasmosis of Rage. The average person disinterested in politics is disinterested because they like the status quo, and their voting preference for the status quo shouldn't be discarded because they're not as 'motivated' as the extremely loud and angry fringes
Also, as for legitimacy, does anyone actually care about what percentage of people in the USA don't vote, and use that to track 'legitimacy'? I know that the % of invalid votes (which are AFAIK deliberate protest votes most of the time) here in Aus is tracked and when it's unusually high it gets talked about, as much as when the vote for no-hope minor parties is unusually high.
USA perspective. My gut reaction to mandatory voting would probably be "oppose", but recently, I think I'm weakly in favor of making it mandatory to participate in the polling process - this is assuming that you're legally allowed to affirmatively abstain from voting.
I'm just completely fed up with how a major portion of US electoral strategy seems to try and involve discouraging participation in the process, disqualifying people from participating, bringing up scares of either fraudulent voters that need strong ID to prevent, or unfair ID requirements that disqualify legitimate voters.
I think that if we just hit the schelling point of "everyone *must* show up and be counted (even if they submit a null vote)", then we can also go and implement strong ID requirements, election security, national holiday for voting, etc.
Some would argue that voting is a 'right' and we shouldn't force people to exercise those, and that's valid, but, I think you can also see voting as a duty. Citizens can't unilaterally opt out of Jury Duty, men can't unilaterally opt out of the selective service. If widespread participation in the democratic process is something _necessary_ to maintain the health of our nation, I think that's valid to call a duty.
The argument against requiring ID is basically that it would be unconscionable to demand that e.g. some impoverished elderly Native American in a distant reservation should go to the city and navigate the bureaucracy to get an ID card. You and I may both be skeptical of that argument, but it doesn't go away if you change "...and if you don't then you can't vote" to "...and if you don't then you go to jail".
You mistake me. I'm not at all skeptical of that argument. I believe and often make that argument. I think that's the motivation behind this push in the first place. That's why people like me hate these laws and try to fight them. But, in a mandatory voting regime, that's demonstrably not the case. There's no scheme to shave a percent or so of low propensity voters off the rolls if everyone has to vote.
Sometime back on one of these platforms a voter id proponent asked what it would take for a voter id opponent to get on board, and this was basically my answer. What it takes is me believing that the intention isn't to shape the electorate, and one way to do that is to have a program that aggressively tries to get everyone to vote. If you're doing that, you build up enough trust with people like me that we don't believe the point is to limit the franchise and get on board.
In the post I went on about different ways that might look. Something like mandatory voting would get there all in one go.
Though, as I note below, I flat don't believe there would have ever been a national voter id movement if we had mandatory voting. Probably the push dies out if we were to get it. Though, at this point, enough people have been convinced of the public reason that it might continue.
So, I'm confused. What happens to the indigent Navajo grandmother who doesn't have and isn't going to get an ID under your system?
You say that if we go to universal mandatory voting the arguments *against* requiring ID go away, so presumably under your universal mandatory voting system we're going to get laws requiring ID to vote (or even just to go about in public). And you say you're not skeptical or the argument that it is unreasonable to expect the indigent Navajo grandmother to actually go out and get an ID. So, come mandatory election day, she's going to be caught without a legally-required ID, unable to cast a legally-mandatory vote, and thus be in violation of the law. Maybe initially she'll just be cited and fined, but she's indigent. So then what?
>So, I'm confused. What happens to the indigent Navajo grandmother who doesn't have and isn't going to get an ID under your system?
Answering despite the lateness of not being on over Thanksgiving. Feel free to ignore.
So, first and most honest answer, I don't know.
Moving on from there. I doubt it would end up being legal to charge someone a 75 dollar fine if they refused/couldn't drive a couple of hours in a car they don't have to a rural DMV that's open twice a week from eight to noon. So I don't think it would come up.
But there could be accommodations. Maybe when you get your fine for non-participation, there's a number. Call the number and show cause and the IdMobile shows up at your house next time there's an opening and gets you an id. (And waives the fine.) If you don't have cause, no joy, pay your fine. Maybe we set up id stations at some polling places to get people who get turned away their ids right then and there. I think there's a bunch we could be doing if the point of the id was actually to make sure that everyone has an id.
We don't do stuff like this now because that's not the real point, it's the public justification. In my state you can vote with a gun license but not a student id, not even a student id issued by the state system. I'm sure there's a plausible enough excuse for this, but I'm also sure that if student's voted 70/30 for the GOP, it wouldn't be true. In a mandatory system, hedging out students isn't the point, so shit like that wouldn't be done. And if it was, after a couple of cycles of those kids (or whoever) getting fines, either they would be pissed enough to get the rules changed or harrassed enough to get their ids. Either way it would take care of itself.
>You say that if we go to universal mandatory voting the arguments against requiring ID go away, so presumably under your universal mandatory voting system we're going to get laws requiring ID to vote
Maybe. I think the reason *for* requiring the ID goes away too, so probably the thing peters out and political energy moves elsewhere.
>And you say you're not skeptical or the argument that it is unreasonable to expect the indigent Navajo grandmother to actually go out and get an ID. So, come mandatory election day, she's going to be caught without a legally-required ID, unable to cast a legally-mandatory vote, and thus be in violation of the law. Maybe initially she'll just be cited and fined, but she's indigent. So then what?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here? She doesn't pay her fine. It gets some late fees. Maybe comes off her tax refund? Next cycle it happens again. And the next. Eventually she gets used to it, or gets irritated enough to figure something out for the id. I think small incentives can work for stuff like this. It's like the quarter for a cart at ALDI. It doesn't need to be huge to work.
Strong oppose. Why force people to exercise their rights? If we force people to exercise their right to vote, lets also force them to voice their opinions, force them to own guns, etc.
I'm agnostic as to its broader effects on the polity and don't particularly care whether it produces better or worse outcomes (however one wishes to define better and worse), but deeply oppose mandatory voting for the same reasons I oppose mandatory military/government service of all kinds: forcing people to perform involuntary labor is wrong. I need a reason a hell of a lot more compelling than 'it might marginally improve some policy outcomes, particularly if you prefer left-wing policies, maybe' to justify an invasion of human liberty that substantial.
I weakly support mandatory voting under the theory that if everyone is required to vote then it breaks down systems that incentivize certain groups to not vote including the poor. I think wrt voting a lot of the poor are in a Molochian situation where it is individually rational to not vote but they would all be better off if they all voted.
I don't vote and accordingly I resent the idea of being forced to. If my country ever passed mandatory voting laws, every year I would vote for the party whose platform is closest to "literally hang the bastards who implemented mandatory voting".
I don't think forcing me to vote would make democracy work better.
I'm a New Zealander who has lived and worked in Australia and now live in the UK. Cannot support the claim that Australia "rode out the Trump-Johnson-Xi years with only a small handful of crazy/overtly racist politicians". Australian politics looks if anything to have a higher baseline of this. This is obviously hard to measure but I'd say the evidence is a wash/slightly negative, for instance Australia lags other developed nations in addressing climate change by a large margin.
In terms of perspectives where it isn't compulsory, it gives you one decision above who to vote for, which is whether to vote at all. People can have different levels of investment in different elections, and can choose accordingly. The government choosing which elections are important enough to warrant compulsory voting seems bad (though to be clear, not *that* bad, just worse than the alternative).
I do however strongly support Australian's ability to vote Harambe.
>Cannot support the claim that Australia "rode out the Trump-Johnson-Xi years with only a small handful of crazy/overtly racist politicians".
I'd have to agree on this. We've avoided strong *polarisation* (and thus e.g. while one can wonder about the prospect of a US civil war, one in Australia is just a laughable idea), which can fairly be attributed to IRV + compulsory voting enforcing the Median Voter Theorem and thus making our major parties near-clones, but we definitely do have some nutjobs in Parliament (and not just the Senate; the Greens have seats in both houses, and while I used to be a big fan, at this point they literally want to ban two of the five highest-polling parties so I think "nutjobs" is an accurate descriptor).
I think NZ is quite possibly the best designed electoral system extant in the world, and I agree that Australia's isn't quite as good, but are you saying that AUs is as bad as the US or Europe, or are you merely saying you think we're second place to NZ?
I really don’t want anyone who doesn’t care enough to show up voluntarily to make decisions about how the country is run.
Ultimately it would be better IMO to switch back to a franchise that was more restricted. I take a very dim view, for example, of not requiring ID in order to vote: if you don’t have the executive function to arrange to have some sort of identification, I’m skeptical of your worthiness to steer the country. I would prefer to limit it to those who have skin in the game for a certain amount of time. So, for example, a good limitation for local elections might be residency for greater than one year.
War in Ukraine and ACX on death in winter: "The Economist" has a long article about both topics:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2022/11/26/high-fuel-prices-could-kill-more-europeans-than-fighting-in-ukraine-has
The SBA dollar was the same size as the successful Canadian loonie. But they should have made it more distinguishable by making the color and edge different from the quarter the way Canada did.
My recollection is that early images showed the SBA dollar was planned to be polygonal. If so, I wonder why they dropped it for the quarter-like milled edge. (Itself a vestgial artifact of precious metal coins, where it was a guard against clipping.)
More recently, they made gold-colored dollar coins with smooth edges. But those didn't catch on either. The key to the loonie's success was that Canada got rid of paper dollars.
@Scott
Just because I tend to miss "the the" in your writings doesn't mean I miss it in other people's writings. Have you considered controlling for the writer in your duplication tests?
A couple years back, I was having a discussion in a travel forum about moving overseas, and to my surprise an Italian joined the conversation and made the argument that immigrating from one highly developed country to another on a whim is morally wrong. He argued that refugees coming to Europe from war-torn regions is fine when their homelands are inhospitable, but if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way, almost blind to/removed from the culture and nation that inhabits it.
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you'd say, "If it were America of 20 years ago I would agree, but with the way things are going lately..." - you get the idea. Anyway, it kind of shocked me and it's an idea I still haven't reconciled. Like lots of Americans, now and then I get those thoughts of various European countries I'd love to live in, and many of us actually do make that move. Still, when I think over my criteria for -what- country I'd like to live in, I run out of material pretty quickly. Why France? "Well, they have amazing food, the best creamy cheeses, killer wine, great labor laws, the country is beautiful...". Why Netherlands? "Great infrastructure, high HDI, they all speak English...". Across thousands of miles of ocean, you too can enjoy a life that's 10-15% better than life at home. Something about it begins to feel trivial. Now - this is not some rebuke against those who wish to immigrate. I'm still meditating on my true feelings over this, because perhaps he had a point.
The argument seems to assume that immigration is basically free (for all parties involved) and indistinguishable with respect to the immigrant (meaning the host country can't distinguish between an American and someone from a war-torn country).
If we grant that, then yes, your Italian has a very good point. People who have no country or a very broken country should be prioritized over people who already have tolerable countries. I will note that this argument is ignored a lot by all people all the time, in matters both related to immigration and not. (for example, this argument would seem to imply that streets and other public spaces should be prioritized to homeless people, since they don't have any homes unlike the many people who have homes and still go to fill those spaces). But, it's still a basically good argument that should be followed if its premises hold.
The trouble is, its premise is huge. Immigration is not free, the African from a war-torn country is already 80%\90% will not succeed. The 10%\20% who will succeed can be comfortably hosted *in addition to* the Americans who want to live in Italy. Even then, the state governing Italy will probably huff and puff and make a big noise about "those damn poor africans degrading our infrastructure", and while this is immoral, it has *some* elements of truth and reasonableness and - regardless of anything - will result in the country being significantly more tolerant of Americans than Africans. So the host country itself wants some people and not others, and if wanted people refrain from immigration then this will not increase the likelihood of unwanted people.
I also disagree with :
>if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way
This seems to play a lot on the trope of the "Businessman American" who does everything for money and by the books. I see absolutely no reason why Americans, a pool of 300+ million people, should be subjected to this stereotype. I see no reason why some Americans can't learn the native language and be emotionally and passionately involved in the country and culture they immigrated to. Because this is how humans work usually, they get attached to the land that welcomes them. (even more so if a previous land exiled or repulsed them)
Meanwhile, I can equally well say that :
>if say an African from a war-torn country were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their survival-chance per location in a kind of detached analytic way
And it would be no more false than the original claim. If this claim sounds racist or unacceptable to someone but the original doesn't, then this is an indication that there are serious problems with this someone's racism intutions, they are biased against a huge pool of humanity. To me, they are both racist and unacceptable, at least without overwhelmingly strong evidence.
Immigration is a hard moral problem, and the more general problem of "Being somewhat rich or at least well-off in a world where people can't find food or basic shelter" is even harder and depressing, and it torments me every waking hour to think of all the things I have but others don't for no reason but raw brute chance. But the way your Italian approached this doesn't impress me in the slightest, it's a very shallow and cherry-picked viewpoint that demeans an entire continent-worth of people while elevating another continent-worth of people to the status of cultural angels who will never make troubles or have integration difficulties with the host country that accepts them.
I think your vision is getting clouded by the inclusion of nationality here. Any stereotype about Americans is irrelevant here - if we accept the Italian's viewpoint, Europeans would be more culpable anyway since there's 3x more Europeans in America than the other way around. Essentially it's a screed against superficial migration, be it economic or cultural. Superficial economic migration is motivated by a desire to gain a slight edge on your income, in such a way that it will not critically affect your quality of life (e.g. only boost your power to consume or something). Superficial cultural migration is motivated by a desire to become a member of another country's culture without real ties to it. By contrast, the "authentic" forms of migration would be (a) leaving your country because it's impossible to maintain a basic livelihood, or (b) leaving because you have a genuine connection (e.g. your mother is a native and you want to experience it). There is no assumption here that the "authentic" migrants would integrate better, of course, and there is also no judgment passed on the quality of people from any country that would produce "shallow" migrants. The point is that unnecessary or trivial migration itself is a shallow activity, and (implicitly) any migration with no real purpose behind it is vain. Anyway, I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's still interesting. No one ever brings it up.
I don't see why that argument wouldn't apply equally to moving between cities in the same state.
I'm in favor of people moving around a lot; the more places you go, the more cultures you run into, the more your culture rubs off on them and theirs on you. If you want to avoid cultural blindness, you need people travelling abroad and spreading the cultures, otherwise people are stuck with the local stereotypes as their only reference.
Is it okay to store physical US fiat coins inside of my physical leather wallet*?
I got into an argument over this with my dad earlier this week. My dad argued that the coins could damage the surface of the wallet since the coins have sharp edges. However, I argued that the wallet is probably strong enough, and that storing my coins elsewhere would make it much harder for me to find them/mark them as mine. After looking this matter up on my dad's command (and filtering out the content relating to the other kind of coins and wallets), the only relevant result I found was a guide for coin collectors (https://www.preservationequipment.com/Blog/Blog-Posts/How-to-store-coins-full-guide ) which suggested that whatever I put my coins into should be acid-free.
*I deliberately added the extra words to make it clear that I am not discussing the other type of coins and wallets.
EDIT: remove unbalanced parenthesis
There's also this sort of thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Leather-Squeeze-Pouch-Purse-Marshal/dp/B00K315LYG/
Which is ever-so-slightly less nerdy than the plastic type that Gunflint mentioned. And also slightly less good at keeping the coins inside. :-)
American custom, as I understand it, is to keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket. When you get home, put the change in some kind of container on your dresser; periodically convert this to paper money or deposit it at the bank.
> keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket
Interesting; I might try this. However, I am in the habit of showering after I come home and so I tend to throw my clothes into the laundry basket oblivious to their contents (they usually don’t have any). I might have lost money this way.
Huh? I don't even understand the question. Where *else* would you possibly store the coins? There should be a part of the wallet that is designed to contain coins, and if something is designed to contain coins, I would assume that it is in general safe to store coins there.
Before reading the rest of your comment I honestly thought that the question was a parody on questions about cryptocurrencies, or something like that.
Perhaps it is a cultural difference and the American wallets do not have a part to store their sharp-edged dollar-shurikens? Or do the kids these days only use credit cards and cryptos, and the coin is something they only see at a museum? I feel quite stupid now, because I must be missing something obvious.
Checked my wallet: it currently contains 30 coins with total value €11.42, plus a few banknotes, an id card, debit card, medical insurance card, and driving license. It is perhaps bigger than it would need to be, but it's winter and I have large pockets on my coat, so it's okay.
My current wallet doesn't have a place to store coins. You can put them in with the bills, but they tend to fall out. I haven't looked closely my friends' wallets, but I don't think any of them had coin pockets either.
It’s at least partially a cultural thing. Like the game the rest of world calls football and the metric system, for some reason dollar coins never gained traction in the US. No looneys or twonies for us, thank you.
I’m not sure exactly why.
For years I’ve been in the habit of carrying coins loose in my pocket till I get home when I put them in a can on my dresser. When the can gets full I bring it to the coin counter at a bank and exchange it for folding money.
Some people are just afraid of change.
(Ba Dum Ching! Not my quip, alas, but I love it so.)
The story I've heard (but haven't seen an international survey to confirm) is that countries with successful higher value coins discontinued the equivalent bills, while we never did the same with the $1 bill when initiating the Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea, or Presidential dollar coins.
Since inertia and established infrastructure favored the bills (e.g., more vending machines take bills than dollar coins, and there was no feedback mechanism to speed retrofitting) bills remained standard and the coins were relegated to curiosities.
(We do seem to have unusual inertia re currency, given our loyalty to minting pennies as their value dwindles into nothingness.)
Anecdotally, the one place dollar coins reliably showed up was as change at Post Office vending machines, I assume due to some mandate.
I suspect another factor is that a transition from bills to coins for the major currency unit (dollar or similar) faces a lot less pushback if it happens when existing coins have enough purchasing power that people are still in the habit of carrying around a significant number of coins rather than just dumping them on the dresser at the end of the day. This makes a big difference because without this, introducing a coin big enough to be worth carrying around routinely would cause an annoying inconvenience at first and require a change of cash-carrying habits to accommodate.
The US has long since missed this window, although a new window might be coming up as inflation erodes the value of a dollar to the point where the coin would just get dumped on the dresser anyway and the bill would be increasingly seen as annoying wallet-clutter. And as more and more people abandon cash entirely in favor of cards and direct electronic payments.
The Susan B Anthony dollar was early enough that it should have been able to hit the first window, but it was a particularly bad design, being too similar in size and appearance to a quarter. It would likely have been better accepted had it been either a bit bigger like the contemporary Kennedy half dollar (the slightly earlier Eisenhower dollar had failed to circulate because it was too big, and because it was desirable as a minor collectable), or at least a different color like modern dollar coins.
These things used to be pretty common. Using them marked you as kind of nerdy though. Up there with plastic pocket protectors.
If you are going for an Apollo project engineer look, one of these would be perfect.
https://www.amazon.com/Made-Oval-Squeeze-Coin-Purse/dp/B0037NM8UC/ref=asc_df_B0037NM8UC/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198077048526&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=7422091239460915550&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019538&hvtargid=pla-348225386822&psc=1
A wallet can't hold more than a trivial number of coins anyway, and US coins have a maximum value of 25 cents, meaning that you're making your wallet uncomfortably bulgy to hold an extra few bucks at the most.
Will you be bringing back challenge mode open thread?
I remember that Hamilton (the musical) got some interest in the SSC comment field back in the days. So if you have missed it, let me tell you about "Scamilton". A Texas church put up their own Hamilton production. It's surprisingly ambitious, unauthorized and totally illegal. The cast is not-great, they cut out some songs (for brevity I assume), censor all the bad words and add a new little segment about Hamilton finding Jesus. And the post-show sermon offers help to those struggling with homosexuality. Ergo, it's a glorious trainwreck. Plenty of youtubers have been on it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GLBEBCwqp4
For more in the same genre, I highly enjoyed Jenny Nicholsons video on church plays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4gM7RC1M0
> Jenny Nicholsons video on church plays
Wow! These things belong to the genre "so bad that it is actually quite fascinating to watch", although I suspect that watching the entire plays would get boring again... unless you watched them while stoned.
Whatever happened to fluidic devices like fluidic transistors?
They can't be made anywhere near as small or as fast as electronic transistors, they leak, they have very little in the way of compensating advantages and there are few if any applications where those dubious advantages would make them the preferred option. If there are a few, it's not enough to pay for the research, development, and manufacturing base to support them.
They're nifty and clever and cool, yes, but so were Zeppelins.
Fine-Grained feedback on online comments and its challenges.
At some point in internet history, probably beginning with Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), some genius figured out the idea of self-curating online communities. That is, give every user the ability to "vote" for a comment, post, reply,etc..., and by the magic of "Wisdom of the Crowd" and other such dynamics you can obtain useful signals about the quality of those things. Basically, make the entire userbase an auxiliary network of moderators\curators operating in parallel without communication.
This is a good idea in the abstract, any idea that treats humans as dumb cells\units\components in a big network that is much smarter than the sum of its constituent humans has an intuitive appeal to me, I see it as a good approximation of reality and it has pleasing parallels to computer science and biology that I love.
The idea is sometimes criticized, however, as too crude. To take the 2 online communities with upvote-downvote systems I'm most familiar with, Reddit and HackerNews, a heavily downvoted comment can mean that the content of the comment is any of lots of things. Some are, ranked from most-deserving of downvoting to least-deserving according to my subjective view, :
1- Spam and obvious off-topic nonsense ("Come chat with hot single girls at scam.sexxxx.totally.not.a.scam", or "GO TRUMP 2024" in a non-politics thread)
2- Trolling (saying something while meaning something entirely different or opposite or not meaning anything at all, for the sole purpose of deceiving and upsetting people) and obvious bad-faith takes
3- Incorrect claims presented as facts
4- Mainstream opinions or facts phrased aggresively and\or personal insults
5- Controversial opinions (whether in general or just relative to the subreddit\thread it's posted in)
6- Comments that indicate the commenter hasn't read the article\video\etc posted
7- Jokes (on reddit, the overused ones, on HackerNews, nearly all)
And possibly more. It's obviously suboptimal to imply that all those things are the same and treat them uniformly, but that's exactly what upvote/downvote does. Suggestions to reform the system can be classified into 2 categories :
A- [Often Suggested] Fine-Grain the feedback. Instead of a generic yes/no counter, or even 2 yes/no counters (as in old youtube), make the feedback much more varied and high-dimensional. A button for spam, a button for overused jokes, etc... Optionally offer various filtering algorithms and other user-modifiable configuration that punish those things differently or not at all. Optionally offer buttons for positive things as well as negative things ("funny", "factual", ....). Basically, move the simplistic up/down mentality to a rich tag system with all its associated paraphernalia.
B. [Original To Me, as far as I know] Fine-Grain the *applicability* of the feedback. Instead of upvoting or downvoting **a comment**, you should really only upvote or downvote **a selection of text inside the comment**. In an ordinary politics thread, "GO TRUMP 2024" shouldn't really be a punishable thing to say (or, in an A-system, should only be tagged with the "Obnoxiously Capitalized" or "Trump Fanboyism" tag). It's probably the "TRUMP WON 2020 !!!" part before it that should be downvoted (or tagged "Non-Factual" in an A-System, along with the obligatory reference to the legal machinery that rejected the claim). This also opens the door to "vote-restoring edits" (or tag-revoking edits in the A-system generalization) : If you delete the non-factual trump claim, all the downvotes due to that claim instantly disappears, or at least decrease in effect. If feedback is tied to the content of the comment, then it makes sense that deleting content invalidates or dilutes the feedback.
Systems A and B are orthogonal as far as I can see, and they are very customizable and full of degrees of freedom. You can mix and match tons of unique cocktails from them as basic ingredients. They potentially offer massive improvments in the quality of signals on online comments.
The difficulties facing those systems, however, are legion:
1- [Applies to A and B] People won't use them correctly, Anti-Trump users will see "TRUMP 2024" and mash all the negative buttons without thinking, people will see spam and downvote as many selection of text as humanly possible thinking that will make it disappear faster. (and probably they would be right if there is a "master" ranking algorithm that averages all the downvotes\tags over a single comment, but they are still corrupting the signal)
2- [Applies to A and B] It's exhausting to use them correctly. This is a subtly different point from (1), but it reinforces its effect. It's not fair to ask people to consider all 5-10-20 tag we came up with (system A), or all possible selections of text in a comment (system B), or every possible combinations of both (hybrid). People will just focus on the most popular 3 or 4 tags, and the most eye-catching selection of text in a comment, and ignore all the rest, making it useless or worse. Even if different people focus on different things, this differential "sparse" feedback feels wrong somehow, like if 50% of people only ever press on "unfunny" when applicable and 50% of people only ever press on "non-factual" then some non-factual comments won't be labeled as such and some non-funny comments won't be labeled as such and..., so heckin complex. And what if the percentages of people who care about each tag is different as well ?
3- [Applies To B] What is the granularity of "claims" ? I handwaved this away with "Selections of Text" but this is clearly nonsense, it will allow some mad anti-trump users with too much free time to downvote "T", "TR","TRU","TRUM","TRUMP","TRUMP W",etc... in a "TRUMP WON 2020" comment. The issue comes back in the "revoking" feature too : if the pro-trump user deleted "TRUMP WON 2020" and instead wrote "THE DONALD TRIUMPHED IN TWENTY-TWENTY", should that revoke or decrease the effect of the downvotes or "non-factual" tags ? should it notify the users who downvoted to consider un-downvoting instead of doing it automatically ? (and how many would care and actually go back and read again? and is that fair for them even if they do?) how similar should two snippets of text be to be considered the same (and what if the original claim was at the top of the comment but the new claim is now at the bottom instead?) how.... oh holy heck this looks like it's AGI-complete.
1,2 and 3 are complete deal breakers that significantly nullify the possible benefits of the 2 systems or any hybrid of them, and - worse - they all look like extremly gnarly "people's problems" that require Politics-Heavy or AGI-complete machinery to solve.
Thoughts ?
My intuition is this would be too burdensome. Facebook did expand to some amount of emojis beyond the thumbs up and down. I notice Discord and Google Chat allow for this too. Yelp has a wider selection of tags. Perhaps with Yelp and Facebook they serve some sort of algorithmic sorting function. You might start by adding one or two symbols at a time ('M' for Misleading, 'laugh emoji' for Funny) and build up to your complex vocabulary of tags over time. Starting with a complex menu is a recipe for choice paralysis.
Set up an economy instead, so you don't have to program all the subtlety of human judgment. Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like. So people who make comments readers value, for any and all reasons, complex or subtle, will earn more tokens, which they can then use to post additional comments.
The reason to insist on readers needing to pay their own tokens to reward a comment they like is to avoid the piling on, either positively or negatively, that happens when there is no cost to the reader to upvote or downvote. If you allow readers to award a varying number of their own tokens, people who feel really strongly can have more influence (at a higher cost, of course), which means a comment that affects a few people strongly can "sell" for as much as a comment that affects a lot more people but kind of meh. Writers can choose to specialize in high-volume low-innovation but popular comments, or in low-volume high-innovation comments that strongly appeal to a smaller, more discerning crowd -- be either Hyundai or Bentley.
You could also vary the price for posting a comment, make it so that unusually long comments, or comments that contain swear words, or which have/dont have assorted keywords matched up to the topic subject cost more/less.
You could also avoid free-riding by allowing writers, if they are sufficiently confident, to charge a certain price for seeing their comment at all -- meaning, the reader has to pay a certain price to even see the comment in the first place. You better have an awesome reputation as a writer to try this, but some people could pull it off no doubt.
Over time, some writers will become "rich" through making comments that are sell well, and others will become "poor" through making Edsel comments. Then we can set up a taxing authority that will redistribute wealth on the basis of assorted social justice nostrums, leading to class warfare, bitter recriminations, revolution, all the rich tapestery of human society.
That seems like it incentivizes creating multiple accounts to feed your main one tokens.
I did not suggest tokens had any meaning or life outside of a given account, meaning if Carl Pham is impoverished in tokens that have meening in the ACTX ecosystem I didn't suggest any method by which ol' Carl could be given tokens by his cousin Enoch Root who has tons.
But I'm curious: let's say that's possible by some mechanism, tokens can be freely traded back and forth between writers. How does this incentivize the creation of multiple "writer personalities?" And if people created multiple personalities under this economy, would that be bad?
Accounts, not personalities. The claim was
"Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like"
This requires an account to have tokens before it posts, which means new accounts are going to have to start with some, or possibly accumulate them over time. So people will make several accounts to generate extra tokens to fund their posts so they don't have to worry about running out.
I am curious of how many physicists are present in the rationalist movement (compared to other studies)?
I ask because when I was an high schooler i was attracted to transhumanism and rationalism and i assumed that studying physics i would have found more people interested in it. However, some years later, i know noone in my institute that knows what rationalism, effective altruism or ssc are.
(Personally, studying physics made me grow skeptic of some of the "accepted wisdom" (coff drexler coff) so maybe this has some selection effect)
3% of the respondents to the 2020 SSC survey described their profession as Physics: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/
Here is a rough answer. Take the petition asking the NYT not to doxx Scott Alexander (https://www.dontdoxscottalexander.com/signatures). Look at the full list of signatures. Ctrl+F+Physics. 93 out of 7500 signatories are physicists. Of course, some (many) may simply be fans of Scott's writing without considering themselves `rationalists' (and there may be others who do consider themselves rationalists but were too chicken to sign the petition).
Few physicists I know really give a rat's ass about the structure of human society beyond some vague wish that it not be too intrusive or too shocking to inhabit, and even fewer are strongly interested in subtle issues of the philosophy of justice and equity -- if you loved that stuff, you'd go into the liberal arts instead and revel in it.
That includes me. If I feel like I should spend part of my dough helping others, I might be willing to spend 20 minutes listening to an argument about why I should give it to Charity A versus NGO B, but not much more. And chances are I'll just use it to help out a person I already know anyway. So subtle questions about how to best distribute charitable giving are not very interesting to me, certainly not enough to participate in an organized movement.
None of the other formal paraphernalia of the movement seem that interesting, either. As an empiricist I find most attempts at predicting Black Swan (low probablity high impact) events, like AIs becoming intelligent and evil, to be functionally sterile -- I just don't believe the chances of the predictions being accurate are sufficiently greater than zero to be worth any action in particular, and even the discussion seems a bit angels on the head of a pinnish. I'm also not that interested in promoting broad "rational" public discourse, on account of (1) people aren't really like that, so it's ultimately futile, and (2) "rational" discourse can easily fall into a Wikipedia style where mindless rules ("a citation, however lame or unrelated, always improves the argument") substitute for quality of logic, and (3) its not obvious that rational beats emotional all the time anyway. A lot of what we need to communicate with each other as human beans is actually emotional, or gets across better if colored that way, so I'm dubious of the broad social value of making communication more colorless and suffused with syllogisms.
The only reason I would interact with rationalism movement folks is because, on the whole, they tend to be smarter, with a greater variety of experience, express themselves better, and are more tolerant of intellectual diversity -- all of which means they're more interesting to talk to. As a parallel, I find it interesting to talk to seriously religious people, even if I don't share their faith, because they have thought more deeply about subtle existential issues than people who have no religion (other than standard-issue default-mode weak hedonism-materialism-sentimentality).
I don't have an answer, but I would warn against taking a probe of this blog as a general indicator of rationalism or EA, I expect it's much more diverse owing to the larger variety of topics.
Physicists are too smart for this I suppose.
Does pregnancy mess with your immune system in any direction? I have a kid and am pregnant with the second, and my subjective impression is: I was healthy before the kid (including through first pregnancy); I caught a lot of whatever the kid caught as he started going to daycare, including the wave of catch-up infections as people came out of COVID quarantines; I seem to have dodged the last two infections that the kid brought home from school. As an isolated observation, it could have a number of causes, including random luck or the kid recently bringing home kids' diseases that don't jump to adults as much. Or it could be pregnancy ramping up the immune system (if that's true, I'd expect a lot of women to complain of allergies during pregnancy). Or it could be lifestyle choices -- I might be sleeping more, and I'm dutifully taking multivitamins which I normally don't do -- and if that's what's going on, I'd like to know so that I can keep doing it! Statistics probably can't help me disentangle "luck" vs. "I normally run a mild vitamin deficiency," but it might be able to weigh in on whether pregnant women have better immune systems?
Congrats on your second Elena!
Thank you!
The coolest thing that I found with my second was how different they turned out to be from the first. Not necessarily in looks, but in temperament, interests and behaviour.
Enjoy getting to know your new arrival!
From Dr. Victoria Male (lecturer in reproductive immunology at Imperial College) here https://youtu.be/fFudXb8l7H8?t=32:
"A long time ago in the 50s it was suggested that maybe in pregnancy a woman's immune system would be weakened to help her to tolerate the fetus...but actually we now know that really the immune system doesn't get suppressed during pregnancy but it does get changed in some ways. So some people with certain kinds of autoimmune diseases that are really dependent on antibodies will find that their diseases get worse during pregnancy, so you're getting a stronger antibody response. But people who have autoimmune diseases that rely on things more like T-cells, might find that their disease gets better during pregnancy. And similarly we see that pregnant women are more susceptible to some infectious diseases and for some infectious diseases it makes no difference. And for some infectious diseases, actually they seem to do a little bit better."
Thanks!
My pleasure!
I found this interesting treatise about magical fantasy settings -> http://jbr.me.uk/mytho.html (especially parts 5-6), describing how a world that was created ex novo -- without needing to arise from natural/evolutionary processes, or to imitate one -- might look; extremely different from what we are familiar with, in which life is shaped by natural selection, geography by plate tectonics, and so on. (It also contains some IMO less-than-perfectly-fair criticism of traditional fantasy and Tolkien in particular that might rub people here the wrong way; I hope they will not turn you off from the rest.)
Some choice quotes:
"After all, there's no reason to imagine the first appearance of the “gene for magic” would be in a sapient species. [...] So feel free to go and visit some biosphere where the wildlife has developed thaumaturgical powers, but don't come back. If you arrive early enough to find it ruled by parasitic para‐wasps that can turn you into a willing host for their larvae, you're relatively lucky, because all the non‐magical parts of that insect are vestigial. Give it another million years and the place will be a witch's cauldron of cell cultures whose sole purpose is to pump out clouds of retroviral hex‐chromosomes."
"Earth's flora and fauna naturally fall into families sharing large sets of characteristics (toothy, furry, viviparous mammals versus beaky, feathery, oviparous birds) just because all the members of a given family share a common ancestral bodyplan. A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way. [...] Folkloric secondary worlds do often seem to nod in this direction by having furry/feathery hybrids like griffins and owlbears and whatnot, but there shouldn't be any coherent taxonomic groupings to hybridise – the things that look something like lions and something like eagles are liable to turn out to reproduce via acorns."
"... we should anticipate that the creatures tailor‐made for domestication by a beneficent providence would resemble perambulatory mushrooms rather than geese or goats. [...] If predators and parasites and prey aren't all locked in an eternal genetic red‐queen's‐race, there's no point leveraging chromosomal variability with a fancy diploid reproductive mechanism. In other words, there's no practical need for sex [...] Elves themselves [...] aren't going to have any evolutionary vestiges like tailbones or wisdom teeth; everything's there because it's biologically or aesthetically appropriate. [...] Their hands aren't feet that have been put through a minor redesign to make them work better as manipulatory appendages, they're organs designed purely for their current role. And similarly, while we upstart monkeys do our talking with repurposed masticatory organs [...] they have articulatory organs that were designed with that function in mind all along."
"In such a cosmos, living things are special because they're full of élan vital; caterpillars turn into butterflies because they're attracted to the right Platonic form by morphic resonance; and magic works because the meaning of your incantation is a thing in its own right that can have a direct impact on whatever it refers to. [...] If organisms are animated not by adenosine triphosphate but by a ghostly vital essence, having a cerebral cortex as well as a soul is redundant – look at ents, which are remarkably nimble thinkers when you consider that their heads are made of solid wood. [...] that the simplest and most obvious way for messages to get from one mind to another is for them to hop across psionically without ever going near the material plane. That sounds as if it would work much better, but it would mean a setting with no need for conlangs."
I remember reading a fantasy setting that had this as a bit of backstory flavor. The first magic users were single-celled organisms that assembled teeny-tiny ritual circles out of proteins, which became the ancestors of all life on Earth.
For the most part this didn't have a lot of impact on evolution (only humans are smart enough to *consciously* use magic, so all the powerful spells are human-only), but it means that you can do cool "biological magic" like altering your body's cells to secrete magic potions.
> A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way.
Nonsense. It would be organized however the Creator wants it to be organized. It might have no coherent taxonomy, it might have extremely coherent taxonomy, or anything in between.
Likewise, from the quote about the magic, it looks like this writing is making a lot of assumptions about how magic would "really" work and then crapping on fantasy authors for not following those assumptions.
Sure, but that would only happen if the Creator was deliberately trying to hide the fact that it was designed intelligently (i.e., the "Satan put dinosaur bones in the soil to test your faith" model of creationism). It's the sort of fact about the Creator that cries out for an explanation, and ideally we'd have a better one than "Because the Author wanted an Earth-like world with a cool creation story, and Last Thursdayism is the only way to reconcile that conflict."
The article does bring up the possibilities you suggested for a Creator in a fantasy setting, but the whole thing is really just a digression. The author's main point is that trying to theorize about how the Elvish language evolved over time is in some sense completely pointless, because it will inevitably raise even bigger questions about about how *anything* in a high fantasy setting is supposed to have evolved over time.
Similarly, the part about magic is saying that you can't solve this problem by removing the Supreme Creator and going "it's a normal evolved world like ours, but with magic" because a world where magic exists isn't going to evolve the same sort of life that Earth did without it.
The bestiary is divided into categories because that means your spells can target the categories and not just be one-enemy-specific garbage. "Effective against flying creatures" is a lot more fun to play with than "effective against bald eagles". And then you can overlap them. Look at Pokemon's mass of intersecting enemy strengths and weaknesses.
And the complaint about creation not allowing the ecosystem is silly, because fantasy stories don't have the big ecosystems with lots of overlap, they have very unique creatures with unique skills and stats. Even in videogames where you have strict palette-swap upgrades of previous creatures, they're unique because they have different stats.
Nothing needs to evolve in a fantasy setting with gods. It's the way it is because the gods knock things into proper orbit whenever it tries to go off-track.
If you are optimizing for that sort of thing you'd probably make categories that are orthogonal to each other with as many combinations as possible, not the tree-like hierarchy produced by evolution. (You make a good point, though: this *is* closer to what fantasy games have than the essay's author suggests.)
Having read that, my conclusion is that the author doesn't really like fantasy and would be much happier with a nice, tidy, hard-science SF doorstopper based on proper physics with plenty of equations peppered throughout, rather than all the icky magic.
To which I will recommend a SF story the author would probably hate:
https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/a-random-world-of-delta-capricorni-aa-also-called-scheddi/
This person seems to have little to no tolerance for *myths* in world-building, which is rich coming from someone insisting on a naturalistic approach based on how things went in our world. Creating myths *is* how things went in our world and nobody much cares about "so how did the dragon fit in the cave, then?" because it's all about the archetypes, innit?
As to the conclusion:
"How would languages work in fantasy fiction if they followed the conventions of European folklore the way the rest of the genre does, which means without overthinking the logic of it all and in particular with no anachronistic linguistics? It seems to me the answer is that things would look something like this:
...Alfese/Angelic: some otherworldly entities communicate via inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter. Fortunately when they want to talk to you they can probably do it in Everyday Speech (but that doesn't mean they're going to be regaling you with thousands of years' worth of Chronicles of the Golden Age Before You Lot Turned Up, because they don't need any of that backplot)."
*Somebody* hasn't read as deeply as they claim to have done! 😁
From "The War of the Jewels", 'Quendi and Eldar', Note on 'the language of the Valar':
"Pengolodh cites a ‘Saying’ of Rúmil: ‘The Eldar took few words from the Valar, for they were rich in words and ready in invention at need. But though the honour which they gave to the Valar might have caused them to take words from their speech, whether needed or not, few words of Valarin could be fitted to Elvish speech without great change or diminution. For the tongues and voices of the Valar are great and stern, and yet also swift and subtle in movement, making sounds that we find hard to counterfeit; and their words are mostly long and rapid, like the glitter of swords, like the rush of leaves in a great wind or the fall of stones in the mountains.’
Pengolodh comments: ‘Plainly the effect of Valarin upon Elvish ears was not pleasing.’ It was, he adds, as may be seen or guessed from what survives, filled with many consonants unfamiliar to the Eldar and alien to the system of their speech."
So Tolkien is ahead of you there, Mr. Ray, on 'inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter.'
I suppose all the references to Tolkien are because he really is the 800lb gorilla of invented fantasy languages, and can't be dismissed as just another author pulling it out of the air because he was a philologist, so Mr. Ray's disagreement really comes down to "Well *I* wouldn't have done it that way". But if he's sniffy about Middle-earth, I'd love to dump E.R. Eddings' "Zimiavian Chronicles" on top of him and see how he feels!
Maybe. I'm unpersuaded, because I think the author has entirely failed to consider the quite considerable problems of logical self-consistency. For example, it's just not logically consistent to imagine an ecosystem made of perfect predators and hapless prey, the former will just eat all the latter and then starve to death. It's not logically consistent to imagine a world with infinitely puissant and wise benevolent Elves and also hobbits that struggle with assorted economic, existential, or practical problems, because the latter would just apply to the former for help and not have any problems any more -- there *has* to be some reason why the Elves can't or won't solve all the problems, e.g. they're assholes, they don't get it, there's some karmic reason why it's bad.
Coming up with a fully self-consistent and very complex ecosystem is very, very hard. (And indeed many story-telling failures are rooted in implausible levels of logical inconsistency.) This is probably why most people tend to hew pretty close to reality, which has the virtue of being ipso facto logically self-consistent.
More interestingly, it is possible that improving self-consistency remorselessly drives you to something that ends up looking more and more like objective reality. We don't actually know whether a form of existence that is radically different from the one we see around each other is even possible. For all we know, what we see around us is the way it is because it is ultimately not possible for any fully self-consistent system to be nontrivially different.
Nice! I nearly was going to link you to this via email before I realised you posted it. Surprised/not surprised.
I feel like your own excellent work on the worshippers is worth linking to in this context, too! https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/The-Perfect-Being-937640582
That looks like fun. I was wondering whether the Common Tongue in LOTR was actually plausible.
Poor Tolkien! He suffers from having been the forerunner or influence on a lot of fannish material since his time, so his use of a term like "common speech" got turned into D&D "Common Tongue/Common Speech/Common" and so people are a little led astray by that.
To quote at random from the letters where he briefly discusses language:
"What I have, in fact done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in the Westron into English terms, with some differentiation of style to represent dialectal differences.
Languages, however, that were related to the Westron presented a special problem. I turned them into forms of speech related to English. Since the Rohirrim are represented as recent comers out of the North, and users of an archaic Mannish language relatively untouched by the influence of Eldarin, I have turned their names into forms like (but not identical with) Old English. The language of Dale and the Long Lake would, if it appeared, be represented as more or less Scandinavian in character; but it is only represented by a few names, especially those of the Dwarves that came from that region. These are all Old Norse Dwarf-names.
...The Westron or C.S. is supposed to be derived from the Mannish Adunaic language of the Númenóreans, spreading from the Númenórean Kingdoms in the days of the Kings, and especially from Gondor, where it remains spoken in nobler and rather more antique style (a style also usually adopted by the Elves when they use this language). But all the names in Gondor, except for a few of supposedly prehistoric origin, are of Elvish form, since the Númenórean nobility still used an Elvish language, or could. This was because they had been allies of the Elves in the First Age, and had for that reason been granted the Atlantis isle of Númenor."
"In Gondor the generally used language was 'Westron', a lang. about as mixed as mod. English, but basically derived from the native lang. of the Númenóreans ; but Sindarin was an acquired polite language and used by those of more pure N[úmenórean] descent, esp. in Minas Tirith, if they wished to be polite."
"That the Hobbits actually spoke an ancient language of their own is of course a pseudo-historical assertion made necessary by the nature of the narrative. I could provide or invent the original Hobbit language form of all the names that appear in English, like Baggins or Shire, but this would be quite pointless."
So people speak Westron mainly because it *is* a lingua franca like English, due to the influence of Gondor and Arnor in their heydays. The Rohirrim speak their own tongue, but also Westron, because they are allies of Gondor. The Gondorians speak Westron but also Sindarin, at least the more educated and the noble families still do.
The Hobbits speak Westron because (1) they are a branch of Men and (2) they picked up the languages of Men as they migrated westwards and adopted them for their own use. In Bree, Men and Hobbits mingle, so they keep with the 'common tongue' everyone speaks. 'Ancient' Hobbitish is going to be a language equivalent to Old English, see how the word "Hobbit" in Westron was derived from Rohirric "Holbytla".
Mr. Rye seems to be confusing Tolkien's plan of linguistic spread with the SF fandom trope of a Common Speech everyone uses, so since he knows this is a contrivance of convenience, he imagines Tolkien did the same to have a tidy set-up. Since Tolkien was writing stories in English for English-speaking readers, he naturally used English and had the Hobbits speaking English and everyone else speaking English instead of putting in everyone speaking in their own native tongue and needing to be translated. For in-world purposes of explaining 'how does everyone speak the same language, or at least a language everyone understands?', hence Westron.
I've just realized the very obvious kabalistic/punny connotations of "Bangkok", after being in the city twice, and I can't help but be surprised at how long it took or how well it fits.
Was it only at my summer camp that boys new to puberty, wearing boxer shorts, complained about "Bangkok Balls"?
Kind of Beavis and Buttheady though.
You said Bangkok! Heh heh, heh heh.
Also "Phuket"
So it's that time of year when I wonder whether it was really such a great idea for mankind to migrate past 40° N.
Personally, I want this for the circadian effects rather than SAD. For this reason, I'd consider it useful to be able to fade on the light shortly before I need to wake up.
People around here have been DIYing 10klm SAD lamps, capable of irradiating a 1m^2 area as brightly as daylight (not direct sun) on a clear day for a long time. But LED technology has come far since then so I don't think the traditional LessWrong solution of spamming two dozen domestic lightbulbs is necessarily optimal. So what is the current state-of-the-art?
This preprint promotes the moar dakka approach, cranking the brightness up to 100klm.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.29.21265530v1
High-bay lights like this come as a single unit that can be plugged into mains power:
amazon dot co dot uk/Blivrig-Industrial-Lighting-Waterproof-Workshop/dp/B0B6FKL2VG/
Or you can run a much smaller COB at 30V:
amazon dot co dot uk/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Components-Lighting/dp/B01DBZHUXA
This youtuber has done some high power LED builds that replicate sunlight pretty well in terms of rays being parallel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw&list=PLOJU8YJjFwGN0hMRewz2_u2IefV-vipsk
One of the big challenges seems to be thermal management. By volume, these things are 90% heat sink. Assuming a luminous efficacy of 100lm/W (this is kind of worst-case nowadays) and a brightness of 10klm, we need to dissipate around 100W of heat. The LEDs don't want to go much above 80°C so we have a ΔT of around 60K to play with. Apparently that's close enough to what CPUs need nowadays that you can use heat sinks designed for them. The other, crazier idea I just had was to get a small radiator (either one meant to be on a wall filled with water or a freestanding oil radiator) and dump heat into there, as they are often designed to output a few hundered watts of heat. This could be done either by attaching the heat source directly or using it as the reservoir for a liquid-cooled system.
I'm not sure how best to orient the lighting. I want to make sure a lot of light reaches my eyes but not to dazzle me. Perhaps uplighting would work. I also have plans involving fresnel lenses.
Colour Rendering Index may or may not be important. I'll be buying cheapo LEDs for now but they could be easily retrofitted with ones that produce a more realsitic sunlight effect.
N.B. Links broken to make this post look less spammy. Products are random ones I saw. Not necessarily the best or even good.
So does anybody here have experience with stupidly bright LEDs and/or SAD lamps?
Im 53° and fine. Make your house comfortable and get out during the sunlight.
Most of humanity's great achievements happened north of that parallel. I grew up at 59° N (Stockholm) and later migrated to 36° N (Malta), and the move does appear to have had a strong positive effect on my mood, but it might also have made me more inclined to enjoying a drink by sea as opposed to spending time on some nerdier pursuit more likely to benefit humanity.
A nice benefit of the Euro Zone. For humanity’s sake you should really go back to the cold and dark and put the finishing touches on safe cheap cold fusion though. jk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw&t=16s
Simulated sunlight, not just the color and the brightness, but also with parallel rays.
I'm at 47.5° N too. I've used the SunUp dawn simulator for years - it's basically a programmable dimmer with a 400W receptacle, into which I currently plug a 150W halogen. The only problem is that they aren't being made any more, but I hear that you can get them on eBay sometimes. (There's also a lesser version called the SunRizr, which isn't as programmable.)
For interior lighting, I have track lighting, and I've gone in the direction of lots and lots of fixtures, rather than single super-bright lights. It's a 2-track setup, so for one track I have 5000K temperature bulbs, and on the other I have dimmable 2700K bulbs. And the great part about LEDs is that I can add *even more* to the tracks. In the day I turn on the daylight bulbs, and maybe the yellow ones as well, and as it gets dark, I turn off the daylight bulbs, and then dim the yellow ones. The bulbs can be a bit bright for naked eyes, so when possible I shade them, or bounce the light off a wall or ceiling.
After doing some research, I've been going for Philips LED bulbs, especially the 2175 lumen BR40s. They seem to last long, have 90+CRI, dim smoothly and without flickering, and are widely available. From what I can tell, the limiting factor in LED bulb lifetime is not the LEDs themselves, but the circuitry in the bulbs, which is damaged by the heat. So no matter how good a particular light-emitting diode is, if the company that assembled the circuitry doesn't have experience, the bulbs will die faster. Also, the brighter they are, the faster they die. And the more complicated the electronics inside, the faster they die. From what I've heard, anyway.
I grew up at 47.5 but relocated to a noticeably warmer area at 45. I get a bit down when the sun sets before 5 PM but it never turned into anything like SAD.
I visit 45.5 fairly often, but I haven't noticed much of a difference, especially not compared to the 37ish where I grew up.
Yeah the difference between northern Minnesota and the Twin Cities is most noticeable at the beginning and end of winter. Generally being a couple degrees North of where I live means the first snow is a couple weeks earlier and true spring is a couple weeks later. The lilacs bloom in mid may in Mpls and in late May to early June in ‘Frostbite Falls’ territory.
I’m talking about climate in this case not weather. As Red Skeleton used to joke “Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.”
I didn't really get any SAD symptoms until I lived around 47.5° N for a couple years. That was a while back, before LED bulbs were available as more than an expensive novelty. I did get marginal improvement by swapping all of the dim CFL bulbs the landlord had installed in my apartment for 100W equivalent halogens.
I currently live at about 37° N, which isn't far north at all: only half a degree north of the Missouri Compromise line. I do have some super-bright LEDs, though, since I like my workspaces nice and bright. For general illumination in existing light fixtures, the search term is "corn bulb": these have standard Edison socket attached to a big, honking heat sink with lots of LED chips mounted all around its surface. It's a quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to retrofit a fixture designed for incandescents or halogens with something considerably brighter. I've got a two-bulb wall sconce in my office loaded with a pair of 200W-equivalent (6000 Lumens total) corn bulbs.
I'm constrained by the size of my fixture, but without that constraint you can get corn bulbs in the 15-20 klm range. Since these have the heat sinks built in, you shouldn't need to rig up custom cooling as long as there's relatively free air flow around the bulbs.
If you do want to play around with computer heat sinks, Noctua's generally considered the top brand for air coolers. NH-D15 is their top-of-the-line model, consisting of two big bricks of cooling fins with a pair of 140mm fans forcing air through them. It's designed with an overclocked top-of-the-line consumer desktop CPU in mind, so it should handily deal with 200W or so of heat. It's a little on the spendy side, though (about $US100), and you'll need to rig up a power supply (12V DC) for the fans somehow.
Noctua also makes a passive cooler, the NH-P1, which relies on convection only with no fans. It's pretty big, though, and can't deal with quite as much wattage as the fan-driven air coolers.
I’m at about 45 degrees N. I’ve found that if I get together with my friends on December 21 and bang on pots and pans real loud, the sun will start to come back. It’s worked so far anyway.
Any recommendations for what could be called a "recreational chemistry" nonfiction book or blog? Basically, I feel like I have a huge hole in my knowledge of chemistry, and that bothers me since chemistry underlies so much technology. I don't have the will to self-study chemistry textbooks, so I was wondering if there are any "fun" books that could also improve my chemistry literacy. In case it matters, I'm good with math and physics, so not afraid of seeing equations in the text.
"Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" is written in a very casual-friendly and entertaining style, but will teach you plenty about the chemistry of various things that go 'boom' 'foom' or various other entertaining noises. and you can get a pdf version for free legally here:
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Ignition! has also been republished in hardcopy and Kindle formats.
https://a.co/b409d7t
Derek Lowe seems to me the obvious recommendation, so I'll make it since no one else has yet: https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline
Focus is on chemistry in the service of drug discovery, but he writes very well on that topic, if that interests you
My mind went somewhere entirely different from the phrase "recreational chemistry" :D
I was going to link to eg. https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics
Theo Gray's books might be good. I haven't read them myself, but they sell very well, he knows his chemistry decently -- he went as far as a few years into a chem PhD at Berkeley -- and the books are heavily and creatively illustrated. Lots of big-name endorsement, too:
http://home.theodoregray.com/printed-products
https://graysci.com/
The Royal Society has a nice sober blog on chemistry topics:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/
If you want to wander around a webite that was assembled over many years, starting back in the dark ages of HTML v2.0 or so, probably once had a <blink> tag or two, which digs into all kinds of odd little corners, Jim Clark's website is fascinating and does not patronize, the way far too many pop-science resources do:
https://www.chemguide.co.uk/index.html
I ran across this article: There is No Liberal West (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west). I suppose I always thought freedom of speech for example was seriously under attack, but seeing it all laid out like this is rather striking:
> Of course Yousaf and his comrades argue they have no intention to chill freedom of expression, but few can take this seriously, given how many people in Scotland have already been arrested for speech and thought crimes – people like Marion Millar, a feminist who faced prosecution this April for the “transphobic” act of tweeting a photo of a suffragette ribbon and “#WomenWontWheesht” (women won’t shut up). Already, between 2008 and 2018 there were 7,618 convictions for speech under the existing Communications Act of 2003, which the new legislation seeks to significantly strengthen. In Scotland, even filming your pug doing tricks can lead to the police showing up at your door. Maybe we should head south.
> But it would of course be untenable for England – home of John Locke and John Stewart Mill – to be left behind by the Scots, so the rest of Britain is rushing to catch up. Britain now launches manhunts for 12-year-olds who allegedly send racist messages on social media, convicts teenagers of hate crimes for quoting rap lyrics in general circulation (fitting them with ankle monitoring bracelets for extra public safety), and jails people for offensive jokes. But the real innovation of the nation of George Orwell has been the invention of the “Non-Crime Hate Incident” – a brilliant category encompassing anything the police deem to potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere. That was the lesson learned by the unfortunate Harry Miller, whose 2019 tweets about gender were reported anonymously to police, who then quickly stormed into his workplace to “check his thinking.” Some 25,000 such incidents are now investigated by UK police each year, with each case filed in a permanent record that shows up in employment background checks even if no crime is ever prosecuted.
It is regrettable that Freedom of Speech is only really protected in the USA, and depressingly unpopular almost everywhere....
So what can be done about the massive homeless encampments in America? My brother recently went to Denver and was quite shocked by them. He also commented that they seemed to be populated by the mentally ill (unlike in Puerto Rico, where there are no encampments but the homeless seem to be mainly drug addicts, sometimes falling apart with disease), which jives with what I saw in Portland. I once heard that this happened because the big state psychiatric hospitals were forced to shut down, so maybe the homeless do need to forcibly interned?
I am somewhat skeptical about the provide housing solution. I happened to have a neighbor who both went insane and became a drug addict and he completely trashed his house (which was paid for and maintained by his dad) and became homeless all the same.
Its not going to change anyones opinion but it should be noted that the rate of homelessness and the raw number of homeless people is down since 2007:
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/
Though there is a good rise since 2018 particularly in unhoused individuals (but numbers are still below 2007).
It would, however, shed some light on why there are all these encampments. Or maybe where. They're renowned in LA, SF, and NY. Are they rampant elsewhere? Were the people in tent cities today on scattered park benches previously? And did they all gather to LA/SF/NY from somewhere else? Did Somewhere Else's homeless count drop -way- down in the past few years as a consequence?
Indications from my city are that a lot of them come from elsewhere, but mostly regionally connected. Like rain in a watershed basin, all flowing into the same river that goes by the same port city. Probably people in this situation gravitate toward the closest big city that offers social services and low enforcement of drug laws. Mild winters are a plus.
I kinda suspect that there's a ongoing crisis in America of people slipping into homelessness and drug addiction, but that it isn't very visible where it's happening. Instead it looks to an observer like major blue cities are having an eruption of homelessness., but that's just because that's where they all end up.
Melvin hits an interesting point. I used to live in Denver, a long time ago, and it had no such problems. But then they legalized weed and got flexible on drugs in general, and shazam parts of Denver have turned into weird little Red Lectroid nests. I don't know, maybe assuming absolutely everybody over 12 is fully competent to deal with mind-altering chemicals isn't the best public policy, even though it makes the life of suburban middle-class recreational stoners much easier, but I think we're all a little baffled by what would be provably better.
I'm by no means an expert, but my vague impression is that the bulk of the chronically homeless are some combination of drug addicted and mentally ill, and nothing will ever change until those twin scourges are dealt with in less of an ad hoc or fitful manner.
I'd suggest that causation might work slightly differently - if a city legalizes weed, that makes existing homeless people more likely to go there. I can tell that this is thing where I live, because there have been complaints about it, and the pushback has quoted statistics about 90-some-% being local, and then a bit later it came out that living here for 6 months is enough to count as a "long-time resident".
(LOL at the "Red Lectroid Nest".)
Yeah that makes sense. I'm sure it's a fiendishly complex problem, with many intersecting lines of causation, 'cause it involves people, which are complex creatures.
No, I don’t think it was the weed. Homeless encampments started to spring up in the Twin Cities about the same time that Colorado legalized pot. Minnesota just made THC gummies legal in July if this year.
Well, I'm willing to believe Minneapolis/St. Paul is in its own special category of urban crisis, like Portland and Detroit. Seems unusually dysfunctional these days for a Midwestern city surrounded by Ole and Lena types. Maybe SAD has finally unhinged everybody, or it's something in the venison.
Also I think the argument would be stronger if it went "Minneapolis legalized pot at the same time as Denver and did not turn into a dump." I'm pretty willing to believe there are additional reasons for visible Skid Rows, beyond a more relaxed social attitude towards drug use and easier access to drugs. In LA you can sleep outside year round with just a tarp and a blanket, so that probably has something to with it having a much more visible street person population than, say, Dawson Creek.
Anyway, the key proposition to test is: if you considerably reduced drug abuse, and got schizophrenics into treatment and/or homes, would you significantly reduce the population on the streets? If it's the case that Singapore lacks a big homeless population -- I wouldn't know, never been there -- and Singapore notoriously has the strictest drug laws in the world, vigorously enforced, then that's some formidable evidence right there.
Enforce drug laws.
Ah yes, we just need to fight the War on Drugs harder, that should work. Just need to throw another *trillion*[1] dollars of taxpayer money at the problem, it'll definitely work this time.
I would give a list of sources on why the economics on that really, really don't work out (and have been thoroughly demonstrated not to), but thankfully others have done that for me: https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/chapter/economics
[1] This is not an exaggeration; 2022 spending alone was almost $40 *billion*: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FY-2023-Budget-Highlights.pdf
How come it works in Singapore?
The US has never had a war on drugs. "War on Drugs" was just a slogan to cover up the half arsed approach that the US has always taken.
Good luck getting the US to take drug law enforcement seriously when the President's own son is a crackhead though.
For one thing Singapore is more or less an island, and pretty densely populated. I imagine smuggling the stuff in is a lot harder. And their government is far more efficient, so I’d imagine their war on drugs is more competently prosecuted
Singapore has about 1,000 homeless in a population of 5.5 million, which is about 70-300x lower than Denver's homelessness rate. However, in addition to differences in drug laws, Singapore also has an aggressive program of building cheap public housing, as well as having a border so it can have its own immigration policy.
The death penalty for trafficking probably helps.
Agreed. Start shooting drug traffickers.
Do you have an infallible omniscient list of drug traffickers we are supposed to shoot, or is it just anyone who looks like they're probably a drug trafficker, or who is carrying a lot of cash, or whatever?
And, if four college girls pool their money so that one of them can go buy some weed for their party, do we shoot that one girl for being a trafficker? Because one of those girls grew up to be a friend of mine, and a good mother and a skilled coder.
Putting drug dealers in jail for years at a time would be enough if we could do it quickly and reliably to all of them, but we can't do that because we'd get too many innocent bystanders at the same time. Shooting drug dealers *won't* work if it only comes at the end of a lengthy trial and usually not even then because the juries will nullify in this scenario, but we really do have to have the trials.
The only people we're allowed to gun down on sight, are the ones who go around the streets shooting unarmed or otherwise generally peaceable citizens on sight.
I mean, there's a lot of evidence it *did not* result in a more functional society. We have higher rates of teen and adult drug abuse, and obscenely higher rates of incarceration, than almost any first world nation. Yes, some of that is due to geographic distribution of drug production, but at least *some* of the blame has to fall on the policy we've had for 40 years not being effective.
You and I have very different perceptions of the world (as seems typical for our discussions) if you think the "current approach" is not still following the line of the war on drugs. (Those enforcement numbers keep going up, after all)
It's still very clearly focused on judicial and carceral solutions. I'd like the orders of magnitudes to actually be switched between that and "treatment and harm reduction" (maybe along with a touch of the housing model from Singapore, as another comment pointed out) and then see whether an *actually* different strategy pays off.
Maybe even try something truly wild - build a bunch of low/virtually-no cost dorm-style housing in the central valley, and legalize all drugs (even opiates), there, with harm reduction in place, ship druggies there for free if they want to work.
Well, even if you do, the US Surgeon General estimates the annual cost of illegal drug abuse at a cool $193 billion annually:
https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/executive-summary
If you trace that back to the actual source[1], where they give a more detailed accounting, ~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*) and for "Criminal Justice System" costs, which are going have a huge overlap with that $40 billion above (otherwise ~$50b to persecute 1b of property crime doesn't seem like great ROI).
The only things which aren't an indirect cost of enforcement are the non-incarcerated labor costs, which they estimate at ~$30b, and health.
Although I'm skeptical of the "lost productivity" numbers, and you should also be more so, since "they would be perfectly productive member of society if they weren't on drugs" seems like a pretty leftist position.
(Maybe they go more into this in the methodology section, but I don't have time to comb through it. I'd love to see Scott do a more detailed analysis of this at some point, actually.)
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs44/44731/44731p.pdf
"~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*)"
I somehow doubt that every single person convicted for drug possession/dealing would be a hard-working citizen instead. Some certainly would, but that would be *after* they get clean. Maintaining a drug habit *and* steady working is difficult, at least for working/lower middle-class level.
People who abuse drugs don't always, or even usually in my experience, go to jail because of the drugs per se. Prosesecuting low-level drug-only crimes is not high on any DAs list of priorities. People end up in jail because they commit crimes to support a drug habit, or because they do something bad while drunk or high.
So imagining that legalizing drugs across the board would magically prevent drunk driving deaths, or people stealing shit or committing fraud to afford a $1000/day coke habit, or murdering each other over drug turf wars, or for that matter make any significant desirable change in work absenteeism, failures in school or life because you're fucked up, or the implosion of marriages and famlies, is either naive or the result of being in the firm grip of ideology.
I know the mayor of Austin TX appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast a few months ago, talking about this exact problem. I *think* they got on top of it, and the lesson there was "early treatment" - they got on it before it got as bad as SF or LA. But I don't remember exactly what they did.
I'm sure it's addressable later; just more expensive per person. How many cities are at the level of "we need to drop everything else"? Or just "this is the #1 issue for enough voters for it to matter in an election"?
Hmm, I found this article about it: https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-mayor-tells-joe-rogan-what-he-wouldve-done-differently-to-tackle-homelessness, it doesn't seem they've gotten on top of it. But he does say there's "there’s a 90-95% success rate that the person can reintegrate back into society and sustain themselves in a positive way. " if they're housed. But I don't get it, how does that work with drug addiction and mental illness (even if the person developed the mental illness as a result of homelessness)?
Not all homeless people are drug addicts. In fact there’s a clear correlation between homelessness and house prices, and most homeless in San Francisco (for example) are in fact from the area - despite what is generally thought. Which means they were often priced out. These might not be the visible homeless however.
The median monthly income of the homeless in the Twin Cities is about $300. You can’t keep a roof over your head with that little.
Without clicking the link, probably some sort of completion bias: if they define housed as stays in the home for some amount of time, people who can't manage that part don't get counted. Apparently that's what pads a lot of rehab/betterment program's stats (sorry, I don't know from where I know that -- likely SSC)!
Or maybe there are some people you can't get into a house in the first place, or maybe there's criteria for housing that excludes hopeless cases.
I've wondered this myself. Are there big homeless encampments in big European (or Canadian) cities? The most prevalent seem to be in California, so I don't know if that's just the weather or policy or something else.
There have been some encampments in cities in Sweden, but they've been populated by gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria who come to work as street beggars, not by the local homeless.
Hmm, I'm sure that Paris had quite large homeless encampments fairly recently. (Illegal immigrant young men generally).
Nothing like that in my neck of the woods, our local town beggar claims to be homeless but he isn't.
>Are there big homeless encampments in big European (or Canadian) cities?
Um, no? At least in Prague, we are somehow without homeless camps in real public spaces, despite the fact that we recently had an influx of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
Of course, our secret sauce is that homeless encampents are illegal, and would be quickly cleared by police if they would appear in public spaces. Our homeless people do live in squalid conditions, but their encampments are hidden in marginal spaces on the edges of the city.
You sure it's not just the weather? The Internet tells me it's −1°C in Prague right now, with highs tomorrow expected to reach maybe 3°C. Brrr. On the other hand, it won't fall below 10°C in LA tonight, and tomorrow it should reach a comfy 23°C or so.
But weather can hardly explain absence of homeless encampents from May to September, when temperatures seldom fall below 10 degrees even in the night, and many of our parks are packed with middle class picnic-goers. Like me; I was never afraid to go the park to do some reading or dining with friends in pleasant weather outside; from what I gather here, it does not seem to be common in American cities.
No, Saint Paul gets pretty cold too. We have homeless encampments.
No kidding? That's pretty surprising. What do they do when there's 3 feet of snow on the ground and it's −5°F out? Light fires? Sleep in enormous piles? Just freeze to death and get shoveled up by the street sweepers during the next thaw?
Here in St Louis, where it's much warmer than St Paul but still gets cold from time to time, there'll be emergency warming centers. I don't know exactly how it works but it's seems to be a mix of public buildings and churches.
No kidding. It’s pretty sad. Not sure how they stay alive. I drove by a bunch of tents last week and spotted a couple of LP gas tanks so some of them are rigging up heaters I suppose.
The local news showed a religious charity delivering hot meals a couple days ago. These are broken people. A lot of them appear to be older.
"The State uses force (violence) to prevent the middle class from having to see the problem of homelessness (/poverty/etc)" seems to be a common theme in all liberal democracies.
Yep, apparently except in US cities! Which is very interesting
I mean, it's still extremely common in the US. Just not as much as it was. In part because (arguably unconstitutional) excessive uses of force by the State have recently become a big part of the discourse. And the thought that "beating the poor until they stop being poor" might not be working so well, or might be slightly unethical.
The US in general is very exceptional among first world countries, so there's other factor too, of course.
The "unfortunate" side effect is that the middle class now has to *see* the problem instead of it being out of sight and out of mind.
Have you read 'The Road' by Jack London? It describes his experiences of being a hobo and is very readable, often amusing, and offers a stark contrast in police behaviour when dealing with the homeless to today.
He’s not the guy to be ashamed here.
"Destruction of the urban environment" is a great vague and non-specific euphemism for "having to see the effects of homelessness", yes. Having to actually see the poverty and squalor certainly detracts from the urban environment.
(But shitting in the streets, you say. You know what you could do to prevent people who live on the street from shitting there? Make it so they're not living on the street!)
Moving them someplace else doesn't fix the problem, it just prevents the middle class from having to see it.
I don't think you are being fair. The problem which trebuchet refers to is that it is unpleasant and unsafe for middle class people like me to share an environment with the homeless. And it very much can be fixed, or at least greatly ameliorated, by shuffling the homeless away via police violence.
Of course, that does not improve lives of the homeless. Probably it makes them worse, since apparently their revealed preference is to live in parks. But it does improve lives of people like me, which is an actual goal of the policy.
I live in Denver, where the problem has gotten pretty bad. And I was just in DC last week and couldn't find a single square foot of public park in the entire city that wasn't occupied by a homeless person. So it's clearly not just the good California weather that's driving the homeless encampments.
"I suspect that's because until recently people who frequently violated the law due to their addictions/mental illness ended up in prison instead."
I think that's the worst solution for everyone. Someone who is mentally ill shouldn't be in an ordinary prison, because the jail is not set up to handle them, the staff can't be expected to be trained psychiatric nurses on top of everything else, and well, the other criminals that they are locked up with.
They certainly may *need* to be locked up due to crime, but in specialised units. And if we're sending people to jail for lack of any other option, because a combination of bleeding-heart idiots thought "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" was a documentary and greedy idiots thought those big old Victorian institutions with their ample grounds could be sold off for property development and $$$$$$, then that was a very bad decision back then and we need to look at going back to "so how about someplace secure but where appropriate treatment can happen?"
And maybe some people will never be fit to live on their own and will end up homeless, crazy, criminal, and on drugs if they're let out, so institutionalisation is the lesser of two evils there.
I once talked to a guy who helped close Minnesota’s ‘State Hospital’. He helped discard the restraints and electro convulsive apparatus. He knows it was just a movie but nurse Ratched still scares the crap out of him.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/louise-fletcher-nurse-ratched-interview/amp
The one part of this that bothers me is where it appears to accept that ordinary (non-obviously-mentally ill) people convicted of crime can (or even should) be subject to an inhuman and degrading situation -- which I agree is quite often what an ordinary prison is.
I'm actually not OK with that. People who are convicted of crimes are still people, and because they have some debt to work off does not mean they can or should be treated like orcs where it's generically OK if they are terrorized or abused, because they are just inherently evil. (I might deviate from thinking they're not orcs in some harsh cases, I think there certainly are people who are deeply evil, but even then I think allowing random abuse and torture is wrong, because of what it says about us, the people in whose name that abuse is being done, or allowed. Execute them, perhaps, or lock them up safely forever, but do not abuse or allow to be abused.)
So in some sense I would say that concluding that the mentally ill should not be confined to a prison is also equivalent to an indictment of prison per se: it means the prisons we do have are inhumane institutions, which allow the abuse and degradation of its inmates in a way that is not consistent with full respect for, let us say, the fact that every man is made in the image of Christ, even if his decisions have been deeply evil. He has abused himself (and others of course), and that calls for correction and punishment, but does not give license for degradation and abuse in return.
Ideally, we should be indifferent to whether a person is confined to a prison as punishment for a crime, or because he cannot live on his own and must be treated for mental illness against his (dysfunctional) will, because it should not be the case that confinement necessarily means degradation and abuse. The fact that we accept that it *does* is, I think, a significant indictment of our failure to be our brothers' keeper, even when -- perhaps especially when -- he is an unsavory bastard that we also need to keep locked up.
We've come a long way when we actually execute people -- we almost all agree it should be done with respect for the soul of the person being put down, even if we do not flinch from the action, we do not condone torturing or degrading executions, and there's a lot to be said for that. But when it comes to less drastic punishment, we haven't done as well. Indeed, there are too many of us who take sadistic pleasure in knowing (or assuming) that imprisonment carries with it the promise of degradation, humiliation, violation, as well as the loss of freedom that is inherent. We're a little better than the ancients who threw criminals to the lions in the arena so their screams could amuse spectators -- but not as much better as we might think. Certainly less better than we could be.
There's a couple of things there:
(1) Agreement on "prison should not be abusive". This is a whole slate of problems ranging from societal indifference to the fact that prison does need to be punitive in some degree (not abuse, but deprivation of freedoms) and prisoners will break rules to get around that and then we have the whole set-up of violence
(2) Prisons are not hospitals, and the mentally-ill need hospitals. Even if they have to be secure hospitals, and even if the inmates are the criminally insane (or whatever the up-to-date term for that is). There is a basic difference between someone in their right mind who steals for a living, even taking into account the circumstances that brought them there and even if it is All The Fault Of Society, and someone not in their right mind due to organic illness or drug abuse or abusive circumstances in their family life.
Yes, I'm not really in strong disagreement, but with respect to (2) I think we should probably observe that there is a significant overlap between criminality and drug addiction and mental illness. A lot of people are ciminals *because* they have the latter two problems.
In actual practice I think there is a fair amount of "hospital" like activity in (at least American) prisons: there are drug treatment programs, and people get psych meds and assorted (usually impoverished) treatment. These things are fouind to be just necessary for the prison not to be an absolute hellhole, although they are neither of them done to anywhere nera the degree that would be sufficient to address the need.
I don't have any great ideas for solving this or any of its related messes, that is not something on which I have the slightest amount of talent. And there is a difficult inherent tension between "medicalizing" socially deviant behavior, so that we decline to judge it morally, decline to put sufficient pressure on individual choice, and being inhumane and treating people with severe mental illness as if they had the full ability to judge right and wrong. (Parenthetically one of the strangest and disquieting things about American capital punishment law for me is the fact that the Supreme Court says you cannot execute a criminal who doesn't understand his own execution enough to be afraid of it. I can follow the legal reasoning easily enough, but the outcome -- we will only kill you if you're afraid of being killed -- seems ugly and sadistic.)
I wish I could be as confident as you that there is a clear difference between people who do bad things because they freely chose to, and because they had some demon riding them and had hardly what we could reasonably call a free choice. I totally agree it's easy at the extremes, but the closer you get to any bright dividing line the more arbitrary and difficult it seems.
In some sense we would like not to even have to make the decision. We could judge the action independent of the actor's intent or awareness, and act in whatever way is expedient to prevent repeats of it, or incentivize people to not do it in the first place, and then simultaneously we could treat any underlying sickness to the extent we could. But that does kind of imply a pretty significant degree of fusion between a prison and a mental/drug (involuntary) hospital.
And I recognize this is all pie in the sky as far as economic and social psychology reality goes, but...dunno, I think we could probably do better than we do. Perhaps it's because I live in the US, and we are a very judgmental nation, and the way we sometimes just throw people away because they have problems that could possibly even be fixed is a little disheartening. Goes with the whole predestination thingy, but I don't like predestination.
Scott has written about the closing of state mental institutions in the past[1][2], and specifically said that he "think[s] closing the institutions was the best thing Reagan ever did."[1] (he wrote that in 2016, but referenced those articles recently and gave no indication his opinion had changed).
I'm inclined to trust Scott on this one.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-prison-and-mental-illness/
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/
The reason "care in community" became a joke in the UK and a term used instead of crazy (e.g. "watch out for that guy, he's care in the community") is because this was the ideal behind closing down the big old institutions (which *did* have their problems, let's not deny that). The *ideal* was that people would go back to live with family support and support from the local government such as nurses, social workers, etc. to be helped live independently.
The reality was that families couldn't cope with, or didn't want to take back, members who were erratic, difficult, and liable to go off their meds, and local councils didn't have the money or resources to provide all the supports needed. So vulnerable people fell through the cracks and ended up the crazy homeless guy ranting in the street.
Proper social supports are needed to help people live outside of institutions, but that kind of support is also expensive, and taxpayers don't like paying high levels of tax.
This is a satisfying reply.
I think you're accidently doing a motte and bailey here. I think most people would agree homelessness has far reaching consequences. No matter how severe these consequences it doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is institutionalization, and certainly it doesn't follow that reduced institutionalization should be viewed as the causative effect.
I'm going to push back slightly on some of this, based on my experience living in one of these cities. There are definitely activists who believe everything you say, but they're not writing the script. They're pushing their agenda, and the left-wing politicians react to that agenda. Some are sensible adults and give lip service to the activists while maintaining relatively competent governance, others are cynical manipulators who push the activist agenda to get ahead but ignore it if it won't make the news, and there are a few true believers who are basically useless in government but impossible to get rid of. We had a BLM-related situation in 2020 that our white lesbian former-prosecutor mayor did not have the political capital or intersectionality points to do anything about immediately, so she had to sit back and wait for the situation to implode badly enough that she could declare it a failure and move in. (That's my interpretation, anyway.) Our new mayor, also a left-wing Democrat, is a half-black-half-Japanese man, and he does have the political capital and intersectionality points to shut stuff like that down, to increase police funding, and to resume "sweeps" of homeless encampments. And the city has gotten better. (I don't know whether the lives of the homeless people in the city have gotten better, though.)
It's not that the activists changed what they believe. I think it's a matter of whether there are enough sensible politicians who feel empowered to ignore them. I'm tempted to credit our "jungle primary" system, where there's an open primary and the top 2 candidates go on to the general. For my city, that seems to mean that we'll get 2 left-wing candidates, but the more centrist of them will win the general. But I don't follow what happens in other cities enough to tell whether this is actually a real factor.
"The activists who write the script most cities' governments follow... [who] don't think there are real societal negative consequences with encampments full of mentally ill drug addicts [who are free to commit crime.]"
I think my point here is that real people, including myself and Fang, are making reasonable arguments. You're ignoring our arguments and swinging at ghosts.
Find me a real person who thinks this:
> The activists who write the script most cities' governments follow
> don't think there are real societal negative consequences to letting
> the streets fill up with encampments full of mentally ill drug addicts
> who have a get-out-of-jail-free pass to commit any crimes they want;
> or if they do, they see the encampments as useful accelerationism
> towards whatever utopia they have in mind.
(Or find five, particularly people who demonstrably have some influence on city policies).
I think that there are lots of people who think that homeless encampments are *better* than the alternatives that they think are possible right now. I don't think any non-negligible number of people think that they are *good*, or that they have no negative consequences.
For whatever it's worth: my wife's entire career is in affordable housing, and she currently works for a county department that directly provides services for the homeless. She and her colleagues do not think anything resembling what you suggested above, nor do any of the politicians that she deals with, nor do people in the homeless-advocacy nonprofits that she interfaces with.
What's the main driver? Addiction?
No.
All you need to ask yourself is:
Why aren't the 11-15 million (almost universally) impoverished people who migrated into the U.S. illegally - often accruing a large debt to do so, frequently exploited by employers offering below-market wages - languishing in homeless encampments on the streets?
Could it be that they're meaningfully different from America's homeless population, in that they're (almost universally) mentally and physically fit enough to complete an arduous journey into a new country, highly motivated to work, and willing to share less than ideal housing to avoid languishing in encampments on the streets?
It's just a coincidence that they're all on drugs?
The causal relationship is not obvious, as there are all kinds of nudges for a homeless person to start abusing intoxicants even if their homelessness originally wasn't related to drugs.
How cheap would a house need to be in order for the average encampment-dweller to live in it? These people don't have jobs, nor do they have their shit sufficiently together to get one.
https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/dean-gerken-why-yale-law-school-leaving-us-news-world-report-rankings
Yale Law School and others abandoning the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
On the one hand - awesome. U.S. News has been a pretty pernicious source of bad incentives for US universities. For example, https://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/05/step-right-up-ladies-and-gentlemen.html Columbia University inviting people with no chance of being admitted to apply so that it can reject them and beef up its "selectivity" metrics.
So schools abandoning the metric is a thing I'm happy about.
On the other hand... Yale's reasons are so mindbogglingly self-serving that instead of just being glad about it, I actually come away annoyed with Yale! Among the reasons they give that this decision had to be made:
- When Yale hires its own graduates for temporary fellowships (popular move schools use to inflate their "employment after graduation" statistics), US News is counting the fellows as unemployed, and refuses to stop doing it.
- USN keeps factoring in "how much debt does a student have at graduation?" as a factor in the rankings, despite Yale's demands to switch over to "how much aid did the school provide the student." Making that switch would allow a school like Yale, which charges $60,000 a year, to give a student a 33% discount, and then when the student graduates with $120,000 of debt, instead of being a negative in Yale's USN ranking ("student with huge debt load"), it would be a positive ("student who received a total of $60,000/33% in aid").
- When measuring "how much debt does a student have at graduation?" USN insists on using the actual amount of debt students have, rather than discounting it based on the possibility of debt forgiveness if a graduate manages to hold down work exclusively with 501c3 charitable organizations for 10 years.
Yale dresses all these things up to try to make them sound like they're about "encouraging public interest work," but they're so completely self-serving that I think I might have torn a retina rolling my eyes.
Yale can afford to ditch USN&WR because they're Yale; everybody knows they are among the top ten worldwide, and everyone will continue to "know" that for a generation or two after it ceases to be true.
Every not-uber-elite university, and every university-going student or parent thereof, still has the problem of ranking universities by some standard of merit. That's not going to go away, even if USN&WR does. So we should probably think about what will replace them if they do go away, rather than just saying "boo USN&WR, hurrah for their downfall!"
And it's not going to be every student and/or parent independently and carefully evaluating every potential university.
Surely, USN&WR can rank them whether they like it or not. Does "refusing to participate" just mean refusing to hand over data?
If I were USN&WR I'd just estimate whatever data points they refused to hand over. And I'd estimate them in just the right way so that Yale winds up ranking worse than Harvard (but not in an implausibly bad position, just rank them sixth or something).
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ (transcript available)
I just found about https://neeva.com/, a no-ads, subscription supported search engine which I've found give much better results than google.
It's $6/month or $50/year. It promises privacy, but I don't know whether it's actually good on that.
As a side issue, the link includes google's vice-president in charge of search, and she's pretty classic marketing droid. She's got a plausible point that one of the reason google is getting worse is that there are more low-quality sites online to sort through, but infuriating with her attitude of "everything we do that you hate is really well-designed to give the public what it wants".
Everytime i move away from google I move back. Google seems right. It’s hard to explain that except that when I search for something, often mistyped, to retrieve an article it works for google - and google changes its results in real time. Googling the word canada today I got live time information about a game - which is what I wanted. That’s clever.
I don't know, is it actually as good as Google?
I tried switching to Duck Duck Go, and I even check on whether Bing has improved from time to time, but I keep coming back to Google because it finds what I'm looking for easier. Sometimes it doesn't show results that the others show easily, but most of the time with the others I'll search something and get 5 results that are SEO squatters trying to look like the result I want.
I'm feeling a lot less sure. I think my search results were good before I signed up, but now they're full of ads. They still might be better than google, but not as much better.
Kagi, which follows the same subscription model for a search engine alternative, is the best one out there at the moment.
Why do you prefer kagi?
People who argue that voting is a waste of time generally point out that a single vote has a very small chance of making a difference. This paper puts the chance of a vote making a difference in the UP presidential election at one in 60 million:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/probdecisive2.pdf
It seems to me this argument fails to consider what the value of actually being able to flip the presidential election is, since the fair value of your vote is the expected value, which is the product of the chance you'll make a difference, and the value if you do. And make no mistake, the presidency is a big deal. Replace George W. with most any Democrat, and the Iraq war probably doesn't happen. Replace Obama with most any Republican, and the Affordable Care Act doesn't happen.
With that in mind, has anyone tried to put a figure on how much it would be worth to flip the presidency?
The Iraq war was certain.
I shared a sleeper car with an Iraqi family from Amsterdam to Vienna in the summer of 2002. Everything was cordial while they thought I was British. Once they caught a glimpse of my blue passport, they forgot how to speak English.
Wouldn't the value be the sum of the differences between each candidate?
Suppose an election had a margin of 7 votes out of several hundred thousand. In this case, you personally could not have flipped the election because the margin wasn't 1. But still, it seems incorrect to say that your vote didn't make a difference.
It's worth noting that it's not too uncommon for US House elections to be that narrow, and once you're already there for the House election you might as well vote for president.
The count will never be exact. It the true, unknowable margin is 7 votes, your vote will affect the probability of the count coming out in favour of your guy by some amount.
The expected value of flipping the Presidency is zero, since we have no way of predicting whether one guy will be better or worse than the other guy. Even in retrospect we have no idea because we can't visit the "Gore won" or "McCain won" timelines to see how things turned out.
That is obviously false? Like, in the extreme example, crazy death cult alien monster vs. boring normal sane human has a pretty clear EV difference in favour of the human.
Real world cases will have smaller, less certain differences, but there's a huge difference between saying that there's uncertainty and asserting that the EV is 0
Yeah, but Melvin probably assumed logical self-consistency. Like, if Candidate A is a crazy death cult alien monster and Candidate B is a normal sane human, what are the odds that both would get almost exactly 50% of the vote? I hold a very low opinion of the intelligence and sanity of my fellow voters, but even I would not expect a race between Cthulhu and Joe Biden to come down to the wire and depend on a tiny number of votes.
If you assume people are not entirely idiots, than it seems to me in the limit as the number of votes grows without limit, the expeccted value of a single vote that switches the election outcome trends smoothly to zero. It feels to me like you'd need to make some strange statistical or psychological assumptions to come up with a different result.
Well, the Nazis plus the Commies got 52% of the votes in the 1932 German election, and the sane humans got a bit less. So it does seem rather plausible to me that 50% could vote for something completely insane.
Well, let me advise you against republicanism then, and still more democracy, in both of which you would be putting your life in the hands of those people. A nice safe dictatorship or heriditary monarchy will avoid the problem.
Although...come to think of it, wouldn't that put you in the company of those voting for Nazi or Communist dictatorship? If memory serves, the 1932 election was in no small part driven by a terrible fear of what the other masses of stupid ignorant voters might choose, and a wish for some Strong Man to take charge. Hmm, tricky.
Scott tried this on his old blog back in 2016, in the opening of this post:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
How do people here feel about compulsory voting? I’m an Australian, where attending a polling place is compulsory although you can leave your ballot blank. I, and a majority here, greatly support it: it ensures our politicians have to appeal to everyone, not just to their base. We rode out the Trump-Johnson-Xi years with only a small handful of crazy/overtly racist politicians (we also have preferential voting so minor parties can get in). I recently learned that it has actually been repealed in several places. The main reasons on Wikipedia were free speech grounds/refusal to support any party (but just submit a blank ballot?), or a sense that uninformed people might vote on simplistic grounds (surely that isn’t worse than a typical partisan voter?), or an estimated 10% swing to the left (surely that can’t be the real motivation for everyone opposing it), and the website didn’t make a big fuss but it’s also annoying sometimes to spend the time going to a polling place and voting.
How do people from places without compulsory voting feel about it? I’m mostly interested in people’s gut reactions about why this is a good/bad idea, or anecdotes or examples where it would be good/bad.
I'm against compulsory voting since the people who don't vote tend to be the least-informed and least-engaged people, and I see no value to having them wield political power. I can't see how forcing them all to vote would improve the quality of politicians, or of referendum outcomes.
I admire Australia's system very much and wish we had it here (in the US).
For foreign readers it's worth noting that early voting is open for 2 weeks before the election, and polling places are really densely provided, at least in the cities - I usually have multiple polling places within walking distance of my house (in fact, the nearest one is usually next door, but my point is that the next-nearest in any direction is walkable). Thus, the time-cost to voting is much less than in the USA.
I also think this isn't a coincidence and that if voting in the USA were mandatory there'd be a lot less chicanery around making it painful to vote.
Compulsory voting is a bad idea and nobody should do it.
It is a form of involuntary servitude; a minor one, but you need a really damn good reason before imposing any sort of involuntary servitude, and you don't have one.
To the extent that voting affects policy, compulsory voting shifts policy in the direction favored by the lazy and apathetic, which is unlikely to be a good thing.
And to the extent that voting affects *legitimacy*, compulsory voting imposes a signal of legitimacy whether it is warranted or not. If the system is hopelessly corrupt in one of several common ways, refusing to participate in elections may be the people's last, best hope to signal their disapproval short of violence.
Any regime that institutes compulsory voting, should be presumed to be falsely and artificially boosting their claim to legitimacy unless proven otherwise.
>To the extent that voting affects policy, compulsory voting shifts policy in the direction >favored by the lazy and apathetic, which is unlikely to be a good thing.
I think voluntary voting shifts policy, or at least campaigning, in the direction of the Toxoplasmosis of Rage. The average person disinterested in politics is disinterested because they like the status quo, and their voting preference for the status quo shouldn't be discarded because they're not as 'motivated' as the extremely loud and angry fringes
Also, as for legitimacy, does anyone actually care about what percentage of people in the USA don't vote, and use that to track 'legitimacy'? I know that the % of invalid votes (which are AFAIK deliberate protest votes most of the time) here in Aus is tracked and when it's unusually high it gets talked about, as much as when the vote for no-hope minor parties is unusually high.
USA perspective. My gut reaction to mandatory voting would probably be "oppose", but recently, I think I'm weakly in favor of making it mandatory to participate in the polling process - this is assuming that you're legally allowed to affirmatively abstain from voting.
I'm just completely fed up with how a major portion of US electoral strategy seems to try and involve discouraging participation in the process, disqualifying people from participating, bringing up scares of either fraudulent voters that need strong ID to prevent, or unfair ID requirements that disqualify legitimate voters.
I think that if we just hit the schelling point of "everyone *must* show up and be counted (even if they submit a null vote)", then we can also go and implement strong ID requirements, election security, national holiday for voting, etc.
Some would argue that voting is a 'right' and we shouldn't force people to exercise those, and that's valid, but, I think you can also see voting as a duty. Citizens can't unilaterally opt out of Jury Duty, men can't unilaterally opt out of the selective service. If widespread participation in the democratic process is something _necessary_ to maintain the health of our nation, I think that's valid to call a duty.
+1. Go to universal mandatory voting and the arguments against requiring ID go away.
The argument against requiring ID is basically that it would be unconscionable to demand that e.g. some impoverished elderly Native American in a distant reservation should go to the city and navigate the bureaucracy to get an ID card. You and I may both be skeptical of that argument, but it doesn't go away if you change "...and if you don't then you can't vote" to "...and if you don't then you go to jail".
You mistake me. I'm not at all skeptical of that argument. I believe and often make that argument. I think that's the motivation behind this push in the first place. That's why people like me hate these laws and try to fight them. But, in a mandatory voting regime, that's demonstrably not the case. There's no scheme to shave a percent or so of low propensity voters off the rolls if everyone has to vote.
Sometime back on one of these platforms a voter id proponent asked what it would take for a voter id opponent to get on board, and this was basically my answer. What it takes is me believing that the intention isn't to shape the electorate, and one way to do that is to have a program that aggressively tries to get everyone to vote. If you're doing that, you build up enough trust with people like me that we don't believe the point is to limit the franchise and get on board.
In the post I went on about different ways that might look. Something like mandatory voting would get there all in one go.
Though, as I note below, I flat don't believe there would have ever been a national voter id movement if we had mandatory voting. Probably the push dies out if we were to get it. Though, at this point, enough people have been convinced of the public reason that it might continue.
So, I'm confused. What happens to the indigent Navajo grandmother who doesn't have and isn't going to get an ID under your system?
You say that if we go to universal mandatory voting the arguments *against* requiring ID go away, so presumably under your universal mandatory voting system we're going to get laws requiring ID to vote (or even just to go about in public). And you say you're not skeptical or the argument that it is unreasonable to expect the indigent Navajo grandmother to actually go out and get an ID. So, come mandatory election day, she's going to be caught without a legally-required ID, unable to cast a legally-mandatory vote, and thus be in violation of the law. Maybe initially she'll just be cited and fined, but she's indigent. So then what?
>So, I'm confused. What happens to the indigent Navajo grandmother who doesn't have and isn't going to get an ID under your system?
Answering despite the lateness of not being on over Thanksgiving. Feel free to ignore.
So, first and most honest answer, I don't know.
Moving on from there. I doubt it would end up being legal to charge someone a 75 dollar fine if they refused/couldn't drive a couple of hours in a car they don't have to a rural DMV that's open twice a week from eight to noon. So I don't think it would come up.
But there could be accommodations. Maybe when you get your fine for non-participation, there's a number. Call the number and show cause and the IdMobile shows up at your house next time there's an opening and gets you an id. (And waives the fine.) If you don't have cause, no joy, pay your fine. Maybe we set up id stations at some polling places to get people who get turned away their ids right then and there. I think there's a bunch we could be doing if the point of the id was actually to make sure that everyone has an id.
We don't do stuff like this now because that's not the real point, it's the public justification. In my state you can vote with a gun license but not a student id, not even a student id issued by the state system. I'm sure there's a plausible enough excuse for this, but I'm also sure that if student's voted 70/30 for the GOP, it wouldn't be true. In a mandatory system, hedging out students isn't the point, so shit like that wouldn't be done. And if it was, after a couple of cycles of those kids (or whoever) getting fines, either they would be pissed enough to get the rules changed or harrassed enough to get their ids. Either way it would take care of itself.
>You say that if we go to universal mandatory voting the arguments against requiring ID go away, so presumably under your universal mandatory voting system we're going to get laws requiring ID to vote
Maybe. I think the reason *for* requiring the ID goes away too, so probably the thing peters out and political energy moves elsewhere.
>And you say you're not skeptical or the argument that it is unreasonable to expect the indigent Navajo grandmother to actually go out and get an ID. So, come mandatory election day, she's going to be caught without a legally-required ID, unable to cast a legally-mandatory vote, and thus be in violation of the law. Maybe initially she'll just be cited and fined, but she's indigent. So then what?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here? She doesn't pay her fine. It gets some late fees. Maybe comes off her tax refund? Next cycle it happens again. And the next. Eventually she gets used to it, or gets irritated enough to figure something out for the id. I think small incentives can work for stuff like this. It's like the quarter for a cart at ALDI. It doesn't need to be huge to work.
Though, come to think of it, I would give odds that in a universal mandatory voting regime the push for voter ID would also go away.
Strong oppose. Why force people to exercise their rights? If we force people to exercise their right to vote, lets also force them to voice their opinions, force them to own guns, etc.
I'm agnostic as to its broader effects on the polity and don't particularly care whether it produces better or worse outcomes (however one wishes to define better and worse), but deeply oppose mandatory voting for the same reasons I oppose mandatory military/government service of all kinds: forcing people to perform involuntary labor is wrong. I need a reason a hell of a lot more compelling than 'it might marginally improve some policy outcomes, particularly if you prefer left-wing policies, maybe' to justify an invasion of human liberty that substantial.
I weakly support mandatory voting under the theory that if everyone is required to vote then it breaks down systems that incentivize certain groups to not vote including the poor. I think wrt voting a lot of the poor are in a Molochian situation where it is individually rational to not vote but they would all be better off if they all voted.
I'm against it-- it seems to me that it would encourage thoughtless voting.
I don't support making voting restricted or difficult. I favor it being easy to get ID in general, not just for voting.
I think mandatory voting isn't just pointless, it displays contempt for people in a way that ordinary oppression doesn't.
We're taking up some of your time for no one's benefit.
I don't vote and accordingly I resent the idea of being forced to. If my country ever passed mandatory voting laws, every year I would vote for the party whose platform is closest to "literally hang the bastards who implemented mandatory voting".
I don't think forcing me to vote would make democracy work better.
Amusing compromise position: make it mandatory to vote, but on every subsequent ballot include a referendum on whether to end mandatory voting.
I'm a New Zealander who has lived and worked in Australia and now live in the UK. Cannot support the claim that Australia "rode out the Trump-Johnson-Xi years with only a small handful of crazy/overtly racist politicians". Australian politics looks if anything to have a higher baseline of this. This is obviously hard to measure but I'd say the evidence is a wash/slightly negative, for instance Australia lags other developed nations in addressing climate change by a large margin.
In terms of perspectives where it isn't compulsory, it gives you one decision above who to vote for, which is whether to vote at all. People can have different levels of investment in different elections, and can choose accordingly. The government choosing which elections are important enough to warrant compulsory voting seems bad (though to be clear, not *that* bad, just worse than the alternative).
I do however strongly support Australian's ability to vote Harambe.
>Cannot support the claim that Australia "rode out the Trump-Johnson-Xi years with only a small handful of crazy/overtly racist politicians".
I'd have to agree on this. We've avoided strong *polarisation* (and thus e.g. while one can wonder about the prospect of a US civil war, one in Australia is just a laughable idea), which can fairly be attributed to IRV + compulsory voting enforcing the Median Voter Theorem and thus making our major parties near-clones, but we definitely do have some nutjobs in Parliament (and not just the Senate; the Greens have seats in both houses, and while I used to be a big fan, at this point they literally want to ban two of the five highest-polling parties so I think "nutjobs" is an accurate descriptor).
I think NZ is quite possibly the best designed electoral system extant in the world, and I agree that Australia's isn't quite as good, but are you saying that AUs is as bad as the US or Europe, or are you merely saying you think we're second place to NZ?
I really don’t want anyone who doesn’t care enough to show up voluntarily to make decisions about how the country is run.
Ultimately it would be better IMO to switch back to a franchise that was more restricted. I take a very dim view, for example, of not requiring ID in order to vote: if you don’t have the executive function to arrange to have some sort of identification, I’m skeptical of your worthiness to steer the country. I would prefer to limit it to those who have skin in the game for a certain amount of time. So, for example, a good limitation for local elections might be residency for greater than one year.
Isn't one's life sufficient skin in the game?